Wanderer's Notebook: Four Fragments of LA
By Creed O'Hanlon

1.
It is just after ten a.m., in the middle of the week. I’m sitting in a booth by a window in the diner on the ground floor of The Standard Hotel, on Sunset, and sipping from a glass of iced latte as I study the geometric pattern in the blue linoleum tabletop.
      “Are you hiding out? Cos’ if you are, let’s order breakfast. I’m starving.”
      I look up. A slender, mocha-skinned woman is standing at the end of the table. Without waiting for an answer, she unslings a hand-stitched leather bag from her shoulder and slides into the booth alongside me. Dressed in a plain white t-shirt, khaki cargo pants slung low on her narrow hips, and leather sandals, she moves with the sinuous angularity of a snake.
      Her name is Aisha. We first met in a café on Abbot Kinney a couple of months ago and we’ve been ‘seeing’ each other ever since.
      “They’re looking for you back at your office,” she says.
      “Did you tell ‘em where I was?” I ask.
      “Baby, who knows that anymore?”
      She relaxes into the scuffed vinyl cushioning of the banquette with the weary grace of someone who, at age 26, has played nearly all the supporting roles in the repertoire of Los Angeles’ cautionary tales: as a young wife of a successful hip-hop artists’ manager, flashing a black Amex card in the fashionable bodegas off Rodeo Drive; as a divorced, single mother sharing a two-room, ground floor apartment smaller than her ex-husband’s garage on the southern edge of Hollywood; as an actress almost too old to hope for a break; as anything to make ends meets – even, she confessed once, as a hooker when a girlfriend offered her a thousand dollars to do a threesome with a well-known director. “I didn’t mind it that much,” she told me, “I was pretty desperate then.”
      There’s a faded tattoo, blue-black like a bruise, on her right shoulder. I haven’t asked her about it but I know it is from a life before the ones she has told me about.
      “So what’s up?” Aisha asks.
      “I don’t know. Nothing.” Actually, I’m free-diving into a deep, aqueous depression. With luck, negative buoyancy will hold me down until I run out of air. “I lost it today,” I tell her.
      “It’s not the first time.”
      “No.”
      A pneumatic, not-so-young blonde waitress with a tangled perm and creamy flesh that billows from a utilitarian, Fifties-style yellow cotton dress unbuttoned to reveal her cleavage, puts a Caesar salad in middle of the table.
      “It’s this fucking town,” Aisha says. “It does it to all of us at different times.”



2.
The aging English pop star is silent.
      He’s performing at The House of Blues tonight, the last night of a four-day residency, but his voice is strained, so he communicates through mime and when that fails, phrases scribbled in pencil on paper napkins. His hands are always in motion, rotating and flicking lightly from the wrists like a percussionist working the inside of a beat playing only inside his head.
      There are three of us at a circular table beneath a bleached calico umbrella on the rear terrace of the Argyle hotel. It is just after midday. Beneath us, partly obscured by a sooty, carcinogenic haze of smog, is West Hollywood: a symmetrical grid of boulevards and streets lined with grubby terracotta roofs, palm trees and eucalypti, and the glistening, crystalline surfaces of swimming pools.
      I don’t even bother to take in the view. Too much of my life has ebbed away in hotels, restaurants and parking lots around here. Whoever it was that said “Hell is other people” must not have worked in Los Angeles. Here, hell is the shiney, empty places, from which all care has gone.
      The other guest is English, too. His hollow-chested reediness and nasally Liverpudlian twang, along with the red Prada slacks and black Prada boots he’s wearing, mark him as a common entertainment industry archetype. He has none of the pop star’s long-practised charisma. His name is Nick and together with the pop star he owns a music company in Tokyo that produces illusively pre-pubescent music acts called idoru for an adolescent market weaned on Sony PSPs and iPods.
      “I was talking to someone this morning and he said I should be careful of having anything to do with you,” Nick says.
      I wait a beat before replying. “He’s heard the worst, I guess.”
      “So have I,” Nick says.
      “How much of it is true?”
      “Nearly all.”
      “You don’t seem too fussed.”
      “Not much I can do about it.”
      And that appears to be the end of it because as we eat, Nick tells me about the pop star’s plans, still in their early stages, to re-form the group with which he gained a rarefied stratus of fame in the Eighties. An hour later, the pop star scratches three words on a tea-stained paper napkin: “Come to Japan?”
      I peer into the pop star’s famous blue eyes for a moment, then past them, over the low terrace wall, to a grassy reserve verge below that local residents use to exercise their dogs. Police in bicycle helmets, white golf shirts and blue shorts, are rousing vagrants lying asleep, bundled in blankets, around the reserve. Dishevelled, faceless figures rise and begin to wander like refugees, trailing layers of threadbare wool, flannel and nylon, towards the scrappy suburban flatlands north of Melrose. A few stragglers, probably stoned on cheap crack or Thunderbird, are hurried along with the prod of a baton.
      I wonder if the hotel pays the police to do this so its guests don’t witness the only mortal sin you can commit in America: poverty.
      “I am so fucking tired of this place." The realization is abrupt and unexpected.
      “Sure,” I tell the pop star. “Why not?”

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