Part 1 (1/2)

Amnesiascope.

A Novel.

Steve Erickson.

Trivial or impure dreaming literally rots the fabric of the future.

LAWRENCE DURRELL.

I wish I never wanted then what I want now twice as much.

MOTT THE HOOPLE.

I'M MOVING UP TO the suite at the front of the hotel. Ever since the Quake I've been living in one of the single units, but now I'm making the move up to the suite. Abdul the manager is giving me a deal, sort of hush-hush between us, a.s.suming his bosses don't fire him first and scotch the whole thing. The other day I heard the landlord chewing him out, as he surveyed Abdul's grand plans for upgrading the building. ”You're throwing away money, it makes me sick!” I was standing at the top of the stairs, on the third floor, and I could hear the argument down on the first, and I thought, Well, there goes my suite. They're going to fire Abdul.

They're all Palestinian terrorists, the guys who own this building, but Abdul is a smooth Palestinian terrorist. He imagines himself a worldly man, and for all I know he is. He reads books. He's dapper. He hara.s.ses the female tenants but he thinks he does it so smoothly no one notices it's hara.s.sment, dropping by in the morning in his bathrobe with his cup of coffee in one hand and his cigarette in the other, complaining back at them that they complain too much. He finds their complaints-about the cracks in the walls, the plumbing that gushes through the ceiling-petulant and unreasonable, but it isn't that he says he won't do anything about them, he's too smooth for that. Rather he says he'll take care of it and then gets around to it when he d.a.m.ned well feels like-weeks later, months, never ... He makes the rest of the world feel as though it's mired in the impatience and pettiness that he has transcended through a disciplined self-education, faith in Allah, and sheer dapperness.

He saw a picture of me in a magazine, I guess, some review or another of my last book. It impressed him. The fact that it was years ago and a lousy review to boot couldn't mean less to him. He doesn't want me dissatisfied, he wants to keep me happy; he considers me a prestige item, as tenants go. He lets his bosses know I had a picture in a magazine once and now they call me to write resumes for them, business proposals, in terrorist code no doubt because I've seen, in Abdul's closet, the portraits of various Middle Eastern dictators and strongmen he keeps hidden. ”There you are,” he said triumphantly, when we signed the lease on the suite, ”you now have a contract signed by a Palestinian.” Well, he's cut me a deal, which is the only way I can afford it, and I waited until I got all moved in before I thought I should let him know I'm not likely to be getting my picture in any more magazines. I let him know his investment in my ”fame” maybe wasn't the smoothest move he ever made. He wouldn't hear of it. The smirk on his face in response said, I'm a smooth Palestinian of the world. You can't terrify a terrorist.

Station 3 on the radio. So far to the far end of the dial it's barely on the radio at all. Broadcast from somewhere in the desert, way beyond the farthest backfires. ...

Station 3 only comes in at a certain time of the evening, and when it does it collides with another signal, a channel in Algiers that's broadcasting to an asteroid hurtling out beyond the moon. The Algerian station is owned by a Moroccan religious sect that believes the asteroid is heading straight for earth and carrying with it a message from G.o.d, so the station is sending a message back, only to have it bounce off the asteroid and land here in L.A.-if I understand it right. And mixing with that signal is yet another that was originally broadcast in 1951, from just outside of Las Vegas when they first started testing nuclear bombs; that broadcast was vaporized by the explosion and apparently only now, fifty years later, has rea.s.sembled itself in the stratosphere. So jajouka music from northern Africa floats through Station 3 along with the death-rock anthems of young metallurgic huns from the inner valleys, and Max Steiner conducting the theme of Now, Voyager, all as dreamlike and beautiful as the twilight, which turns a very particular shade of blue outside my windows.

I live in an old art deco hotel on Jacob Hamblin Road, a small concrete avenue that winds and twists so much on its short two-block journey from Sunset to Santa Monica Boulevard that at the beginning you can't see the end. Even in L.A., city of great non-sequitur streets like National Boulevard and San Vicente, streets of absolutely no linear logic whatsoever that disappear on one side of the city only to suddenly reappear on the other, Jacob Hamblin Road has some crazy turns in its short life. Back in the Thirties the Hotel Hamblin was built by the studios to put up young studs and starlets s.h.i.+pped in from all over America for screen tests, which is to say it became a sort of private brothel for producers and casting agents; Abdul's apartment on the ground floor was the lobby, marble and s.p.a.cious. Now, along with the telephonic punctuation of in- and outgoing communiques to and from the hotel's single women, the rooms and nights groan with the sounds of vicious h.o.m.os.e.xual exchanges. In the mornings I wake to someone somewhere in the building crying out ”I'm tired of this life!” with so much force it's hard to believe he's really dying, but so much anguish it's harder to believe he's kidding.

Over the years the hotel has succ.u.mbed from its earlier, slightly debauched elegance to Caligari dilapidation. Plaster buckles around archways carved in lightning-bolt zigzags, and a coat of white paint covers doors originally patterned after the portals of Austrian chalets. A gloom has overtaken the Hamblin's dark halls, where images of huge water lilies wave in shades of brown. In front of the hotel, hovering right above Jean Harlow's name scrawled in the sidewalk, is L.A.'s last remaining fire escape, something I took note of not long ago when one of the city's backfires jumped its demarcation line and threatened to slip south of Sunset. My new suite is on the top floor in the southwest corner of the building, with eight huge windows that run to the ceiling, facing every direction but north. At one place in the apartment I can see east, west and south all at the same time. The mists of Santa Monica fill the third window, the first and second contain the looming Hollywood Hills, near the base of which the Hamblin stands; along the upper ridge of the hills tiny barren palms sway in silhouette, and the Strip is visible below them, with the pa.s.sing figures of amazon j.a.panese waitresses drifting in and out of the sus.h.i.+ bars. A clandestine helicopter lands at four o'clock every morning on top of the towering silver-and-gla.s.s old St. James Club, at which time the tower's lights go out ...

In windows number four, five and six is the constant glint of the backfires. In windows seven and eight is the rain of their ash.

I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight of Los Angeles. I love walking along Sunset Boulevard past the bistros where the Hollywood trash have to brush the black soot off their salmon linguini in white wine sauce before they can eat it. I love driving across one black ring after another all the way to the sea, through the charred palisades past abandoned houses, listening through the open windows to the phone machines clicking on and off with messages from somewhere east of the Mojave, out of the American blue. I've been in a state of giddiness ever since the riots of ten years ago, when I would take a break from finis.h.i.+ng my last book and go up onto the rooftop, watching surround me the first ring of fire from the looting. I still go up there, and the fires still burn. They burn a dead swath between me and my memories. They burn a swath between me and the future, stranding me in the present, reducing definitions of love to my continuing gaze across the smoldering panorama as Viv, my little carnal ferret, devours me on her knees. I love having nothing to hope for but the cremation of my dreams; when my dreams are dead the rest of me is alive, all cinder and appet.i.te. Don't expect me to feel bad about this. Don't expect my social conscience to be stricken. My conscience may be touched by my personal betrayals but not my social ones: the fires burn swathes between me and guilt as well. In this particular epoch, when s.e.x is the last subversive act, I'm a guerrilla, spending my conscience in a white stream that douses no fires but its own.

Halfway through Sahara's routine, Viv cooks up the kidnap plan. She maps it out for me on the c.o.c.ktail napkin under my shot gla.s.s of Cuervo Gold, a tangle of lines and arrows that bleed into the tequila smudges. She explains it in the din of the music: ”Now we'll grab her here,” pointing at the napkin, ”you throw her in the back seat-” Sahara has dropped her dress at the end of the second part of her act; true to form, once the third song begins she emerges naked from behind the curtain. The third song is the naked part, every dancer, every act. It's clear right away that Sahara's mystique doesn't lie in her body. It's good enough as a body but it's not out of the ordinary: it's Sahara's face I love, and Viv too. Neither of us can get over it. She's some mysterious blend of Persia and Icelandic, perfect and remote; her face says, If you are seduced by me, it's your choice. I don't care. The other people in the Cathode Flower, all men except Viv and the dancers, have no idea what to make of Sahara, that's obvious. But Viv wants her as much as I do, maybe more. ...

”The last time we did this-” I start to say.

”This isn't going to be like the last time,” Viv shouts, over the music.

”I'm not throwing anybody in the back seat,” I explain. ”I'm not good at that part. Besides, I'm driving.”

Viv looks at me in total exasperation. She's five foot two, a hundred and six pounds; tonight she's wearing a little white dress with nothing under it but a white garter belt that holds up her white stockings. She's a wicked little angel, and suddenly I can't help myself. I pull her up from the table and into the back of the club, around the corner into the hallway where the bathrooms are, and I pull up her dress. She opens my pants and puts me inside her. f.u.c.king her against the wall I can see Sahara in her eyes like they're little mirrors; she has a perfectly good view of her. Oh ooh, she says, those little sounds she makes when she's not sure whether it feels good or hurts her, a confusion she finds particularly exciting. I stop when I know I'm going to come because I hold back until the evening's over, our little agreement. ”The plan!” she suddenly shouts, having left it on the table with our tequila, so we beat it back to our seats. Viv watches the rest of Sahara's act transfixed.

Now all we can do is wait. Sahara won't come out into the club for fifteen or twenty minutes, doing whatever the girls do backstage after they're done. When she finally appears she glides along the back wall. She sits with the other girls in one of the booths, and Viv goes over to ask if she wants to have a drink. Viv is a lot less shy about it than I am and, since she's a woman, less threatening; the dancers always talk to her and usually after a while they come to our table. Sahara strikes me as less approachable, but after she and Viv exchange a few words she joins us, shaking my hand perfunctorily and then the rest of the time talking to Viv.

She orders a Kahlua. In the music I can't hear a thing either of them says to each other, which is exactly the way I like it. Neither of them particularly wants me in the conversation anyway, which is also the way I like it; I just sit and check out the other dancers and drink my tequila and wait for Viv to fill me in later. From what I can tell in the dark Sahara isn't the wildly animated type, as pa.s.sively remote as she appears on stage, hiding the same secret damage all of these women hide. But Viv is undaunted. She has that kind of personality people instinctively trust, and as far as I know that includes Sahara. I just want to run my wet finger around the contour of Sahara's mouth like I would around the rim of a wine gla.s.s trying to make a sound. For a moment I look away, and turn back to the two of them in time to see Viv lowering the top of her dress, and Sahara placing that mouth on her nipple. ...

Outside the club the night sky is red from the backfires. ”I didn't know they were burning tonight,” I mumble half drunkenly in the car, behind the wheel. Viv is in the back seat like always and says something about how it was scheduled for next week, but the long-range forecast was for high winds so they moved it up. From what I can tell it's either the second ring or third, starting at Beverly Hills to the west and circling around to Silverlake in the east, which means we're pretty much confined to Hollywood unless one of the Black Pa.s.sages is open on Sunset. Sahara has told Viv she gets off at one-thirty and we're waiting in back of the Cathode Flower for her to show, a.s.suming she does, which would make the abduction unnecessary; I don't know that I'm really up to tossing strippers in the trunk tonight. For a while Viv is content to listen to the sky glow. ”Maybe we should go watch the fire,” she murmurs dreamily.

It becomes obvious Sahara has stood us up. I circle the car around to the front of the club and the sign is off, the lights are off; and so we just start cruising east on the Strip, me behind the wheel and Viv in the back seat where she always rides. A block from the Cathode Flower below the Chateau Marmont, at the corner of Jacob Hamblin Road are the hookers sitting on the low white wall that runs along the parking lot on the north side and hanging out on the south side around the bus stop in front of the deserted sus.h.i.+ palace. We head toward Hollywood until we can see the faint red s.h.i.+ne of the eastern backfire, and then turn around and go back.

All the little clubs and bars along Sunset are just about to close when who do we see stumble out of one of them, shaking herself loose of some guy in the process, but Sahara! I pull over and both Viv and I hop out of the car and grab her. It's hard to know with Sahara whether she's just a little blotto or so remote that nothing registers very quickly, but either way she looks at us with more confusion than concern. In the back seat the only thing she says is, They're burning tonight; and then she slips into unconsciousness, right in Viv's arms. Viv whispers sweet nothings to her, trying to get her attention as I head west past the hookers, past the now dark Cathode Flower, down the Strip out the other end into the woods of Beverly Hills. I can distinctly see the flames of what must be the second ring, and sure enough we hit it around Benedict Canyon where the old resort used to be. The Black Pa.s.sage is open so I drive on through, walls of fire lining our way. The heat of the flames revives Sahara somewhat; she stares at them in a daze. In the rearview mirror of my car I can see both her face and Viv's, the bright red firelight flas.h.i.+ng across their eyes, Sahara's dull and Viv's alive with antic.i.p.ation. Viv's got that slightly crazy look like she wouldn't particularly mind if I turned the car the fire's direction and just headed right into it.

With the fire at our back everything feels open to us, every thing is possible. ... Crossing into the Mulholland Time Zone from Zed Time I reset the clock of the car ahead eight minutes. On the radio I can still get the tail-end of Station 3's broadcast, a ghostly Indonesian voice drifting into the car. Sahara, who Viv has now undressed, is in a stupor-alabaster embodiment of all possibilities-and I'm inspired to turn off Sunset and head south past Black Clock Park through the rafters of the old freeway that used to run down the spine of California, from the age-blasted Spanish missions of the north to the Mexican border. As we drive, the frontiers of the west side are dark. In the rearview mirror Sahara's head lies against the back seat, her eyes half closed, staring at the roof of the car while Viv sucks her breast.

Viv's still at it by the time I hit Century Boulevard and the dark abandoned LAX. I steer the car off the boulevard and through a hole in one of the terminals where the sliding gla.s.s doors used to be. I drive through the black gutted airline terminal past the darkened ticket counters and dead metal detectors, along the hallways where pa.s.sengers used to stream back and forth to and from their flights, and every once in a while the high beam on my headlights slashes across the darting figure of someone who lives here. Sahara surfaces just long enough to regard her breast in Viv's mouth and then pa.s.s out again. Over by the arrival gates I see small fires burning and a line of naked women parading up and down the empty motionless baggage carousels. Drive out through the gate toward the runway and I'm following the runway to the ocean where the planes used to fly out over the beach when, in the quiet of the night, under the smoky moon with the fading flare of the backfire to the northeast of me, I hear the sound of both women asleep.

At the end of the runway there's nothing to do but stop the car awhile, unless I want to drive into the sea. I roll down the window and listen to the waves. I push back my seat and forget about the two naked women behind me, watching and listening to the ocean, until Sahara comes to. What is this? she slurs, less fazed by her nakedness than sitting out on the end of an airplane runway with the ocean in front of her. The look on her face says she hasn't the faintest idea how she got here or who I am. Nothing quite registers until she inspects Viv more closely, whose own nakedness throws her until she gets a better look at Viv's face. Let me out of here, she demands, so I get out of the car and go around to the pa.s.senger side and open the door for her; she staggers nude onto the runway under the ashen moon. I get back in the car and watch the ocean some more while Sahara runs off into the dark. ...

Soon I start the car and turn north. I pa.s.s Sahara, stumbling down the airfield naked, and soon I'm leaving the airport behind me and heading up the coast, surprised to see lights in some of the Marina high-rises, since I didn't think there had been any electricity in this part of town for years, when I'm ambushed, as usual, by my arch nemesis, My Conscience. I turn the car around and drive back to LAX, cruising slowly onto the landing field. Soon she's in my headlights. She's crawling around on the ground now in a haze of alcohol and panic; let's just say she's not as ethereal as she was in the footlights of the Cathode Flower. I stop the car. You coming? I call to her, and the bracing ocean breeze at four-thirty in the morning has apparently sobered her enough to convince her it might be a good idea. She scurries back into the car, first into the front seat then changing her mind and climbing into the back, next to Viv who just goes on sleeping through it all like a little white bird.

Slipping from Ocean Time Zone into Oblivion Time, I reset the car's clock back eleven minutes. Sahara grumbles about the situation all the way up Pacific Coast Highway; when her hostility toward me is finally exhausted, she goes into a monologue about her life in general-all the usual stuff about her mother who committed suicide, her h.o.m.os.e.xual brother who died last year, the rock band she's trying to start in Los Angeles. ... Soon Sahara's mystique lies all over the car in tatters. Viv, in her fas.h.i.+on, entirely misses the depressing part of the evening and wakes silently with the first light of sun; one minute I look and she's asleep and the next minute she's awake, sitting up in the seat quietly watching the ocean out the window, still perfectly naked and content to remain that way for a while. ”Stop and get some juice” are her first words of greeting, and I pull over to a little market. I get out and peer at them together in the back seat. Would you like something to eat? I ask Sahara.

”b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” she mumbles in response, under her breath.

”She'll be OK,” Viv coolly explains. ”I've a.s.sured her that when the time comes, she and I will have our revenge.”

They'll have their revenge! In their eyes I'm responsible for the whole plot. I could point out it was Viv who defiled Sahara all night in the back of the car while I was just the chauffeur; but what's the use? There's no use being reasonable here: ”What's reason got to do with it?” Viv would say. It's as useful as arguing about the shape of a circle. ”What's round got to do with it?” The thing for me now is to just get them their food, get back in the car, and take them somewhere I can leave them to their unholy alliance. The thing for me now is to just quietly spend the rest of my life watching over my shoulder or out the corner of my eye, on my guard for the inevitable coming vengeance, and not waste two seconds trying to be reasonable about it, since I've finally learned, halfway or so through this life of mine, that with women there's no percentage at all in reasonableness. And ever since I got this through my thick head I've gotten along with them a lot better.

Right now Viv can see all these thoughts flas.h.i.+ng behind my eyes and, smiling, she reaches up through the car window and kisses me on the cheek. ... So I'm not so surprised to get back to the car three minutes later, with their juice and an armful of those little processed sweet rolls in plastic packs, and find the back seat empty, and the two of them nowhere to be seen, their clothes still in a pile on the seat as they have been all night. I turn looking up and down the coast highway for a glimpse of them-but nothing; you tell me where a naked stripper and a sculptor dressed only in white garters and white stockings could disappear to, because I'll never know. Later when I find Viv I'll ask her and she'll just give me the same little smile she gave me when she kissed me through the car window. I suppose, all things considered, it was pretty shrewd of me when I went in the market to take along the car keys.

Couple of years ago, the newspaper I work for asked me to write a piece on the city's ”spiritual center.” I begged them not to make me. But, unavoidably coerced, I finally turned in an essay on another strip joint not far from the Cathode Flower, down on La Cienega Boulevard in the barren stretch where all the little art galleries used to be along with stores that sold Dutch clogs and designer hot dogs. It was across from the theater where Bertolt Brecht wrote plays for Charles Laughton before Brecht was run out of Hollywood in the early Fifties; last time I was there all I saw were the remains of the lingerie shop, lingerie of all colors and configurations blowing along the sidewalk like old newspapers. At this strip joint I had befriended a forlorn blonde stripper named Mona. ”Befriended” is a misnomer, of course, since our friends.h.i.+p never existed outside a five-minute conversation now and then in the dark, and of course Mona was not her real name; I never knew her real name. She was from Stockholm and never seemed very happy. I always thought she was beautiful and sweet, but it was dark, after all. One night, as I knew would eventually happen, Mona was gone, as all these girls are eventually gone-and they don't leave forwarding addresses, a rule that used to apply to strippers in particular but has recently come to apply to everyone in Los Angeles. ... Now about an hour past dawn, after Viv has disappeared with Sahara, I turn off Sunset and head east through the Palisades thinking about Mona. The ocean is behind me and I take another turnoff toward this bluff I know where there's a view of the whole bay, from the smoking ruins of Malibu to the paramilitary outposts of Palos Verdes. The sky is filled with the smoke of last night's backfire along the second ring, and from the bluff looking east I can see two or three of the wide scorched concentric gashes that circle Los Angeles, with old Hollywood in the bull's-eye.

With the car parked I run the radio up and down the dial one last time before finally shutting it off. In the distance below me, a last few tiny fire engines make their way back to the fire stations from the charred ring of earth. Out at sea the hundreds of Chinese junks that sail in about this time each month approach the sh.o.r.e with their mystery cargo. My article identifying the spiritual center of Los Angeles, incidentally, was never published, the only story I've written in a long time that was flatly rejected and which I flatly refused to rewrite. The sun has risen just high enough to come cras.h.i.+ng through my front winds.h.i.+eld when I'm still thinking of Mona who, for all I know, is hanging out at this very moment with Viv and Sahara, or was abducted according to the plan scribbled on a c.o.c.ktail napkin and is now held captive in the Scandinavian fjords, near the top of the world.

I started talking to myself again the other day. I don't think I even realized I was doing it, until I noticed the woman in the next car looking over at me in horror. ... Since the Quake I haven't talked to myself like I used to-in the shower, pacing my apartment, in the car or walking down the street, yakking up a storm in broad daylight and never thinking twice about it. The plain truth is I've never known anyone else I was so confident would be as understanding of what I had to say, or as patient to let me say it; if nothing else I could always be sure I would at least let me finish my sentence, before interrupting. Some years ago I mentioned it to a woman I was seeing at the time. It wasn't so much a confession, since I didn't think it was anything to confess; it just sort of came up in pa.s.sing: ”Well, yes, now and then I talk to myself. No, I don't mean in my head, I mean right out loud.” We were at the beach, lying on the sand. She grew increasingly sullen the rest of the day and evening, until finally she admitted it seemed to her a pretty distinct sign of instability. In fact she had to admit it seemed to her a pretty distinct sign I was flat-out cracked; and she was right, of course, I've never denied it. I've never denied the deep fault line running from my psyche through my brain out my door and down Jacob Hamblin Road, straight to Melrose Avenue and the feet of Justine.

Actually it was Justine who got me talking in the car in the first place, though I don't remember exactly what I was saying to her. I was driving east on Melrose when I saw her rise before me on the other side of Fairfax, having just appeared a block or two behind me and altogether likely to manifest herself again on some other street several miles from here, some time in the next hour or two, if not sooner. She hovered high above the avenue as she always does. ... Justine is a billboard. She's everywhere lately, an eruption of flesh, sprawled across a silk sheet in barely existent red panties and ta.s.sels that match her red hair, under a scrawl in red lipstick that reads Justine. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pink luscious bubbles floating over the cityscape, cannot be called merely spectacular, they are supernatural, eternal like the woman herself, who was first revealed some twenty years ago on billboards just like the ones she's on now, in a similar pose, her body slightly less pneumatic as though she was ripening at the speed of her own legend. Ten years later she reappeared up and down the Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard, La Cienega Boulevard ... and now she's reappeared yet again. No one knows exactly what Justine does, or what she's advertising for, I a.s.sume she doesn't actually do anything, though there's a phone number at the bottom of the billboard for anyone interested in finding out. But as the years have gone by, with Justine bursting forth new and better each decade, ever more perfect and ubiquitous, it becomes less and less imperative that she do anything at all but watch over the city as the Red Angel of Los Angeles, from block to block and street to street and billboard to billboard and year to year. Nonetheless, I make note of the phone number anyway.

I don't have to write it down, because in the L.A. of Numbers I am Memory Central, just as in the L.A. of Names I am Memory Void. I seem not to be able to remember any thing or any one anymore, and I guess I've insulted a few people in the process; I run into somebody here or there and he starts jabbering at me and pretty soon I realize I'm supposed to know this person, I've met him before, maybe ten or twenty times, maybe a hundred. And after he goes on awhile I can finally only look him straight in the eye and say, ”Excuse me, but who are you?” and then he's not too happy about it. But at the same time that I've cut myself loose of memories of people and events, the memories of dates and times and phone numbers attach themselves to my brain like gnats to fly paper. At the same time that I'm the deep well into which one can drop a bad love affair, a death, a childhood trauma and never see it again, never even hearing it hit bottom, a.s.suming there is a bottom, I remember not only my own dates and times and phone numbers, but yours too. I'm a walking Filofax for everyone's appointments and vital statistics. I remind Viv of her lunch date at this gallery or that studio, I let my friend Ventura know when it's time to pick up his laundry. I'm the man of deadlines and itineraries and bank account codes; even Carl in New York calls in to check his schedule for the afternoon. So remembering Justine's phone number, written so inconspicuously at the bottom of the billboard that I have to figure she would really rather not hear from me at all, is a snap. I don't even have to repeat it to myself out loud. Instead, with the woman in the next car looking aghast that the man in the car next to her is having an unduly animated dialogue with no apparent pa.s.senger, I figure maybe I should put a lid on it again, no more talking to myself. I'm beyond the point anyway where, even to myself, I really have all that much to say. ...

Over the two days I spent moving into my new suite, I panicked. Not about the extra rent but because, situated in this apartment, in the big wide open front room with all the windows, I might be generally expected by others to become more productive, even inspired. I have no intention of becoming either inspired or productive; to the contrary I intend to sit in the dark at night in my big black leather chair staring out at the Hollywood Hills like a man gazing on an approaching tsunami. Here comes the present. On my monitor I run the same movies over and over with the sound off: The Bad and the Beautiful, Out of the Past, Pandora's Box, I Walked with a Zombie. Studying the films on my shelf, Ventura remarks that I don't own any funny ones. ”What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?” I answer in outrage. ”You don't think Scarlet Empress is a funny movie? You don't think Detour is a funny movie?” Last time I was up the hall in Ventura's apartment I took a look at his film shelf, and there's a guy who doesn't own a single funny movie-except Charlie Chaplin, and he and I both know he doesn't watch City Lights because he thinks it's funny, he watches it because he thinks it's profound. The truth is I don't own anything but funny movies. Every one of them is hysterical.

On the walls of his apartment Ventura tacks little sayings written on paper, maxims he's scribbled from his readings, words of wisdom. He even has up there one or two things I've said. Starting at one end of his apartment and reading to the other, one comes away with a sum total of the Twentieth Century that's rather different from what the century itself might have concluded. Ventura has been having a dispute with the Twentieth Century, and now that it's over he just goes on disputing it, first the century and then the whole millennium. Ventura's whole life is a dispute with the Twentieth Century and I'm the moderator, the referee. I watch for the low blows, the groin kicks, the cheap shots, while trying not to get belted myself in the process. I'm neutral not only on the century and the millennium but on G.o.d himself; let's just say I'm reserving judgment. ... Over the years Ventura and I each move from one apartment to the next in the Hamblin, trying to better situate ourselves, though for what I have no idea. He moves up the hall as I move down; he used to be in a larger apartment and moved to a smaller one, before I moved from my smaller apartment to the larger one. As he moves to smaller s.p.a.ces he acc.u.mulates more and more pearls of wisdom on paper until there's no more room on any more walls, at which point he begins to layer over: he never throws anything out, G.o.d forbid. Just once I'd like to see him throw something out, one of these little pearls of wisdom scribbled on paper, just so I could see which one it was; I wouldn't even mind if it was mine. When the universe stops expanding and starts contracting, Ventura will start eliminating all these revelations until there's only one left-and that's the one I want to read. That's the one I want to take with me to my grave.

As for me, as I move to larger s.p.a.ces I get rid of more things. I lose things as the universe expands; I'll start acc.u.mulating when the universe contracts. There you have it in a cosmic nutsh.e.l.l, the difference between me and Ventura. Soon he'll be living in a closet with more paper than the Library of Congress, and I'll be living on the roof naked in my black leather chair. This morning when I go up the hall to see him he's staring at his tarot, dealt out on the floor in the shape of a cross. He's contemplating the meaning of the Queen of Cups, at the nexus of the cross. On the broken-down table that stands in the middle of his ever-shrinking apartment is the usual volume of mail he receives for the column he writes for the newspaper. Ventura's sense of purpose is such that he will answer all these letters; he's been writing the column since the first issue of the newspaper almost fifteen years ago. But now, between his fan letters and his empty typewriter, sitting in his fedora and his cowboy boots and the same s.h.i.+rt that's always rolled up at the sleeves, he stares at the Queen of Cups. He almost always wears his fedora and cowboy boots, even in his own apartment; only very occasionally does he take off the hat, and every once in a while, if he's feeling really familiar, he may even be seen in his socks. Staring at the Queen of Cups, he's wondering who she is. He's wondering if she's his ex-wife or his current girlfriend or the woman who was his last girlfriend and may be his next. One of the most enduring and gratifying things about my friends.h.i.+p with Ventura is that when it comes to women, he's even more screwed up than I am, the best and most compelling evidence of which is that he actually thinks I'm more screwed up than he is. ”I'm not going to ask,” he says, ”what it is they want. You haven't heard me ask that.”

”No.”

”I wouldn't dream of asking.”

”Oh, go ahead,” I say.

”No,” he shakes his head, ”I wouldn't think of it. It wouldn't even occur to me.”

”Actually, it's easy.”