‘The houses in Todd Hido’s outdoor shots seem to glow in the dark. While the bright light that shines through the windows gives some indication that these structures are lived in, one can also sense their gloomy desolation. Isolated in the frame, almost like portrait subjects, the houses exist in a still twilight that can leave a viewer wondering whether someone is home watching television or absent owners are trying to ward off prowlers. Hido, lurking with his camera across the street, comes off as a benign but creepy surveillance aficionado, a private eye of domestic disarray.
‘For his shots of interiors, Hido visited homes whose previous owners had failed to meet their mortgage payments and were evicted; now owned by banks, the places bear the marks of sad lives and hasty departures. His camera lingers on a few vestigial reminders: window curtains, a chandelier-style lighting fixture, and a stained mattress are almost all that remains as evidence of the former inhabitants. Hido doesn’t dwell on the sociological, however: his interest, indicated by the care with which he modulates light and color, lies in the haunting quality of these spaces. In a sense, the photographs duplicate the banks’ seizure of the houses by repossessing them in the name of art.
‘Anonymity is one of Hido’s most redolent themes. First, there is the anonymity of the houses themselves, which, as the repetitive exterior shots make clear, seem to have been designed and built not by a single intelligence but by some demented committee intent on foreclosing any possibility of individual spirit. Who creates these pathetic living spaces and dreary facades? But even more tantalizing is the question of who lives in them. Surely not people like us, we may be quick to assert, given the houses’ absolute lack of aesthetic appeal. Hido, however, shows no sign at all of passing judgment on his absent subjects. His prints nearly redeem the horribly empty living rooms, bedrooms, and family rooms by bathing them in soft pastels. Out of doors, he photographs at dusk and in the area’s storied fog to give the prints an unnatural but attractive glow.’ — Andy Grundberg, Artforum
_____ Action
Masterclass: Todd Hido
Todd Hido: House Hunting 1
Todd Hido: House Hunting 2
TODD HIDO “HOMING IN” BOX SET
____ Found
‘I collect photographs and things I find in my night investigations, and the reason I do is that they’re all components that I’m able to pull together to create a story,’ says Hido. ‘There’s a communication that happens between people and pictures… that’s a really wonderful thing.’
_____ Interview
There is a very unsettling atmosphere throughout your photography, is this always intentional and why do you choose to shoot such sinister shots? Are you a moody guy?
Todd Hido: I’m actually not a moody guy at all! But I can clearly see that my work is. I guess I’m attracted to that cinematic feeling where something’s about to happen. Kind of like a pregnant moment. I’m very much attracted to that kind of narrative element.
The quality of your images is incredible, what camera and film do you prefer to shoot with?
Todd Hido: I have been using the same camera for the last 20 years–a Pentax 6 x 7 medium format camera and I’ve been using Kodak Portra of 400NC film forever. One of the main reasons that my work looks the way it does is because I’ve printed in the darkroom myself. I’m still using all analog technology and I go to the darkroom a couple of times a week to print. This is a very important part of my process. In most of my work nothing is staged, I shoot like a documentarian, but I print like a painter, often my contact sheets look nothing like my final prints.
I could imagine shooting all those night scenes in neighbourhoods some of which don’t look all that appealing at times must have been a bit more exciting than the actual scenery. Did you run into problems with people wondering what you were doing in the dark around their homes?
Todd Hido: One time some guy thought I was his girlfriend’s ex-husband. That was scary until he figured out I wasn’t! But I most often go unnoticed even though I am very careful to not look like I am “lurking”. However, I never ask permission as people would mostly say no. I have tried a couple of times when I first started but got rejected right off the bat. It is a very hard process making art to begin with—just finding the right place is hard enough and half the battle. Sometimes I’ll drive around for 5-6 hours to find just the right spot—and then you find it at midnight you can’t knock on the door and ask. When I find it I just take it. I never ever stand in someone’s yard or on their property. The police have been called several times but after they “run me though the system” and find I am not a criminal they leave.
Can you please explain for our readers your following quote: “I photograph like a documentarian, but I print like a painter.”
Todd Hido: Sure, that is quite simple. In most of my photographs of places (interiors or exteriors), I am shooting precisely what I have found. The only modification to that comes when I am working either the dark room or on the computer to make the final print. That is where I take many liberties in influencing the mood of how the picture will ultimately appear.
What’s your favorite time of day: twilight or dawn? Do you believe both moments have the same charm?
Todd Hido: I’d say dusk. I would agree that all transitions from light to dark have unique qualities to them.
As a photographer and an artist, how do you achieve the balance in sequencing your work? Making sure the pieces are similar enough to follow a pattern, but unique enough to tell different stories?
Todd Hido: Selecting and sequencing my images has always been something that I have very instinctively understood. My typical process involves making pairs of images, then pairing the pairs. After a few of those, you end up with different groups. Once that has occurred, those groups turn into books or projects when placed together. Yet again, I try and let my intuition lead me. Sometimes, when you overanalyze these things, they simply do not turn out very well.
Much of your work evokes the sense of an apparition or a vision, not exactly visionary but something that stops the viewer in his or her tracks with something otherworldly and at times even apocalyptic. Do any of these themes resonate with you or is this pure projection on my part?
Todd Hido: I always say that the meaning of the image resides in the viewer. But I definitely loaded the deck, and that is something that I would say is true about my work, that there’s something like an apparition. Is my new work apocalyptic? Oh, I would say it kind of fits that mode. Plus, the times we’re living in. It’s like I’m absorbing this into my process, the darkness. For my next book, the working title is Bright Black World. It comes from a description that a writer named A.S. Byatt had. She made a book of Nordic mythology. It talked about the Fimbulwinter, which is their version of the Myth of the Endless Winter. When it got dark, started snowing, and it never stopped. That’s her description of that darkness, and it’s where I got that title.
p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. This blog is persnickety. I’m not, but it is. Big up on your Xmas miracle phone. Ah, have a, uh, festive and inimitable Xmas. Seems like a safe bet. You take care too. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Beckett on acid is a nice way to characterise his stuff. Huh. I’ll do my best, re: Wilson. ** Misanthrope, He’s a very pleasurable read. Can’t imagine you not liking his fiction. Well, you got to eat something at least a little special on Xmas, otherwise it didn’t happen. Spoken by the guy who will probably eat the same vegan microwave stuff he eats every other day, but at least I have Paris to do that in. I presume all this weird interest in celebrity minutiae is what it must’ve been like in the 1950s with Hollywood gossip magazines and all of that, it’s just that now everything is consolidated in this god damned internet so we basically have no choice but to know about it. But, yeah, not that I had a working brain the 50s, but it feels like a return to that era’s level of pervasive, extreme escapism or something maybe. ** _Black_Acrylic, My pleasure, Ben, of course. Aw, thank you so much about ‘I Wished’. I’m so happy you liked it, maestro. That means a ton. I’d be grinning from ear to ear if you could see me. I like the title ‘Shell’, as you can imagine. Oh, great, exciting, an enjoy the editing, I hope. ** CAUTIVOS, Hi, CAUTIVOS! I’m going to have to write in English because my Spanish is terrible and ultra-primitive. Thank you a lot for what you said. The publisher who just reprinted ‘Contact’ had said he was interested in reprinting the other Cycle novels and translating ‘Period’, but I don’t know if he’s really going to do that or not. Obviously, I would severely love for my books to be back in print in Spain. I just have to sit here and hope that’ll happen somehow. Anyway, thank you! Come back anytime, and again I’m sorry to have to speak back to you in English. Take care! ** Tosh Berman, His novels are really wonderful. I highly recommend you pull one off the shelf at your convenience and join the fan club. Early Happy Xmas of whatever sort to you, sir. ** Bill, I think ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ is on soap2day. Wurlitzer’s novels are terrific. My personal favorite is ‘Drop Edge of Yonder’, so I would maybe recommend starting there? How do you find these movies? ‘The Feast’, okay, I’ll endeavour re: it. Thanks, Bill. ** Steve Erickson, Everyone I know in NYC is describing the city similarly. Our case numbers just shot way, way up, so I fear we might join you. I thought that Can album kind of gradually meandered its way into being very good. Joni Mitchell = ugh, for me. I liked that Ben LaMarGay album a lot. No, we’re working on the film. Puce Mary just did some sound recording of the actor who’ll play one of the main characters (who gets killed and turns into a ghost) so she can start constructing his ghost presence, and we’re starting the story boarding and refining the script a bit. That art context roll out was the original plan, but I don’t know if that’s still that plan due our producer’s frustrating opaqueness. Might know soon. No, I don’t think I’ve seen any art like that. The artists I like seem to be treating the NFT thing like the elitist pet rock phenomenon it probably is. I agree with what Brian Eno said about NFTs recently, if you saw that. ** Right. I thought maybe a galerie show of Todd Hido’s melancholy, stalker-ish photos might be kind of Xmas-y. See you tomorrow.
‘A pivotal moment occurs late in the third act of Rudy Wurlitzer’s sardonic post-apocalyptic novel Quake, a morbid and surreal episode that unifies his third novel (after Nog in 1969 and Flats in 1971) with the balance of his work. The setting is Hollywood, California, in the late ’60s. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake has brought Los Angeles and its skyscrapers to its knees and “the city has broken into little pathological groups… giving expression to what has always been latent within us.”
‘As Quake hurtles toward its redemptive climax, the nameless and faceless narrator, a man with no discernable past or future (a Wurlitzer trademark), is cowering in the darkness of a ruined Hollywood Boulevard restaurant after escaping from one of the armed and deadly militia bands that have sprung up from the ruins of the metropolis like wild poisonous mushrooms.
‘When independent upstart publisher Two Dollar Radio took on the task of re-issuing Wurlitzer’s long out-of-print first three novels this year, it presented the gatekeepers of literary academia with a unique gift – providing they were paying attention or have taken the time to unwrap the three-volume parcel of nihilistic, experimental American literature and recognize that herein lies a unique specimen any course on contemporary writing cannot afford to do without.
‘With all due respect, gatekeepers of academia, push aside Brautigan and Ginsberg and make room in the curriculum for Wurlitzer as an overlooked and undervalued voice of the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s, wedged comfortably between the collected works of William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.
‘Over the last 20 years I have explored Nog, Flats, and Quake as stand-alone reading experiences. But with the reissue of the three novels in chronological order it is impossible not to notice that the trio of works (written back to back and challenging the norms by which stories are frequently put on paper) are more than vaguely interconnected; a close reading of all three books reveals that the unreliable narrator of the tercet just might be the same person, bouncing like a human pinball from one corner of the North American continent to the next before coming to a full tilt rest at the Tropicana Motel in L.A. moments before the earth rips open and all manner of hell breaks loose.
‘(As an important aside, it should be mentioned that several literary critics have insinuated that all three novels are semi-autobiographical efforts taken from the author’s own wanderings both at home and abroad in his youth, an accusation that Wurlitzer has neither denied nor confirmed in my many conversations with him over the last 18 months; the nearest he came to asserting truth to allegation was when he bristled at my overstated reference to recreational drug use in my original PopMatters review of Nog, protesting irritably that he “wasn’t doing a lot of drugs back in those days.”
‘Nog, Flats, and Quake are novels rich in invention and introduce the recurring narrative and stylistic tendencies in Wurlitzer’s canon: the myths of unspoiled frontiers and the freedom of the open road, lives played out on the margins of society (“the politics of displacement”, as Wurlitzer calls it), the dissolution of ego and the illusion of self, attachment and detachment, wrestling matches with the ghosts of Samuel Beckett and Louis L’Amour, and the author’s stubborn but refreshing resistance to “narrative authority” and “the false deliverance and redemption… of recreational enjoyments and dramas” (Wurlitzer, “This Long Century”, 2009).’ — Rodger Jacobs, PopMatters
Candy Mountain (Robert Frank et Rudy Wurlitzer, 1988)
Rudolph Wurlitzer reads from Nog @ 192 Books.
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) – Trailer
Walker Q&A with Alex Cox & Rudy Wurlitzer at Basilica Hudson
Pat Garret & Billy the Kid – 1976 Trailer
____ Interview
THE BELIEVER: In an early interview you said, “Everything I write, there’s always one complete draft and I write it just for the sound. And it’s like writing music and that’s when I dig it the most… you know, the sensual feel of language and the sound of it and the rhythm of it.” Can you expand on how writing relates to music for you?
RUDY WURLITZER: At first I try to get underneath the language and hear a subject, sort of in a musical way, in terms of how large a sound it is, what the rhythms of a subject are. And then in the actual composition of a piece, I always try to arrive at a place where I’ve left the conceptual mind behind and am going toward the unknown. In that way, I’m rescued by the sound of language, which a lot of times will deliver me to the subject in an intuitive way. So the actual rhythm of language is really important to me, because a lot of times it’ll dictate something more objective. Especially in prose and books, one of the things that I’ve tried to evolve in writing—not always successfully— is to break through a conceptual paradigm, or being programmed in a traditional way, with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s always the frontier of my mind that I’m reaching for. Sometimes that takes place in a more concrete way, in terms of the actual western frontier, but it isn’t really the West that I’m so obsessed by. It’s really about leaving my own set of descriptions, and leaving the traditions that I was raised in. I was initially raised in a very formal music tradition, to be a violinist. My family was generations of music people. But I needed to push past that grid and become more open-ended and spontaneous. I’ve been around music all my life, but it’s been transferred into the actual sound and rhythm of language as a deliverance.
BLVR: You worked on an oil tanker as a teenager, an experience that informed your early stories.
RW: “The Boiler Room” was about that. I really wanted to break out of my formal upbringing, so I got a job on an oil tanker, as a wiper in the engine room, through a distant relative who worked for an oil-shipping company. I was seventeen, you know—I could barely tie my shoelaces. This oil tanker went from Philadelphia to Venezuela to Spanish Morocco to Kuwait, so it was a long voyage. It was under the Liberian flag. I was the youngest, and the white guy—most of the crew was black. They introduced me to all kinds of exotic, terrifying adventures at these various ports of call, which I learned in very primal experiences of a male-female variety. When I went to Columbia [University] after that, it was a very different experience. I just felt trapped there, in the academic world. I went to Cuba with a friend on a spring vacation during my sophomore year. As soon as we arrived in Havana, it was the end of the whole uprising; Castro’s troops came into the city, completely took it over. A lot of the soldiers, and the girls, were all my age, and we had an amazing time. I became involved with an older woman over there and didn’t go back to school for a while. I joined the army for a couple of years, and had the usual kind of terrible experiences. I finished up at Columbia and then went to Paris and Spain. Then back to New York—that’s when I started to write Nog. Nog broke a lot of rules. The first review of anything I ever wrote was in The New York Times. The first sentence was “‘Wurlitzer’ means music to millions, but obviously literature to none.” I’ve come to cherish that. It did touch a few sore spots with the critical establishment.
BLVR: You’ve cited Beckett as a big influence at the time of Nog, but was Buddhism an influence, too? Had you gotten into that yet?
RW: In a sense. I’ve always been aware of the idea of self-cherishing, which is a dharmic expression about the self, and I’ve always been aware, in my half-assed way, about the fallibility and illusions of self, which play a lot in my books, I think. So I was attracted to the basic tenets of Buddhism before I ever encountered it. Even before that I was meditating in various groups in New York, not in a very evolved way; something just drew me to that. Around the time of Two-Lane, I wrote a script that took place in India and so I thought, I better go over there and see what it’s about. I went with a friend of mine, a producer, and we were both very naive and didn’t know what was happening either in films or in India or anywhere else. I had various adventures there and got exposed to the Dharma, to Buddhism. I spent a lot of time in Nepal, and met a Tibetan lama who became a teacher of mine. And then I became more seriously involved, and helped start a dharma center in New York, went back and forth between Nepal, the States, and India. Then it became more internalized, the actual practice. I’ve been involved with Buddhism for maybe forty years, and had the privilege of being around some very evolved people—just from their great compassion and grace I’ve been able to hang around, you know— and I’ve learned a little. But I consider myself an amateur.
BLVR: You’ve commented that in Two-Lane Blacktop, no one wins and no one loses; it’s a competition that never ends, and even along the way the players become confused as to whether they’re still in competition.
RW: That’s true, that’s absolutely true. I would get involved in these competitive linear situations, and then, out of my innate perversity, try to pull the rug out from underneath, and be in the present. Not get trapped in results. I’ve always been aware of the tyranny of having to be attached to results, so that’s what Two-Lane is about. When I did films with Robert Frank—we did several short films together [Keep Busy (1975) and Energy and How To Get It (1981)] and a feature [Candy Mountain (1988)], where I wrote the script— it was all about being in the moment, being in the present, not having any idea of an ending. That’s why jazz is so great: because it’s in the process, in the moment, surrendering to the moment without any kind of conceptual program about where you’re gonna end up. And also feeling deeply trapped by what became corporate, L.A. films. I was always naive; I thought it was still possible to be collaborative and have a situation that would not be so sublimated to a corporate grid. But it got worse and worse, and I drifted off to Europe.
BLVR: Nihilism has been talked about in relation to Two Lane Blacktop, too; it shows one underside to the late ’60s that then became more fully articulated in the ’70s punk rock scene. To me, in some ways Two-Lane is an incipient vision of a “blank generation.” A lot of your work is about the road, and the end of the road, and then questioning whether there is—
RW: Whether there is a road—
BLVR: —or whether there is an end to the road.
RW: Again, it’s the myth of the frontier, the road leading to the end of the road, which leads to an open space you’ve never encountered before. I wrote a little essay on Louis L’Amour [“Riding Through,” published in For Now, 1970], and what fascinated me about Louis L’Amour—he’s a real old Western genre-hack, you know, but the first two or three pages of a Louis L’Amour book are about just riding into open space. You don’t know where the rider is going, there’s no particular destination, it’s really about its own rhythm, its own process. That’s what I really loved about Louis L’Amour. And when the plot kicks in, that’s where I stopped. I was always trying to get back to that early sense of being in the moment.
BLVR: You’ve talked about how in the old West, it didn’t matter if you went north, south, or west, it was all uncharted territory.
RW: Yeah—that’s a good way to say it, what I was trying to find was uncharted territory. And so, initially, being a primitive guy, it seemed like you could go out west, take the car and drive. In those days I would deliberately go east and then south and then north, to try and completely confuse myself, because I had no real destination. But then the destination leaked in, and as time went on I was always going for a reason, you know—for a gig, for a girl, for whatever. [Laughs]
BLVR: There’s a similar progression in your work: in Two Lane nobody is sure of their next destination, even at the end, but in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Pat Garrett is actively looking for Billy, and in Slow Fade Walker is searching for his sister in India.
RW: I was thinking about that, with Slow Fade, which I hadn’t read since it came out. So I picked it up; I didn’t remember a lot of it. I was so struck by how much of it is influenced by writing films, and how it’s trying to break that. Creating the different voices, to go back and forth from the prose to the screenplay in a circular way. I try to break that sense of inevitability toward a destination.
BLVR: Was it also trying to reconcile the two experiences of writing novels and screenplays?
RW: Oh yeah, that’s really what it was about.
BLVR: Compared to Flats or Nog, Quake and Slow Fade had more in the way of specifics and a recognizable narrative structure. Do you think you would have gone in that direction as a novelist if you hadn’t been writing screenplays?
RW: I don’t think so. Certainly Quake and Slow Fade were influenced by my experiences in L.A., in the film business. I remember writing Quake, completely damaged, in my hideout in Canada. It was a catharsis. I didn’t think of it as that, at the time, but since then I see why that came to be.
BLVR: You had other connections to what are now considered classic ’70s films. I’ve heard that you suggested Sam Shepard to Terrence Malick for the role he played in Days of Heaven.
RW: Yeah, I did. I was a friend of Terry’s and I knew Sam, and I thought he would be really good, even though he never really acted, you know. Terry was wide open.
BLVR: Was it true that you had met Shepard in relation to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour?
RW: I knew him then, but I think I knew him before. He had a place with his then wife in Nova Scotia; I’d seen him up there, and in New York. He’s been a friend for a long time. He’s an old warrior; he’s got a lot of arrows in his quiver.
BLVR: Actually, when you were describing your experience of running off to the oil tanker, it made me think of Five Easy Pieces, where Jack Nicholson’s character, who was a classically trained pianist from a family of musicians, goes to work in an oil field. And that film was written by Carole Eastman [under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce], who wrote The Shooting [one of Monte Hellman’s pre-Two-Lane films].
RW: I knew Carole Eastman; she was a good friend. Five Easy Pieces resonated with me because of the whole music thing in it; I used to talk to her about that. We all knew each other—Nicholson and [Bob] Rafelson [director of Five Easy Pieces], the BBS company [the film’s producer]. In those days everything was personal and open-ended and independent. It was Roger Corman country. We all felt a little bit like privileged outlaws.
BLVR: When we think about the ’60s and how rapidly things changed in the culture, even in a period of five years, say 1964 to 1969—
RW: But nothing has changed as fast as the last three to five years now, don’t you think?
BLVR: In terms of?
RW: In terms of the whole internet phenomenon, the whole sense of what art is, and literature, and streaming, music and films, the whole media, and the whole corporate takeover.
BLVR: The speed at which information travels now—
RW: It’s just amazing. And the addiction to it.
BLVR: What’s your perspective on the changes in New York bohemia over the years?
RW: It’s completely different now. The conversation between all the different venues, music, art, film… In the early days I was involved with Claes Oldenburg; there was a filmed “happening” that I did with him that was up at my family’s place in upstate New York. It was called “Birth of the Flag.” It was kind of like Two-Lane, now that I think about it—it was just the process itself without any result, just filming whatever happens, with this relatively spontaneous collection of whacked-out characters from New York. And I was in a few other happenings with him. So I was very aware of that, of Rauschenberg as well, and was influenced a lot by Phil Glass’s music. Phil is probably my oldest friend, and in the ’60s when he was writing Music With Changing Parts and his early work, I was very much involved with what he was going through musically, which resonated with what I was going through in terms of Nog. The whole literary thing was much more wide open— Burroughs, all different kinds of poetry going on, and it was all mixed. In those days, the whole thing about not having any money was not so terrifying. You knew you could somehow survive. I had an apartment on East Tenth Street for forty bucks a month, it was fine, you know. You could get jobs as a bartender or something. There’s a certain nostalgia for that time, which is why my first three books are being reissued. There’s a kind of counter-nostalgia thing; the communication was a bit different. Communication was so present that you could do things like mine, which would sort of pull the rug out from under communication. That was another way to go, but there was a communication about that. But now all that is lost.
___ Book
Rudolph Wurlitzer Quake Two Dollar Radio
‘It’s the late 1960s in Hollywood at the infamous Tropicana Motel, and the big one strikes, more than 8 points on the Richter scale. Quake, now in development as a film by Repo Man director Alex Cox, is a deadpan, nihilistic look at how fear unravels people?s emotions, how terror can liberate, and how people manage to survive, even panhandler drifters, Hollywood Cretins, and hippies. A true underground classic.’ — Two Dollar Radio
Excerpt
I was thrown out of bed. The mirror fell off the wall and shattered over the dresser. The floor moved again and the ceiling sagged towards me.
It was dawn and I was in the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles. There was another trembling through the room and what sounded like wires snapping and windows breaking. Then it was very quiet. I lay back on the floor and shut my eyes. I was in no hurry. There was a high prolonged scream by the pool and then a splash and another shorter scream. I stood up and raised my arms over my head and tried to touch my toes, an early morning ritual I never perform. The wall next to the bed was moving as if it was alive and I walked into the bathroom.
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. The door banged open in the other room and a lamp crashed to the floor. A small man in black silk jockey shorts crawled towards me. His black hair was parted in the middle and there was an oblong birthmark the size of an ostrich egg on his left shoulder. He managed to crawl to the doorsill of the bathroom before he collapsed. After a long moan, he began to cry.
“The ceiling fell in on me,” he whispered. “My hips are crushed. My leg is broken and something bad is happening inside. You got to help me.”
He propped himself up by the door, his eyes full of rage and shock.
“I’m room six,” he said. “Next door. The phones are out. It’s going very fast. I figure it for an earthquake. I’m scared, man. It’s going altogether too fast.”
Blood was forming on one side of his mouth. His head tilted back. Then he threw up in short violent spasms. When he was finished he wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and looked up at me again.
“It’s going to be a long day. But if we’re not dead now we probably won’t be. I’m hemorrhaging or something. I’ll wait here. But don’t forget me. You forget me and I’ll come after you. Everything is in my wallet. Room six. I got credit cards.”
He sank down to the floor and put his arms over his head. He had curled in on himself like a baby. He was very still. I knelt down beside him. He was dead. I stepped over him and walked to the bed. I couldn’t find my pants and I pulled off a sheet and twisted it around me. Then I went outside. There were no lights on and I could hear the dial from a portable radio being twisted quickly from station to station. The cabins were arranged on two landings around three sides of the kidney-shaped pool. The open side faced Santa Monica Boulevard where a broken water main squirted a stream twenty feet in the air and a telephone pole swayed forward, as if about to fall across the length of the street. The cabins were a faded blue and white and the brown plywood doors were chipped and smudged from banging suitcases and prodding boots, the law and otherwise. It was a reasonably priced, almost cheap motel, plastic and transient. Except for me. I was becoming known as a regular. I had fallen in three months ago from New York and was waiting for my money to run out. Then I would either borrow more or cop some and take a ride somewhere else, San Francisco or Vegas, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t above panhandling, spiritual or otherwise, movie extra, weekend carpentry or genteel smuggling. But New York was different than L.A. It had taken time for me to get it together, to get used to a different set of rituals and corruptions. But all that didn’t matter right then. I walked over to the diving board on the cabin side of the pool and crawled out to the end. I wanted to sit on the most precarious space available, as if to prove to myself that the event was already over. No one was around except for a body across the pool huddled beneath a bath towel on a yellow chaise lounge. It was suddenly very peaceful, as if the earth had never trembled at all. I lay on my stomach over the length of the board, my arms hanging over the water.
A foot rubbed against my ankle at the end of the board. “Either let me in or give me the fucking key.”
I looked up at her torn white sneakers with one pink toenail visible and then at her faded blue jeans. Two inches of her round stomach were exposed between her belt and pale orange tee shirt.
“You’re not Jerry,” she said. “I thought you was Jerry.”
I twisted around to face her. A few feet behind and to the left of her a barefooted fat man in cuffed brown slacks and white undershirt took two steps out of cabin seven, then a quick third, and considered the dawn. A small haggard woman in curlers and an open blue dressing gown that exposed one deflated breast stepped slowly after him. She was crying and scratching her hip with one hand and trying to put the other arm around him. He shrugged her off, preferring to fold his arms across his sagging chest and swing his head back and forth like it was loose on its pivot. The girl on the diving board kicked my leg.
“You look like you’re in shock,” she said. And then again. “You look like you’re in shock.”
I looked up at her. Her heavy breasts more than filled her tee shirt and her neck was short and crouched between her shoulders like she was about to snap. Her features were arranged in a strangely geometric order, a kind of precise oasis between her wild brown curls sticking straight out from her unusually small head. She was around eighteen.
“Did the ceiling fall in on you?” She prodded at my foot. I began to suspect that she was not altogether in control.
“I got out all right,” I said. “Nothing happened.”
She stepped back and stared off across the pool, her arms folded across her breasts. She seemed unable to move one way or the other. A young man in a brown and gold flecked business suit, without shirt or shoes, stepped briskly out of cabin twelve. He cupped his hands around his milk white face and shouted across the pool.
“7.6 on the Richter scale and you should get off the diving board. Did you hear what I said? 7.6 on the Richter scale.”
He walked off to the side of us and stood near the office. The girl dropped her arms and then slowly raised one hand and gave him a slowly rotating finger. He stared open mouthed at her, the back of his wrists braced girlishly on his hips. Two stout, whitehaired women rushed out of cabin twenty-three and leaned over the iron railing above him. The one on the left wore blue hot pants, the one on the right a rose patterned black and white mumu. The one with the hot pants leaned further over the railing.
“Did you say 6.5?” Her voice started as a yell but broke into a whimper. The other woman slapped her across the face and then slapped her again. The man in the brown and gold flecked business suit stepped out a little and looked up at them.
“7.6,” he yelled. “The whole San Fernando Valley might go. They got a dam out there and if the pressure builds up any more you can forget about it.”
The girl sat down cross-legged on the diving board. It was an awkward position for her but she seemed determined to hold it.
“Fuck them,” she said. “Pressure. What do they know about pressure? I don’t care if the whole state goes. I’m up to here. All I can think about is the goldfish falling out of all the tanks. There must be eight million goldfish in this town.”
I wasn’t watching myself, so to speak, but the action around the pool. Somehow I felt a need to delay my own reaction as long as possible.
The manager of the motel stumbled out of the office. He was old and white haired and wore baggy yellow flannel pajamas. He walked around the pool with his eyes to the cement, checking for cracks. When he had returned to the office he stopped and shaded his eyes towards Santa Monica Boulevard. He stood that way for a long time before he opened the door and disappeared.
“I came back late,” the girl said. “You don’t mind if I talk like this, do you? You’re not doing anything, are you? I’m not going to be able to talk much longer. I can feel it. This is my rush now. They were all fucking around inside with their videotapes and dope and experiments in some kind of science. They’re English. Room eighteen. You don’t mind, do you? All they do is play music and put everything down. Snort coke, bitch about the air conditioning, watch the tube. It’s a life. Their group makes bread. You don’t mind if I go on like this? Well, shit, I’m from Montana. Northern Montana. I don’t need them. Heh Heh. I was sitting out here and the water hit me and woke me up. I was scared. I was so crazy I ran around and tried to scoop the water back into the pool. Talk it back, you know. I been here three days. Four days counting today. I might go to London. They have a house in London. I never been anywhere except for three weeks in London. I mean Denver.”
She stared off across the pool. There was a slight tremor and she dug her nails into the bottom of my foot. I screamed.
“Is it?” she yelled. “Well, is it? This is it, isn’t it? But they have these all the time out here, don’t they? They got some kind of a fault underneath. Don’t they? You can answer me. It’s all right. Don’t do a number on me. Okay? It’s passed. I think it’s passed.”
“What do you care?” I pushed her back with my foot. My voice sounded very loud to me. “So what if it comes down? Who are you to choose sides? You can’t go anywhere. You’re totally lamed out as it is.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right.”
I watched the side of the pool.
The form underneath the bath towel slowly stretched and the towel dropped over the back of the plastic chaise lounge. A massive and leonine head appeared, with golden curls swirling over narrow pinched shoulders. A full blond beard covered most of the granite-shaped face but the eyes, even from the diving board, were an electric pink and piercing blue.
“I seen him around,” the girl said vaguely. She watched me anxiously. “He plays base guitar somewhere and knows about mushrooms and Kundalini.”
His posture was rigidly messianic as he stood with legs apart and arms spread-eagled towards the sun. His long body was pale and emaciated. He wore blue nylon swimming trunks and heavy white shower clogs. He began to sing a morning mantra, his voice low and melodious, his eyes squeezed shut.
“I’m not into hostility,” she said.
“I’m not either,” I said.
“I think you are. Just a little.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, you want me off this board.” Her voice suddenly rose to a higher pitch. “You lie on this board like you think you own it. No good. No good. I’m sick of that kind of attitude. I’m up to here with that kind of chicken shit. Just the way you slouch over it and hang one leg over the side and wrap yourself up in that sheet makes me sick. It makes me want to puke. I can’t stand guys like you. You can see I need help and you just lie there thinking you’re some kind of laid-back local star …”
She stopped. I wanted to get rid of her but I didn’t know how to go about it. If I had been able to choose someone to share this particular morning with it wouldn’t have been her. It might have been someone with the kind of suspicious repression it takes to share a small space with. Someone a little older.
The door to cabin nine opened and two girls in red panties and black bras took long wavering steps towards the pool and then sat down. They were followed by a black man in white shorts and blue tank shirt. He stared at the top of their curly blond heads and then returned to the cabin. An elderly man with a towel wrapped around his thick waist stepped outside cabin ten and whispered to the two girls, who stared at the pool. His long white hair was tied behind his head with a pink ribbon and he slapped a TV antennae against his thigh. He waited for a long moment but the girls held their gaze. Then he walked over to the edge of the pool, to the left of the diving board, and yelled to someone at the far end.
“It’s a fucking earthquake. It might get worse. I can’t move them. They’re scared out of their minds.”
A wheezing voice called back. “Just get them out of the doorway. Forget about the date. It’s only a grand. Get them cooled down. I don’t care how you do it. Give them some reds if you have to.”
The man looked into the water. Then he shifted his gaze to the end of the diving board and spoke vaguely towards us.
“Everyone is so snapped out because they don’t know how to handle disasters. Someone says dying to them and they put their heads under the bed. I never saw the likes of it. This is the worst goddamn shithole place I’ve ever seen. You don’t see it at first because of all the palm trees and orange juice bars but let something happen and then see what they do. There could be a million dead and maimed out on the roads and no one would pay it any mind. I swear to god. Look at the two of you; balling and playing around out there like you was movie stars. All you need is a color TV and some goof balls and you’d be wailing. Now ain’t that the truth? I’m getting my kids out of this place if I have to leash them and walk them out.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” the girl said.
The man zapped the antennae against his thigh and walked past the two girls, who were staring at their feet. He slammed the door to his cabin.
He had reminded me that I was on a diving board. I had forgotten and that was no small achievement. Perhaps I needed another tremor to block it all off again. The girl had removed her tee shirt and was vaguely rubbing her right breast while staring off across the pool. The sheet had fallen from my shoulders and gathered itself around my waist and legs. I propped myself up on my elbows. The ends of the sheet had fallen into the pool so that now there was a slight weight tugging at my lower body. The sun was rising underneath the neon motel sign. Its presence made me almost relaxed. A few cars moved slowly on Santa Monica Boulevard and I took that as a good sign. And yet there were a few dead around. There was even one in my bathroom.
A tight-lipped, parched young couple with straw cowboy hats and khaki shorts carried their bags out from cabin twenty-four. They dropped them to my right, at the edge of the pool. The bags were new and cheap. They sat on them and stared blankly into the pool. The woman wore a large shell necklace which she twisted slowly through her fingers while her husband tossed a silver key in the air. The key picked up the rays of the sun and occasionally fell through his fingers to land with a brittle clink on the cement. The pool area had become congested. People moved in and out of cabins, slamming doors and yelling at each other, while some sat quietly, as if adjusted to whatever might come. I began to suffer a strange nausea as if I was being pulled towards a forbidden place deep within myself, a swamp that I had only reached a few times before. We were becoming removed from the pool, from the calamity which we had been unable to confront.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know how to answer that.”
I was suddenly afraid of losing the anonymity that existed between us, as if once we knew our names the erotic focus we were falling into would dissolve. I curled my lower lip.
“We’re overloaded as it is.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said.
An upright middle-aged man in white slacks and yellow polo shirt walked out of cabin eight. He shook his head, disappointed in the surroundings. He circled the pool twice, carrying a black leather briefcase and whistling tunelessly. He stopped once and stared at us. His small pugnacious face twisted into a frown. He walked to the office and barked an order.
“Clear the area. The quake isn’t over. All you people are in danger out there.”
One of the two girls outside cabin ten went inside.
“This area is hazardous,” he shouted.
The tight-lipped woman with the straw cowboy hat looked up from her vigil by the pool.
“Fuck off, Jack,” she said evenly.
The man turned on his heels and disappeared into the office. A helicopter circled overhead. There was a sudden tremor and then a deafening crash as power lines snapped on Santa Monica Boulevard and a car swerved into the plate glass window of a luncheonette. The window in the office broke and glass sprayed out towards the pool. The golden-haired man in the blue swimming trunks, involved in a wavering shoulder stand, dropped to the ground and dove into the pool. The girl put her hand on my cock and I had an erection. She crawled out on the board and put her arms around me and we kissed.
Part of the edge of the pool must have caved in. I could hear a man weeping. A woman on the second story landing shouted for Harold. Feet ran around the pool, there were distant thuds behind me, a door opened and fell off its hinges, two women chanted the Lord’s Prayer while a man yelled at them to shut up. A fire engine clanged down Santa Monica Boulevard followed by police and ambulance sirens. The diving board was still, as if we had been overlooked. Her tongue explored my mouth and her hands wandered over my thighs and stomach. The sheet had slipped to my ankles. I opened my eyes. Her eyes were still closed and a line of sweat had broken out on her forehead. She was trying to struggle out of her pants while keeping one hand on my cock.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I think if I do a Wilson Day, and I’m pretty sure I will, I’m going to concentrate on the earlier work up through the 1980s. When he started collaborating with Tom Waits and Lou Reed and so on, I think the work started to suffer. My favorite Wilson is the never completed ‘Civil Wars’, or the two episodes that I managed to see. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, no, it’s just really complicated and a little confusing at the moment. There’s some stuff that needs to be sorted out with the producer before the exact Plan B comes into focus. I really do need to buy new shoes. It’s really freezing here at the moment, and when I go outside my toes become sculpted ice cubes very quickly. Ha ha, the poor ukulele gets no respect. Of course your saintly love would do whatever it takes to repair its reputation. What a nice guy. Have big fun away from this cursed place today! Love — and here I’m quoting from a slave profile I found this morning — ‘looking for someone who has a lot of rope and has a snake that will crawl over me while I am tied up’, G. ** Jack Skelley, Jackerooni! JackStalk! JackEtc! Hi, buddy. I just listened to you on that Alexander Lawrence podcast not two days ago. You were great, he’s such a character. Yay that you made it to NYC and saw all the genius poet buds. I didn’t know that about Jerome’s New/Selected, and that is very great news! Yes, I did see the Paul/Yoko improvisatory face-off. Extremely embarrassing, I say. You’re back in relatively toasty LA now. And it’s almost motherfucking Xmas! Bought all your presents? Dude, talk soon but not soon enough! XOXO, moi. ** _Black_Acrylic, Indeed. I keep hoping the Glove will pop in here again one of these months, but I don’t know. ** Misanthrope, The old is so full of good, lucky for the sometimes post ideas-free me. It’s weird how even if you don’t give the teeny-tiniest fuck about Kardashian/Davidson, you still somehow end up horribly knowing about their budding romance. Oops, better get a Xmas dinner backup plan going. Sounds fragile. ** David Porter, Hi. I wonder if I could teach them to fly. I suspect they’re too old and set in their ways. ** T, Hi. Well, our Phantasialand plan are not officially cancelled, and there’s still a very vague hope, but, yeah, it doesn’t look good. We may have to go to Vulcania instead. It’s actually a pretty fun place but it ain’t no Phantasialand, that’s for sure. Christ, yes, it does go on endlessly, and I guess will for theoretically ever. Ooh, I’ll be doing Pfizer when I get mine on the 5th. Psychoactive! But I won’t get my hopes up. Actually, thanks to your wish for my day, I don’t need a psychoactive for the moment, thank you. I hope your day turns the top layer of soil beneath your feet into falafel and turns your feet into mouths. xo. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. The Glove was a fount of postal goodness whenever he tried his hand. Right, I guess ‘DiV’ and ‘TD’ were art film-style hits, you’re right. So, mystery solved, but the decision making stupidity still abounds. I used to end up giving my parents pretty good gifts in the end. But every year, without fail, I would open the present from my father, and it would be a sweater. And he knew because he lived with me that I never ever wore sweaters. Not the ones he had previously given me or any sweater. Damn. Thanks a ton for rereading my novel. Hm, I think that makes sense about the parallel between ‘Torn from Something’ and ‘The Marbled Swarm’ because that was the first section of ‘I Wished’ that I wrote, and I was trying to wean myself off the voice I’d used in ‘TMS’, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was still in there infecting me a little. Cool. I’m so happy to read your kind words about the novel, man, thank you again. I hope your today occasions you fully enjoying the last loveliness of the Xmas build-up period, which, you know, definitely has its charms. ** Okay. I thought I would spotlight another novel by the great and eternally undervalued novelist/ screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer today. As ever, if you’ve yet to imbibe the serious pleasure of his fiction, I suggest you take the plunge, and today’s spotlit novel is as good an entry point as any. See you tomorrow.
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