The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [58]
“No,” I said, “I’ll take a walk. By the way, my reservation here was called in, possibly under the name Coolberg. Jerome Coolberg.”
“Ah.” Sudden recognition; his face brightened slightly, as if a rheostat had been turned to about twenty-five watts. “American Evenings.”
“Yes,” I lied. “I’m one of them. I’m one of the evenings.”
His lips tightened patronizingly, as if at last he had to acknowledge my minuscule somebody-ness. “Congratulations,” he said.
Outside the hotel, I walked in what I thought was a westerly direction.
38
ACTUALLY, I KNEW perfectly well where I was going. I ignored the somnolent junkies on the sidewalk and got out of the way of the roller girls zipping past me in the opposite direction. I was intent on my destination. Tempted as I was by the neighborhood record store, still in business and, I could see, patronized by clueless middle-aged men who didn’t know how to steal music files from the Web, I nevertheless continued to stride at a soldierly pace, peering in quickly at the tattoo parlors and the magazine racks as I advanced toward the shrine. At last I found it.
Angelyne. There it was, the billboard, dedicated to totally meaningless celebrity. Just as historic literary Long Island had its eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, so L.A. had Angelyne. She was completely admirable. She had her blowsy showgirl beauty and had peddled it for years in these primary-colored billboards mounted on the roofs of the neighborhood buildings: and in this particularly characteristic one—traditional, just her picture and her name, ANGELYNE—her hazardous giant breasts were on display, though miserably confined by a tight dress of plastic, or was it laminated vinyl? She sported black elbow-length evening gloves, a junk-jewelry bracelet, a cigarette holder, and her aging blond-bombshell hair tumbled on either side of the weather-beaten eyes. Supposedly, according to legend, she drove a chartreuse Corvette. She had once run for mayor.
No one I knew in L.A. had ever paid the slightest attention to these Angelyne billboards. But I loved them. I loved them more than the ocean, more than the Getty Museum, more than the canyons, more than Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. They spoke to the moralist in me. They were like Protestant cautionary tales to the supplicants and votaries of the dreamworld: here, presiding over the beautiful narcotic substances of the city, was this shopworn royalty figure, this majestic ruin, this queen without identity, this ex-beauty, this tautology (her full name was Angeline Angelyne) as powerful in her prodigious way as Ozymandias. She looked out at you, and if you dared, you looked back. You could ignore her; you could pray to her; you could deconstruct her; you could even bother to think about her; but whatever you did, she would continue being as blank and as melancholy as fading beauty itself, brooding down at you from this height, but, like the rest of us commoners, powerless against time.
39
I RETURNED TO the hotel. On the way I bought some postcards and mailed off one to Laura (a picture of the Hollywood sign), another to Jeremy (Malibu volleyball-playing beach bunnies), and a third to Michael (smog). A toothless wizened African American guy approached me and asked me for bus fare. I walked right past him, afraid of a shakedown from a practiced con. Back in the hotel, behind the front desk, the clerk roused himself from his customary insolent ennui and smirked quickly at me before composing himself again. Finding the best seat in the lobby, out of the way of commerce, I sat down to wait until Coolberg arrived. Moths fluttered around inside my stomach. Models and DJs and B-list Eurotrash movie stars came and went.
I felt myself dozing off.
I