Chapter 3:  America.  Los Angeles.  Late Nineties.


To a rhythm of childhood fantasies … recalling terribly little much time spent dreaming of or wanting to become a movie star.  An actor, or fame.  There was a very brief spit of my youth when I had designs on becoming a stuntman, partook of a course offered through the classifieds - someone resembling thee Burt Reynolds himself diving out of a very sexy burning window.  Possibilities, idle time, and getting up early on a Saturday and endowing myself with the skill necessary to safely dissipate the energy of a jump and roll from a moving taxi I hadn’t paid for; ingraining the brain with the camera angles involved in faking modern saloon altercations with my drunken friends: the thrill eventually itself into the back pocket of my desire to get my own apartment away from Mommy.  Just stupid shit one does do in the Before the absolutely fantastic of a few years ago when I would find myself in Los Angeles, within echo of Hollywood big sign and creation star. 

Unemployment and a relocating friend had me sharing a drive clear across the continent from my Ottawa to go do nothing more than chase the moon’s reflection off the cresting waves of the Pacific; hanging out all cool at the climax of my 20’s I was.

This friend and I - he forthwith lovingly referred to as Bambino for reasons of privilege - were in Santa Monica, enjoying a craft pint at a brew house on Main Street, hearing a bartender happen a general out loud as to “the cunt of a dog” he insisted upon for companionship whilst generally away from that there Island of his.  I could mention his further specific; I should say that it was December and warm, and that the tourist in big hairy Bambino and me had already gotten previous day liquored and stripped down for a midnight run into the warm Pacific - a luck and beauty of a toenail moon, the temperate surroundings and other stuff not wasted on two half-naked Canadian males.

I sat there and enjoyed an ale named after certain fierce dragon of lore, had me a good gulp; enough of one to get up and wink a whisper to that previous Aussie accent a quiet query as to whether or not ‘twas questionable his legal status: the shrug from him to me was delivered strictly in the hypothetical … a more polite than I deserved.  He was quite maybe tall, although not necessarily.  And there definitely were two sideburns.  

I slow nodded and sat back down with the big Bambino.

This friend of mine, the one I’ve taken to calling different of name, be really smart of guy and fully influencing things upon genes with cell-penetrating guns.  He was even a bouncer in an earlier spell; very modern he has lived life to my way of reckoning. 

He sipped his honey lager-something and lifted his goatee, “What’d he say?”

“He says it happens in this industry.  In this industry.  Whatever; I didn’t want to put him on the spot or think I was wired, but, yeah, he was cool enough.  The only teeny snag is that they aren’t hiring …and I know jack slug about working in a bar.  But hey.”  I laughed and smiled and laughed the more.

“What do you know, amigo - far as staying in this wondrous L.A., working with the other illegals?”

This wasn’t or isn’t necessarily a difficult question; still, one for which I had no immediate answer other than wash jockey - no automated car washes in L.A. appeared present, only bending Mexicans.  I sipped my big bad dragon ale and stared at the everywhere beautiful people, wondering about their scams, their wonderful ways of staying and hanging in the permanent sun.  Was I willing to be dog walker to the rich and busy; I paused with my working knowledge of propane, that erstwhile wonder fuel, and its power to melt snow and earth below the permafrost, it’s ability to allow for wintertime deep-6 burial in our northern land - all of this somehow to be turned by me into an improbable ticket to stay in L.A.

And, yes, blanks of love thus drawn by me.  That fabulous Southern sun, displaying an infectious difference from the selfsame one I’d left at home, broke a December sweat on my brow.  I no longer casually sipped from the dragon’s mouth, laughed the giddiness of a luxury of time.

Then dribbled the want to enjoy many life moments of grown up people not rolling their eyes in boredom when told that I delivered liquefied petroleum gas for a living.  The word unemployment left the mouth with at least the slight whiff of promise, of imagination.  Of L.A., with all its immediate fabulous glory, that had that very soon encountered my lack of useable skill: there were no scripts in my back pocket, no 5-by-7 with my bio on the back.  I was a guy with an empty beer glass in his hand.  In January I would turn 30.

Somewhat long ago all those Venice Beach lunatics selling wares behind self-imposed sandbags; a visibly-siliconed Christmas on the boardwalk of whackos, Brazilian bikini cuts.  I stayed with the big Bambino a week or so, slept on the couch of his rented wall-to-wall shag shack, mostly with pound of vein in temple and one-eye sleepless.  I blamed it all on the wild possum stories, tales we’d heard of skittish babies crawling out of cupboards, their worried mothers grey and searching or road-killed down the narrow back alleys of burnt Goodyear rubber close to the beach.  Within days the pickups of Bambino’s Stratocaster began to grow a fine film of sea salt, and he paid it no alarm: he was warm and in California, well away from the disaster of another Canadian winter.  He and I had stuffed his entire life, save maybe a parka and a television, into his tiny shitbox of a Honda that we’d used to traipse across the entire United States in. 

With the waking hours we would do a bong, relax and walk around, occasionally driving the many parts that constitute the diversity collectively called Los Angeles.  I napped amongst the dunes on the beach at Venice most afternoons, Bambino my big pale date sizzling to my side - that famous belly of hair dare I say growing daily smile for the soon return to prom dress size.

And never did I then give straight answer to that simple question of his.  We cruised and ogled, tried and failed to get laid around the various of town.  I completely avoided thought in the fashion of a fun.  And he had a new job to start; cutting edge stuff I know just enough about to win a beer in a honky-tonk on the edge of most counties, not near enough to commit to a framed square piece of paper with my proper name quilled all stylish above line.

I grabbed an inevitable Greyhound and left.  Bambino waved me the smile of a rather large man already an entire inch thinner in diameter.  I sat back and fell into the funky vibration of a bus headed back; on the cheap and no better off.