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