Book Lover. Karen Mack
She’s beginning to get that overworked, harried look that creeps up on you if you don’t watch it. She slams down the receiver. “What a jerk!” she mutters, then sees me and smiles.
“Hey! What are you doing here, girl? God, you look so elegant. How are you? Let’s go outside for a smoke.”
We walk around to the back of the building and Brooke lights up. I’d forgotten about the smoking. It’s been years since I’ve been around people that smoked. In West L.A. you’re considered a pariah if you smoke. People look at you like you’re killing them and there’s this immediate hostile reaction that’s akin to road rage. But like most people under thirty, Brooke is oblivious to all this, and I sit there inhaling her smoke while I tell her my story.
“I’m trying to maybe go back to work because I’m separated and I’m kind of at odds, but not really.”
“God, Dora, I’m sorry to hear that, but why would you want to come back here?” she says with obvious reference to that phone call. “Honestly, I know it sounds strange but I think I get more and more antisocial every year. I’m even beginning to dread interviewing people about their problems,” she confessed, adding that she spends her weekends meditating with a yogi and staying away from crowds.
“I just realized one day that I could care less what sources have to tell me for these stories and when they call me back to elaborate or give me more quotes I find it so annoying. Pretty grim, hey, for someone in the news business.”
I feel better talking to her. The old misery-loves-company axiom, but I still know that, in my heart, I would trade places with her in a minute.
She can tell I’m discouraged. “Listen, Dora, if you really want to come back, I’ll talk to Eddie, who still has a lot of clout around here, and I know he always liked you. In fact, why didn’t you go to see him?”
I tell her that his office had sent me to that editor in Metro who couldn’t wait to get rid of me.
“You mean Miss Piggy? Everyone hates her. She’s so rude. Don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s the air in her office. It’s suffocating. Do you still have a copy of your résumé? I’ll make some calls, okay?”
As I walk out, I remember how I used to feel a combination of pity and disdain when older writers tried to make a comeback. Being in your thirties is not that old, but in the news business it might as well be. And now here I am trying to do something with my life and ending up exactly where I thought I would end up, which is why I dreaded doing this in the first place.
Stray Dogs and Other Companions
“Classic. A book which people praise and don’t read.”
∼ Mark Twain (1835–1910) ∼
I drive back to Brentwood in a brooding funk. For the first few miles or so, I work myself into a hyped-up, articulate rant in which my imaginary retorts to Miss Piggy are so blunt and uncomplimentary that I end up getting into terrible trouble. Daggers start flying across her office and, well, you get the picture. Some things are better left unsaid. Then again, some things aren’t. Why IS it that I always think of the perfect thing to say when it’s too late? Like with Fred. There I go again. I’ve got to stop massaging to death that pathetic scenario in the bookstore.
I cruise down the street just beyond Chinatown and turn on the radio. It’s daylight but the streets have a deserted, menacing quality about them that prompts me to lock my doors. If I could navigate the freeways, this wouldn’t be an issue. When I was a reporter, I’d drive around the neighborhood with a brazen, no-problem attitude, filing stories in an urban sprawl where whites, Latinos, blacks, Middle Easterners, and Asians all live in separate neighborhoods. The melting pot doesn’t exist in this town—people stay in their cars, shielded by metal and tinted glass.
I decide to call Darlene. I don’t feel like going home and dwelling on my failures. Or, for that matter, having to give Virginia an upbeat, bullshit report.
Darlene is happy to hear from me, the way she always is, and my mood starts to brighten.
“Hey, you,” she croons. “Where are you?”
“I’m in our old stomping grounds, near the Times.”
“Oh god. Don’t remind me. How did the interview go?”
“Terrific. You want to have lunch?”
“I’d love to. I knew you’d do great. You’re so amazing. Good for you.”
“Great.”
Darlene doesn’t fit in with my other friends, nor would she want to. They think she’s low-rent and bonkers and she thinks they’re shallow and spoiled. They’re both right. My time with her is a welcome respite from the insular life in West Los Angeles. She is the only one of my friends who doesn’t have any credit cards and still doesn’t own a cell phone. Also, Darlene rarely buys books. She goes to the Malibu library to check out her trashy sci-fi fantasies and romances, which she’s always trying to get me to read.
We normally spend most of our time discussing her newest failed romance or her latest harebrained scheme to make money. This afternoon, it’s a do-it-yourself prefab “Charming Swiss Chalet” kit, which she’s ordered sight unseen from a catalog and which she’s going to build in Big Bear, a mountain resort ninety miles from L.A.—the white trash version of Arrowhead. Darlene has vacationed in Big Bear for as long as I can remember, and the first and last time I accompanied her there we stayed in her friend’s ramshackle, dingy A-frame house by the lake. It was dark and dank, furnished in early kitsch mountain resort with seventies fake wood paneling, a thick, mustard-yellow multicolored shag rug that smelled faintly of mildew, and enough water damage to lead me to believe this was not a good place to be in a rainstorm. The walls were covered with homey sayings in needlepoint, like “There’s no place like fucking home” and “Hello, where’s the beer?” and there was a cramped, cluttered kitchen with ancient windows that spewed shards of paint flakes when you tried to open them.
The house was located in the kind of bedraggled mountain neighborhood where there were no sidewalks and people’s lawns were cluttered with rusted swing sets, mattresses with springs poking through, Big Wheels, firewood, tires, and other junk that usually is hidden away in garages. Her next-door neighbor had an enormous RV parked on the lawn that was painted an alarming shade of teal and had blotches of seascapes and seals camouflaging a fading paint job. Our morning walks along weed-lined streets ended up on the main drag where we’d get breakfast at a diner connected to a Gas-and-Shop and watch the kids in the back make gray slushy snowballs. The area had its share of beer-bellied bikers and scuzzy, scratch-assed locals who were still lit at nine a.m. when we’d order our eggs and juice. There is something depressing about a place where life just doesn’t shape up.
I meet her on the beach outside her apartment building, which is advertised as ocean view, but can only be called ocean view if you stand in a corner and look over her neighbor’s garage. Her unit is a one bedroom that faces the street, and whenever I duck in there to use the bathroom, it’s always cluttered with catalogs and paraphernalia from her latest project. Right now the apartment contains sample light fixtures and synthetic rug swatches, not to mention undecipherable blueprints that apparently came with the chalet-building kit.
Last year, Darlene supposedly made a bundle selling porno vampire-themed movie posters over the Internet. She mentioned it a few times, but I always changed the subject. Too weird. In addition, there’s her dog, Brawley, an overweight Rottweiler, who always rushes me for attention or a walk. Darlene only walks him at dawn or at dusk because the dog regularly pees on people instead of the usual lampposts or hydrants.
A few years ago, Darlene underwent a life crisis. Her husband, Mel, got hit by the proverbial lightning bolt one day at the precinct when he first spotted Detective Maria Gonzales, a member of the Bicycle Co-ordination Unit (BCU) of the Venice Beach Patrol. She was raven-haired, perky,