Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [8]
I have something close to total recall. I never forget a face. It had been over a decade, but I was certain: the man at the bar that night was Sol Kupferman. He had barely aged. A strange coincidence that probably meant nothing. If I ever got to speak to Solly K, I would ask him “What were you doing in a crummy bar on the south side in the fall of ’68?” And he would very rightfully look at me like I was insane and say, “I don’t know” or “Was I?” or “I don’t remember.”
I considered my options. I could wait around and tail Kupferman after he left his office, or I could take off and resume my surveillance the next day. I decided to head toward the old neighborhood to see my friend Walter.
Western Avenue between Beverly and Wilshire and the blocks surrounding it constitute the old neighborhood. Situated two miles west of downtown L.A. and a mile south of Hollywood, there is nothing exceptional about it. The prosaic thrust of the ordinary lives lived there produced nothing during my formative years but an inordinate amount of male children, a good portion of whom assumed roles emblematic of the tortured 60’s: Vietnam veteran, drug addict, college activist, burned-out corpse. The neighborhood has changed slightly, topographically: Ralph’s Market is now a Korean church, old gas stations and parking lots have been replaced by ugly pocket shopping centers. The human core of the neighborhood, the people who were in early middle-age when I was a child, are elderly now, with resentments and fears borne out of twenty years of incomprehensible history.
And that makes the difference. The library on Council and St. Andrews still has the same librarian, and the bars on Western still supply Wilshire Station with an extraordinary amount of drunk drivers. But it’s different now; it’s a middle-American graveyard inhabited by the malaise of my past, and I feel chills of doom whenever I drive through it, which I do frequently.
I got out shortly after my parents died, as did most of the guys I grew up with. But my friend Walter is still there, ensconced at the old house on 5th and Serrano, with his lunatic Christian Scientist mother, his TV set, his science-fiction books, his records, and his Thunderbird wine. He is thirty-two years old, and we have been friends for twenty-five. He is the one person in my life I have loved unequivocally. I do not judge his inertia, his self-destructiveness, his complex relationship with his mother, or his incipient psychoses. I accept his oblique love, his self-hatred, and anger. Our relationship is twenty-five years of shared experience: together and in our separate solitudes; books, music, films, women, my work, and his fantasy. Here Walter has the upper hand: he is far more intelligent than I, and in the fifteen years since high school his sedentary lifestyle has afforded him time to read thousands of books, from the profound to the trivial, to assimilate great music into the bedrock of his consciousness, and to see every movie ever to pass the way of the TV screen.
This is an extraordinary frame of reference for an agile mind, and Walter has taken fantasy into the dimension of genius. His is pure verbal fantasy: Walter has never written, filmed, or composed anything. Nonetheless, in his perpetual T-Bird haze he can transform his wino fantasies into insights and parables that touch at the quick of life. On his good days, that is. On his bad ones, he can sound like a high school kid wired up on bad speed. I hoped he was on today, for I was exhilarated myself, and felt the need of his stimulus: the power of a Walter epigram can clarify the most puzzling day.
I stopped at the Mayfair Market to pick up three chilled short dogs. Walter works best when inspired by the right amount of T-Bird. Too little invites peevishness, too much, incoherent rambling. T-Bird is Walter’s drink of choice because it is cheap and easily obtained by threatening his mother, ripping off her purse, or mowing the