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 L.A.’s
essentially dark and loveless heart; I had sometimes thought Blondie’s was L.A. 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. And there would be a sign reading CLOSED
FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON.
By the time I reached the building, this nutty idea had taken over my mind with the force of a compulsion, and not even
the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could quite dispel it. But seeing is
believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on the glass. It was just the Fulwider,
the same as ever. I went into the lobby, smelled the familiar odor–it reminds me of the pink cakes they put in the
urinals of public men’s rooms these days–and glanced around at the same ratty palm trees overhanging the same faded
red tile floor.
Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world’s oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In his frayed red suit and ancient
pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus monkey which has fallen into an
industrial steam-cleaning machine. He looked up at me with his mournful basset-hound eyes, which were watering
from the Camel pasted in the middle of his mouth. His peepers should have gotten used to the smoke years ago; I
couldn’t remember ever having seen him without a Camel parked in that same position.
Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. There wasn’t room enough in the car for him to move far enough. I’m not
sure there would have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far enough. Delaware, maybe. He smelled like
bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in cheap bourbon. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, he
belched.
“Sorry, Clyde.”
“Well, you certainly ought to be,” I said, waving the air in front of my face as Vern slid the gate across the front of the
car and prepared to fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor. “What drainpipe did you spend the night in,
Bill?’
Yet there was something comforting about that smell–I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t. Because it was a familiar
smell. It was just Bill Tuggle, odoriferous, hung over, and standing with his knees slightly bent, as if someone had filled
the crotch of his underpants with chicken salad and he’d just realized it. Not
pleasant, nothing about that morning’s
elevator ride was pleasant, but it was at least known.
Bill gave me a sick smile as the elevator began to rattle upward but said nothing.
I swung my head in Vernon’s direction, mostly to get away from the smell of overbaked accountant, but whatever small