ham fisted theatrics

On Tuesday it’s finally sunny. I can see apartment complex’s pool through a window by the elevators and it looks how it’s supposed, all day-glo blue. A swimming pool on a cloudy day is under the mistaken impression that you need more gray in your life. Walking outside, the sun is hot on the back of my jeans.

It might be because of our proximity to a hospital but there seem to be a high concentration of crazy people muttering to themselves in the blocks around our building. For instance, a man with salt-and-pepper stubble walking down La Cienega, his arm in a sling, monologuing to himself, gesturing wildly with his free arm. Also in the blocks around our building: A house whose 50’s-style design embellishments include what looks like three triangular Muppet noses. A Hummer limo with a for-sale sign in the window along with the words “A TOUCH OF ELEGANCE” painted on the glass.

Dom is nice enough to drive me back to the dealership so I can pick up my freshly LoJacked car. We make the cunning game-time decision to start off right in the heart of rush hour, so it takes much longer than it should. On the way: there is unauthorized Lakers championship-wear hanging from some hangars on a chain-link fence, but no one is there to sell it, it’s just there unattended. Two Rastafarian guys have their truck parked diagonally across a sidewalk with its hood popped. In the fenced-in tunnel of a pedestrian overpass, nine or ten black schoolkids, all boys, stand in two rows. One kid dances for a couple of seconds, then passes to the kid behind him. Another kid films the whole thing on a small gadget, a camera or a cellphone.

I fiddle with the radio. There is something that pulls you up about stopping on a song that sounds good and then the vocals come in and it’s in Spanish. You feel an unearned level of open-mindedness. Is there a kind of white hipster that listens exclusively to Spanish radio? Because I might become that guy.

A Latino guy is selling flowers on the median. If I was the head of a selling-flowers-on-a-median operation, I would provide kickbacks to exotic dancers, flirtatious secretaries, and mistresses, with a not-very-specific instructions to, y’know, sex it up. Just keep doing things that make men make mistakes that will make their wives mad at them and make them more likely to buy flowers from a guy on the median. It would be in my interest to keep an air of jealous suspicion hovering over the city. The making-up process would inevitably cause men to put off leaving their wives for their mistresses (if they were ever really going to) which would piss the mistresses off in turn, causing the men to have to buy them some median-flowers as well, and I would get it coming and going.

At the dealership, I get my keys from the front desk and get in my car. The apple core I left in my cup-holder the day before is still there. It would be a treat for a cartoon rat in a junkyard, second only to a boot with a hole in the toes.

I bought “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” on CD at Best Buy when I bought my GPS and it hasn’t left my car’s CD player since. I have a tape deck and I could easily get one of those iPod tape-adapter things that are so much more reliable than FM adapters, but having a CD player in my car is novel to me even though you and everyone you know got over it in 1998. Driving back from the dealership Bruce Springsteen sings about a girl who now has a house up in Fairview and a few minutes later I drive by Fairview Boulevard. I like to think rippling Springsteen-magic is terraforming L.A. around me, and I invite it to keep doing that. Hey everyone: soon I will be winning your girlfriend from you in a car race.

There is something voyeuristic about looking in your rearview mirror at someone in the car behind you at a stoplight. The girl behind me in the red Ford Focus is having neck problems. She is behind me in the center lane for most of the drive home and I have to remind myself that this doesn’t necessarily mean she likes me: La Cienega is a very popular street that takes lots of people lots of places.

People’s heads bobbing in unison when the bus they’re on brakes makes it look like they’re rocking to the music that’s playing inside your car.

In our building, there seems to be a tradition of throwing your junk mail in a big pile on a ledge in the mail room, so I throw our junk mail with the rest. Considering how everybody in this building seems to feel about us, I expect to walk by later and see that someone has segregated our junk mail from everyone else’s, in a little lonely pile off to the side of the bigger one.

That night we try extra-hard to be quiet after 10 PM so as avoid getting further noise complaints. Being told to Keep It Down You Kids is the kind of thing that makes you realize, holy shit, there really are squares. This doesn’t trouble me much because if Springsteen keeps manipulating my time here through sheer force of song, soon I will have my revenge on all these squares by meeting their daughter in a field and putting ideas in her head about leaving this last-chance burg and showing her what it means to be alive and stuff.