It occurred to me that less than ten minutes ago, I’d been thinking that this was the perfect LA morning — so perfect it deserved a trademark symbol. And it had been, dammit. So where had things gone wrong? And how had it happened so fast?
No answers came, only an irrational but powerful voice from inside, telling me that the kid’s mother couldn’t have won the lottery, that the kid couldn’t stop selling newspapers, and that, most of all, the kid couldn’t see. Peoria Smith was supposed to be blind for the rest of his life.
Well, it’s got to be something experimental, I thought. Even if the doctor up in Frisco isn’t a quack, and he probably is, the operation’s bound to fail.
And, bizarre as it sounds, the thought calmed me down.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we got off on the wrong foot this morning, that’s all. Let me make it up to you.
We’ll go down to Blondie’s and I’ll buy you breakfast. What do you say, Peoria? You can dig into a plate of bacon and eggs and tell me all ab — ‘
‘Fuck you!’ he shouted, shocking me all the way down to my shoes. ‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you cheap gumshoe! You think blind people can’t tell when people like you are lying through their teeth? Fuck you! And keep your hands off me from now on! I think you’re a faggot!’
That did it — no one calls me a faggot and gets away with it, not even a blind newsboy. I forgot all about how Peoria had saved my life during that Mavis Weld business; I reached for his cane, meaning to take it away from him and whack him across the keister with it a few times.
Teach him some manners.
Before I could get it, though, he hauled off and slammed the cane’s tip into my lower belly —
and I do mean lower. I doubled up in agony, but even while I was trying to keep from howling with pain, I was counting my blessings; two inches lower still and I could have quit peeping for a living and gotten a job singing soprano in the Palace of the Doges.
I made a quick, reflexive grab for him anyway, and he brought the cane down on the back of my neck. Hard. It didn’t break, but I heard it crack. I figured I could finish the job when I caught him and ran it into his right ear. I’d show him who was a faggot.
He backed away from me as if he’d caught my brainwave, and threw the cane into the street.
‘Peoria,’ I managed. Maybe it still wasn’t too late to catch sanity by the shirttail. ‘Peoria, what the hell’s wrong with — ‘
‘And don’t call me that!’ he screamed. ‘My name’s Francis! Frank! You’re the one who started calling me Peoria! You started it and now everyone calls me that and I hate it!’
My watering eyes doubled him as he turned and fled across the street, heedless of traffic (of which there was currently none, luckily for him), hands held out in front of him. I thought he would trip over the far curb — was looking forward to it, in fact — but I guess blind people must keep a pretty good set of topographical survey maps in their heads. He jumped onto the sidewalk as nimbly as a goat, then turned his dark glasses back in my direction. There was an expression of crazed triumph on his tear-streaked face, and the dark lenses looked more like holes than ever.
Big ones, as if someone had hit him with two large-caliber shotgun rounds.
‘Blondie’s is gone, I toldja!’ he screamed. ‘My mom says he upped and ran away with that redhead floozy he hired last month! You should be so lucky, you ugly prick!’
He turned and went running up Sunset in that strange way of his, with his splayed fingers held out in front of him. People stood in little clusters on both sides of the street, looking at him, looking at the papers fluttering in the street, looking at me.
Mostly looking at me, it seemed.
This time Peoria — well, okay, Francis — made it as far as Derringer’s Bar before turning to deliver one final salvo.
‘Fuck you, Mr. Umney!’ he screamed, and ran on.
II. Vernon’s Cough
I managed to pull myself erect and make my way across the street. Peoria, aka Francis Smith, was long gone, but I wanted to put those blowing newspapers behind me, too. Looking at them was giving me a headache that was somehow worse than the ache in my groin.
On the far side of the street I stared into Felt’s Stationery as if the new Parker ball-point pen in the window was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen in my life (or maybe it was those sexy imitation-leather appointment books). After five minutes or so — time enough to commit every item in the dusty show-window to memory — I felt capable of resuming my interrupted voyage up Sunset without listing too noticeably to port.
Questions circled in my mind the way mosquitoes circle your head at the drive-in in San Pedro when you forget to bring along an insect stick or two. I was able to ignore most of them, but a couple got through. First, what the hell had gotten into Peoria? Second, what the hell had gotten into me? I kept slapping at these uncomfortable queries until I got to Blondie’s City Eats, Open 24 Hrs, Bagels Our Specialty, on the corner of Sunset and Travernia, and when I got that far, they were driven out in a single wallop. Blondie’s had been on that corner for as long as I could
remember — the sharpies and the hustlers and the hipsters and the hypes going in and going out, not to mention the debs, the dykes, and the dopes. A famous silent-movie star was once arrested for murder as he was coming out of Blondie’s, and I myself had concluded a nasty piece of business there not so long ago, shooting a coked-up fashion-plate named Dunninger who had killed three hopheads in the aftermath of a Hollywood dope party. It was also the place where I’d said goodbye to the silver-haired, violet-eyed Ardis McGill. I’d spent the rest of that lost night walking in a rare Los Angeles fog which might have only been behind my eyes . . . and trickling down my cheeks, by the time the sun came up.
Blondie’s closed? Blondie’s gone? Impossible, you would have said — more likely that the Statue of Liberty should have disappeared from her barren lick of rock in New York Harbor.
Impossible but true. The window which had once held a mouth-watering selection of pies and cakes was soaped over, but the job had been done indifferently, and I could see a nearly empty room through the stripes. The lino looked filthy and barren. The grease-darkened blades of the overhead fans hung down like the propellers of crashed airplanes. There were a few tables left, and six or eight of the familiar red-upholstered chairs piled on them with the legs sticking up, but that was all . . . except for a couple of empty sugar-shakers tumbled in one corner.
I stood there trying to get it into my head, and it was like trying to get a big sofa up a narrow flight of stairs. All that life and excitement, all that late-night hustle and surprise — how could it be ended? It didn’t seem like a mistake; it seemed like a blasphemy. For me Blondie’s had summed up all the glittering contradictions that surround LA’s essentially dark and loveless heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie’s was LA as I had known it over the last fifteen or twenty years, only drawn small. Where else could you see a mobster eating breakfast at 9:00 p.m. with a priest, or a diamond-decked glamorpuss sitting on a counter-stool next to a grease-monkey celebrating the end of his shift with a hot cup of java? I suddenly found myself thinking of the Cuban bandleader and his heart attack again, this time with considerably more sympathy.
All that fabulous starry City of Lost Angels life — do you get it, chum? Are you picking up this newsflash?
The sign hung in the door read CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON, but I didn’t believe it. Empty sugar-shakers lying in the corner do not, in my experience, indicate renovations in progress. Peoria had been right: Blondie’s was history. I turned away and went on up the street, but now I walked slowly and had to consciously order my head to stay up. As I approached the Fulwider Building, where I’ve kept an office for more years than I like to think about, an odd certainty gripped me. The handles of the big double doors would be wrapped up in a thick tow-chain and held with a padlock. The glass would be soaped over in indifferent stripes.