Without wishing to go all Camus on you, my mother died last week. A heart attack. I thought men had heart attacks and women had strokes. So it was a bit of a shock.
LA seems a long time ago now. Since then I’ve been to
No building in LA seemed to be older than me. The cliché, of course, is that no one in LA walks anywhere. It is true, and I assumed it was because they are all too lazy. But a quick stroll though the Westside tells a different story. The few visible pedestrians are the underclass. They are walking because they cannot afford cars, or because they enjoy hanging out on street corners looking like they might shoot you. Illegal immigrants solicit under bypasses, waiting for pick up trucks to take them to gardening and maintenance jobs. Even though there are thousands of cars flying past every second, the pavements can seem like alleyways at night. I don’t know if the streets are like this because everyone drove everywhere, or if everyone drives everywhere because the streets were like this. Either way, it seems a shame because the sidewalks are so huge.
We ate meals with friends, rode mechanical bulls in shopping malls, smoked potent weed in the desert, had our photographs taken with black bears, counted trash cans on the beach, bought moderately priced jeans in Santa Monica, drank tea in Culver City, cooed over new-born babies, met strangers and drank beer with them, forgot who they were and re-introduced ourselves days later, failed to get friends to take us through Compton, teased cats with laser pointers, played Guitar Hero, watched a double bill of Homicide and the first episode of the new season of the Wire, fell in love all over again in countless tiny moments and stood on a pier as dusk fell and saw the low sun create orange halos around our heads and reveal the secret white hairs on women’s faces.
Then I got a phone call. It certainly put a dampener on the last couple of days of my holiday. The funeral was a predictably grisly affair, featuring awkward conversations with guests only reluctantly invited, stale vol-au-vents and more maudlin drunkenness from a gatecrashing Sid.
Over the next few days I wrote fifty pages and sent them to my editor.
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