Leaving Tinseltown Tomorrow
Tonight, being all alone in Hollywood, as I mostly was for years not too long ago, crossing La Brea at Sunset with my two-piece Pollo Loco chicken dinner which I’ll eat in my cheap chain-motel room, I tell myself yet again I must again reread Repetition, Kierkegaard’s account of the tragic young man who returns to the scene of past raptures in a futile attempt to have them again. My return, by happenstance and bad planning is much happier, much more detached than that; I am here on legitimate business that went successfully and which has nothing to do with The Industry. It has seemed to me, in the three evenings I have been here that everything has gotten cheaper and sadder since last I laid eyes on it, but perhaps Hollywood has ever thus tended, the pictures always getting smaller, like adverts in the Entertainment section diminishing week by week after The Opening. Many of the things I remember with affection are already gone, replaced with idiot imitations of themselves or reborn as liquor stores or fitness facilities, the only sure-growth industries at the heart of the fabled place. I am surprised to find Angelyne® again hovering above Mann’s Chinese Theater, looking on her billboard like the Fifty Foot Woman and a moron’s pneumatic/pornographic fantasy, her bowling-ball breasts straining a flimsy fire-engine-red slingshot as she offers her perfect airbrushed ass invitingly up to the sunset. Angelyne was Homerically old when I was pounding these pavements with scripts; she was a legend, endlessly promoted on billboards all around town as the next sexpot (ads paid by a sugar-daddy) and yet decades went by and no roles came her way. I never met her, but once I met a woman whose car had been immolated, collateral casualty because parked next to Angelyne’s red Corvette, torched by the angel’s enemies. Today, after a day and a half of handling and peering into true quirky beauty in the study room at the Huntington, I came back and passed out as if I’d been on a bender, waking occasionally to the sense that I might sleep right through the night, until finally I dragged myself up and got coffee and worked, then at six ran up Runyon Canyon, taking in its vertical circular parade of Hollywood aspirants getting slimming exercise, many too many accompanied by the kind of awful small dogs which seem inbred then fed on cat turds, Tic Tacs, Brie cheese and whatever drugs fall off the coffee table. The view from the top is awful, smudged with the car-farts of the teeming freeways, so I am not tempted to rest pretending to enjoy the vast vista while watching the belles of various small-town balls pass by in their Juicy Couture workout wear. Running back on Hollywood Boulevard I am again surprised by Angelyne, this time on the sidewalk, yammering at a white wormy guy, Angelyne in the flesh & a fire-engine-red minidress, surgeried into something dim extraterrestrials might send to spy on us puny humans, her legs several shades of salamander tan ending in red stilettos, her face the bad LSD flashback the cops promised me. I am as happy to have seen her as ever I was to have any of the successful legends manifest themselves in my presence. Angelyne is the genius of Los Angeles, setting the standard at the pathetic nether end, allowing us to sink and sink, synchronized sinking, allowing us to compare ourselves out, as they say chez Betty Ford and better pin-resetting clinics. Long as we are not yet that pathetic, we can go on and on, beating ceaselessly against the tide, ever toward hope’s past rapture.
