My landlord in the Sunset District had a space heater that would shock you if you touched the metal guard. Not every time — just often enough to keep you honest. The thing worked fine otherwise. Threw heat like a furnace. But if you brushed against it on the way to the bathroom at three in the morning, you’d get a jolt up your arm that made you forget you had to piss.
The laundromat on Fourth had one of those bulletin boards by the door. Business cards for dog walkers. A guy who fixes guitars. A flyer for a psychic named Crystal — fifty dollars for a past-life reading, which I thought was a bargain considering most people pay a lot more than that to avoid looking at who they used to be.
Someone had pinned a handwritten note in the corner. Block letters, blue ink: “LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO TALK TO. NOT ABOUT ANYTHING. JUST TALK.”
I used to write letters to people I’d never met.
Not emails — letters. Paper, pen, the whole stupid ritual. I’d be three drinks past good judgment and something I’d read would crack open a door in my head that I didn’t know was there. I’d write to the author. Tell them what their words did to me. Sometimes I’d get a reply. Usually I wouldn’t. The act was the point — the need to tell someone, anyone, that you existed, that you’d understood something, that the particular loneliness of their book had touched the particular loneliness of yours.
I watched a crew tear down the old library on Figueroa last week. Three days. Seventy years of brick and that specific hush that only exists in places where people are trying to think — reduced to a pile of rubble and rebar in three days. They had machines for it, obviously. An excavator with a jaw that could bite through a load-bearing wall like it was drywall. A bulldozer that didn’t know or care what used to happen inside those rooms.
A woman on the bus asked if she could take my picture. Not in a flirty way — she had a clipboard and a laminated badge and the dead eyes of someone working on commission. She said it was for a “visual diversity database.” Fifteen dollars for my face. Five more if I could do some expressions. Surprised. Angry. Sad. Happy.
I told her I could do all four at the same time, but she wasn’t interested in range.
I couldn’t sleep, so I was sitting on the kitchen floor at four in the morning eating cold rice out of the pot with a fork. The tile was freezing. The refrigerator hummed like it was thinking about something. You do stupid things at four in the morning — eat cold rice, read the news, let yourself feel the full weight of whatever it is you’ve been outrunning all day.
I used to know a guy named Eddie who sold fake Rolexes on Venice Beach. He had a card table, a beach umbrella, and a smile that could make you forget you were buying a seventeen-dollar watch. The thing about Eddie was, he never once told you it was real. He’d hold one up, turn it in the sunlight, and say, “Beautiful, right?” That was it. The lie was in the implication. The truth was in the price.
The guy at the next table was holding his phone over the wine list like he was trying to defuse a bomb.
I watched him snap a photo, tap something, wait. His date watched too. She had that look women get when they realize the evening has already gone somewhere they didn’t want it to go. He nodded at his screen, smiled, pointed at something on the list with the confidence of a man who has just been told what to think by a machine.
A woman at a garage sale in Glendale was selling a box of Chicken Soup for the Soul books for a dollar each. She had eleven of them. I know because I counted while she told me about her grandson who’d just gotten into dental school. She held each book like it meant something — thumbed pages, cracked spines, little Post-it notes sticking out like the tongues of sleeping dogs. She’d read every one. Some of them twice.
The waitress at the diner on Sunset has a scar above her left eye and a gift for absolute certainty. She told me last Tuesday the pie was fresh that morning. It wasn’t. The meringue had gone translucent, the way meringue does when it’s been sitting under fluorescent lights long enough to reconsider its life choices. But she said it — fresh this morning, honey — without a flicker. Steady eyes. No hesitation.