Pokrewne

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.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 shipped 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 spacious.Now, along with the telephonic punctuation of in- and outgoing communiqués to and from the hotel’s single women, the rooms and nights groan with the sounds of vicious homosexual 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 succumbed 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 passing figures of amazon Japanese waitresses drifting in and out of the sushi bars.A clandestine helicopter lands at four o’clock every morning on top of the towering silver-and-glass 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 finishing 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 appetite.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]