ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS
The throw of the dice this week lands on the continuation of last weeks, adventures in moving again.
I’d just walked into Jack Taylor’s haberdashery. Jack was looking at from behind his big signature black eye-glass frames; one of the largest frames I’ve ever seen. He didn’t recognize me right off.
“Jack–it’s Luellen.” I kissed him on the lips and he smiled.
“How are you?” he said softly.
“I’m good. I was just driving by, and saw your sign. What a place you got here, it’s beautiful.”
“What? I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
“I SAID IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPACE YOU HAVE HERE!”
“You know how many customers come in off the street?” he asked.
“How many?”
“One.In a whole year, one customer.”
“Oh Jack, that’s awful.”
“What? I can’t hear?”
“IT’S AWFUL TO HEAR THAT.”
“ Look out the window.” He said. I turned to look, and a young man was passing by. He was hunched over, plugged into an Ipod, dressed in crotch hugging jeans, a sweatshirt, and lace-up shoes.
“Look at that-no one dresses. They all look like that,” he said.
“ Jack, they look like that everywhere.”
“Call Bonnie,(his wife)and ask her to come down to the shop.”
I wondered why he didn’t have a hearing aid; knowing Jack, it wasn’t stylish enough. Bonnie got on the phone with me, while Jack sat, staring into his memory through floor to ceiling glass windows. What separates Jack from all the others is that Jack’s continental suits are custom fit to the customer by Jack, and no one else. His tailors hand stitch each item; with custom lining, handmade bottom holes, and your name woven into the pinstripes.
I remembered back to the summer of 94, when Jack used to fancy-foot around the shop on Camden Drive; calling out orders, answering phones, greeting customers, and yelling at me,
” Luellen, don’t just stand there. For crying out loud, count the suits or something!” Whenever I went to do something, he shouted, “For crying out loud Luellen, don’t do it like that!” He repeated the same script to me every day for three months. He had a similar script for everyone in the shop. His tailors, some of whom have been there thirty years, shake their heads in frustration and sew. Behind all that shouting and hollering is one of the good guys, a guy who would give you the shirt off his back, a guy from Brooklyn.
Bonnie, his wife for some fifty years, speaks with a flare born from the genes of an actress. She’s theatrical without being in the business. “Oh Luellen darling–it’s so good to hear your voice. How are you? Did Jack recognize you?”
“Oh yes, right away.” I fibbed.
“I’m surprised. He can’t hear, his eyes are bad, but he won’t leave the shop.”
“Bonny, he said he has no customers. Is that true?”
“Unfortunately, it is. We both thought new customers would come from the second generation, but it didn’t happen, so what can you do? All the old ones are failing or dead. Tell me about you. Are you married?”
Bonnie and I chatted while Jack talked with Soaring Crow. I was looking at Jack the whole time I was on the phone. I noticed the way he raised his brows, and shut-tight smile that resonates a New York edgy resignation. His expressions were so familiar to me from working with him that summer.
“How’s your daughter?” I asked Bonnie.
“She died four years ago.”
I was watching Jack, “Oh Bonnie, I’m so sorry.” Jack’s eyes darted back to me. I promised Bonnie I’d come back and we’d all have dinner. I told her about the memoir and she remarked, “I have lots of stories about your father. He was a character.”
After I hung up the phone, Jack yelled, “Is Bonnie coming down?”
“No. She’s not up to it right now,” I answered. He pressed his lips into a thin disappointedly accepting line. For twenty years Bonnie worked side by side with Jack. She knew every customer, and made them feel like family. As a young teenager dad used to bring us in the shop. Bonnie always made an effort to be our friend.
“Look out the window, there’s another one. See what I mean?” Jack said.
“Yes Jack. I do. Listen, I want to thank you for giving me a job that summer. I never had a chance to thank you. It really meant a lot to me.”
He smiled. “I can’t sit here all day and count the birds. What am I gonna do?”
“What do you want to do?” I answered.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Do you have any hobbies, anything else you like besides suits?”
“I love to paint.”
“Paint?” Well that’s what you should do.”
“Look over there,” he gestured with a heavy arm. On the wall behind me, half a dozen oil paintings were hanging. I noticed one of a young sailor standing next to his ship.
“I really like that one Jack. I think you should paint.”
“What?”
“I said, RETIRE AND PAINT.”
He shrugged his shoulders. I kissed him again and he didn’t move from the chair. He needed me to raise him up, close the shop, and lock the door. I would have done it if he was all alone. I wanted to take him back to Santa Fe and place him at the Audubon, and let him paint the swallows.
I walked out and looked back once. He was staring out the window. I thought about the stories he used to tell, like the time Mickey Cohen came rushing through the shop and dropped a suitcase at Jack’s feet, “Hold onto this until I get back.” Mickey had commanded.
“What was in it Jack?”
“Whatta ya think? Stolen loot. They all used to come through the shop on the way out of Ducker’s Barber Shop. I couldn’t stop them–they did what they did–I don’t even know what they did, but use my phone all day.”
After I left Jack, Soaring Crow drove me over Laurel Canyon to meet Marietta, my mother’s friend. We had just passed Lookout Mountain when I recalled being there. It was painted right before my eyes. Lizzie, one of the wild ones in high school, and I used to drive up there in her British racing green Volvo. She loved going to mountain tops. We’d get high, and lean into the flickering spray of lights imagining all we were missing by beings so darn young. We didn’t know then we weren’t missing anything. We had it all; a big bubbling hot city filled with mysteries, puzzles, romance, and opportunities. Neither one of us had dreams of college and marriage. Lizzie wanted a baby, and I wanted to runaway to a distant splendor in the grass. As Soaring Crow descended the canyon and inched towards Studio city, I glanced over, and noticed a street sign, Sunshine Terrace.
“That’s where Kenny used to live with his parents. I bet his mother is still there. I’m going to call her.” Kenny was an irreplaceable boyfriend at eighteen, who later became the man who guided me towards writing. He used to shout out loud about how f—g good my poetry was, and how I should be published. Who can let go of a guy like that.
Kenny’s dad, Bernie the big shot, who everyone tolerated because he was a WWII Nazi military prosecutor, had died years before. You couldn’t butter your bread without Bernie finding something fishy about it. Soaring Crow met Kenny back in the nineties, when Kenny dropped by his house on his way to living in a campsite in Escondido. He stayed a month.
“Kenny! What a case that one is. You gotta love him. I understand him now. I know why he bailed out of society. I thought he was weird back then.” Soaring Crow chuckled thinking about Ken. He always had a neatly organized backpack, a cigar in his mouth, and carried a little black book with all his notes and phone numbers. He was an herbal tea importer and an inventor of gadgets.
We drove into the strip center on Ventura Boulevard fifteen minutes early. I called information and got the phone number for Ken’s mother, Anna Marie.
“Hello Anna Maria, it’s Luellen.”
“Oh Luellen how are you? It’s been a long time.” That was an understatement. It had been thirty years or more.” Her voice revealed so much. She spoke in long unwavering sentences, and it reminded me of how long-winded Ken could be when he got on his philosophical podium. She was Austrian and her accent smoothed out the awkward moments.
“I’ll be 84 this week.”
“Really? Well Happy Birthday.”
“ Oh thank you. I’ve been in this house fifty years.”
“ Wow, that’s amazing. It’s a beautiful house. I always admired your cooking and gardening.”
“ I don’t do much of that anymore.”
“ How is Ken doing?” I asked.
“ He moved to Guatemala.”
“ Really? When was that?”
“ Five years ago.”
“ Have you seen him lately?”
“Five years ago was the last time.”
“Is he all right?”
“He says he is. But I don’t know. We email, and sometimes he’ll call. I wish he would visit.”
“He couldn’t stand living in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the US.” I added.
“He lived in Ensenada for years; then he decided to go to Guatemala. It’s so far. He loves the Latin culture. It’s too hot for me. He should come back and visit. I need a little help.”
“What about the other brothers?”
“Rick has cancer.”
I rolled the rental-car window down and looked through people as they walked by. I didn’t tell her I was around the corner; I couldn’t just stop in and leave five minutes later.
“I’m so happy you called. I’ll tell Ken when I write to him next time. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Oh well. So nice to hear from you. Come and visit sometime.”
“I will, I promise you I will.”
As I left the car and headed upstairs to meet Marietta I felt a peck of familiarity with my surroundings. I was standing in front of the Starbucks, where Ken used to call me from when he was in town.
“ I’m over here at Starbucks, what a nightmare, I can’t even find a set a teeth in the place, nobody smiles. I’m telling you Lou, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to me. I got a headache and nothing even happened yet.” I wished he was sitting there, he could make bring hours of non-stop laughter.
Soaring Crow opened the door to the Daily Grill. Seated on a high stool, next to the hostess, was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her hair was pulled back in a bandana, and fell to her shoulders. Her skin was snow white, with a frosty pink glow and her china blue eyes glistened when she smiled.
“Oh you must be Luellen. I knew it right away; you look like your mother.” To be continued next week.
Any dice to throw: Email: folliesls@aol.com
The throw of the dice this week lands on adventures in waiting. As children, our waiting depended on how long it took Mom and Dad to finish what ever they were doing, and pay attention to our needs. Waiting wrestled with us, like a high-fever, and we resorted to nudging them, whining, even sobbing, if we were made to wait longer than we expected. During those formative school years, I waited all semester for the summer. In Los Angeles that meant it was hot enough to go swimming in the ocean.
When I lived in Hollywood, I rode two buses to get to Santa Monica. The second bus dropped me off on Ocean Avenue, the parallel street to Palisades Park, and above Santa Monica Beach. I ran down the ramp that connects to Pacific Coast Highway, and headed north to Sorrento Beach, another long block away, and when I reached the wide flat sands I stumbled in my tennis shoes trying to run in sand so thick it filled my shoes. I slowed down when I found my schoolmates clustered in a caravan of towels, beach chairs, radios, and brown bag lunches. I didn’t just take off to the ocean, I had to sit and talk and have something cold to drink. The wait lasted until my hair started to frizz, and then when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I ran down to the shore. Limb by limb I let the embrace of the waves, inch higher and higher until I was tumbling inside their grasp, and floating into abandonment.
After I moved to New Mexico, I stopped thinking about the ocean. I had to remove the memories from my thoughts, so I could continue to experience this spark of the world. The dry sage ocean of pink soil, and radiant blue sky that pinches your eyes when you’re driving through sunlight, the warmth of a desert night, and the white snow on pink adobe. It has a postcard perfection, even now, with curly brown leaves spread like trash in the streets, and the trees almost naked, and the dead plants in the garden. I try not to think of the ocean, the look of the sea from watery suntanned eye lids, or from the bluff at Del Mar, or the splashing of waves around my shoulders as I sink beneath the surface. I waited, like I did as a teenager, for that summer to come, so I could return to the sea.
Last week, I stood at the Del Mar seashore; it was like a summer day in August. Except there were no kids playing ball and screaming, no boom boxes, or the running of the dogs, and no lifeguards thrashing this part of the beach in their jeeps shouting, ‘ no swimming, no dogs off the leashes, no glassware, and no surfing.’ They were missing, so were the beach runners, surfers, and wind surfers. In fact, I was the only one swimming, on that first day at the beach. Before I went into the water, I reclined on a big black boulder facing the sea, and let my eyes wander the scenes on a Tuesday afternoon. In front of me was an older man with graying hair, reading in a canvas beach chair. He must be retired, he looked adapt to his spot about five feet from the shoreline. I thought about that Dennis Hopper commercial, the one on retirement, and how I still cannot come to grips with the idea of spending my days on park benches or in cafes watching younger men and women live.
I noticed there was one swimmer on a boogie board. He was far out, and floating along, and I wished I’d brought mine with me, but it was in SC’s van. The last time I used it was when I lived in Solana Beach. I also wished I had a new bathing suit, because the one I was wearing was busted and the neck straps were tied together in a knot so I could swim without losing my top. The sun baked my body, and I let it without abeyance, without shading my skin, or wearing a hat, just enough sunscreen to keep the rays from invasion. I closed my eyes and I opened them, and this is when the waiting business suddenly felt so important, so much so that I began to think about waiting as an aphrodisiac or something, that you have to make last while you wait for that moment that makes you feel immortal, childlike, and senses sharp as a wild animal.
I felt the beach flies, and the tang of salt on my lips, and when the seagulls swarmed above the water’s surface, like so many beads of a necklace, I thought, this is more beautiful, because I WAITED. I didn’t give up on the ocean, or my place in it, or believing that I would have my day in the sand, under a faded denim blue sky, with cotton ball clouds floating above me. I baked until the sweat drenched my pores, and then I raised myself up, and walked slowly to the edge of the water. It was a flat glassy day, and I felt the first sting of the chilly water on my feet, and then my knees, and then all at once I submerged. I discovered the best way to celebrate the day was to keep flopping backward on top of each wave as it crashed, and I did this for a dozen rounds, until I felt silly and weak, and dented with the surf. I found that waiting thing again, meant something that I should write about, because all of us were waiting for the election, and the economy to recover, and our real estate to be worth something again, and for me, to be published in hard back with at least three hundred pages. We are all waiting for this big change so we can feel secure and optimistic about the future. There is something useful about waiting, something predisposed, that gives us the support and substance we need, so when the waiting is over, and we are all flush with success again, it will feel like the first time, it will overwhelm us with bitter joy, like the ocean.
When I left the beach I had enough jubilation bouncing through my body to take the risk of driving by Maurice’s house, the one he left three years ago, when he died under his favorite orange tree. To be continued next week. Any dice to throw Email: folliesls@aol.com
