Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.
Too penniless to hire a cab.
I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists
in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.
It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed
scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their
cold, oiled working-model blondes.
The bells rang.
The iron hands came down.
Stop civilization. Go civilization.
Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain.
The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth.
Alarm.
Headsplitting daylight.
How about this?
She sees him get out of the ice wagon.
She throws a snowball at him.
Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says.
I've got it!
She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay--her mitten sticks to
it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the
mitten--which he gets in his teeth--he makes like it's a mustache!
Hell! He's a football player, isn't he--not just an ice-man? Going to
be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So
okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a
long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her--not
real hard--but hard--and there's how they meet, the both of them lying
down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that
good--or is it terrific?
And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three
thousand dollars, is how they do meet.
Wrong coast for Aglaia, I say? I'm sure I did.
That morning's taste.
The rest of them. The contract. The months.
The arms and the lights and the bells became lost in the prospect and I
stepped from the curb and brakes trilled.
"Want a lift? You need one, pal."
That was Dave.
At my apartment, I made some coffee and later we went back together to
the address in Beverly Hills--because he didn't know it, and he was a
lonely guy, too.
In fact he still is.
The most brokenhearted guy in the world.