L.A. Thoughts

(Not this again. Here it is three-and-a-half in the morning and I’m awake. Can’t sleep. So, I dig up the notes I wrote while in L.A. back in November, the day after I was in Iceland, and put them in here for you. [1])

Everybody’s windows are open. Everybody’s curtains are open. People in LA want to be seen.

My brother tells me about the fake houses on the Universal lot. They’re built without backs on them, without insides. They’re just three convincing walls. He says this while we’re driving through Hollywood near midnight on a Sunday. I can’t see the backs of any of the houses. Most of them are dark. I don’t know if they’re real or not.

News stands, their magazines open to the sun and the wind, without fear of wind or rain.

A friend tells me Scarlett Johansen fucked Benicio del Toro in the elevator at the Chateau Marmont. Though I like them both a great deal as actors, this makes me somehow sad.

Two people sitting with scripts in the Starbucks. They keep eyeballing me and my laptop. Three other guys have a meeting; one of them uses the word “preproduction” and I can’t ignore it.

What’s modern and what’s not. Things don’t age the same way here. Dial-up internet and early twentieth-century signage. It feels like new money and old stuff.

You get lost while driving in LA. You find yourself at an alien intersection and glance out your window where you spot Michael Chiklis and a camera crew shooting a scene of The Shield and you know you’re in a bad neighborhood.

The grocery store in Malibu, where the tabloids go to harvest photographs of stars carrying bags of groceries and dressing badly — that is, like you and me — is downright ordinary-looking. Around there, south of the high-price stores and ubiquitous LA Christmas lights, the street runs down a dusty plebian hills with a Kentucky Fried Chicken, an In-and-Out Burger and sun-cracked parking lots. It ends in the deep black nothing of the ocean, where Sunset Boulevard sinks into the west, where America falls off into oblivion.

My brother filed out of the audience, walked away from Monica and Chandler’s apartment and straight to his own, only a block away. That’s weird.

Everybody knows I’m from out of town because I’m not wearing sunglasses.

I watched my brother’s copy of Beverly Hills Cop while I was there. It’s pretty good.

When I walk down the street with two cups of coffee or a bag of food, I just assume everyone else assumes I’m somebody’s assistant.

Music: “Collapsing Stars,” The Mountain Goats

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1. This isn’t all of them, actually. I’m preparing a separate post about pornstar karaoke.

Slipping on Iceland

Out on the falls at the Golden Circle, the ice is covered in puddles of water. To get out there, I slid down an icy slope at the edge of a cliff with my hands on an ice-sheathed rope, slipping sideways the whole way. At the bottom, trying to keep my feet as I picked forward across frozen rock, people turned back. I followed Runar, the most Viking-looking Icelander with us, up over a pile of black stones dressed in snow and dead brown grasses the texture of horse hair. It was a stack of shrinking levels, each one a rocky and muddy edge on top of the next. To get up, you had to put your foot against the rock and the snow and let it slide away from you until it either dug into slush or stopped against the solid edge of a volcanic rock. If it didn’t, you’d slip down the grassy slope, across the ice sheet on the wet rock, under the rope line and off a cliff into the gorge beneath Iceland’s most famous waterfall. At the top of all this, the view along the canyon showed it winding away through black cliffs, out of sight.

“How far does this go?” I asked Runar.

“Oh,” he said, as if I’d asked how long until dinner, “about ten or twelve kilometers, until it runs out of rock in the southern lowlands.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to match his tone. “Holy shit.”

We’ve inched out across the rock table the waterway bends around before plummeting into the gorge, so we’re out over the falls now. If we chose to have a climactic battle at the waterfall — which is to say, if we chose to have Runar chop the hell out of me — this is where it would be. Of the thirty or forty of us from the bus, there are six of us here. From nowhere, walking up as if he’d just encountered us on the street, is Runar’s brother, Jon (which I’ve been mistakenly pronouncing as Yol for two days), in what I remember as a denim jacket and a scarf. The rain and the spray from the waterfall has turned his glasses into foggy blinders, like mine. He says something absently in Icelandic to Runar, who nods back at him.

We stand here for a moment, mentioning how wonderful it is to be so near to nature in a city like Reykjavik. I watch a raven circle overhead once and fly away. It’s huge, the size of an eagle. Finally, on the island at the top of the world, I feel like I’ve reached something genuinely remote. I’ve climbed farther than some, at least, and I’ve plugged into a part of Iceland that not everyone does. I’ve done something.

Then Jon fishes in his pocket and pulls out his iMac-colored little cell phone. It’s ringing. He mutters something in Icelandic and makes the universal phone-waggling motion that says, “I’ve got to take this.” He puts the phone to his ear, his hand in his pocket, and steps away from the group toward the falls and chats with his caller.

“Will,” says Runar, and I turn to look at him. “Let me show you where we climbed down the cliff to take our company picture.”

My feet hurt.