Hollywood Trembles on the Verge of Tears

I was the Cinema

Two years ago I came to New York as a sojourner, on tiptoe but with a little height in my heels, looking for good light and story lines drawn on the faces of strangers. And temporary newness. I found the light (and bonus! a geranium) in an apartment in Carroll Gardens. Strangers were everywhere I looked as long as I was walking or riding the waves of public transportation. Newness isn’t hard to find; turn a corner, look up, turn down the light, the bed, wake up in the morning or don’t go to sleep at all. Newness is a given. I stayed for two weeks, then went back to Los Angeles where every day is a ticker tape parade of endless sunshine.

Notwithstanding the first time I visited for three days in 2000, I never hated Los Angeles and couldn’t sympathize with people who did. People who have known me a long time found my address unlikely. I never begrudged Los Angeles the things it couldn’t offer. I never held Los Angeles in one thought and New York in another, measuring what each city gives or takes. I never knew a time there when I wasn’t lonely. That city makes no promises it can’t keep; that’s at least one thing I understood right away, and one way in which I wasn’t mislead.

I left Los Angeles the only way I could, smiling and waving, with nothing in my car except my genuine intentions to return. If I’d looked back in my rear view mirror, I’d have seen the bright gleam of salt plains. Not that time stops in a place when you leave it, but in a way it does. When I went back in January to empty the storage space in Woodland Hills (a friend had moved my things out for me, and so I was spared having to deconstruct and put into boxes the life I’d made there), I knocked on my old door in the Hollymont, half expecting to come face to face with myself. No one answered.

I live in Brooklyn now, and in a perpetual Hollywood of the mind, which, true to everything we know about imagination, is more powerful than the thing itself. “The problem with living in LA when you’re a writer,” says Alison, in words I’m paraphrasing, “is that it’s devoid of encounters, and so there are no new stories.”

A week ago from yesterday, I was riding my bike through SoHo and a cab almost hit me. Shaky and buzzing, I walked my bike to the sidewalk, where a man about my age or slightly older, with sandy hair spilling from under a construction worker’s bandanna, was rolling a cigarette. He’d seen my near-flattening and offered me his cigarette, which he held out to me with both hands, the little unlicked sail of paper up. I took it from him, licked it sealed and accepted his match. Now other workers started to appear and before I was halfway through the cigarette, the whole crew was out there lined against the wall like a living Pollock, speaking in a language I’d heard before but couldn’t identify. An older, stocky man was talking to my anti-hero now and sizing me up in quick sidelong glances; it felt easier to ask him the questions with which I would have engaged the other. They’d been working on that building for two years; they’re on to the penthouse of the building now; they don’t like New York; they miss Slovakia. The stocky man asked me if I liked to smoke my cigarette or eat it. I smiled and spit tobacco shreds out of my teeth. Gracefully. Adrenaline was draining from me. I said “Thank you,” to the anti-hero, beamed a smile I meant to hang in the air behind me, and sped off on my bike.

Three days later on the A train platform at Canal St., he was walking towards me. “Where’s your bike?” he asked. I said, “It’s raining.” (This is good. “Never answer a question with the answer,” says Alison. We are talking about dialogue). Chance encounter, recognition, my dreams are made of these things, and for a while I forgot everything I learned about the A train from a man I loved, lost and missed. I asked a lot of questions one after another, hoping to maintain the shy and dimpled smile on his face. He said he lived in Ozone Park and pointed to it on the upright subway map. I pointed to Park Slope. “Not far,” he said. “Not far,” I said. He traced good bike rides with his hand, Marine Park to Fort Tilden, Breezy Point and Roxbury, Jacob Riis Park. The A came, we got on, and I kept talking, asking questions. He came here when he was 25; now he’s 33. His name is J__.  He bought a house in the country in Slovakia not too long ago. He’s never seen the house. “Who lives in your house?” I asked, and he said, “No one.” He wants to be a farmer, and he’s homesick. “I’m a travel agent,” I said and was rewarded with the dimpled smile.

For pacing maybe I should say we managed well, under the circumstances: the same volcanic ash that may well have started the French Revolution two hundred years ago canceled only a few of the flights under my jurisdiction. Today United bought Continental, and they’re keeping that ultra-catchy Gershwinesque theme.

More people boarded the train. In reality, the air between us couldn’t have been so thin as it felt. It occurred to me I should shut up and see what happens. He smiled and asked if I liked movies. “Oh, yes, I like movies very much.” Broadway-Nassau. High St. My hand involuntarily went for his elbow. The other was frozen in the pocket of my jacket.

I got off the A at Jay St., walked across the platform to the F, knock-kneed and high and unable to wipe the grin off my face. My hand was crumpling a business card in my pocket, and that business card was mine. I don’t know what his reservations were, shyness, fear, a fierce and busty Slovak girl in Ozone Park. Mine were easy. Among other things, I remembered that the A train was the fastest train.

So there we are. And if it didn’t all happen the way I described it here, I was still truthful in the telling. I was the cinema.

Eskimo Kiss by The Wave Pictures

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