Friday, November 01, 2002
it was 1:30 am and
it was 1:30 am and I wasn’t yet ready to sleep, so I wrote it up and it looked like this.
Tonight I watched the hordes walk past, then Tanja came and drove away with me - I’d helped a carload of tourists recognize the tow-away zone, and had a strange pretty woman come up to me twice, smiling ambiguously. But Tanja arrived, after 40 minutes fighting Paul McCartney traffic at the Staples Center, and finally off we went. Judd was MIA; pressed, I chose to dine at Versailles and ordered Cuban ground beef (beens rice plantain) and a side of yuca. Tanja went right for the yuca, yum it’s good - I reached for a slab and burned my fingers but fast; Tanja works all day with hot rocks and has a professional inurement. Dinner done, we drove the streets for hours. What divinity. Hollywood and Sunset were grandiose garish abuses of plaster and neon and glass… then up to Mulholland where we just talked for an hour or more, a real conversation, unhurried, unburdened.... it was so reminiscent to barrel up Laurel and park on a turnout, the valley spread out at our windows like sprinkles on a chocolate sheetcake… the streetlight cut the fog obliquely, trees presented hairy profiles - all was as it had been 20 years ago I kid you not. The other changes notwithstanding, this was as it ever was. And I was grateful.
The drive back was exhillirating. Tanja drives aggressively, the center line occasionally overlooked and overdriven, the road to Lake Hollywood taken with the headlights dark, the blacktop curving wildly to and fro between the wall of the hill and the lake dark below us… a tour up Woodrow Wilson, along Wonderview Drive, into Franklin Heights - the stately homes unrolling past us with gratifying regularity and sophistication… SIlver Lake, Echo Lake, coalblack diamonds hidden in the megalopolis… then out through historic Filipino Town and into downtown with a generous loop, through Little Tokyo and the Flowermart District, the Gorky sign still hanging without referent on a cut stems storefront; then right, and through the Industrial District, officially named, with hollow dark warehouses peeling and bleached, filling block after block, each a little bit sadder and darker and emptier, till we turned right again and came through upper south central, three-story gabled residences and riverrock chimneys and broad inviting porches by the dozens, the hundreds - the homes that no one thinks of when they think of LA - and finally back to the Fig, where I savored a fat shot of Jack on the verandah overgrown with bouganvilla, by a fountain with a lantern in it… and then to sleep in a richly textured room, in a richly textured night…