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T H E
L O S A N G E L E S
D I A R I E S a m e m o i r
Ja m e s B r o w n
In memory of my sister,
Marilyn, and my brother, Barry
C O N T E N T S
F i r e 1
S n a p s h o t 1 9
D a i l y Ru s h e s 4 1
M y Pa p a ’s Wa l t z 5 5
T h e Fa c t s 6 1
To u c h 7 7
D a i s y 9 7
Pe r s o n a l E f f e c t s 1 1 7
O n S e l l i n g a N ov e l t o H o l l y wo o d 1 3 7
A F i n e P l a c e 1 4 7
M i d a i r 1 6 3
S o u t h D a ko t a 1 9 5
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 2 0 1
About the Author
Other Books by James Brown
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Of this memoir, three pieces appeared in the Los Angeles
Times Magazine: “My Papa’s Waltz,” “On Selling a Novel to
Hollywood,” and “Fire,” under the title “A Taste of What
Falls from the Sky.” “Fire” was also published, in different
form, in the New England Review. “Daily Rushes” was pub-
lished in the Denver Quarterly and “The Facts” appeared in
the Santa Monica Review.
The author wishes to thank the editors of these publi-
cations and to express gratitude for the generous support re-
ceived from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Although this work contains descriptions
of people in my life, many of their names and other
identifying characteristics have been changed
to protect their privacy.
F I R E
W i n t e r 1 9 9 4
Winter is the season of the arsonist in Southern Califor- nia. The manzanita and chaparral are dry and brittle and the
Santa Ana winds have begun to blow. They move at gale force.
They cross the arid Mojave and whip through the canyons of
the San Bernardino Mountains, through the live oak and the
pines, the ponderosa, the sugar and coulter, white fir and in-
cense cedar. I know these names because I live in these moun-
tains, eighty miles east of the sprawl of Los Angeles, and I
worry when the winds come. I worry about the possibility of
fire. I know he’s out there, the arsonist. I know he’s waiting, like
me, for a day of opportunity very much like this.
I’ve seen the Santa Anas uproot trees. I’ve seen them strip
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roofing from houses and shatter windows. I’ve seen them top-
ple big rigs, and once, along the same freeway I’m traveling
now, I saw a stop sign flying through the sky. I keep a firm hold
on the wheel. The winds hit in sharp gusts and can blow you
clean over the line. You have to be ready. You have to hang on
tight and keep your eyes on the road.
Traffic moves slowly, carefully. No one’s taking any
chances, making abrupt lane changes, cutting you off or tail-
gating. I would like to believe that it’s courtesy that dictates our
caution, our good manners, except this is Southern California,
I grew up here and I know better. Danger or its potential some-
times brings out the best in us, and I wonder, as I reach to turn
on the radio, if maybe it would be a good thing if the Santa
Anas blew every day all year-round.
From time to time I find myself having to drive into Los
Angeles on business, and just the thought of it always fills me
with a sense of dread and anxiety. The city has changed and
grown immensely since I knew it as a child, and sometimes
even the most familiar streets, streets I grew up on, seem barely
recognizable. Gated communities have replaced the bungalows
and tract homes and the signs in the windows of the shops and
stores are in Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, occasionally Arabic.
Where corner markets once stood you’ll now find minimalls,
and Hollywood landmarks, places like Schwab’s and Pandora’s
Box and the old Brown Derby restaurant, have gone the way of
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the bulldozer. There are more freeways, too, bigger and wider
ones, but the traffic has never been worse.
But it isn’t the unfamiliar that makes me anxious. It isn’t the
traffic or the crowds or the evolving landscape of architecture
and ethnicity. I am a fiction writer who doesn’t make enough
money at it not to have to do something else for a living. So I
teach. So I am a professor. And what Hollywood offers me is
the chance to escape the classroom and tell stories full-time.
Trouble is, I’m not very good at telling stories that pay better
and that’s what this is about. It’s what it has always been about:
my driving into Hollywood to talk to producers and executives
who like my work but want me to write something more com-
mercial. In this case that less commercial work is my last novel
and the screenplay I wrote based on it, a screenplay commis-
sioned by Universal and Amblin, both of whom passed on it
when I was done. “I don’t know why you ever bothered to write
this,” an executive tells me, after she finishes reading my script.
“It’s no movie. It’s too real.” Now the rights are mine and my
agent, who feels differently than the executive, is sending it to
other executives and producers in Hollywood. As a sample, he
calls it. The idea is not so much to sell the script as it is to sell
myself as a scriptwriter. Already I’m looking forward to the
end of the day.
The Santa Anas die down as I approach Los Angeles and I
ease up on the wheel. I take a deep breath. But I know it’s only
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temporary, this calm. I know better than to let myself relax.
That thing called the L.A. River borders the last stretch of the
freeway into Burbank, and I look out on it, the dirty water,
moving sluggishly through the narrow concrete channel that
contains it. Over the rush of the cars I try to imagine it as I
was told it used to be, a real river, filled with trout and salmon
and lined with sycamores and willows instead of chain-link
and barbed wire. But I’m not successful. I think about my
brother. I think about my sister. We are children down by that
river on a day very much like this with the wind blowing lightly
and the smell of fire in the air. I’m nine years old, the youngest,
and we’re passing a bottle around, a bottle I’ve stolen from a
grocery store nearby. My sister points to the sky.
“Look. Look,” she says. “Snow.”
Only they’re ashes. Ashes are falling. Ashes are everywhere,
and in the sunlight they appear white, almost translucent. My
head is spinning and I laugh. My brother laughs. I can hear us
all laughing as we look to the sky, opening our mouths, catch-
ing ashes, like snowflakes, until our tongues turn black.
In the rearview mirror I check to see if my eyes are clear.
They are, and they should be. I’ve gone without a drink or a
drug for four days, four long miserable days of white-
knuckling it, all because I want to look my best, and I like to
think I do. I’m clean shaven. My hair is freshly cut and neatly
combed and I have on my best oxford shirt and a brand-new
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pair of Levi’s. But for some reason my heart is beating faster
than it should and every now and then I can’t seem to catch my
breath. It’s nerves. I’m under pressure. I see today’s meetings as
an opportunity and I’m keenly aware that the older I get, the
less these opportunities will come my way. It’s been six years
between novels and now with a new one out, and a new agent
working hard to set up these meetings, there is renewed inter-
est in my writing. But that interest is always fleeting. I think
about stopping at a liquor store but decide against it. Only al-
coholics, I tell myself, drink before noon.
Everything, I tell myself, is under control.
My first meeting is at Disney Studios in Burbank and I ar-
rive early enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes and try to
collect myself. There are no soundstages at this end of the lot,
and except for a gardener gathering up his hoses, I am alone on
a path that divides two generations: On the one side are the
older offices, the Hollywood bungalows with stucco exteriors
and terra-cotta roofs and well-manicured lawns; on the other
are the multistoried buildings made of steel and glass. And at
the end of this pathway are the executive offices where I soon
find myself, on the third floor, seated across the room from a
woman maybe twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. I wonder
how she came into her position so young and the only scenar-
ios I come up with have to do with her mother or father or
some very good friend. This is just like me, though, to think in
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the negative, and because I’m aware of it I’m able to check my-
self. I don’t know this woman. I shouldn’t prejudge. I’m here
for a job, if not today or next week then maybe it’ll happen for
me a year or two down the line, and I need to remember that.
I need to keep an open mind.
For a while it’s small talk. I tell her about my drive from
the San Bernardino Mountains, the wind and the traffic. She
tells me about how bad it used to be when she worked for a law
firm in downtown L.A. “Now,” she says, “I can walk to my
job.” Her office looks as if she’s in the process of moving into
it, or out, I can’t tell which. There’s a stack of pictures, big
framed pictures propped against the couch and it’s either be-
cause she’s taken them down or hasn’t hung them yet. Same
with the bookcases. They’re empty and there are boxes and
boxes of screenplays all over the place that need to be unpacked
or hauled away.
“I enjoyed your script,” she says. “But I wouldn’t exactly
call it Disney material. I mean it’s pretty fucking dark.”
She seems relaxed and confident and I wonder if at her age
I showed that confidence, or if I’ve ever had it to show. Cer-
tainly I don’t now. I look through the window behind her. Out-
side I can see the tops of the trees swaying in the wind and it
occurs to me, though I immediately push the thought out of
my mind, that maybe I don’t belong here. On her desk is a bag
of peanuts and every now and then, as we continue to talk, she
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reaches for one, cracks it open with her teeth and drops the
shells on the carpet.
“Are you working on anything new?”
“Another script,” I say.
“What about?” she says, popping a peanut into her mouth.
I’m lying. I’m not working on another script, at least not
putting words to paper, but then that’s what this is all about.
To pitch. To sell what you haven’t written and probably never
will unless you’re paid first. I think my idea is commercial.
“It starts out in the desert,” I say. “You see this man all by
himself in the middle of nowhere. It’s toward nightfall and at
first you can’t tell what he’s doing. But he’s got a long steel pole
and he’s jabbing it into the ground. The camera pulls back and
we see hundreds of holes all over the desert floor. He’s been
doing it all day.”
“And why’s he doing this?”
She asks the question but I’m not so sure that she’s inter-
ested in the answer. This does little for my confidence.
“He’s searching for his daughter,” I say. “Checking for soft
spots in the ground.”
The producer shifts in her seat.
“That’s a real cheery opening,” she says.
I smile awkwardly. I clear my throat, I push on.
“The next thing we see is a parade of news vans following
a sheriff ’s car into the desert. The killer’s in the backseat. Pull
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over, he says. He points out the window with his cuffs on and
that’s when we cut away, to the same scene, only now we’re
watching it on TV. It’s a videotape, and the killer’s face is
frozen on the screen.” I pause, waiting for her response, but she
just cracks open another peanut and pops it into her mouth.
“The father, the guy we saw in the beginning, we’re in his liv-
ing room now. He’s slouched in an old lounge chair staring at
the TV and all around him are empty beer cans and whiskey
bottles and half-eaten plates of food. The poor bastard’s been
playing the same scene over and over. Hasn’t moved from that
chair in days.”
I pause again for her reaction and she gives me a strange
look, as if I might be a little over the edge myself for having
thought it up. And in a way, I suppose, she may be right.
“Christ, don’t you write anything light?”
“You want light, I got light.”
But that’s as far as I get.
“To tell you the truth,” she says, “we’re really not taking on
new projects now anyway. But I have a script that could use
some work. Maybe you’d like to take a look at it.”
Of course I would. What I want is a chance, any sort of
chance, and in this case it’s a shot at a rewrite of someone else’s
screenplay, an adaptation of a novel called Going Blind, about a
college music professor who’s slowly losing his sight and tries
to hide the fact from his friends and family and colleagues for
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as long as he can. He can’t face what’s happening to him, can’t
admit to the truth, and I think I can understand that. I think
it’s something I can work on, even with the changes she wants,
which are to set the story in high school instead of college and
make him a football coach instead of a music professor. My
first reaction is that it strains credibility, to make him a foot-
ball coach. But it’s possible, I suppose. Anything is possible
when there’s money involved, and before I leave her office I’m
already working on it, trying to imagine different scenes, dif-
ferent predicaments, trying to imagine myself as a man going
blind.
My next meeting isn’t for a couple of hours, and I’m back
in my car with nothing to do. I think about getting something
to eat. I think about getting a cup of coffee. But I’m nervous
and jittery and what I really want is something to take the edge
off. My sister lives nearby in Studio City and ordinarily, when-
ever I come into L.A., I drop by and have a couple of drinks
with her. Do a line. Or two. Or three. Only these aren’t ordi-
nary times. She’s quit drinking and using since the death of
baby Katherine and I don’t feel welcome in her home anymore.
Still I want her to be clean and sober. Still I am proud of my
sister and I’ve told her so. That doesn’t mean, however, that I
have to follow her example. Because I can take it or leave it. I
can quit whenever I want. I fumble for my car keys, start the
engine and drive into Hollywood to kill some time.
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The plan is to hit a bookstore or maybe cruise by one of
my old neighborhoods and see how it’s changed, or maybe how
it hasn’t. Our mother moved around a lot when we were grow-
ing up and it’s hard to go anywhere in this city without bump-
ing into someplace we used to live. An old apartment complex.
Some shabby house. I went to fourteen different schools before
I reached the ninth grade, and one year, the first year we moved
to Los Angeles, my brother, sister and I didn’t attend school at
all. The area was too rough, our mother said, and she was right.
Barry and Marilyn were beat up the first couple of weeks of
classes, and I had my share of trouble, too. Until we could af-
ford a better neighborhood, a better school district, our mother
thought it best that we ride the year out at home.
But today I don’t stick to my plan. I don’t go to a book-
store. I don’t drive by the old neighborhoods. Instead I make
myself a promise: I’ll only have one. Just one. I mean it, too. At
the time I couldn’t mean it more. And of course after the first
drink I see no harm in having a second. Or a third. I sit at the
far end of the bar, under the Olympia waterfall, and further
justify my being here by reading the script to Going Blind. At
least, I tell myself, I am being constructive while I drink.
It’s good, the way the writer has it, from the point of view
of a music professor, and the more I read, the less I’m able to
imagine it differently. A teacher who is going blind could make
himself intimately familiar with the physical layout of his
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classroom and soon learn to move about it with something
close to ease. I can buy that. And certainly he could play his in-
strument, which in this case happens to be the piano. But a
blind football coach? What happens when he steps out onto
the field? When he has to call a play, or simply throw the ball?
The drinks have begun to take effect and I’m able to see things
clearly now, for what they really are: The whole idea is fucking
ridiculous, and I feel like a fool for ever having gotten my
hopes up. That I hoped at all just goes to show how desperate
I am, and I hate to think that the producer saw it in me, that
desperateness, although I’m sure that she did. Then I start to
think about how she kept cracking peanuts while we talked and
dropping the shells on the carpet and how someone would
have to clean them up. I bet it won’t be her. In fact, I bet she’s
used to making messes for others to clean up, messes much big-
ger than peanut shells, and I resent her for it. I resent myself,
too, for trying to sell someone a story that I don’t believe in
and would never write unless I was paid.
So I light another cigarette.
So I order another drink and pretty soon I find myself
condemning not only the producer who gave me the script but
also the one that I’m scheduled to meet, and never will, because
by now I’m too drunk. And by now it’s too late. Exactly how
long I’ve been here, I don’t know, but when I drink I often lose
complete sense of time and this is one of those occasions.
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Once I drove halfway across the state to visit my in-laws for
Christmas, a good five hundred miles, and I barely remember
getting into the car. Suddenly it’s eight, nine hours later and
I’m there, parked in my in-laws’ driveway, listening to the en-
gine tick itself cool. How I made it without getting into a
wreck, maybe killing myself or someone else, is something akin
to a miracle.
I pick up some change from the bar and head to the pay
phone on the wall outside the bathrooms and call my sister.
She answers on the second ring.
“Hey, Marilyn,” I say.
“Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at a gas station. My fan belt broke.”
“Bullshit.”
“No bullshit.”
“You should be calling your wife,” she says, “not me.”
There’s a long pause. I twist the phone cord around my
hand.
“Just tell her I’m on my way, okay?”
“I’m sick of lying for you.”
“It’s no lie,” I say.
“Jimmy,” she says. “I can hear the fucking music in the
background. You better sober up and get your ass home.”
My wife’s name is Heidi, and I know I should call her, that
I owe her that much, but I don’t want to hear it. Her cursing.
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Her screaming. I know I’ve done wrong. I know there’s no ex-
cuse for getting drunk when you’re supposed to be home with
your family and I wish knowing this would stop me from
doing it. I wish that’s all it took. That I could will it to happen.
But it doesn’t work that way, it never has, and in my state of
mind, at this particular moment, I can’t imagine living without
it. The alcohol. The dope. I’ve been drinking and using since I
was nine years old and sometimes I think it’s the only thing
that gives me any real pleasure. I love the feeling, the rush. That
numbing of the brain. That deadening of the senses or the
heightening of them on speed. I need that drink. That pill, that
fix, to feel better. I need it, sometimes, just to make it through
another day.
It’s dark out when I finally leave the bar, and the Santa
Anas have kicked up again. I’m on Hollywood Boulevard, and
even for a weeknight the streets seem abnormally quiet. Few
cars are on the road, and the sidewalks, usually crowded with
tourists, are strangely empty. The wind is strong and I lower my
head and lean into it as I walk, in the opposite direction from
where I parked. At the corner there’s an old man waiting for
the light to change and I ask him for the time. He doesn’t seem
to hear me. I repeat the question, only louder. That gets him to
glance my way but again he doesn’t say anything. Maybe he’s
scared to be out on these streets at night. Maybe he smells the
liquor on me and it offends him. I don’t know. When the light
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changes he steps off the curb, holding his jacket closed against
his chest and hurries across the street.
I walk on.
My legs are heavy and the lights in the windows of the dif-
ferent shops and stores are blurred. For the first time that night
I realize I’m drunk. Too drunk to drive. I need more than cof-
fee to sober up. But I’m in luck. This is Hollywood and what-
ever you want, whatever you need is always just around the
corner or a little farther down the block. Tonight I find it out-
side a run-down apartment complex on a side street between
Vine and Cahuenga. Two Puerto Rican kids are standing on
the front steps, and I catch eyes with the smaller one as I walk
by. There’s a boom box at his feet and the bigger kid is sipping
on a can of Olde English “800.”
“Anything happening?” I say.
“What you looking for?”
“Rock. Crank. Whatever you got.”
“You a cop?”
“I look like a cop?”
“Yeah,” the smaller one says, “you look like a fucking cop.”
“You look like a fucking cop, too,” I say.
But I say it in a good way, because I’m in a good mood. Be-
cause I know I’m about to score. Besides it’s only protocol: If
you’re a cop and don’t say so when you’re asked, that’s grounds
for entrapment. They know it, I know it, and for fifty dollars
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they point me to a chink in the apartment wall, just a few feet
away, where they’ve stashed a tiny plastic bag of what proves,
surprisingly, to be some very potent dope. For another ten I get
a chipped glass pipe that sells new for a couple of bucks but
I’m not interested in bargaining. Like Pavlov’s dogs, my mouth
is suddenly dry, my heart is beating faster and I can almost feel
it, the rush, without even firing up.
I plan to get high in my car where there’s less chance of
being seen, and where I’m out of the wind, but it’s parked a few
blocks away and I can’t wait that long. All the stores on Holly-
wood Boulevard are closed for the night, and I duck into the
alcove of a souvenir shop, drop a rock into the pipe and light
up. My back is to the street and at first, when I feel a wave of
heat pass over me, I think it’s on account of the dope, the rush.
That it’s just powerful stuff. But then it happens again, an even
stronger wave along the back of my neck, and that’s when I re-
alize that it’s coming from behind me. Turning, I see it: The
building directly across the street is immersed in fire. And it’s
a beautiful sight. Flames seep through the edges of the roof
and the big storefront windows glow and pulsate like they’re
breathing. Burning embers dance across the sky. In the power-
ful Santa Anas the flames grow fast, and in a matter of seconds
they’ve doubled in size. I look around to see if anyone else is
watching but the streets are empty. This makes me nervous. I’m
the sole witness to what is most likely the work of an arsonist,
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and I don’t want to be anywhere near here when the police and
firefighters arrive, especially in my condition. Ashes rain from
the sky, and I begin to walk.
Everything, I tell myself, is under control.
I don’t remember the ride home that night any better than
I do the time I drove halfway across the state to visit my in-laws
for Christmas. That’s the nature of a blackout. But I must’ve
stopped off at a liquor store along the way because there’s a
pint of Canadian Club in my lap. And most of it is empty. It’s
light out now, and somehow I’ve managed to navigate my way
home. Sixty miles of freeway. Another twenty of winding
mountain roads. I’m parked in the driveway outside my house,
and the windshield is silver with frost. Exactly how long I’ve
been there, I can’t say for sure, but when I wake up I’m shiver-
ing from the cold and everything is quiet. The branches on the
big pines that surround my house are motionless and there’s a
certain stillness about the air, a certain calm. The Santa Anas
have passed finally and now, lightly at first, it begins to snow.
She will threaten to leave me.
She will tell me over and over that I am a horrible man and
I will promise repeatedly, as I always do, repeatedly, never to hurt
her and our beautiful children again. I will vow never to drink.
I will vow never to use. I will vow, from here on out, to be a re-
sponsible man. And I will mean all these things. I will mean
each and every one.
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Faintly I hear the sound of laughter, and on the hillside in
the distance I spot my three little boys. They are bundled up in
heavy jackets. They’re wearing knit caps and bright-colored
scarves and mittens too big for their hands. The snow falls
harder. The snow falls faster, and as I start toward the house I
watch them spinning round and round, laughing, their mouths
open to the sky.
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F a l l 1 9 6 1
N A P S H O T
I’m waiting in the car for my mother while she sets fire to an apartment building down the street. I’m five years old. The car
is a new Thunderbird with big wide seats that still smell of
fresh vinyl, and the street where we are parked is lined with
sycamores that have begun to shed their leaves. It is early in the
evening. We are in a quiet working-class neighborhood in San
Jose, California, fifty miles south of San Francisco along High-
way 101, and when my mother returns to the car, slightly out
of breath, we drive to Fisherman’s Wharf and have shrimp
cocktails for dinner.
Afterward we catch a cable car. The rumble of the steel
wheels and the jerkiness of the ride scares me but I feel safe
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with my mother’s arm around me. My brother and sister are
back in San Jose with our father, and I like it this way, being
alone with her. Barry is eleven years old, Marilyn is just nine,
and for once I don’t have to compete with them for our
mother’s attention. In the distance, as the cable car reaches the
top of Nob Hill, you can see the skyline lit up with the lights
from all the different office buildings. You can see the fog
rolling in off the bay, unfurling across the city.
My mother shivers and holds me tighter.
“I want to buy you a present,” she says.
“What for?”
“Just because,” she says.
We get off at the end of the line and walk down Market
Street, pausing every now and then to look through the win-
dows of the different shops and stores. I like the cutlery shop
with all its knives laid out in perfect rows. Bowies and stilettos.
Fat butcher knives. Hunting knives, daggers and swords. The
chromed and steel blades shine under the glare of the bright
lights. I stare and stare until my mother takes my hand.
“C’mon,” she says, pulling me along. “You’re too young for
a knife.”
We head down the block, her high heels clicking against
the pavement. When we come to an army surplus she stops and
asks me if I want to go in. I tell her that I do. It smells good
inside, musty and damp, and for a while my mother lets me
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wander the aisles by myself. They have old army helmets. They
have old G.I. canteens. They have field jackets, German parkas,
empty ammunition cans, scalpels and tweezers, duffel bags and
rucksacks. The list goes on.
I’m looking at a portable foxhole shovel with a folding
blade when my mother finds me. It unfolds easily enough but
now I’m having trouble breaking it back down, like I found it.
“The store is closing,” my mother says. “Hurry and pick
something out.”
It’s between the foxhole shovel and one of the old army
helmets, and I choose the foxhole shovel in part because I’m
curious as to how it breaks down, which I feel I’m just on the
verge of figuring out, and in part because I can imagine myself
digging a deep hole with it in our backyard. Maybe, if I dug
wide enough, I could turn it into an underground clubhouse.
Maybe, if I covered the top with leaves and branches, I could
make a trap for my brother and sister. With a good shovel,
there are all kinds of possibilities. With a helmet, all you can
do is wear it, and of course none of them fit. I give the shovel
to my mother and she pays the cashier.
On our way back to the cable cars we encounter a man
sprawled out on the sidewalk, one hand hanging limply over
the curb, the other clutching a thin green bottle to his chest. I
think he could be dead, or badly injured, and I want to stop. I
want to see if there’s anything we should do to help. But my
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J a m e s B r o w n
mother knows different. She grew up poor in Chicago and has
witnessed these kinds of things all her life.
She squeezes my hand. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He’s okay.
He’s just a drunk.”
We make a wide arc around him. We continue down the
block but I keep glancing over my shoulder at him. He doesn’t
look okay to me, not at all. My mother hurries me along, and
I wonder, as I turn my back to the man, what exactly a drunk
is and why it is that he doesn’t deserve our concern.
We spend the night at the Travel Lodge on Beach Street.
There’s only one bed in the room but it’s large enough for both
of us, and I remember lying beside my mother in the dark, lis-
tening to the cars passing on the street outside the window. She
has her back to me. I remember her gentle, even breathing and
the warmth of her skin against mine. I don’t think she is sleep-
ing. Even at that early age I sense that something is wrong, ter-
ribly wrong, and for a long while I also remain awake. The
headlights from the passing cars outside make shadows on the
ceiling, and I watch them, the different patterns, how they
bend and disappear.
In the morning we have breakfast at the coffee shop next
to our motel. The counter is full of men reading the newspa-
per, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. We sit in a booth
near the back. My mother looks tired, in no mood for the men
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
at the counter who keep glancing her way. She dips the corner
of her napkin into a glass of ice water on the table.
“Hold still,” she says.
Leaning toward me, she draws the wet part of the napkin
along my cheek. The water is cold. I wince and pull away.
“How you get so dirty,” she says, “I’ll never know.” The wait-
ress brings her coffee, and afterward, when we’ve ordered and
eaten our breakfast, we return to the car in the parking lot of
the motel.
For most of the ride home that morning we say little. It’s
still foggy out and she is concentrating on the road. Highway
101 runs parallel to San Francisco Bay, and I look out over the
gray choppy waters as we drive. We pass Candlestick Park,
where our father once took us to watch the Shriners’ all-star
game. We pass the San Francisco airport. We pass through the
sprawling suburbs of Brisbane, Burlingame and Palo Alto and
then we are back, moving along the familiar streets of San Jose
where again, while we are stopped for a red light, I catch a cou-
ple of men staring at my mother. They’re standing at the bus
stop on the corner, and one of them whistles. I give him a dirty
look. The other guy smiles at me. My mother ignores them
both, and when the light changes we drive on. I’m too young
to realize why men stare at my mother so much but I’ll under-
stand when I’m older and look at some old snapshots of her.
I am looking at one now, as I write this.
2 3
J a m e s B r o w n
It is pinned to the wall in front of me, and in it my mother,
brother, sister and I are standing in front of an older Buick
Special. We are squinting against the glare of the sun, and in
the background you can see the wide expanse of the Pacific. I
look closer at the photograph. My mother’s hair is cut short,
like a boy’s, and she is wearing a white sleeveless sweater, a tight
skirt, and sandals. One of her legs is posed ahead of her. Her
hands are laced behind her back, and she’s leaning against the
fender, smiling pleasingly into the camera.
This house is an achievement for our father, a building con-
tractor with an eleventh-grade education, and our mother, a
secretary and real estate agent who dropped out in junior high.
It is Spanish style, painted white with brown trimming, the
roof terra-cotta. The front lawn is neatly manicured. Inside
there are three bedrooms, two baths, a den and an office.
Through hard work, scrimping and saving, they have also ac-
quired six other houses in San Jose. They buy them run-down,
fix them up, then sell or rent them out. They are doing well.
Marilyn and Barry attend private schools and take piano and
dance lessons. We have a baby-sitter, a beautiful Mexican
woman a few years older than our mother, a woman who reads
to me, who makes us breakfast, makes our beds, does our laun-
dry, shops for us and keeps our house clean.
I share a room with my brother, and when I get home that
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
morning I find him stretched out across his bed reading. He’s
always reading, it seems. Big fat books. By eleven Barry has
skipped two grades. He can speak French and Spanish and his
IQ tests out at 170, genius level. Someday he wants to be a
movie star. Already he’s had two small roles in Equity theater
in San Francisco and a walk-on in the movie All’s Fair in Love and
War. This is our mother’s idea, for Barry to act, though he’s
taken to it as if it were his own. He is the classic overachiever,
ambitious, driven to please. As a child Barry is bone-thin,
sickly and pale from lack of sun and exercise. Fun, or play as
other children know it, is not an important part of his life.
My brother is reading Profiles in Courage. John F. Kennedy
has recently been elected president, and Barry is a big Kennedy
fan. Usually he ignores me when he’s reading, usually he ig-
nores me in general, but this morning is different. He puts the
book down and looks at me when I come into the room. I’m
carrying the foxhole shovel.
“Where did you and Mom go last night?”
“San Francisco.”
“Why’d she take you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She just told me to come.”
“The fight wasn’t that big a deal. They’ve had a lot worse.”
“She said she had to get away from him,” I say.
He shakes his head. He picks up the book and begins to
read again.
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J a m e s B r o w n
“I don’t see why,” he says. “She was doing all the yelling.”
My brother and I share bunk beds. He has the lower half.
I have the top. I climb up to my bed and sit Indian-style. The
foxhole shovel unscrews at the base of the handle so that the
blade can drop up or down, and I play with it for a while,
screwing and unscrewing it. The threads are rusty and make a
grating noise. I hear my brother sigh. I hear him slap his book
shut and leave the room.
Maybe he worries about losing her for good. Maybe he knows
that you can only fight so long before you just wear out and
give up. I can’t say. I can’t say much about a lot of things that
happened, or didn’t happen, between my mother and father.
But he is fourteen years older than her and less volatile, less
willing to meet her head-on. If he is angry about her taking me
and running off to San Francisco, he doesn’t show it when he
gets home from work that night. In fact, they both act as if
nothing has happened. She makes dinner. He mixes drinks.
They get along perfectly. At this point only our mother knows
what she has done, and it surprises me, when I think about it,
how calmly she is able to conduct herself that night.
There is a story about the fire in the local newspaper the
next day. An old woman who lived on the top floor of the
apartment died of smoke inhalation. And another old woman,
who lived in the complex next door, is quoted as saying that
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
she saw someone, a younger woman, leave the laundry room
and hurry down the street and into a new Thunderbird shortly
before the fire broke out. That in itself doesn’t seem like evi-
dence enough to single someone out, let alone make an arrest,
but there are details that the newspaper doesn’t print, details
that will surface in court. They come for our mother a few
nights later while Barry, Marilyn and I are lying on the living
room floor. All the lights are out and it’s dark except for the
gray-white flicker of the television. We are watching House of
Wax. Our father isn’t home from work yet, or maybe he’s
stopped off at a bar along the way, but our mother is there,
seated on the armchair behind us. She is the first to notice
them—the patrol car, its headlamps off and motor dead—roll
quietly down the driveway.
“Get up,” she says. “Hurry.”
She herds us behind the couch. We crouch there, waiting.
Barry is the boldest.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Quiet.”
“Mom?”
The beam of a flashlight shines through the living room
window and lands on the wall behind us. My mother has her
arm around me. She is wearing a pale blue nightgown and one
strap has slipped off her shoulder. I can smell her sweat. I can
hear her shallow breathing. Then the doorbell rings. Another
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J a m e s B r o w n
beam from a flashlight glances across the ceiling and we hear
the footsteps of one of the men on our front porch. His voice
is flat, monotone.
“Mrs. Brown,” he shouts. “Mrs. Brown. This is the sheriff
of Santa Clara County.”
From around the edge of the couch I can see the television.
It’s near the end of the movie. The heroine is cornered by Vin-
cent Price, the curator of the museum, and she pounds at his
face. Only it’s a mask, and it cracks away, in chunks, like porce-
lain. The face behind it has been hideously disfigured by fire,
the skin molten and hardened.
They do not take her that night. They do not take her the next.
But they will take her soon enough with her attorney, Mr.
Menken, negotiating the terms of her surrender. Before then
she will have to tell our father about the charges, and she will
deny them, and he will believe her because he needs to believe,
because he loves her.
“I was with Jimmy,” she tells him. “We went to San Fran-
cisco.”
What she does not tell him is that they are bankrupt. That
over the last year she has been forging his name and selling and
mortgaging the properties they own. She does this to cover the
loss of some poor investments she made without our father’s
knowledge. This includes the mortgaging of our own house,
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
though it does nothing to explain why she would burn down
an apartment complex they do not own. Those are two things
that none of us, except maybe our mother, will ever under-
stand.
The Jose Theater in downtown San Jose is playing The Errand
Boy with Jerry Lewis. The box office opens at eleven forty-five.
The first showing begins at noon. This is Saturday morning,
and our father drops us off early, a few minutes before the box
office opens. He gives Barry the money for our tickets. He tells
him to keep an eye on me. He tells Marilyn the same.
“Stay together,” he says. “Don’t let Jimmy out of your
sight, not for a second. I’ll pick you up when the movie’s over.”
I am expecting Barry to protest, to speak out on our be-
half. We do not want to see The Errand Boy. We do not want to
see any movie because we know why he is doing this and it isn’t
right. He has told us nothing. We have overheard nothing. Still
we know things. We know them intuitively, and we resent him
for it, for the silence that lies.
It’s the way our father looks at him. It’s how that look
lingers, and as Barry shuts the car door and turns away, with-
out a word, I begin to suspect that he’s a part of it, this con-
spiracy, this lie. I begin to suspect that as the oldest he has been
taken aside, sworn to secrecy and told things that Marilyn and
I are supposedly too young to understand. Our father drives
2 9
J a m e s B r o w n
off. We start for the box office. Barry grabs my hand, but I am
too old to hold hands, and I pull away.
“Hey,” he says, “what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“You don’t act like it.”
“Leave him alone,” Marilyn says. “If he doesn’t want to
hold hands, he doesn’t want to hold hands. Don’t force him.”
Ordinarily she sides with Barry. She is his biggest admirer,
his greatest ally in a family divided by favorites. But today, on
this small matter, Marilyn sides with me. We stand together in
line at the box office. We sit together inside the theater and
share a box of popcorn that she buys with her own money. I
feel privileged, special for her attention. My sister is a shy, soft-
spoken girl and I like that about her.
“Are you all right?” she asks. “You okay?”
I don’t say anything. But in the darkness of the theater, I
reach for her hand.
On-screen Jerry Lewis is screaming and making grotesque,
distorted faces. The audience laughs, and we laugh with them,
but for us it’s not real. None of this is real. None of this is
happening. If you just don’t think about it, everything will be
fine, and when our father picks us up later that afternoon and
drives us home she will be there, as she always is, making din-
ner maybe, maybe talking on the phone. But she will be there.
I will tell her about the movie. I will say that it was really funny.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
Really crazy. And then I will go out to the backyard and dig a
hole with the shovel she bought me.
I will dig for hours while our father sits alone at the
kitchen table and drinks. Marilyn will lock herself in her room
and cry. Barry will open another book. The hole will grow. If
I dig long enough, if I dig deep enough, she will call me in for
dinner. I will dig until the sky is dark.
The old woman who allegedly saw my mother leave the laundry
room of the apartment complex and drive off in a new Thun-
derbird shortly before the fire broke out is found to have some-
thing less than 20/20 vision. She also takes several prescription
medications that can adversely affect judgment and motor skills.
Her age, of course, is another strike, and in the end the prose-
cutors for the State of California determine that she is not a
credible witness. Because there are no other witnesses, and be-
cause there is no apparent motive for our mother to have started
the fire, the original charges of arson and second-degree mur-
der are dropped. Instead they prosecute and convict her for
what they can prove: tax evasion. For several years running our
mother knowingly failed to report the income from the sale and
mortgaging of the properties she and our father owned. Her
punishment is two years at the Center for Women in Alviso,
California, and restitution to the federal and state governments,
which cannot be paid because she has bankrupted us.
3 1
J a m e s B r o w n
In her psychiatric evaluation she is diagnosed with a seri-
ous mental disorder, and the judge offers to reduce her sen-
tence if she will serve her time in a state psychiatric hospital.
In doing so he would allow her to return home once a month
to visit her husband and children. But to accept the offer is to
accept the diagnosis and our mother refuses to be stigmatized.
Maybe it’s about pride. Maybe it’s about denial. The problem,
if there is one, doesn’t exist if you don’t acknowledge it, and the
choice she makes is a painful one.
In the months to come we are evicted from the home we grew
up in. The Thunderbird is repossessed. Our father files for bank-
ruptcy and we move into a run-down, one-bedroom apartment
on the poor side of town not far from where our former baby-
sitter lives. At school word leaks out and my brother, my sister
and I are teased and ridiculed. “Your mother is in prison,” they
say. “Your mother is a murderer.” In defense Barry retreats further
into his books. Marilyn finds solace in God at the Lutheran
church and dreams of one day becoming a missionary. I fight.
And I do it often. I am a problem for the teachers. I am six years
old now, in the first grade, and I am considered a threat to other
students. The school psychologist says that I am emotionally dis-
turbed and recommends that I be placed in the special education
program. The kids are tougher there, and I learn more. To always
throw the first punch. To always hurt others before they hurt you,
and to hurt them good, so they will remember.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
I am suspended often.
Usually it is for fighting but one time it is because I am not
properly bathed and dressed. My father leaves for the con-
struction site in the morning before I’m out of bed. My
brother and sister are also on different schedules and leave for
school earlier than I do. I don’t know who is at fault, except
myself, but then you can’t expect much from a boy at this age.
He doesn’t worry about washing his face or brushing his teeth.
He doesn’t think about combing his hair. And the clothes he
wears, the ones he wore playing in the dirt the day before, and
the day before that, they’re as good as any.
Our father won’t accept welfare, his pride doesn’t permit it,
though every week several bags of groceries mysteriously ap-
pear on our doorstep. Once I came home and found a bike in
the hallway with a note with my name on it taped to the han-
dlebars. It’s no secret, we know our benefactor, but she prefers
to remain anonymous, and of course we go along with it. Of
course we are appreciative, and in my hazy memory these gifts,
this sense of goodwill, are connected with a more significant
event that occurs around this time—one night, in our apart-
ment, as it’s getting on toward dinner.
Marilyn is at the stove boiling water for spaghetti. Barry is
sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window. Our apart-
ment is on the second floor, and from that window you can see
down into the carports.
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J a m e s B r o w n
“C’mere,” he says.
“What for?”
“Just c’mere.”
He is talking to Marilyn but it’s the sound of his voice that
gets me up off the floor. I am in the living room watching TV,
and when I come into the kitchen I find them both looking out
the window. In the shadow of the light in the carports below,
where he must believe that they can’t be seen, our father is
holding our former baby-sitter. “We can’t tell Mom. We can’t
tell anyone,” Barry says. “Not a soul. I just thought you guys
should know.” She has her arms wrapped around our father’s
neck. His hands are clasped together behind the small of her
back. Aileen is her name, she is our benefactor, and we watch
them as they kiss. We watch them that night, and others, in the
shadow of the light in the carports below.
I am in my father’s work truck, sitting on my hands to keep
them warm. The heater is broken, and this is winter. It is sev-
eral days before Christmas and he is taking me to visit my
mother, who I have not seen in almost thirteen months. For the
occasion my hair is freshly cut, I am dressed in slacks, Hush
Puppies and a white button-down shirt that my sister ironed
for me shortly before we left. On the seat beside me is the
Christmas stocking that I made for my mother at school, of
red crepe paper, white yarn and silver glitter for snow. My fa-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
ther is sullen as he drives. His eyes rarely stray from the road.
He talks little. The Center for Women is in the neighboring
town of Alviso, about twenty miles south of San Jose, but it
seems much farther.
My brother and sister are not taking this trip, and they
never will. Though our father visits her often, until now she has
not wanted to see any of her children, or rather she has not
wanted any of her children to see her under these circum-
stances. Probably I am the exception because I am younger—
too young, they must think, to be affected, to understand. And
maybe they are right. At my age I have little notion of the in-
dignities of prison life. I am not likely to judge her. I am not
likely to ask the sort of questions that her older children
might.
In the visiting room there is a long counter divided by a
sheet of thick glass with wire running through it. I sit on my
father’s lap in a steel fold-out chair. My mother sits across from
us on the other side in the same kind of chair, and she is thin-
ner than I remembered, wearing a shapeless green smock. Her
hair is cut short like a boy’s. Her fingernails are not painted,
and she is without her makeup, no dark eyeliner, no lipstick or
blush. You talk through phone receivers, only there isn’t any
phone. As a child I find this strange.
“How’s my little Jimmy?” she says.
“Fine,” I say.
3 5
J a m e s B r o w n
“You look so handsome,” she says. “All dressed up. How
do you like school? You started first grade this year.”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
I hold up the present I made her.
“This is for you,” I say.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “Did you get my present yet?”
It came in the mail a few days earlier, and on the back of
the package she wrote: Don’t open until Christmas. Inside I found
a handkerchief with a Viking ship embroidered across it. My
name is stitched in the corner in flowing red letters.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I got it.”
“Don’t open it until Christmas.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” I say.
She smiles. I smile back. We talk a while longer. She wants
to know about Barry and Marilyn, if everything is all right, if
we’re all getting along, and soon, after a lull in the conversation,
she tells me to put my father on.
“I love you, baby,” she says. “I love you.”
There’s a guard at the door on my mother’s side of the
counter, standing with her hands behind her back. There’s a
guard at the door on our side of the counter, too, and when
the visit is over, when our time has run out, my father gives her
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
the crepe-paper stocking to pass along to my mother. I don’t
know exactly what happens to her after that. Or if seeing me
has anything to do with it. But somewhere between Alviso and
San Jose, while my father and I drive home in silence, my
mother is placed in solitary confinement.
The story, as I heard from my father years later, goes some-
thing like this: She returns to her cell after we leave and all is
as usual. Then her cellmate says something, or maybe she just
looks at her the wrong way. I don’t know. I wasn’t there and my
mother never liked to talk about it. But I’m not surprised. I
know what she’s capable of if provoked, and fortunately her
actions didn’t result in a longer sentence. From what I under-
stand they got into it good and she bit the woman’s ear off.
Clean through. To where the flesh joins the skull.
On the six o’clock news you see the motorcade moving slowly
along a wide sunlit street in downtown Dallas. We are watch-
ing this, Barry, Marilyn and I, while our mother and father rage
in the kitchen about his affair. She has been home now for sev-
eral days, and as we watch the scene unfold on TV we try to
block them out. It is old news by a week or better but the
broadcasters continue to play it nightly: President Kennedy
and his wife, Jackie, are riding in the backseat of a black Lin-
coln convertible. They are waving to the crowds on the side-
walks when he leans toward his wife as if he wants to whisper
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J a m e s B r o w n
something in her ear and the side of his face explodes. Then
you see Jackie rise from her seat. At first it looks as if she’s try-
ing to climb out of the car, that she’s afraid for her own life.
But really all she’s concerned about is gathering up the pieces
of her husband that landed on the back of the trunk. Her im-
pulse is to put him back together. Of course that’s impossible
but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t beauty in the moment, in her
desperateness to salvage what can’t be saved.
In the kitchen our parents continue to rage. They are
drinking as they argue and the drinking only makes them more
volatile. “It’s over,” she says. “I’m taking the kids and we’re
going to Los Angeles where Barry can make something of him-
self. There’s nothing you can do about it,” she says. “You lost
your rights when you fucked that woman.” I don’t remember
our father’s response, though I’m sure he fought back. I know
he loved us. But I also know about the insidiousness of guilt,
how it distorts judgment and weakens your resolve. One of the
last memories I have of that night is of our mother later passed
out on the couch. The rest is pretty much a blur. But the next
day our father makes a deal to remodel someone’s kitchen in
exchange for an older Buick Special. That’s the car in the snap-
shot I keep pinned on my wall, the one showing my brother
and sister and me squinting against the glare of the sun. In the
background you can see the wide expanse of the Pacific. My
sister is wearing a funny straw hat with a flower in the band.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
My mother’s hair is cut short, like a boy’s, since it hasn’t had
time to grow out yet, and her lips are painted bright red. She
is smiling pleasingly into the camera. My pants are rolled up to
the knees because I’ve been in the water, and if I look closely I
can make out faint trails of sand on my legs.
The photograph is taken at Pismo Beach when we pull off
Highway 101, about halfway between San Jose and our desti-
nation. Sometimes, when I look at it, I imagine them as
strangers: All I see are three children and a woman who could
be their mother. I like to think that their father is there some-
where, maybe snapping the picture, that this is just another
family on vacation. They are standing against the background
of the ocean and they look small, almost fragile. It’s another
boy, the one with his pants rolled up to the knees. It’s someone
else’s mother. It’s someone else’s brother, someone else’s sister
wearing the funny straw hat with the flower in the band, and
their story, whatever happens to them, bears no connection to
my own.
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S p r i n g 1 9 9 5
D R U S H E SA I L Y
I’m driving into Los Angeles again for another important meeting. Depending on traffic, Caltrans roadwork or wrecks,
the trip takes anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours
one way. It’s rarely less even if I speed, and occasionally it’s
more. There have been days when all five lanes on the San
Bernardino Freeway have literally come to a complete, seem-
ingly final stop, and I’ve shut off the engine, climbed out of
my car and smoked a cigarette between the dividing barriers.
I’ve learned to be patient. I’ve learned to accept these delays as
inevitable, as necessary, as something as basic to Southern Cal-
ifornia as its beaches, its earthquakes and its random drive-by
shootings.
4 1
J a m e s B r o w n
But the traffic is light this morning, no Sig-Alerts or Cal-
trans roadwork to back it up, and I get to Universal Studios a
full hour early. This is a mistake. Because now I’m left with too
much time to get nervous, and I’m already nervous. I want a
drink but I’m not going to take one, at least not until this is
over, and then it will be as a reward for having survived the day.
I pull into the driveway and stop at the guard booth.
“I’m here for a meeting,” I say.
I give him my name. I give him the executive’s name and the
guard checks his ledger. For a moment I worry that I might not
be on the list. The executive’s assistant could’ve forgotten to
phone down my pass. Or maybe we got our dates mixed up.
Anything could happen.
“What time?” he says.
“Ten thirty,” I say.
He continues to scan the ledger, and now I’m feeling like
some sort of impostor, that he thinks I’m trying to pull a fast
one on him. I could be a desperate, overzealous actor attempt-
ing to lie my way into a casting office. I could be a crazed fan.
Or an autograph hound. That I’m driving an older Toyota
doesn’t help matters. Finally the guard comes up with my pass.
“You’re a little early,” he says.
And before I can explain about my long drive from the
mountains of San Bernardino and the need to anticipate the un-
expected, like wrecks or traffic or Caltrans problems, the gate
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
rises and he waves me through. I doubt if he wanted to hear my
story anyway. I know I wouldn’t have if I were him.
My meeting with the executive is in the Black Tower, a sky-
scraper of steel and glass, and to kill time I buy myself a cup
of coffee, smoke four or five cigarettes, and walk in circles
around the studio commissary.
Through a window in the waiting room on the tenth floor of
the Black Tower I look out over the green rolling hills of For-
est Lawn where my brother is buried. He was twenty-seven and
alcoholic when he ended his life, and at this moment, in this
place and time, I see myself in him, sitting here, waiting to
meet with an executive. I imagine he once occupied this same
space, if not this exact office then another in the building, and
I imagine he felt as I do now. Anxious. In need of a drink.
Maybe, like me, he questioned why he was here, if this was
what he really wanted. If he belonged. Maybe, like me, he was
both repelled and attracted to a business that is at least in part
responsible for his destruction.
On a bookshelf nearby are rows and rows of screenplays,
the pages of each loosely bound with brass brads. The titles are
written in black felt pen along the spines. Some of the names
I recognize. I’ve seen them on the big screen. Others, if they’ve
been made, I’ve never heard of. Generally a script averages a
hundred and twenty pages, but I’ve been told that the ideal
4 3
J a m e s B r o w n
length is about a hundred, and if you can whittle it down to
ninety, that’s even better. Pages are time. Time is money. Expo-
sition, all those words, all that ink on the page, or “black shit,”
as a producer I once met referred to it, ought to be kept to a
minimum.
“You want a fast read,” he said. “The story has to move like
a rocket. All the pieces have to fit, exactly, down to the minute.
Down to the dollar.”
And I listen.
Because I’m concerned about these things, the pieces and
the pacing, how a story is put together. I’ve come to measure
my life in pages, stories read and written, and as I get older I
find myself more conscious of time, down to the minute, the
mile and the dollar. My agent continues to believe in me,
continues to set up these meetings, and I take them, always
hoping. “All work,” my father used to tell us, “is noble—es-
pecially work that pays well.” And I wonder if this is why I
find myself in Hollywood again, because I don’t make
enough writing novels, if it’s just about money, if it’s that
simple. I wonder, too, if my brother saw it this way, and if, at
any point in his brief life, he considered it something of a
mistake.
I’m leafing through a copy of Premiere when the executive’s as-
sistant rises from his desk and walks up to me, this young man
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
with his hair parted neatly down the middle, and asks if I’d like
a cup of coffee, decaf or regular. Or bottled water. Maybe a
diet Coke. At this point only twenty minutes have passed since
the appointed time.
“It might be a while longer,” he says.
He smiles, and by the way he smiles—wry, knowing—he’s
telling me that I’m in for a wait. Relax, he’s saying. The execu-
tive is a busy man.
I appreciate his gesture, this small kindness, but I pass
on the coffee, decaf or regular, the bottled water and the
diet Coke, and after he leaves I wonder how long it’ll be be-
fore he’s moved from the front desk into an office of his
own, if he studied literature, art or film in college, or if it
was business administration or law. Then I wonder if it
matters, if I’m being narrow-minded, defensive for defen-
siveness’s sake, or if I’m just making up excuses to justify
my own shortcomings. Good movies are put together by ex-
ecutives as frequently, or as rarely, as they are by anyone else
in Hollywood.
Don’t prejudge, I tell myself.
Despite my misgivings, despite my ambivalence, I know
I’m lucky to get this meeting. Most writers would kill for it.
Around me are other assistants and receptionists, and every
now and then, while I wait, one of the office doors opens and
someone steps out. An actor maybe. Another writer. And I
4 5
J a m e s B r o w n
think—there’s my competition. That woman shaking hands
with the man in the suit. She’s smiling and her eyes look too
bright, too excited. Because he probably loved her script. Now
she’s only a phone call away from her agent who will nail down
a deal for a million up front, plus points on the back end, gross
not net, and next Sunday I’ll spot her picture in the “Calendar”
section of the Los Angeles Times. Of course I’ll be jealous but I
certainly won’t begrudge her victory. Until today she may have
been waiting tables and worrying if she could make this
month’s rent, and suddenly, after ten years of writing, she’s an
overnight success.
Something similar happened to a friend of a friend of
mine who wrote a movie that later won an Oscar nomination
for best screenplay, only it took him closer to fifteen years to
become an overnight success. Before that he worked a series of
low-paying jobs, and he once confessed to me how it was a ter-
rible strain on his marriage, trying to balance his dream of
making it as a writer with the day-to-day realities of making a
buck. Back then, just before his big break, he was writing one-
liners for the miniature recorders that fit into the plastic cavi-
ties of Barbies and Kens.
“It was grueling,” he told me. “You rack your fucking brain
for a couple hundred lines and then they only take two or
three. But they still have to pay you, I mean even for the shit
they don’t use.”
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
He smiled at me—wry, knowing—just like the executive’s
assistant had.
“Actually,” he said, “it’s not bad training for a screenwriter.”
I’ve finished with Premiere. I’ve read Daily Variety and the Holly-
wood Reporter cover to cover, including the classifieds. It’s five
after eleven and my anxiousness has given way to irritation. But
I’m not about to voice it. I’m prepared to wait as long as it
takes. Two or three hours. The whole day. My main concern is
that the executive hasn’t forgotten about me, that I’m out here,
that I exist in this room with this window overlooking Forest
Lawn where my brother is buried. The assistant assures me that
it won’t be much longer.
“He’s wrapping up a deal,” he says, “but it’s just details
now. If he’s not done in a few more minutes, I’ll drag him out.”
Of course I’d like to hear about the deal and its details,
even the smallest ones, but I know that it isn’t any of my busi-
ness. So I don’t ask. I sit there and wait, and wait, and while I
wait I go over my ideas, the ones I turned in to the executive
two weeks before. This is the reason for our meeting: to do
what’s called pitching, and for the executive to suggest which
idea, if any, he’d like me to develop further. The same producer
who warned me about putting too much ink on the page, all
those words, that “black shit,” also advised me to keep my ideas
short.
4 7
J a m e s B r o w n
One line. Max.
“These guys,” he said, “don’t like to read.”
I have three ideas written in the style of TV Guide with its
capsulated descriptions, and I’ve memorized each word for
word. The first is a coming-of-age story about a father and son
on the run from the law, beginning on the banks of the
Willamette River in Oregon and ending in catastrophe in Las
Vegas. The second is about a woman who, after fifty years in
an abusive marriage, finally leaves her husband and starts a new
life for herself at the age of seventy-one. The third idea is
about a man who attempts to avenge the murder of his wife
and ten-year-old daughter by changing his identity and taking
a job as a guard in the maximum-security prison where the
killer is incarcerated.
This last sounds the most commercial to me, but it’s also
the least credible, and the one I’m least inspired to write. I call
it Victims’ Rights, and I know the political and social climate is
ripe for a story like it. The second idea isn’t thought out yet,
although I see potential in the woman’s plight, and I believe I
could write it with some sense of conviction, of passion. And
the first idea, my favorite, is based on the last novel I wrote.
Even it sounds crummy to me when reduced to one line, but I
like to think that the other lines—all that black shit, over three
hundred pages of it—make a difference.
I go over my ideas in my head, word for word, in case the
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
executive hasn’t gotten around to reading them and I have to
rattle them off.
“A good pitch shouldn’t take more than five minutes,” the
producer told me. “Max. And cut it short if they start shifting
in their seats.”
At eleven thirty-five the assistant asks if I’d like to reschedule
my appointment. I’ve been waiting now for over an hour and
my lower back aches from sitting too long. The muscles in my
neck are tense, and I massage them from time to time, trying
to keep them from knotting up. I need to stay calm. I need to
relax.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m in no rush.”
The assistant rises from his desk.
“I’m going to run and pick up a hamburger before things
get too crowded. Want me to get you anything?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
He shrugs and then disappears down the hall, the one lead-
ing to the elevators. I take a deep breath and tell myself to keep
cool. Any second now the executive will step out of his office,
smile and call me in. I have to be patient. I have to accept this
delay as inevitable, as necessary, as something as basic to the
business of moviemaking as gridlock is to the freeways of Los
Angeles. It’s either that or lose my mind, and as a writer I’m
4 9
J a m e s B r o w n
already well on my way. So I take another deep breath. I con-
tinue to wait. And while I wait, here on the tenth floor of the
Black Tower at Universal Studios, where ideas as ethereal as air
are bought and sold for heavenly prices, one of the windows
shatters like party ice.
Nobody thinks much of it at first.
Sure, it startles the other assistants and receptionists and
myself, too, and the woman closest to this window is actually
cut by a shard of glass. Fortunately it isn’t a bad cut, hardly a
slice along the back of her hand, with no real blood to speak of.
She even shakes her head and laughs.
“Now,” she says, “now I can collect workers’ comp, since
mental stress doesn’t seem to carry any weight around this god-
damn place.”
That’s when another window blows out. It’s on a different
floor, but this time we all hear it for what it is, like the back-
fire of a distant car, only more hollow sounding. All hell breaks
loose after that. Some duck under their desks. Some run for
the elevators or race ten flights down the emergency staircase
while others crouch behind file cabinets or lock themselves in
their offices. I just sit there.
I’m not trying to be brave. Or stupid. I’m as scared as the
rest. It’s just that I don’t know what else to do, what to think
or where to run, and despite my mixed feelings about Holly-
wood I’ve been waiting a long time for this meeting, if not this
5 0
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
particular one on this particular day, then certainly careerwise.
Like an earthquake, I expect it to pass soon, and I don’t want
to appear panicked.
Another window blows out. Again it’s on some other floor.
I continue to wait. Two or three minutes pass, and finally
the door to the executive’s office opens slowly, tentatively, and
he peers out at me, a young man with curly red hair. He looks
about ten years my junior. I stand up and hold out my hand.
He doesn’t take it.
“Hello,” I say. “I’m Jim Brown.”
“Who?”
“Jim Brown. We’re supposed to have a meeting today.”
“There’s a sniper out there,” he says. “Are you fucking crazy?”
I think about that for a second but decide not to answer.
The question that most concerns me is whether or not he’s had
a chance to look over my ideas and I’m afraid to ask for fear of
sounding too anxious, as if it’s a matter of life and death.
Ordinarily when I drive into Los Angeles I try to anticipate the
unexpected, insofar as that’s possible, and compensate for it in
advance. Coming, I allow myself that extra time to change a
flat tire, say, or if I make the wrong turn and get lost. Going
home, if I can’t get back on the freeway by two in the after-
noon, I’ll wait the traffic out until around eight that evening.
I’ll have a few drinks at a dark quiet bar, maybe some dinner at
5 1
J a m e s B r o w n
a fast-food place before I hit the road. But today, both coming
and going, my plans backfire.
By the time I leave the Black Tower, the area has already
been cordoned off with yellow tape. Studio security and
LAPD are everywhere, and as I move through the crowds, on
my way to the parking lot, I overhear a man talking.
“It’s a tram driver who lost his job,” he says. “But they got
him already. He was across the street in the park with a high-
powered rifle just randomly shooting out windows. Top to bot-
tom. I hope they lock his ass up and throw away the key.”
Soon I’m back in my car on the San Bernardino Freeway,
heading home. There shouldn’t be much traffic now, it’s just
half-past twelve, but you can’t predict when there will be a
wreck. Ahead the exhaust from hundreds of cars wavers in the
air, liquidlike, and no one is going anywhere. I roll down my
window. I light a cigarette and think about the tram driver. He
could be a screenwriter. Or better yet an actor. I would bet on
it, and his desperation to make it has probably been building
for years. Maybe his wife or girlfriend recently left him.
Maybe he’s drinking too much and can’t stop. Each day his
disillusionment grows, each day he finds less reason to care.
Eventually his frustration turns to anger, the anger to rage,
and when he loses his job, a shitty job he never even liked,
something inside finally snaps. I can understand that. I can
even sympathize.
5 2
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
Slowly the traffic lurches forward. The flashing red and
blue lights of the highway patrol come into view, and I see it
now—the cause for this delay. It’s just a fender bender but still
everyone has to stop and stare. We’re all looking for blood.
We’re all expecting the worst. Mangled frames of cars. Shat-
tered glass. Anything short of someone being carried away on
a stretcher is a disappointment.
5 3
S u m m e r 1 9 6 2
M Y P ’ S WA P A A L T Z
We have an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and when my fa- ther gets drunk he puts on Patsy Cline’s song “Crazy” and asks
me to dance. He has this sloppy smile on his face. I’m six, maybe
seven years old at the time. He is in his midfifties and his drunken
sentimentality annoys me. His palms feel rough and hard when he
slips them into mine and tries to lift me from my chair at the
kitchen table. But I hold tight to the edge, the chipped green
Formica, or one of the slick chrome legs. “Up, up,” he says. “Let
go. Dance.” His breath smells of whiskey, his collar of sawdust
and sweat. My father is a building contractor, a good one, a real
finish man who charges people according to what he thinks they
can afford, and they often take advantage of him.
5 5
J a m e s B r o w n
A few years back I wrote a novel that uses this memory as
its heart. I’ve mined the territory before, if not this particular
moment then something like it, and I’ve done it so often that I
find myself confusing what actually happened with how I
imagine it. In trying to sort between autobiography and fic-
tion, or invention, and then trying to put the pieces together so
that they make some kind of sense, I’ve come to think that the
truth as it occurs isn’t of much use to me other than, say, as a
catalyst for a story. While I’m figuring this out, I lose a couple
of years writing a bad novel. I don’t get through it and that’s a
good thing, because if I hadn’t given up I would have lost more
time. And I worry about time.
The problem, at least one of them, was that I was being
dishonest with myself in the worst, most shameful way. I was
writing about people and events and places that I didn’t fully
understand, and I wasn’t good enough at it for it not to show.
So I start another book, one that makes me see past what I
think actually occurred, to what hasn’t but should have according
to that thing I imagine called plot. And the writer’s obsession,
as I also come to understand, suggests something other than
limitation or theme, that as storytellers we basically spend our
lives telling the same story over and over, only we do it from
different angles.
The trick is disguising it, so it doesn’t seem the same.
The trick is how well you can keep doing it, not once or
5 6
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
twice, but hundreds of times, page after page, with one real de-
tail after another. The hardest part is to make it appear seam-
less and vivid in the end as if it all came naturally.
Like magic.
Like you don’t have to think. Like it really couldn’t have
happened any other way.
I was in college when I encountered “My Papa’s Waltz,”
Theodore Roethke’s short dark poem about dancing with his
drunken father. I don’t know for a fact if Roethke ever danced
with his father and I don’t believe that it matters. Of course,
when I’m six or seven years old, I’d never heard of the poet, and
it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. Reading is for
sissies, especially poems, and like my old man I consider my-
self a tough guy. Pound for pound I can kick any kid’s ass in
the neighborhood, and where we live on the poor side of San
Jose I have some serious competition. My mother is in prison
at the time, and my father, my brother and sister and I share a
one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette and a hot plate, a
window overlooking the warehouse next door and a sofa bed in
the living room. You have to push it back into place in the
morning, so you can get to the bathroom.
William Street Park is only a few blocks away, and I spend
plenty of hot summer days playing around the creek that
passes through it. It was a rough place then and it’s no better
5 7
J a m e s B r o w n
now, with all the dope and every other kid carrying a piece.
The generation has changed. The clothes are different. But the
pose is the same. Black kids still hang out on the benches and
behind the bathrooms, glossy eyed, getting wasted, and the
pachucos or cholos, what they call homies now, are on the other side
of the park at the mouth of the old drain storm tunnel that
runs under the street. My father buys the old reel-to-reel
recorder here, off some older guy who needs a few quick
bucks.
I like the tunnel. On the hottest days, when everybody is
dragging, I stop about halfway through the tunnel and suck the
cool air deep into my lungs. I like to press my cheek against the
cool steel and feel the vibrations of the cars and the trucks
rumbling past on the street above. I think about my mother. I
think about when she’s coming home. My old man doesn’t like
to talk about it and I’m left to wonder, to make up stories. To
imagine. I plan the Great Escape in that tunnel and play it over
and over in my head.
I need rope.
I need a gun.
I need a guard’s uniform and a pair of walkie-talkies, so
that my father and I can coordinate our actions, working from
the inside and out. The first two items are easily had; the rope
I buy, a hundred feet of good nylon five-hundred-pound test,
and my father owns a German Luger. We’ll steal her away to
5 8
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
Mexico in our Chevy stepside. But there’s a catch. Finding a
guard’s uniform to fit a sixty-pound kid will take some doing.
It isn’t funny, either.
Every detail has to work or I will fail.
Lives, real or imagined, are at stake.
In that novel I wrote, a father plays a prominent role in a
boy’s life. His mother disappears years before. The boy, the nar-
rator, can’t recall knowing her, because she deserts him before
he has the power of memory, and toward the end of the book
he decides to pull up stakes and go looking for her. In my own
life, when I try to remember exactly what happens the night
that my father asks me to dance, I get confused.
Maybe it isn’t 1962 in that cramped apartment on the
poor side of San Jose. Maybe it’s 1963. Maybe I’m closer to
eight than seven, and why my mother is sent to prison doesn’t
really matter because she is never coming back, not the same
woman anyway, and what I did know of her—before—is little
more than imagined.
For dancing, I am too awkward, too timid and full of
anger and blindness. But when I write today, when I write now,
when I write this, the drunken smile on my father’s face no
longer annoys me. I let him take my hands and guide me
across the cracked and yellowed linoleum floor in that kitch-
enette with Patsy Cline playing on the old reel-to-reel tape
recorder that is probably stolen. I feel the warm harsh breath
5 9
J a m e s B r o w n
of his whisper in my ear and I smell the whiskey. I smell the
sawdust and sweat.
“Smile,” he says. “Dance. Your momma’s coming home to-
morrow.”
That’s fiction. But, in fact, it doesn’t matter.
I let go of the table and dance with my father and the song
is always “Crazy.”
6 0
T H E F
F a l l 1 9 8 8
A C T S
Someone is watching me. Someone has been watching me off and on now for sixteen hours. But every time I look out the
window he slips behind the refrigerator in the yard of the
abandoned house down the street. All I see is his pants leg. All
I see is one foot, a tennis shoe, before he ducks out of view.
This is happening to me at the E-Z Eight Motel on Macarthur
Boulevard in Oakland. I haven’t slept or eaten in three days. I
check the locks on the door again. I check the window and turn
away. On the TV a young woman is fucking two men and I
watch them for a while. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and in
a few hours I have to lecture on Huckleberry Finn to a class of un-
dergraduates.
6 1
J a m e s B r o w n
In the bathroom mirror I look at myself. My eyes are
bloodshot. My face is drawn and pasty and there’s a distinct
chemical odor emanating from the pores of my skin. Over the
last few weeks my weight has dropped from a hundred and sev-
enty pounds to a hundred and forty, and I’ve lost the feeling in
two fingers on my left hand. Nerve damage. A short circuit in
the brain. I look closer. There are delicate, threadlike patterns
of broken blood vessels along the bridge of my nose. The con-
dition is called spider angioma, and it comes from drinking
heavily over a long period of time, when the liver can no longer
freely cleanse the blood and it begins to clot. The tiny vessels
burst. I know this because my brother had it. I know this be-
cause I’ve read dozens of books on alcoholism and drug ad-
diction, though none of them, no amount of knowledge, has
helped me to stop.
I undress. I turn on the hot water, only the hot water, and
step into the shower and bear it for as long as I can. The pain
distracts. The pain is good, and when I step out I am pink all
over, the flesh tender and inflamed. Naked, I return to the bed
and lie down, my arms to my sides, like a corpse. The movie is
still playing, a continuous loop, but now the scene offers two
women. They’re stretched out on a bed in what looks like a
motel room, a motel room like this, with a loud bedspread and
cheap vinyl furniture. One is only wearing a garter belt and
stockings. The other is dressed in tight jeans and a halter top.
6 2
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
I want to keep watching them but instead I shut my eyes. Sleep
is what I need, even if it’s only for a few minutes, but my body
is a live wire. I get up and go to the window again and peer
through a break in the drapes. The streets are empty and quiet
and most of the apartments and houses that line the block have
bars on their windows and doors. The sun is just rising and so
far as I can tell I’m no longer being watched. That or he’s hid-
ing somewhere else. At best this is only a temporary reprieve
and yet I’m thankful for it. I am relieved.
At the corner an older Buick pulls to the curb and a
woman steps out. She crosses the street, a little unsteadily in
her heels, and when she disappears I turn away from the win-
dow and start to dress. I put on a pair of wrinkled Levi’s and
the oxford shirt that I wore to class last Friday. I comb my hair.
I use my finger to brush my teeth. Then I put Visine in my eyes
and stand before the mirror and try to convince myself that I
look like something other than a drug addict. By the time I
leave the motel the morning traffic has begun and soon I’m
surrounded by other cars and trucks on Interstate 580, all of
us moving at a steady seventy miles an hour, all of us trailing
closely together.
If the car ahead suddenly threw on its brakes, I wouldn’t be
able to stop in time. Neither would the car tailgating me. In an
instant the freeway would be littered with bodies, steel and
glass. I hold the wheel tightly and concentrate on the road.
6 3
J a m e s B r o w n
Ahead my exit is approaching, and I need to change lanes.
There’s an opening but I don’t trust myself, whether I looked
carefully enough, so I check again. I check three, four times. A
mistake at this speed in rush-hour traffic is deadly, and I know
I shouldn’t be here, that I have no right to be behind the wheel
of a car. But I make it, as I have so many times before, in even
worse condition, and once I’m safely parked in the school lot I
take a deep breath, thankful to have again reached my destina-
tion alive. I light a cigarette and just sit there for a while, smok-
ing, listening to the engine tick itself cool. On the radio the
weatherman predicts another bright sunny day.
The month is October but for the last several weeks tem-
peratures have been in the eighties. Students are dressed as if it
were still summer, the young women in shorts and skirts, the
young men in T-shirts and rubber sandals, and as I start across
campus I wish for dark skies. I wish for black clouds and
strong winds and rain, hard rain, the kind that washes out
roads. The kind that knocks down power lines. But the sky is
perfectly clear. Already I’ve begun to sweat.
My briefcase is heavy with papers and books—The Norton
Anthology of Literature, The Story and Its Writer, the Bantam edition
of Huckleberry Finn—and two classes’ worth of undergraduate
essays, about sixty in all, that I can’t bring myself to read. The
students will be disappointed. I said I would have them back
today. I said I would have them back the week before and now
6 4
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
I have to offer up another excuse, another promise I may fully
intend to keep but which I will most likely break. My office is
on the third floor of the humanities building, and though I’m
short of breath I take the stairs. I take them because I don’t
want to risk being trapped in the elevator with someone who
knows me and having to carry on the pretense of a polite con-
versation. I’m not ready for that yet, or the crowds, all the peo-
ple. All the noise and commotion. I need to ease into this
slowly, retreat to my office, lock the door and do another line.
The hallway is long and narrow and the walls on both sides
seem to merge at the end, into a point, like a diagram in per-
spective. The fluorescent lights overhead seem extraordinarily
bright. Some of the professors are in their offices, and to get
to mine I have to pass by their open doors.
The trick, I tell myself, is to stare at the floor. To walk
quickly.
I almost make it.
The professor in the office directly across from mine is at
her desk having a conference with a young Japanese student.
She speaks slowly and loudly as if she’s instructing the deaf.
Teaching English as a second language is her specialty and she
addresses all of her foreign students in this manner. While I’m
fumbling with my keys, trying to get the right one into the
lock, she glances over at me.
“You look like hell,” she says.
6 5
J a m e s B r o w n
“What?”
“I said you look like hell.”
“I’ve been up all weekend,” I say. “Working on my book.”
“Yeah,” she says, “right.”
I resent her snide remarks, I resent her as a person for talk-
ing down to her students, but I’m in no condition to react. All
I want is to escape into my office. She says something else—
something rude, I imagine—which I don’t catch because I’ve
finally gotten the door open, stepped inside and shut it behind
me. I lock it. I check it just to be sure and then I take the small
plastic bag from my pocket and empty it onto my desk. I have
a razor in my wallet and I use it to cut the crystals into a fine
white powder and draw them into two long lines. The rest I
return to the bag. For a straw, I roll up a dollar bill. The tis-
sues inside my nose are swollen and raw, I’ve been bleeding,
and it’s several tries before I can do the first line. It makes my
eyes water, it burns, and I like it. In a matter of seconds all the
fear and paranoia, all the things I don’t want to think about or
feel, slip away. I take a deep breath again. I let it out slowly and
wish that I were someplace, anywhere but here. The next line
is easier.
My wife hasn’t heard from me since I left Friday night.
What we fought about, I don’t remember, but I imagine that it
had to do with money. It always seems to be about money at
first and then turns into something else. I pick up the phone.
6 6
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
I make the call. It rings and rings, and as it continues to ring it
crosses my mind that this could be the last time, this could be
the end. I picture an empty house. I picture empty closets and
unmade beds. But then she answers, slightly out of breath.
In the background I can hear our second child, Logan, cry-
ing loud and sharply. He is three years old and so far he has
not been as easy to raise as his brother. His eyes are highly sen-
sitive to light, his ears to noise, and he cries often, constantly
testing his mother’s patience. Usually I’m the one to calm him,
to hold and walk the boy until his chest stops heaving. He is
more used to my arms than hers.
“Honey,” I say, “it’s me.”
“What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
“I hate you,” she says, and hangs up.
I call back. She answers on the first ring this time but
doesn’t say anything. I tell her I’m sorry. That I want to come
home. I go on like this for a couple of minutes before she cuts
me off.
“Just do what the fuck you want,” she says. “You always do
anyway.”
Then she hangs up.
From my office window I can see San Francisco Bay, the
waters a greenish-blue. Beyond it is the coastline, and if I left
now I could be there in an hour, cruising along Highway 1. I
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J a m e s B r o w n
want to get in the car and drive and drive but I know I won’t. I
know I can’t. Classes have begun, and already I’m a few min-
utes late. I grab my briefcase and hurry out of the office.
I dim the lights when I come into the room. I draw the
blinds and try to keep my hands from shaking. The students
are quiet. At the podium I fumble for my notes. I almost drop
the book. Someone laughs, and I look up. It’s a kid in the back,
a freshman with purple hair and a spiked dog collar around his
neck. “Another rough weekend, Professor Brown?” he says. The
girl sitting next to him laughs. The rest don’t see the humor in
it, and I appreciate them for it. They’re a range of ages and col-
ors but mostly they’re older. Housewives returning to school
after raising their families. Middle-aged men frustrated with
their careers and trying to start a new one. I have a guy in his
seventies who comes to class with an oxygen tank. I am in my
early thirties. The course is a standard comp and lit, required
of all English and liberal arts majors.
On the board I write the words guilt, compassion, humility. Be-
neath that I write Jim as moral instructor and then I begin to read
aloud from chapter 22. It’s about a lynch mob who set out after
a man named Sherburn because he killed the town drunk for
disgracing him in public. And considering my condition I
think I’m doing an excellent job of it. My mouth is dry but I
read clearly. I go at just the right pace. I pause in all the right
places. When I first walked into class and looked out over all
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
those faces I wasn’t sure if I’d make it, if I ought to just dismiss
them and save myself the embarrassment. But my confidence
grows as I continue to read. I’m on the scene now where Sher-
burn confronts the mob for the cowards they are; it’s one of my
favorite parts, and as I pace in front of the class reading with
more passion, it suddenly occurs to me that my notes on the
board have absolutely nothing to do with the material at hand.
The scene I intended to talk about isn’t even in this chapter.
That’s when I lose my rhythm and begin to stutter.
An older student raises her hand.
“Excuse me,” she says. “But I think you went over this last
week.”
No one laughs this time, though I wish they had. The si-
lence has less to do with respect than compassion for some-
thing pathetic. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be such a big
deal—professors get mixed up all the time—but because I’m
hungover and strung out and have no business being here, I feel
I have to justify myself. I try to look surprised at my mistake.
I make an act of checking our syllabus, and finally I smile,
admit the error and shake my head.
A young woman in the front row catches my eye. Her name
is Sylvia Garcia. She’s a shy, unassuming student who some-
times brings her little boy to class with her, and when I’m con-
scious of being a good teacher I make a point of calling on
the quieter ones. I want to involve everyone. In Sylvia’s case,
6 9
J a m e s B r o w n
however, that proves a mistake. The word nigger appears three
times in the passage I ask her to read, and though I encourage
my students to refer to Jim as Jim, as I do, even when the text
uses nigger, I don’t require it. The only rule is to remain true to
the spirit of the story. That’s why I don’t initially interrupt her.
The first time could be a mistake, the stress she puts on it. The
second time is clearly not. There’s a slight but certain venom in
her voice. It’s as if she enjoys saying nigger, as if she’s been given
a license to offend because it’s there in print.
“Sylvia,” I say, “there’s no reason for that.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
She gives me a wide-eyed, innocent look.
“No,” she says, “I don’t. Tell me.”
Now I wonder if maybe I’m wrong, if maybe I’m imagin -
ing things, or being overly sensitive. I don’t think so. Another
student, a black woman, gets up and leaves the room.
For a while the class is dead quiet. Everyone is staring at
me, and I don’t know what to do, whether to turn today’s les-
son into a discussion on race or pretend that nothing has hap-
pened and continue where we left off. Either way I’m bound to
fail. I take the path of least resistance and dismiss them early.
No one protests. No one even seems to care.
The rest of the day is uneventful, and I’m grateful for it,
though I regret having wasted the class and the students’ time.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
They deserve much better. I return to my office, lock the door
and spend the next few hours trying to get through a stack of
short stories from my next class, Creative Writing 101. The
first is set on a spaceship that’s under attack by alien creatures.
Another all takes place in the mind of a teenage girl but we
don’t know where she’s at until the last line when it’s revealed
that she’s about to have an abortion. I’ve read them before, if
not these particular stories then something very much like
them. I’ve read them so often that I don’t know what to say
about them anymore that doesn’t sound cynical or mean-
spirited. Sometimes I think about turning them back with a
match taped to the last page. Instead I write things in the mar-
gins like great image or well done or good job or Yes, with an excla-
mation point, and at the end of the story I comment briefly in
still more general terms. I’ve only been at this university for a
year, as a writer-in-residence, my first real job out of graduate
school, and because of the alcohol and drugs I already feel
burned-out.
It rarely happens but the student whose work is due for re-
view today turns up absent. I keep the class waiting for twenty
minutes and then, like the first, I let them leave early. Normally
I teach three courses each term but the dean of the School of
Humanities and the chair of the English department have re-
warded me with one less class for recently winning a literary
award and publishing a novel called Final Performance. So I’m
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J a m e s B r o w n
through for the day except for keeping my office hours, which
I have no intention of doing. By now it’s maybe two, three in
the afternoon and I need a drink to steady my nerves. I need a
drink before I can face my wife and kids.
On the drive home I stop at a liquor store and buy a half
pint of Smirnoff. That’s all I want. I’ve resolved, on a whim,
that I should at least try to limit myself today. But of course
it doesn’t work that way. I live in the town of Santa Clara,
about forty miles from the university, and by the time I pull off
the freeway the bottle is empty and I need another. Trouble is,
I made a resolution to limit myself and I’m determined to stick
to it. It’s supposed to be about choice, about willpower, but
once the craving kicks in I don’t seem to have much of either.
So instead of buying another bottle I make a pact with myself,
and as a compromise, because there’s always room for compro-
mise, I agree to one last drink. That’s all. No more. And as fur-
ther proof of my commitment that last drink has to be beer.
There are three dingy little bars on the way to my house, when
I pull off the freeway, and I choose the closest one. Before I go
in I check my watch. It’s just after four. A couple of old
Harleys are parked out front, the chrome shining in the sun.
The jukebox only plays old rock and roll but no one is put-
ting in any quarters. Except for a listless barmaid staring at a
silent TV, and a couple of gray-haired bikers drinking in the
corner, the place is dead. It’s dark and quiet and I like it this
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
way. There are no potted ferns hanging from the ceiling. There
are no bright, airy windows and they don’t make strawberry
daiquiris or fluorescent-green margaritas. You come here to
drink and the drinks are cheap. I get my beer and then go to
the pay phone outside the bathrooms and call my wife to let
her know I’m on my way.
We have two children at this point in time, our third and
last son has yet to be born, and the older one answers. He’s
only seven but he’s smart and grown-up for his years, maybe
too smart and grown-up. Over and over he’s seen his father
loaded and strung out and I know it scares him. I know it hurts
him as it hurts his mother, and time and again he has had to
come to her aid. To comfort her. No child should have to live
under these circumstances, and I worry that one day he will
grow up to be just like his old man. For all this I feel deep
shame, and yet, without explanation, it isn’t enough to keep me
from drinking and drugging.
“Hey, Andy,” I say.
“Dad?”
He says it like he’s surprised to hear from me. That I’m alive.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Put your mom on.”
He calls out to her from across the living room. A few sec-
onds pass. I take a drink from my beer. Then he gets back on
the line and says, “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
7 3
J a m e s B r o w n
“Tell her it’s important.”
“Mom,” he calls out, “he says it’s important.”
I can’t quite make out what she says but her tone is clear
enough.
“Did you hear that?” Andy says.
“No,” I say.
“Good,” he says.
“Just tell her I’ll be home for dinner.”
I say good-bye and hang up and return to my bar stool. My
beer is almost gone, and because I still have a couple of hours
to kill before dinner, and because beer is so low in alcohol you
can’t honestly count having just one as a bona fide drink, I
order another. In the back of my mind I know that I’m ra-
tionalizing but at this particular moment, sitting in a dark and
quiet bar, it all makes perfect sense. The next time I look at my
watch it’s after midnight.
The house we rent is on a tree-lined street in a middle-class
neighborhood in Santa Clara. It’s pitch-black out and so quiet
that I can hear my ears ringing. I know my wife hears me pull
into the driveway. I know my car wakes her. But I also know
that she won’t be out of bed to confront me tonight. That will
come later, tomorrow morning, after she returns from drop-
ping our older son off at school. Quietly I let myself into the
house and fumble through the dark, down the staircase leading
to the basement that I’ve made into an office. I turn on the
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
desk lamp. I take a sleeping bag from the storage closet and
spread it open on the floor.
As a nightcap I do another line. It’s the last of my dope
and the thought of running out panics me but there’s nothing
I can do about it, at least not now. I undress and turn out the
light and get into the sleeping bag. My heart is pumping hard.
I imagine it bursting, the fluids draining, seeping out, filling
me up. I close my eyes and clips from the movie at the motel
flash through my mind. A woman and two men. Two women
together. Then suddenly I hear a rustling noise outside, the
snapping of twigs. At first I think it might be the raccoons that
live in the sewer and come out at night to hunt for food. I lis-
ten more intently, and when I hear it again I climb slowly to my
feet and peer through the basement window that looks out over
the driveway. A tall maple grows at the curb, and I see some-
thing duck behind it. The outline of a shoulder. The shape of
a head.
He’s there and then he’s not.
I don’t know if I’m hallucinating. Or just paranoid. But I
continue to stare. Paranoia, I tell myself, is a man with the facts.
And the facts, for this man, are these: I am no kind of fa-
ther. I am no kind of husband. No kind of teacher. I am instead
that man I see and don’t see and he is watching me, as I am
watching him, both of us afraid to step out from the darkness.
7 5
S u m m e r 1 9 6 8
T O U C H
A man in my apartment complex wants to take pictures of me. He says I am naturally photogenic. He says that one of the
boys he photographed recently signed a modeling contract
with the Broadway stores. “Have you ever thought about mod-
eling or acting?” He leans against the hand railing. His dress
shirt is rumpled in front and stained under the arms. I look
down at the pool in the courtyard below. The water is soft blue
and white. Threads of light reflect beneath the surface, and in
the evening I like to come out here and watch them, how they
twist and bend, these threads of light. I am twelve years old.
“My brother’s the actor,” I say.
“What’s he done?”
7 7
J a m e s B r o w n
“A movie of the week.” I say this casually, as my brother
does, as if it’s not a big deal. But it is a big deal and I’m proud
of him. “It airs in September.”The word airs, I think, makes me
sound more mature. It’s also the word Barry uses.
It is humid and I am alone in the hallway when the man
comes up the stairs that night we first met. I’ve seen him
around before, many times, but until now we have never spo-
ken. He carries a long black equipment case and the weight of
it pulls at his arm, making one look longer than the other. The
apartment door is open and he stops and glances inside. The
TV is on but there’s nothing worth watching. This is the be-
ginning of the summer rerun season. “I know we’re neighbors,”
he says, “but I’ve never stopped to say hello.” He puts down his
equipment case and holds out his hand to shake. His palm is
cool, his grip loose. Ranchero music rises from one of the
apartments below. “I’m Earl, from apartment 22,” he says. In
the dim light of the hallway I feel him staring.
Before he leaves he gives me his business card. I appreciate
the gesture, that he treats me as an adult, but I have no use for
it. He is just another person in the building I don’t care to know.
I rest my elbows on the railing, turning the card over in my
hands. There is no rush to go back inside. My mother is work-
ing late and won’t be home until after ten. My sister is supposed
to be staying the night at a friend’s house but she’s really at the
beach with her boyfriend. I overheard her plans on the phone
7 8
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
and promised not to tell. And our brother, he has his own place
now, a one-room studio in Hollywood a couple miles from here.
I went by earlier hoping to surprise him but he wasn’t there.
Down the hall, the kitchen light comes on in Earl’s apart-
ment. Then it goes out and he draws the drapes over the living
room window, lit up now by the blue-gray flicker of his TV. I
fold the card in half and tear it along the crease. I do this sev-
eral times and then let the pieces fall, like confetti, into the
threads of light that move along the bottom of the pool.
On the surface it’s about money, but it’s really about control.
She is happy for him. She is proud that he landed his first se-
rious role in a movie of the week. But she has also invested
years of her life in helping him build his career and expects
more of the paycheck than he’s willing to share. Barry has grad-
uated from high school with a 4.0, he’s already been dreaming
of moving out for quite a while, and these recent troubles with
our mother just give him all the more reason to go. He is no
fool. If he stays, he knows that nothing will ever change. I
know it, too, and I encourage him to leave. But it’s been two
months now and I miss him. That he lives nearby is no conso-
lation if he’s rarely at home.
In those first few weeks after he leaves he makes a point of
finding time for me. Twice he lets Marilyn and me sleep over
and we stay up until the early morning hours listening to music
7 9
J a m e s B r o w n
and drinking beer and talking. He gives Marilyn the bed. He
and I sleep on the floor, and when we wake up he takes us to
the House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard for a late break-
fast. But things soon change. Once he has that first credit, his
agent sends him out more regularly, and he’s getting attention,
he’s generating interest.
“I’m up for three shows,” he tells us over breakfast. “Two
are callbacks. I’m close. Real close,” he says. “Maybe then I can
help you guys more.” He drinks from his coffee. “But you
know I couldn’t stay there. I mean with Mom.”
I don’t know if in those earlier weeks he’d been trying to
wean us from him, or if, as the days continue to pass, he just
finds himself too busy. Either way, missing him doesn’t get eas-
ier with time. Where before he always returned my phone calls
quickly, now it takes him two or three days, sometimes longer,
and I begin to think that he doesn’t care anymore. That I’m a
pest. That he’s outgrown my company. Inside I believe differ-
ently, but then I have also learned not to trust myself. What I’m
trying to say here is that at this point in time I am very young
and vulnerable. And when you are very young and vulnerable
you may make a mistake. You may be scared. You may be reck-
less. Most likely, you don’t think at all.
I’m standing in the magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard,
looking at the masks lined neatly along the shelves behind the
8 0
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
counter. There is Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. There is Lon
Chaney as the Werewolf. There is Frankenstein and the Crea-
ture from the Black Lagoon but my favorite is the one of Tor
Johnson with the jagged scar that runs from the top of his
round bald head to the corner of his left eye. He is scowling. I
am trying to remember the name of the movie, the one with
the scene where he stares up at you from inside a sewer,
through the black iron grate, when I see Earl at the counter. It’s
a coincidence but not a stretch. His studio is on Cahuenga, a
block off the boulevard, and it’s his lunch hour. He is walking
by and spots me in the window.
The clerk approaches.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Let me see that one,” he says, pointing. “The one the boy’s
looking at.”
It’s made of rubber, the kind of mask that covers the whole
head, and he has to work it on slowly. The rubber pulls at his
hair, pinches the flesh around his chubby ears. With it on he
turns to me and holds both arms out as if he’s just risen from
the grave. He makes a low, growling noise.
“That’s pretty lame,” I say.
He laughs and pulls off the mask. In that short time he’s
already begun to sweat.
“Don’t lie. I can tell you’re scared.” He turns to the clerk.
“How much?” he says.
8 1
J a m e s B r o w n
“Forty bucks.”
“I don’t want it,” I say.
Earl looks over his shoulder at me. “Who said it was for you?”
Pink’s Famous Hot Dog stand is across the street on the
corner, and I follow him there from the magic shop, out of po-
liteness, too shy to turn down his invitation. We sit on red vinyl
stools at the counter and eat greasy chili dogs, not talking, not
a word. It’s another hot smoggy day. The sidewalks are crowded
with summer tourists, and as I watch them pass I wonder how
it is that anyone could find Hollywood glamorous. Next door
is a tattoo parlor. Farther down it’s the Pussycat Theater and a
leather bar. Every block has the same old T-shirt shops, and at
the end of the day, when the different businesses turn out the
lights, what you can’t find in the stores is sold openly from
their alcoves at night. My brother has bought grass here half a
dozen times.
From under the counter Earl slips the bag from the magic
shop into my lap.
“Thanks,” I tell him, “but I can’t take it.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
I set the bag on the counter beside him and he opens it.
Holds out the mask.
“Try it on.”
“Here?”
“Yeah, here. What do you care what people think?”
8 2
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
I hesitate.
“Go on,” he says. “Don’t be a pussy.”
The mask slips easily over my head. I like the strong smell
of the rubber but it’s hard to breathe and the eyes of the mask
don’t line up with my own. That’s when it comes to me. The Un-
earthly. The name of the movie I couldn’t remember. Or maybe,
on second thought, it’s Mr. Sardonicus. My brother took me to
both. “Hey,” someone says, “a monster.” From somewhere
along the counter I hear laughter.
I pull off the mask and hand it to him. But he won’t take
it, he waves it away. “It fits you perfectly. Keep it.” He sips from
his Coke. He smiles. “Sometimes,” he says, “you have to go
along with people, even if you don’t want to, because it makes
them happy.”
At twelve I’m not very good at guessing an adult’s age. But
I am forty-three years old as I write this, and when I look back,
when I remember that smile and how his stare lingered, I see
the face of a plain, average-looking young man. His hair had
already begun to thin and gray on the sides but he couldn’t
have been any more than twenty-four, twenty-five. His skin is
what makes me think this. It is smooth in my memory, un-
blemished from the passing of too many years, and his hands
as I remember them, and I remember them well, are as soft as
those of any woman who’s ever touched me.
* * *
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J a m e s B r o w n
In the middle of the kitchen table is a lazy Susan that our
mother and father brought back from their trip to Honolulu
before the breakup. It is a relic of the past, somehow surviving
our family upheavals through the years, our many moves where
too many things get lost or broken or simply left behind.
Perched at the top of the center post is the hand carving of a
little girl wearing a grass skirt and a lei. She is captured in the
pose of dance, her arms swaying to one side, the hips cocked
in a rolling motion. In the wooden dishes surrounding her are
smoked oysters, cashews, baby corns, green olives stuffed with
pimentos, potato chips and garlic dip. I look closely at the
carving, the stiff smile cut into her lips. Then I stab a tooth-
pick into the open half of a deviled egg and push it into my
mouth.
“That’s it, no more,” my mother says.
“I’m starving,” I say.
“Too bad. You just have to wait.”
On the kitchen counter is a bottle of Korbel, and she pours
the last of it into her champagne glass, the rim stained red
from her lipstick. She is wearing a bright yellow apron and
fuzzy white slippers and the half-moons of exhaustion weigh
heavy beneath her eyes. Our father sends her little money, he is
struggling himself back in San Jose, and so our mother must
work long hours, weeks on end without a day off until now.
Tonight is about making up for lost time, all the fast food
8 4
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
we’ve eaten, TV dinners and frozen chicken pot pies. Tonight
is about declaring a truce with her older son, her favorite son,
who is supposed to have been here a half hour ago. It will be
our first dinner together since he moved out.
A pot of spicy marinara sauce simmers on the stove. She
stirs it with a wooden spoon and calls out. “Marilyn . . . Mar-
ilyn.” The door to Marilyn’s room opens and she peers out
from around the side. Her hair is wrapped in a towel, and you
can hear the music behind her, louder now with the door open.
Rock and roll. The Beatles’ White Album.
“What’d you want?”
“Tell your boyfriend good-bye. You have to get off the
phone.”
“In a minute.”
“Now,” she says. “Your brother might be trying to call.”
Marilyn slams the door, so hard the kitchen window rat-
tles. A moment later the music grows louder, and our mother
takes off her apron, tosses it on the couch. I think at first that
she’s going after her, that she intends to set her straight, but in-
stead she heads toward the bathroom. “I better get ready,” she
tells me. “Would you mind opening another bottle of cham-
pagne? Just hold it over the sink, so you don’t make a mess.”
I have made her drinks before, two shots of Old Crow and
a splash of Coke, vodka and V-8, or just neat with a pickled
onion if it’s been a particularly long day. But champagne is her
8 5
J a m e s B r o w n
favorite, reserved only for special occasions, and I’ve never
opened a bottle of it. Because Barry is older and stronger this
would ordinarily be his job, and though I’ve watched him do it
many times before I am still nervous as I peel back the label,
untwist the wire and take hold of the plastic cork. I work it
back and forth and soon it rises, on its own accord, pushing
against my hand. I push back but the pressure is suddenly too
great. The cork flies across the kitchen, bounces off the wall,
and I hold my mouth over the stream of champagne so it won’t
spill onto the floor. I swallow quickly, several mouthfuls, and
when the stream subsides I tilt the bottle back and swallow
some more.
When my mother returns she is wearing a black dress, a
color she thinks makes her look thinner. She has always had a
problem with her weight, ballooning up for months at a time
and then starving herself, subsisting on celery, radishes and
water. It’s a cycle. It’s a constant struggle, and since Barry left
she has put on more weight than ever. Most of it goes to her
thighs. The black dress fits too tightly, and her nylons make a
faint scratching noise as she passes through the living room,
back to the kitchen. The clock on the wall shows that it’s quar-
ter after eight. He is over an hour late, yet she continues to pre-
pare, ignoring the obvious. She sets the table with care, laying
out her best place mats and matching cloth napkins, adjusting
them just so, humming to herself. I want to tell her that she is
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
wasting her time but I don’t. I know better. Instead I say,
“C’mon, sit down for a while. Let me pour you another glass
of champagne.” By now I am feeling the effects of it myself
and no longer have an appetite.
Later that night, after she’s passed out on the couch, my
sister slips out of her room. “I’ll be right back,” she says. “I
have to get some hairspray.” She locks the door on her way out,
and I get up. I phone my brother. But all I reach is his answer-
ing service, a harried woman on the other end of the line. “Tell
him his brother called,” I say. “Tell him he was supposed to
come by for dinner.” I hang up and return to the living room
and sit back down on the floor beside the couch. The TV is on
but the sound is turned low. It’s the only light in the room, and
for a while I just watch the rise and fall of her chest, her gen-
tle breathing. On her finger is the wedding band and diamond
that my father gave her, and I remember asking about it, why
after all these years she still wears it. She tells me it’s to ward
off other men, that another man is the very last thing she needs
in this life. Somehow I don’t believe her. I take her hand in
mine, the same hand that holds a steak knife to my brother’s
throat when he tells her that he is leaving. But I prefer to think
of other times. I prefer to rest my head on the cushion beside
her and feel the warmth through the coarse fabric of her black
dress.
* * *
8 7
J a m e s B r o w n
It is worse at night. It is worse when the apartment is quiet and
I’m lying in bed across from where my brother used to sleep.
Now his bed is stripped to the mattress. Now his dresser is
gone as well as the bookcases and all the books that I helped
him pack into boxes and label with a black felt pen. Fiction.
Film. History. On the wall, where glossies of Montgomery
Clift and James Dean once hung, there is only the vague out-
line of the frames, the brighter spots of paint. These nights,
they just pass, one into another, and I have this sickening feel-
ing inside that I am losing something more than a brother.
I have few friends, no close ones, anyway, of the sort that
make a difference, and I spend most of my mornings stretched
out on the couch watching TV. I don’t get dressed before noon.
Later, maybe, I take myself to a movie or blow off a few hours
dropping quarters into the pinball machines in the arcades on
Hollywood Boulevard. By then it’s growing dark, and instead
of going back to an empty apartment I hang out at Plummer
Park for a while. Usually the baseball field is lit with stadium
lights. Usually there’s a softball game, adult teams, and I sit at
the top of the bleachers and watch them for a while, rooting
with the crowd, cheering the hits, pretending I belong.
His guitar strap reminds me of the blankets I’ve seen hanging
in the open markets in Tijuana. It’s made of the same material,
the same pattern and garish colors, and that’s what first catches
8 8
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
my eye. Though it’s still light out, the living room is dark. The
shades are drawn, and as I reach for the light switch I see move-
ment, I glimpse the strap. They’re on the couch, my sister and
José, the boyfriend who carries his guitar wherever he goes and
sings Spanish love songs to her. He has her blouse open and is
working his hand into her pants. I don’t know who’s more
shocked, me or them, but they both jump back, knocking the
guitar off the couch.
“You’re in deep shit,” I say. “Just wait till Mom gets home.”
She holds her blouse together with one fist and flies up at
me with the other.
“C’mere, you little creep.”
I’ve felt her blows before, and she isn’t even close when I’m
back out the door. She stops at the threshold and hollers down
the hall.
“I’m serious,” she says. “You better keep your trap shut.”
It’s late in the afternoon and the rush-hour traffic has
begun. I walk quickly, keeping my head down, concentrating
on my steps. My brother lives in an older building in the heart
of Hollywood, a tall, ten-story building that looks as if it were
once a lavish hotel. In its glory days it was probably a nice place
to live but now the paint is peeling off the stucco walks and
most of the window screens are torn or missing. The ivy along
the walkway is yellowed and dying, and inside the lobby, where
a clerk works behind a sheet of bulletproof glass, it smells of
8 9
J a m e s B r o w n
mold and the powerful cleansers used to mask it. I step into the
elevator. It creaks and groans as it rises, taking me to the sixth
floor. From there I walk down the hall to my brother’s room
and knock on the door. Music plays softly from inside. I knock
again, louder. He answers this time, wearing only a towel
wrapped around his waist. His hair is wet and freshly combed
and one side of his face is covered with shaving cream. My
brother is handsome, dark-complexioned from the Sicilian on
our mother’s side. People tell me we look alike, and though I’d
like to believe them, I don’t see much of my brother in myself.
“What’re you doing here?”
I shrug.
“I just thought I’d drop by.”
“You should’ve called first. I have to leave in a few minutes.
But come on in,” he says, “we’ll talk while I’m getting ready.”
He returns to the bathroom but leaves the door open. I
wander around the room. There’s a bed and nightstand in one
corner and a service kitchen in the other with a small refriger-
ator and a hot plate. His books are carefully arranged on their
shelves, even the paperbacks. The one window overlooks the
rooftops of the stores and shops along Hollywood Boulevard,
and in the distance, if you lean out and look east you can see
the Capitol Records Tower on Vine Street. On the nightstand
is an ashtray, and in it are several cigarette butts, the filters
stained red. I pick one up.
9 0
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“What’s she look like?” I say.
“Who?”
“Your girlfriend.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
I hold up the cigarette butt.
“What’s this?” I say. “She the reason you missed dinner last
week?”
He pokes his head out from around the bathroom door.
“That,” he says, smiling, “is none of your goddamn business.”
I go to the refrigerator and open it. All he has are a few
cans of Budweiser and an old package of Oscar Mayer bologna
and a near empty jar of mayonnaise. I help myself to a beer
and then lean against the doorjamb of the bathroom and watch
him shave. He looks at me in the mirror, and for a second I
think he’s about to reprimand me for drinking. Instead he tilts
his head back and draws the razor slowly under his chin.
“That better not be my last,” he says.
“You got two more.”
“Good,” he says. “Why don’t you get me one.”
And I think to myself, Yes, this is what it’s like. To be on
your own. To be a man. No one telling you what you can or
can’t do.
“You mind if I stay over?” I say.
“Not tonight.”
“How come?”
9 1
J a m e s B r o w n
He gives me that smile again.
“I might have company later. Hey,” he says, “where’s my
beer?”
In the window of the studio are high school graduation por-
traits. The young men wear tuxedos. The young women wear
formals cut low in the front. They are all carefully posed, chins
raised, staring off into the distance as if looking toward their
future. Hanging above them are wedding portraits in big gold
baroque frames, the couples looking dreamily into each other’s
eyes. There are also pictures of babies and children and another
of a Welsh terrier with a pink ribbon tied in a bow on the top
of its head. Even though the sign on the door reads CLOSED, I
see Earl inside behind the counter, still working. I tap on the
glass. He comes to the door, jingling a set of keys, and unlocks
the deadbolt.
“Good,” he says. “You changed your mind.”
“About what?”
“Having your picture taken.” He points to a photo of a
young girl on the wall, a framed glossy. “I could put it there,
only bigger.”
“Maybe some other time.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “I was hoping I could catch a ride home
with you.”
9 2
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“Give me a minute to lock up,” he says.
Earl drives a newer Firebird with wide tires and a T-top.
The sky is dark now, and as we cruise down Hollywood
Boulevard I look at the lighted marquees of the different the-
aters. The Egyptian. The Hollywood. The Pacific. I’m light-
headed from the beer I drank at my brother’s place and crave
another. If one makes me feel good, a couple more will make
me feel even better. I want to get drunk. I want to get sky-high
drunk. There’s no other reason to drink, since I don’t care for
the taste.
“Can you do me a favor?” I say.
“Like what?”
“Buy me a six-pack. I got the money.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “What are you,
thirteen? Fourteen? That’s awfully young to be drinking.”
“I don’t need a lecture,” I say.
“No, I don’t suppose you do. You seem pretty grown-up
for your age. Where do you plan on drinking it?”
“At the park.”
“That’s not too smart.”
“Who cares?”
“I just don’t want you getting in trouble, because if you get
in trouble that means I get in trouble. I don’t need that. Tell you
what,” he says. “I’ll buy you a six-pack but you have to drink at
9 3
J a m e s B r o w n
my place. It’s not a good idea to be wandering around the park
drunk, especially at night.”
There’s a liquor store on the corner down the block from
our complex, and after Earl buys the beer we go up to his
apartment. The first can goes down fast, and somewhere in
there, as I’m working on my second, he reaches under the
couch and pulls out the top of an old shoebox. In it is mari-
juana.
“Ever smoke weed?” he says.
I tell him I have, and it’s true, though I’ve never much liked
how it makes me feel. I prefer to drink but when he offers me
the joint I take a few hits anyway to show that I’m cool. That
I’m not afraid. It’s powerful stuff. “From Maui,” he says.
“They call it Maui Wowwee.” He laughs. On the TV is an old
rerun of Star Trek, and while we’re watching the good ship En-
terprise weather a meteor attack he slides his hand along the
back of the couch. I’m twelve years old but I am not stupid. I
know what this is about. I know what’s coming and I can’t ex-
plain it away, saying I’m drunk and stoned, but it’s as if I’m in
another place at that moment, someplace far from here, that it’s
not me sitting on that couch beside Earl. He starts with my
hair, lifting strands of it, then slowly growing bolder and hold-
ing them out as if he’s measuring.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, and he says it softly.
I don’t say anything. I don’t move and he takes this as a sign
9 4
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
and begins to stroke the side of my neck with the back of his
hand. He raises my chin with the tips of his fingers as if pos-
ing me. “You really are beautiful,” he says. “It’s a shame you
won’t let me take your picture.” Then he kisses my ear, and it
feels good, feels gentle like a warm breeze. A chill passes
through my body. He kisses me again, farther down my neck. I
stand up. I start toward the door.
“Where you going?” he says. “Come here. I didn’t mean to
scare you.”
But I am outside now in the hallway, and I hear other
voices. I hear laughter. From over the railing I see my mother
floating on her back in the pool, her eyes closed, her hair fan-
ning out around her. My sister stands at the edge of the deep
end, her arms stretched toward the sky, poised to dive. She
looks up. She sees me. “Hey, Jimmy,” she says. “Where you
been?” Threads of light reflect beneath the surface of the
water, twisting and bending, and when she dives they shatter
into a million sparks. Dizzy, short of breath, I move toward the
explosion of light.
9 5
D A I S Y
W i n t e r 1 9 9 5
When I’m trying to patch things up, I buy my wife a present. Perfume maybe. A box of See’s or her favorite peanut
brittle. Later I’ll take her out to dinner, apologize profusely
and promise to treat her better. But my last binge was particu-
larly loathsome, I feel particularly rotten about my drinking
and drugging, and I want to do something special for her. She
is a homemaker who collects little ceramic piggies, piggy salt
and pepper shakers, stuffed animal piggies and china with pig-
gies painted on them, and because she collects these pigs it oc-
curs to me, in my hungover state of mind, that she might
appreciate having the real thing.
I’ve heard her talk many times about the Vietnamese pot-
9 7
J a m e s B r o w n
bellied pig, how intelligent they are, even smarter than dogs,
and what fine and affectionate pets they make. So that next
day, after another night of heavy drinking, and while my wife
is off running errands, I dig out the newspaper. I turn to the
classifieds and find exactly what I’m looking for listed under
Livestock: Baby Potbellied Pigs. Wonderful pets. Registered. $150.00 &
up. The number has a desert area code. I dial it and a teenage
boy answers.
“Yeah,” he says.
“I saw your ad in the paper,” I say. “About the potbellied
pigs.”
“Hang on,” he says. Then I hear him holler, “Mom, you
got any pigs left?” I can’t make out her answer, the TV in the
background is too loud, but a few seconds later he returns to
the phone. “Yeah,” he says, “we got one female left.”
“Can you hold it for me?”
“First come, first serve,” he says. “You want to know how
to get here?”
“Let me grab a pen,” I say.
Nature furnishes all of its creatures with a special ability
to defend themselves against their predators. The deer, like
the rabbit, boasts swiftness of foot and highly sensitive hear-
ing. The bird possesses the gift of flight. The turtle has its
bone-hard shell, the skunk a foul-smelling oily liquid. And
the Vietnamese potbellied pig, a stout, short-legged mammal
9 8
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
with bristly coarse hair, is blessed with a bloodcurdling, ear-
piercing cry that paralyzes its enemies dead in their tracks. To
the baby Vietnamese potbellied pig I purchase that afternoon
for the outrageous sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, I am
that enemy. I am that predator. The first time the teenage boy
places that pig in my arms it lets out such a painfully high-
pitched squeal that my ears ring for several minutes afterward.
I am stunned. I am dazed. That at this point it is no bigger
than a puppy, weighing no more than ten or twelve pounds,
makes its powers all the more impressive. Imagine, I think,
what it will sound like when it’s all grown-up. This omen, how-
ever, doesn’t stop me from buying the little piglet, nor does the
fact that I have yet to consider where we will keep it.
“How big do these things get?” I ask.
The boy shrugs.
“Hard to tell. All depends. We butcher the ones we don’t
sell at about eighty, ninety pounds. But this is the runt of the
litter,” he says. “I don’t see her getting past sixty, tops.”
To me the pig is a highly unattractive animal with beady
eyes and chubby jowls and short bony legs far too thin to sup-
port its enormous weight. It’s a freak of nature. A bad joke
from God. But the features I abhor in the Vietnamese potbel-
lied pig, or any pig for that matter, are the very ones that my
wife finds so appealing.
“Oh, how cute,” she says, when I bring it home that
9 9
J a m e s B r o w n
evening in a flimsy cardboard box. I set it on the living room
floor. Her face softens, and I think I’m in the clear.
Upstairs, in the boys’ bedroom, I hear the beeping and fake
explosions of the Nintendo game they’re playing. My wife
kneels beside the box. She reaches in for the little pig.
“Better put cotton in your ears,” I say. “That thing has one
mean squeal.”
In her arms, however, it doesn’t let out a peep. Instead it
burrows its snout into the warm flesh of her stomach and
closes its beady eyes.
“You probably scared her,” she says. “She’s so sweet. Aren’t
you?” she says to the pig. “You’re just a sweet little thing.”
I’m pleased she likes it. Pleased that I did something good,
something special to make up for the night before.
“Let me shower,” I say, “and then I’ll take you out to Pa-
paguyo’s. Have a couple margaritas. A good dinner.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Her face hardens again. “You’re an asshole, that’s why not.
You come home drunk at three in the morning, no calls, no
nothing, and you expect me to be nice. I don’t think so.” She
looks away from me in disgust and cuddles the pig. “Daisy,”
she says, cooing in its hairy little ear. “I think I’ll name you
Daisy.”
When I think of a daisy I picture a flower with a yellow
1 0 0
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
center and white rays. I don’t, by any stretch, see a pig with
bristly black hair and stubby legs. But when I think of myself,
I see her point. And part of me wants to change. To right my
ways. The alcoholic, however, like the pig, is created with cer-
tain defense mechanisms and mine are denial and rage. They
make for the better part of me, too, and I explode.
“Fuck it,” I tell her. “Stay home with your stupid pig. I
don’t give a shit. But I’m going out. I’m getting wasted.”
“So what’s new?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing’s ever new with us.”
She holds the pig closer and it makes a soothing, grunting
noise in her arms.
“Daisy,” she says. “My sweet little Daisy.”
I don’t think anyone ever really knows why they get di-
vorced or have affairs or regularly drink and drug themselves
into a stupor. My memories of our last days together are splin-
tered, lost in a haze of booze and dope, yet one thing remains
absolutely clear. And that thing is Daisy. The measure of her
growth is the final measure of my marriage: The fatter she gets,
the worse my marriage seems to become.
I mean this literally.
Pound for pound. Blow for blow.
I am sitting on the floor in the basement. This is where I write.
It is night and my wife and children have gone to bed. Daisy is
1 0 1
J a m e s B r o w n
asleep in her box in the kitchen above me and the house is
quiet. Surrounding me are five neat piles of handwritten man-
uscript. I am struggling to get another novel off the ground. In
fact, I am struggling to get five novels off the ground all at the
same time and that’s the problem. I can’t focus. I can’t make up
my mind. This has been going on for months, long before
Daisy’s arrival, and I have sixty pages of one book, forty some-
thing of another. The others are shorter but they all have one
thing in common: Each peters out, coincidentally, when the
drugs wear off and I see them for what they are, these awful
things I’ve written under the influence of methamphetamine
and alcohol.
Tonight I am relatively sober. I’ve only drunk a few beers,
and in terms of narcotics I haven’t touched a thing in two mis-
erable days. But trace amounts of meth are still coursing
through my veins, and as I read over the first sentence of one of
the five manuscripts I am far from clearheaded. On a notepad,
in long hand only I can decipher, I write and rewrite that open-
ing sentence nine different ways. I excogitate on a single word. I
contemplate its deep symbolic meanings in relation to the pro-
found themes of my work. I am brilliant. I am divinely inspired.
Then I apply this divine inspiration to the opening lines of my
other four manuscripts, believing that if I only concentrate long
enough, hard enough, that some grand truth will soon reveal it-
self to me and I’ll know, once and for all, which story most de-
1 0 2
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
serves the full attention of my genius. Only there’s a short cir-
cuit somewhere in my brain. The traffic of ideas runs in circles,
round and round, and then shoots off down a thousand differ-
ent streets. I don’t know which one to follow. I don’t know
which way to turn or where to get off and I’m on this crazy ride
now when a piercing squeal, like the screech of brakes, brings
the traffic in my head to a sudden standstill.
I am not, by nature, a mean or intolerant man. After all, she
is still a piglet. At this point we’ve only had her a couple of
weeks, and like a puppy you have to expect a certain amount of
whining and crying. But we all have our limits, and when she
squeals again, instead of losing my temper, I give in. I give up
for the night and head upstairs to the kitchen. Her box is be-
side the stove so that the heat from the pilot lights will keep
her warm and snug. But it’s too small for her already, this box.
Just the week before it was roomy and now she can hardly turn
around in it. As of this morning Daisy weighs exactly twenty-
nine and one-half pounds. I know this because I put her on the
bathroom scale when it struck me how quickly she seemed to
be growing.
We keep a big sack of piggy food in the pantry, and I fill
her dish from it, these hard green pellets of compressed alfalfa.
She makes loud slurping noises as she eats, and when she’s
done, which takes only a matter of seconds, she looks up at me
with those beady little eyes and grunts for more.
1 0 3
J a m e s B r o w n
“That’s it,” I say. “No more. Enough.”
I turn off the kitchen light and feel my way through the
dark to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I wash my face and
gargle twice. Then I go quietly into the bedroom, undress and
slip under the covers beside my wife. It’s maybe ten thirty,
eleven o’clock at night. Her body is warm, and I curl up close.
I take in the scent of her freshly shampooed hair.
“You awake?” I whisper.
“Not anymore.”
I pass my hand along her thigh. The skin is soft and
smooth. We haven’t made love in over a month, and it’s been
like this, off and on now for a couple of years. She bats my
hand away.
“Knock it off,” she says.
“Honey,” I say. “Baby, don’t be like that.”
“You reek,” she says.
“I brushed my teeth. I gargled twice.”
“It’s inside you,” she says. “The stink. All the booze and
cigarettes and God knows whatever else you put in your body.
It doesn’t just wash off, you know. The whole room smells
when you come to bed.”
She rolls over on her side, away from me, and I think
about getting up. I think about storming off and sleeping on
the couch. Or down in the basement. I don’t know why she
stays with me, if it’s about love for the man she remembers,
1 0 4
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
the one long before the drugs and alcohol really took hold, or
if instead it’s about fear. Fear of having to strike out on her
own with three kids in tow and not many marketable skills.
That Heidi doesn’t drink or drug places the burden of our
failed marriage squarely on my shoulders. I just lie there in
bed, without any answers, staring at the ceiling until my eyes
grow heavy.
It’s hard, if not impossible, for some people to fall asleep
when they’re mad, but it’s like anything else. Practice makes
perfect, and pretty soon, if you do it enough, it comes like sec-
ond nature. Of course that next morning we wake up angry,
and to compound that anger, when I pour myself a cup of cof-
fee and head down to the basement to get back to work, I find
my manuscripts—the manuscripts I’d left neatly stacked on the
floor—chewed and mauled beyond recognition. All of them.
Destroyed. Bits and pieces of paper are everywhere. Slowly I
take a deep breath. Slowly I exhale. I call for her, sweetly, so
she’ll come out from hiding.
“Daisy. Little Daisy, where are you?”
But my wife, who woke first this morning, is a step ahead
of me. She is standing in the doorway, cuddling the pig to her
chest.
“She got out of her box last night,” she says.
“I can see that.”
I start toward her.
1 0 5
J a m e s B r o w n
“Give her to me,” I say.
She steps back, holding the pig tighter. “Don’t even think
about it.” Then she looks at the scraps of paper strewn all over
the floor. She laughs. “You’ll never finish another novel any-
way. Face it, honey, you’re all washed up.”
I would like to think that I am not alone in my resentment
toward the pig. I would like to believe that I have allies in my
two sons, Andy and Logan, ages ten and six, respectively, but un-
fortunately this is not the case. Like their mother, the boys take
to Daisy as they would to a new puppy. They enjoy petting its
ugly coarse hair as they would a smooth coat of fur. They enjoy
laughing while it gorges itself, devouring its meals and all our
table scraps in record time. They enjoy playing with it and chas-
ing it around the house and making it squeal until I think my
head is about to explode. But what they do not enjoy is clean-
ing up the piggy litter box, and since their mother is also of lit-
tle help in this matter, the chore is frequently left to me. For the
good of the family, as Daisy’s appetite grows, it becomes in-
creasingly clear to everyone that she must be relocated. It’s a rare
occasion but for once we are all in complete agreement.
Soon after the manuscript episode, I drive down to Home
Depot and buy enough wood, wire and nails to build her a nice
pen in our backyard. The cost is ninety-three dollars. To shel-
ter piggy from the elements, I also build her a nice house. It’s
1 0 6
T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
a large house, too, and the materials set me back another
twenty-eight. Counting the two fifty I paid for her, along with
the vet bill for her shots, another forty-five, I am now into
Daisy for four hundred and sixteen dollars, not including the
cost of piggy food.
That night after I build the pen and piggy house, between
the hours of ten o’clock and five in the morning, I rest soundly
believing I have solved at least one of the problems in my mar-
riage. At exactly 5:03 A.M., however, that belief—like my man-
uscripts—is torn to shreds. Daisy is banging on her gate,
demanding to be fed. For this she uses her snout, repeatedly
ramming it against the gate until she wakes me from a deep
sleep.
I throw open the window.
Our backyard is small and her pen is just a few yards from
our bedroom. It’s dawn and I can see her beady little eyes star-
ing up at me in the growing light. She snorts. She grunts.
“No,” I shout. “Bad girl. Bad Daisy.”
For a while, say a week, this approach works, and I’m able
to fall quickly back to sleep. But it’s a process of diminishing
returns, and soon the mild admonitions of “no” and “bad
girl” escalate into threats along the lines of “shut the fuck up.”
The pig, however, no longer fears me, she hasn’t for some time,
and the more I holler, the louder the banging seems to get.
Daisy is taunting me. Daisy is egging me on.
1 0 7
J a m e s B r o w n
As usual my wife just rolls over in bed. Somehow it never
seems to bother her. I don’t understand it.
“That pig,” I tell her, “is driving me crazy.”
“You bought her.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do. You’re the one with the problem. You’re the one who
keeps waking me every morning with all your stupid scream-
ing. Grow up. It’s a pig and that’s what they live for. Food. That’s
what they do. Eat.”
I know she’s right. The pig is only doing what pigs do
best, and as an alcoholic I should understand this far better
than most—the nature of obsession, of compulsion, the
constant quest for more when there can never be enough. But
having knowledge and using it are two vastly different mat-
ters. So that morning, spent and frustrated from hollering, as
I lie in bed listening to Daisy banging at the gate, I come up
with a simple but surefire plan: stack rocks in front of it. Big
rocks.
Like a stone fence.
That same morning, with my head pounding and my
mouth chalky and dry, I find myself hauling rocks up from the
creek that runs alongside our house. It’s a hard job, and I break
a good sweat. I also slip once and fall into the creek, tearing a
hole in a new pair of Levi’s and cutting my hand.
Soaked, sweating and bleeding, I stand in the pigpen and
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
look at my handiwork. Six heavy rocks, around thirty pounds
each, are strategically positioned between Daisy and the gate.
“Now bang on it, bitch.”
I smile.
One of the rocks is smeared with my blood. At first Daisy
just sniffs at it. She doesn’t know what it is. Then her tongue
darts out and suddenly her beady little eyes spring open and
she’s wild, grunting and snorting, sniffing the rocks for more
of my blood.
Each day the pen grows a little smaller. Each day the nice
roomy house I made for her is a little less nice and roomy. In-
side of a month she can barely squeeze into it and her ass sticks
out the door. That part I like—her discomfort.
“You should’ve anticipated this,” my wife says. “Look at
the poor thing. She can’t even move. You need to build a big-
ger house.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I promise.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
My wife is referring to my drinking and my repeated
vows to quit. In my hungover state of mind, I don’t care to
discuss it.
“Forget it,” she says, waving me off. “I’ll just buy one.”
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J a m e s B r o w n
And she does. It’s one of those igloo-style doghouses that
they sell at Home Depot and it sets us back another eighty-
seven bucks. The total outlay for Daisy rises to five hundred
and three dollars, not including the cost of piggy food, which
has gone up considerably. Eight days after the manuscript mas-
sacre I weigh her again and she comes in at an even fifty-four
pounds. Two weeks later it’s ninety-eight. By the end of that
month she’s topping a hundred and ten, and I get on the
phone. I call that kid who sold her to me and he denies every-
thing.
“I don’t know where you got your information,” he says,
“but it wasn’t me. They average about a hundred and fifty.
That’s when we butcher them anyway, the ones we don’t sell.
You want, we’ll take her back.”
I know exactly what he’d do. The idea strikes me as a good
one.
“Let me think about it,” I tell him, and then I hang up.
As Daisy continues to grow, so do her muscles. Her neck
is as thick and strong as a linebacker’s, and with it she is soon
able to move heavy rocks. I discover this at five in the morning
when I’m awakened from a deep sleep. I throw open the bed-
room window. I look into the pen. In the dawn’s light she is
prying with her snout, lifting with her neck, banging one of
the rocks against the gate. She does this repeatedly. To taunt
me. There can be no other explanation.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
She pulls her snout out from under the rock. Stares up at
me. Grunts.
“It ain’t over yet,” I say.
My wife wakes.
“Who you talking to?”
“Nobody,” I say. “I must’ve had a nightmare.”
Later that afternoon, on my way home from work, I stop
off at Home Depot again and buy a bag of spiked plates. Each
is three by five inches and boasts twenty-four razor-sharp
points. Typically they’re used for joining rafters in rough frame
construction, but I mount them on the opposite side of the
gate, leaving the treacherous spikes exposed. Pigs have ex-
tremely poor eyesight, and so I mount them just before dark. I
mount them while she’s distracted, devouring her evening meal.
I want it to be a surprise.
“Eat up,” I say. “Enjoy.”
Where my initial reprimands succeeded in quieting Daisy
for about a week, and the rocks nearly a month, the spikes fail
miserably from the very beginning. The difference is that I’m
not asleep this time. For most of the night I lie awake, partly
because I’m worried about things—my marriage, my children,
my writing and drinking—and partly because I’m excited. I
want to be awake for this. I want to experience the moment—
that bloodcurdling squeal when she first encounters the spikes.
But at five that morning, instead of a painful squeal, I hear the
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J a m e s B r o w n
banging of the gate again. I get out of bed and go to the win-
dow. In the dawn’s early light, Daisy is rubbing her rump
against the spikes as if she’s simply scratching an itch. At this
point I snap.
I put on my pants. I put on a shirt and a pair of shoes and
hurry quietly outside to the storage cabinet. This is where we
keep our household chemicals, half-empty buckets of paint,
cans of lacquer thinner, wood stain, quarts of motor oil and a
spare gallon of gasoline in a red can. I carry the red can around
to the backyard. I empty out a spray bottle of window cleaner
and refill it with gas and walk calmly over to the pigpen. The
sun is rising, and I can see clearly now. I can see everything
clearly now. I know what I must do and I am not thinking of
my children or my wife and how my actions might endanger
them.
“Daisy,” I say. “C’mere, Daisy. I have a little surprise.”
I hold the bottle up to her snout. Immediately she recoils.
“Like that?” I say. “Huh? It smell good?”
I spray the rocks with it. I spray the spikes and the gate
and the dirt all around it. Then I start back into the house,
confident that I’ve solved the problem, if only temporarily,
when I hear something that stops me dead in my tracks. At
first I can’t make out what it is, or maybe it’s that I can’t be-
lieve it, but I hear it again. These wet slurping noises. Slowly I
turn around.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
She is licking at the rocks.
She is lapping at the spikes. That’s how I lose it. My mind.
I walk back to the pen. I squat down. Face-to-face. Pig to man.
“Like it?” I say. “Gas? This good gas? Want some more?”
Daisy glares at me with those beady little eyes and snorts.
I lower the nozzle. I slip my finger around the trigger and I’m
just about to squeeze down on it when my wife calls to me
from our bedroom window.
“What’re you doing?”
“Nothing, honey.”
“What’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
“It’s gas. I smell gas.”
She sees the red can that I set nearby on the ground. Then
she looks at the bottle in my hand.
“My God,” she screams, “is that what you’re spraying? Are
you trying to kill the poor thing? Are you trying to burn down
the house? You’re sick,” she says. “You’re out of your fucking
mind.”
She threatens to call the Humane Society. She says something
about calling the cops, too, but I don’t stick around to see if
she’ll follow through. I take refuge at a local bar and wallow in
my anger, an anger that has been building now for some time.
Like an ugly hangover, it carries over from one day to the next,
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J a m e s B r o w n
and eventually I don’t think my wife and I even know what
we’re fighting about anymore. We fight, I guess, because the
anger is never resolved and we’re unaware of it, how left
unchecked it only grows, how that anger turns to resentment,
that resentment into coldness. A bitter coldness. The kind that
kills.
A storm has moved in this morning. It’s pouring outside
and the place is packed with construction workers taking ad-
vantage of their day off. The guy beside me has a cigarette
dangling from his lips. He’s patting his pockets for his lighter,
and I hand him mine. I strike up a conversation. I tell him
about the pig, not the whole story, just parts. In no time he’s
laughing.
“My brother-in-law had one of those,” he says. “Lived
twenty-two years. Weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.
They’re tough fuckers, you know, from the jungles of Vietnam.”
Twenty-two years.
I roll those words over in my head. Twenty-two more
years of this and I will be an old man. I will be full of con-
tempt and self-loathing. Our children will be grown and
gone. Without them, my wife and I will become one of those
bitter old couples who have their own bedrooms and only
talk to each other when they have to. Crippled with regret
and remorse, we will push on gallantly, battling it out to the
bitter end.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
The bartender approaches.
“Another drink?” he asks.
“Why not?” I say.
He looks at me and sniffs the air.
“Do you smell gas?”
“No,” I say. “But something around here definitely stinks.”
I’m not sure when I return home. What happens once I get
a few drinks in me is that I want something more, and once I
get that something more there’s no stopping me. I’m off and
running. Generally my binges don’t last longer than three or
four days, and because it’s still storming when I run out of
money, drugs and booze, I’m guessing that, at most, only a
night or two has passed.
I run out of gas about a mile from my house and have to
walk the rest of the way. It’s late at night and cold. The rain
is coming down hard. My clothes are soaked and I’m chilled
to the bone. When I last slept, I don’t know, but I am weak
with fatigue. What I need is another drink, some clean dry
clothes, a warm bed. I stagger across the driveway and pull
myself up the porch steps. For a while I lean against the hand
railing, struggling to catch my breath, then I fumble for my
house key. I try to slip it into the lock. I try several times be-
fore I realize that it no longer fits. Suddenly I’m enraged. I
pound on the door. I shout for her. I shout for my children
but no one answers.
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J a m e s B r o w n
A light glows in the living room. The curtains are drawn
but there’s a space between them, and when I stumble into the
flower bed to look through the window, I see Daisy sprawled
in my La-Z-Boy, one hoof hanging over the armrest. She is
staring at the TV, the screen flickering with static.
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S u m m e r 1 9 7 7
P E F F E C T SE R S O N A L
My brother is standing outside the baggage claim dressed like a cop. This wouldn’t be unusual if that’s what he
did for a living, police work, but it’s not. Barry is an actor and
sometimes he just doesn’t know when to stop. I pull to the curb
and tap the horn. He looks through the traffic, spots me,
waves. We’re at the airport in San Jose and I’ve come to pick
him up. I’ve come to take him to see our father who was taken
to the hospital the night before.
I’m driving the old man’s truck, and it’s a tired one, a real
workhorse. There’s no radio or heater and it won’t go into
second gear anymore, but it’s served our father well through
the years and I like it. How it rides bumpy. How you have to
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J a m e s B r o w n
wrestle the wheel when you make a turn. My brother climbs
into the front seat and I put it into first gear. He doesn’t look
good. He’s gained too much weight, his face is bloated and
his eyes are dull. But I don’t say anything. I give it some gas
and we go.
“How’s he holding up?” he asks.
“He’s doing okay.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They never tell you much. I don’t think they know much
or they won’t let on. But they moved him out of intensive care
this morning.”
“That’s a good sign,” he says.
Our father, he had a stroke. I called Barry with the news
after our stepmother called me and that’s why we’re here. I took
the Greyhound in from San Francisco. Barry flew in from L.A.,
just off the set with a small role in a B movie called Piranha.
Our sister, she has a little girl to look after and can’t make it
on short notice. She lives in L.A., too.
“What’s with the uniform?” I say.
He lifts the badge from his chest with the tips of his fin -
gers and smiles.
“Looks real, doesn’t it?” he says.
“You know you can get in serious trouble going around like
that.”
A plane roars by overhead, the noise almost deafening.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
When it passes I look over at my brother again and try to
smile. But it’s a forced smile because he worries me. He’s wor-
ried me for a while now. His drinking has progressed rapidly
over the last few years. “I didn’t have any clean clothes,” he says.
“And I didn’t have time to do the wash. That all right with
you?” he says. “I just got your call and jumped on the plane.”
He reaches around to his back pocket and takes out a half-pint
wrapped in a brown paper bag and offers it to me. I wave it off.
It’s only about ten o’clock and already he is drunk or well on
his way. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s truly drunk, because
he drinks so much and because he’s so good at maintaining.
I’ve seen him put away a fifth and not slur his words or weave
when he walks. But the smell, you can’t hide that. It fills the in-
side of the truck and I crack my window and let in some fresh
air. He takes a drink and caps the bottle and rests it between
his legs.
“A couple nights ago,” he says, “I was driving home from
the set and this woman cut me off. We’re on the Hollywood
Freeway and when she exits I follow her off the ramp. I pull up
alongside her while we’re stopped at the red light and flash her
my badge. ‘Hey, lady,’ I say, ‘I could give you a ticket for cutting
me off back there.’ ” He laughs. “ ‘But I’ll let you off with a
warning this time. Just don’t let it happen again.’ ”
He laughs harder. It’s his trademark laugh, a high-pitched
laugh that I’ve always enjoyed, and it makes me want to laugh
1 1 9
J a m e s B r o w n
with him. But I don’t find the story so funny. I also don’t be-
lieve it. My brother likes to embellish. He likes to make up sto-
ries, and sometimes it worries me. Sometimes I wonder if he
knows the difference between the truth and a lie.
This is June and we’re in the middle of a heat wave. Yes-
terday it hit a hundred degrees before noon, and today doesn’t
promise to be any kinder. The sun is beating through the wind-
shield, and while we’re stopped for a light I notice that he’s
sweating, heavily, like he’s sick with fever. The ends of his hair
are soaked and he keeps wiping his forehead with the back of
his arm. “Doesn’t this thing have air-conditioning?” he says,
and I want to tell him that it wouldn’t matter. That what he
needs to do is quit drinking or at the very least cut back to just
beer and wine. I have a few myself every other day, and though
on weekends I don’t usually bother to keep count, I believe that
I am perfectly fine. I believe that I am far from becoming any-
thing like my brother. But I tell him none of these things, and
when the light changes I put the truck into gear and start across
the intersection and onto the freeway.
As we drive toward the hospital I look out over the valley.
Where there were once apricot orchards, orange groves and
wide-open fields, now all you see are housing tracts, strip malls,
gas stations, fast-food places. We talk about this, my brother
and I, how it’s all changed since we were children. We talk
about the house that our father built for us and lost. We talk
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
about the older San Jose, downtown, and how it’s blighted now,
the different shops and stores all boarded up because people
prefer the malls in the suburbs. We talk about anything but the
man responsible for our being here on this hot morning in June
in this beat-up old truck.
Even at the hospital, as we ride the elevator up to see our
father, we talk about other things. Barry tells me that he has to
move out of his house in Echo Park. He has until the end of
the month.
“After that,” he says, “I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe
Marilyn will let me stay with her until I get back on my feet.”
“You can live with me.”
I mean it, and when he doesn’t say anything I find myself
suddenly angry.
“Fuck Hollywood,” I say. “You need to get out of that
place and sober up.”
The elevator doors open. We step out and start down the
hall, looking at the numbers on the doors. Our father is in
room 614. “Did you hear me?” I say. We pass room 609. We
pass 610 and 611 and he still hasn’t answered. It could be that
he’s seriously mulling over the offer. It could be that he’s mad
at me because I told him the truth. I don’t know. I don’t know
if I have ever understood my brother. We are inside room 614
now, where our father lies, his eyes half closed, drowsing, with
a tube running from one arm and wires connected to his chest.
1 2 1
J a m e s B r o w n
I am scared for him. I am worried. But as we approach the bed
I am thinking, oddly, only of my brother.
Strokes often come in pairs. Where the first is mild, the second
can be fatal. And the chances of another striking are greatest
in the first forty-eight hours. Beyond keeping the patient calm
and relaxed as possible, and monitoring his vitals, there is little
the doctors can do. But hope is on our father’s side and he does
not suffer that second stroke, the one that kills. Unfortunately
the first has robbed him of the use of his right hand, he can
hardly open and close it, and for someone who has made his
living all of his life working with his hands this is a particularly
devastating blow.
After three days the doctors send him home to his wife,
Aileen, our former baby-sitter, along with a prescription for
blood thinner and a rubber ball that he is supposed to practice
squeezing. The idea is to rebuild the muscles of his hand, to
somehow retrain them. “It’s the mind-body connection,” he
tells us, when we’re back at the house. We have been back for a
few hours now and we’re sitting around the kitchen table with
a bottle of Canadian Club. It’s late in the afternoon and the
drapes are drawn to help keep out the heat. Our father is wear-
ing Bermuda shorts and his favorite Hawaiian shirt and I think
that this is good, not to have to see him in that ugly hospital
gown. Except for being a little pale, a little shaken for the ex-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
perience, he seems fine. The hand, you can’t tell anything is
wrong by looking. He is squeezing the ball as we drink, or try-
ing to anyway. The fingers will barely move.
“What’s it feel like?” Barry says.
“It’s strange,” he says. “When you will it to move and it
won’t.”
Barry is wearing the pants to his uniform but he’s stripped
down to his T-shirt. The alcohol is making him sweat again,
and I would like to think our father would notice, that it’s a
sign too obvious to deny. I am surprised then, when he smiles
at Barry from across the table and tells him that he looks good.
Healthy. That he must be working out. They haven’t seen each
other for months, not since Christmas, and in that time my
brother’s drinking has clearly escalated. It shows in his face, in
the bloat, in the dull bloodshot eyes. But then I am no one to
talk. I am no one to judge. I am drinking right along with
them, shot for shot, when our stepmother comes into the
kitchen. She’s been out shopping and is carrying a big bag of
groceries. She sets it on the counter, looks at our father and
shakes her head.
“Don,” she says, “what do you think you’re doing?”
“Mi vida,” he says. “No más un poquito.”
“A little, my ass,” she says. “You know you’re not supposed
to drink on your medication.” But he gives her a smile, and she
softens. She shakes her head again. “A few hours out of the
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J a m e s B r o w n
hospital,” she says, “and already you’re acting like nothing hap-
pened. I can’t leave you bums alone for a minute.”
“C’mon, pull up a chair.”
“I don’t know about you,” she says.
“Have a drink. Jimmy,” he says, “you want to make her a
drink, a screwdriver.”
“Just one,” she says, and she means it.
So I make her a drink, a screwdriver, and for a while it’s like
old times, sitting around the kitchen table with my brother and
father getting wasted on a hot afternoon. The liquor has taken
effect and I dismiss my concerns as petty and hypocritical.
Barry will be fine. This is just a phase he’s going through. And
our father, he’ll be all right, too. There is no reason to worry.
We are just men doing what men do when they drink. We tell
tall stories. We get loud sometimes. Or too sentimental. We
solve world problems and make big plans and promises to each
other that we will never keep.
I am the youngest and I am proud that I can keep up with
my father and brother. I am proud for the liquor I can hold.
But we all have our limits, and soon after dinner the room be-
gins to spin. I go into the guest room and lie down on the
bed and shut my eyes. That only makes it worse, and I think
I’m going to be sick, but it subsides, and a short while later I
pass out.
When I wake up the room is dark. Someone has taken off
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
my shoes and covered me with a blanket. My throat is dry, I
can hardly swallow. I get up from the bed slowly, because my
head is pounding, and wander into the kitchen for a glass of
water. It has to be around two or three in the morning and the
house is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. I pour
myself a glass of water, drink it and pour another. I’m so de-
hydrated that I can’t seem to get enough. On my way back to
bed I notice that there’s a light on in the living room, and I
walk toward it. I pause in the hallway. He is sitting in an arm-
chair under the dim light of the table lamp with a drink at his
side. He is reading a book. I do not know what book. But in
the shadows of the light the bloat in his face seems to have dis-
appeared and his eyes are clear and sharp. He looks up at me
and smiles and in that moment I see him again, the old Barry,
healthy and untroubled. Then he turns slightly, more toward
the light and the picture changes. Something about the smile
isn’t right. I don’t know what exactly, or how to describe it, but
it looks almost as if it hurts him. It looks as if he’s doing it for
my sake, on cue, like he might for the camera, and inside him
I can sense something tightening, something closing down and
pulling us further apart.
I live in a dirty little beach town called Pacifica, about ten miles
south of San Francisco. It is foggy all year round, but on those
rare days when the sky is clear I can look out the window and
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J a m e s B r o w n
watch the waves rise and break along the beach. My place is
small, just one room and a kitchenette, and I don’t have a
couch. I don’t have any armchairs or even a TV set. But I do
have a table to eat on. I do have a desk and a typewriter and a
bed to sleep in and for now, as a college student at San Fran-
cisco State, that’s all I need. For now, as an alcoholic, that is all
my brother needs, a place where he can stay and dry out, and
where at night, when you close your eyes, you can hear the
waves breaking in the distance.
I sit down to write him a letter the night after I return from
San Jose. In it I want to tell him that I admire him for his ac-
complishments, his drive and ambition. At twenty-seven he has
already worked in over forty television shows and starred in
two movies, Bad Company with Jeff Bridges and Daisy Miller with
Cybill Shepherd. You should be proud, I want to say. You didn’t
know anybody when we first moved to L.A. and in a few short
years you’re a contract player for Universal taking home five
hundred dollars a week. That’s not bad for a kid. And it was
just the beginning. But things changed. You started drinking
too much and hanging out with some fucked-up people. I’d
like to blame them. I’d like to blame Hollywood and all it
stands for but I know it’s not that simple—that blame isn’t
even what it’s about. What matters now, and this is all that mat-
ters, is that you straighten up or you’re no good for anyone, es-
pecially yourself.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
Look, I want to say.
Take a good hard look.
You haven’t worked in three years except for this lousy role in
a low-budget movie, a role you never would’ve taken if you hadn’t
needed the money, and you have to ask yourself why. What
brought you here? Don’t blame it on bad luck. Don’t blame it on
a bad childhood. I’d like you to come stay with me for a while. I
think you need to get away from Hollywood, and when you’re
strong again, when you’re ready, you can always go back.
These are the things I want to tell my brother, and I do.
They aren’t the exact words—I can’t remember what I actually
wrote—but the sentiment is the same, and I sent the letter off
the next morning on my way to school. About a week later I
get a phone call. It’s close to midnight, and he’s drunk again.
“I got your letter,” he says, “and you’re right, man. I have
to do something because I’m going nowhere but down and I
can’t stop it. I mean the drinking. I can’t fucking stop. Every
morning I wake up, I say ‘Today I won’t drink. Today I will be
sober.’Then my head starts pounding and my hands start shak-
ing and I sink into this deep depression, this deep dark ugly de-
pression. It’s a horrible place,” he says, “and it’s killing me. I
know that. But it’s killing me if I don’t drink.”
I’m convinced that it will pass—the depression, the fears.
I’m convinced that I can make the difference. We talk for well
over an hour.
1 2 7
J a m e s B r o w n
We work things out.
Here is our plan: Final exams begin for me next week but
as soon as they end, on Friday, I will borrow our father’s truck
and drive down to Los Angeles that same night. We’ll take as
many of his things as we can in one trip and store the rest in
Marilyn’s garage or give them away to the Salvation Army. Of
course we’ll need to bring his bed, because I only have the one.
And having his couch would be nice, if we can fit it onto the
truck. I’m excited discussing the details. I think we’re both ex-
cited with the prospect of living together again, of making a
fresh start. From that point on there will be no more drink-
ing. I will quit with him in moral support, quit my own bal-
ancing act between drinking and studying. Every morning,
where before Barry would wake up hungover and immediately
reach for a drink, I will make him coffee and a good breakfast.
Later we will run on the beach. Maybe we will join a gym. We
will sweat the toxins out of his system and soon the bloat will
vanish. His eyes will clear. At night we will relax and take long
walks or fish off the pier or go to a movie, and it won’t be easy,
I understand this, but in time his depression will lift and the
compulsion to drink will pass and I will have him back, the
brother I remember.
“Friday,” I say.
“Friday,” he says, just before we hang up. “I’ll see you next
Friday.”
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
But of course that Friday never comes. On Tuesday of the
following week, three days before I was to leave for Los Ange-
les, I get a phone call from my stepmother. It’s around four
o’clock in the morning, and I’m up, wired on No Doz and cof-
fee. I’m cramming for finals.
“Jimmy,” she says. “You need to come over as soon as pos-
sible.”
“What happened?”
“Just come over,” she says.
“Is it my dad? Is he all right?”
“He’s okay,” she says. “But he needs you right now. It’s your
brother,” she says. She says, “He shot himself.”
On the darker stretches of Highway 101 I feel motionless.
Like the truck is not moving. Like I am standing still, fixed in
time. Ahead only a small patch of road is illuminated by the
headlamps, and behind me, when I glance into the rearview
mirror, it’s just darkness. Fog has settled over the highway, and
the glare, the bright whiteness reflected in the lights, is blind-
ing. I drive slowly and hope that the fog will lift soon. I listen
to the engine, the rhythm of the pistons rising and falling, and
do and do not think of my brother. He comes to me in flashes,
his image stirring as if from a pool of still water, breaking the
surface momentarily and then submerging again.
Beside me on the seat is a pint of vodka, and I sip from it
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J a m e s B r o w n
as I drive, trying to make it last. I don’t want to be inside my
head. I do not want to have to feel. I do not want to have to
think. These are some of the reasons why my brother drank,
and why, when the alcohol no longer worked, when it became
a problem greater than the problems he drank to escape, he
found another way. I would like to respect his decision. I would
like to forgive him. But these things are not possible for me and
I can’t see how they ever will be. I take a drink and stare into
the fog. I light a cigarette and roll down my window. The air
that rushes in is cool and smells of salt and rotting seaweed,
and I know, because the ocean is near, that I don’t have much
farther to go. I am returning to Los Angeles for my brother’s
funeral. I am returning to Los Angeles to claim the things that
the dead leave for the living.
It has been less than a month since our father had his
stroke, and on his doctor’s advice he is not making this trip
with me. But I believe that the real reason has less to do with
matters of health than those of shame for a son who has taken
his own life. The fog lifts when I pass Ventura Beach and turn
inland and soon the traffic thickens. The night air grows
warmer and instead of the salt and seaweed it smells vaguely of
exhaust now. I get off the freeway in Studio City and cross an
overpass that runs high above that concrete channel called the
L.A. River. From there it’s just a few blocks to my sister’s place,
and when I pull into the driveway I see that she’s left the porch
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
light on for me. It’s late, maybe two in the morning, and I fig-
ure she and her husband are asleep. The house key is supposed
to be under the mat, that was the arrangement so I wouldn’t
have to wake them, but I don’t have to use it. Marilyn greets me
on the front porch, we hold each other tightly, and in the dim
light I can see that her eyelids are red and swollen. “Oh God,”
she says. “Tell me this isn’t happening.” But I can tell her no
such thing. She is by nature timid and shy, she has always felt
too much too intensely, and I worry for her. I worry that this
is something from which she will never recover, and I worry for
myself, too, because we are very much the same.
He’s dead, I want to say.
I want to say those words over and over to take the power
out of them, but I say nothing. I hold my sister for a while
longer and then we go inside. Her husband makes us drinks
and sets out a mirror, a razor and a straw on the coffee table.
We do not talk about Barry. Not a word. The funeral is to-
morrow morning and we ride out these last hours by numbing
ourselves with vodka, Valium and cocaine. The combination is
potent, and with the cocaine we are able to drink far past the
point where we might ordinarily pass out. We drink and drug
until the living room windows begin to fill with the morning
light, and my little niece wanders in on us, rubbing the sleep
from her eyes. She is wearing jumper pajamas. Her father hides
the mirror on a shelf above the stereo and my sister rises un-
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J a m e s B r o w n
steadily to her feet. “Munchikin,” she says. “My little
munchikin. C’mere, give me a hug.” But my little niece hesi-
tates, she looks away, and when she does step into her mother’s
open arms it is with a certain awkwardness. She is only three
years old, and though she has no understanding of death or of
the drugs we are using, she senses that things are not right.
“You better get her dressed,” her father says. “The sitter
will be here soon.”
When they leave the room he pours us another drink, and
later, in the car, we all do another line. I am impressed that he
is able to drive so well. I am impressed that he is able to drive
at all, or that he doesn’t get us lost. Our only mistake is that in
our fucked-up state of mind we don’t think to leave the house
early enough, and by the time we arrive the services are already
under way. This is at Forest Lawn in Hollywood, and it is our
mother’s choice, for a funeral befitting an actor, to hold the
services here where the stars are buried. She is sitting in the
front pew with her new husband, ironically a Mormon from
Utah, and my sister, her husband and I take seats in the back.
The chapel is small. There are maybe thirty, forty people
present, and on a stand up front, near the podium, rests our
brother’s casket. The priest wears a solemn expression on his
face and talks of Barry as if they had been intimate friends
when in fact they had never known each other. As he drones on
our mother rocks back and forth in her seat, keening. Then a
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
strange thing happens to me. Their voices seem to fade. They
grow fainter and fainter until I’m only watching their mouths
work, and I suddenly feel very small. I watch the funeral play
out in front of me but it’s as if I’m viewing it all from a long
distance, like you might in a dream. None of it is really hap-
pening, and I am somewhere else now. I am somewhere very far
away.
It is an old house in a neighborhood of Echo Park that is not
safe to walk at night. The paint is chipping off the sides and
the shingles on the roof are cracked and brittle from the sun.
The lawn is dry and yellow. There are no hedges or trees, no
shade or cover, and if you stare long enough you can see waves
of heat rising off the asphalt in the driveway. His car is still
parked there, an old battered Volkswagen squatting on its axles,
the backseat packed with boxes of books and clothes that he
had planned to move, throw out or give away. The registration
tag is nearly two years old.
On the front porch is an upturned wicker chair with the
weaving broken out of the seat, and on the door is a warning
from the Los Angeles city coroner: Removal of this seal is a felony.
The day is hot, and I am sweating. The Fourth of July is near,
and as I reach for the doorknob, turn it and find it unlocked, I
hear the snap of firecrackers from somewhere down the block.
For some time I have contemplated this moment, wondering if
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J a m e s B r o w n
I could go through with it, and I’m surprised at how easily I
enter, without hesitation, without a second thought. The odor
is overpowering. Immediately my throat tightens, and in that
instant I want to turn back, but I do not. On a table in the hall-
way, just past the door, is a stack of unopened mail, and in the
living room cardboard boxes are scattered across the floor.
Some he has already packed but most are still empty. I’d like to
think that he was preparing to move in with me. I’d like to be-
lieve that I could’ve helped if he’d given me the chance. But my
sister tells me that he never mentioned anything about moving
in with me and instead had borrowed money from her and
rented a room in a run-down hotel in Hollywood not far from
where he used to live, when he was just a teenager, when he first
moved out.
I walk slowly through the house. A pile of neatly folded
towels rests on the couch, and nearby, on the coffee table, is a
basket of clean clothes still in need of sorting. The police uni-
form, the clothes I last saw him wearing, is among them.
I don’t have to go far.
I don’t have to search.
The living room adjoins the dining room and that is where
he killed himself. I don’t know why but he had dragged the box
spring and mattress from his bedroom into this room, set up
the nightstand, a reading lamp and portable fan. Maybe it was
cooler here. Maybe it was only late at night, long after the sun
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
had gone down, that my brother was able to sleep. I sit on the
edge of the mattress. The pillow is dark and heavy with blood.
There is still the indentation where he had rested his head.
On the floor beside the bed is an empty fifth of Kessler’s,
and I imagine him lifting it to his lips, draining the last of it
before reaching for the revolver that he’d bought for home pro-
tection several years before. I imagine that the reading lamp is
on but that it barely lights the room and that the fan is purring,
turning back and forth, back and forth. Outside, maybe, he
hears a car pass along the street. Maybe a dog is barking. I see
him pull the drapes shut and stretch out on the bed. For a
while he just lies there, staring at the ceiling. Does he think of
me? Can he see the faces of our sister, father and mother? He
places the barrel of the revolver in his mouth. He cocks the
hammer. Where is he, in that instant between life and death,
when he pulls the trigger? Somewhere down the block I hear
more firecrackers go off, and I see him then, recoiling from the
blast.
Sometimes late at night I will wake up in a cold sweat, un-
able to catch my breath. Sometimes when I am playing with my
children, teaching class or talking with a friend, that scene will
visit me. I could be reading the newspaper. I could be watch-
ing TV. I could be wasted or sober and suddenly I’m there
again, just a college kid, sitting on the edge of that bed in that
house in Echo Park where my brother ended his life. Now I’m
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J a m e s B r o w n
forty-three years old, a middle-aged writer, and whenever I
drive into Los Angeles on business, or to visit a friend, it fills
me with a sense of dread. On every street, around every corner,
I come face-to-face with the memory of my brother. Bronson
Park. A restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where he once took me
for lunch. Laurel Canyon where he lived in better times. Larry
Edmund’s Books in Hollywood. They are different moments
but they all lead to the same place. There is no answer for sui-
cide, no final reconciliation.
That afternoon in July I load our father’s truck with my
brother’s belongings and vow never to return to Los Angeles.
On Highway 101, while I’m driving along the coast smoking a
cigarette and staring blankly out the window, I notice a sign up
ahead. It’s for the Pismo Beach turnoff, and seeing it I recall the
day when our mother left our father and first moved us to L.A.
We stopped here along the way to play in the ocean and have
our picture snapped by a stranger. We are just children, my
brother and sister and I, posing for the photo in front of an
older Buick Special, squinting against the glare of the sun. He
has his arm draped over Marilyn’s shoulders, and later, in the
car when I begin to cry, my brother will hold me and whisper
something into my ear, something that will make me smile.
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S p r i n g 1 9 8 4
O N S E L L I N G A N
T O H
O V E L
O L L Y W O O D
D E A L I
I am twenty-eight years old, confident and self-assured. When Warner Brothers options my second novel I am ecstatic. In a year
or so they’ll make the movie and I will join the ranks of the rich
and famous. Because the movie will be a phenomenal success, my
novel will rocket to the top of the best-seller list. I will appear on
all the big talk shows. My face will grace the cover of Esquire.
Above all the New Yorker will finally stop rejecting my short stories
and recognize me for the brilliant talent that I am. In the mean-
time the celebration begins. I run out and buy an eight-ball of
coke, a few cases of Heineken, a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s, Ab-
solut and Johnnie Walker Black and invite all my friends over for
a party. The last guest leaves at dawn but I’m just getting started.
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J a m e s B r o w n
The novel I sold is about three teenage brothers growing
up in some seedy parts of Los Angeles with their widowed
mother. The oldest brother is an aspiring actor. The middle
brother deals cocaine and methamphetamine. The youngest is
a habitual runaway. They are poor kids. They are reckless kids
on a collision course with life, and because I have lived this life,
because I know these characters intimately, I want to write the
screenplay.
I meet with the producer at Warner Brothers. At the main
gate that afternoon is a long line of cars waiting for the guard
to check them through. Ahead of me are a Mercedes, two
BMWs and a Porsche. I am driving an eleven-year-old Nissan
pickup with a broken muffler, and it’s loud. People are staring
at me and I’m suddenly self-conscious. On a whim I put it into
reverse, and instead of parking on the studio lot as I was in-
structed to do, I leave my old truck at a meter down the street
and walk back to the guard’s booth. He passes me through, and
a few minutes later I’m in an air-conditioned bungalow seated
across from the producer and his assistant, an attractive girl
who barely seems out of her teens. She’s wearing a tight skirt
and a low-cut blouse. The producer is in his early forties, fit
and tanned. He is beginning to lose his hair.
“It’s a terrific book,” he says. “But I’m a little concerned.
Novelists are generally too close to their own work to make the
necessary changes.”
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“What kind of changes?” I say.
He waves his hand.
“Nothing major,” he says. “We don’t want to lose your vi-
sion of the story.”
As we discuss these changes the assistant takes notes. She
gets us coffee and Cokes and phones in lunch. She is very ac-
commodating, and I wonder if she’s just a good employee or if
the producer is fucking her. On the wall behind the producer’s
desk are glossies of old movie stars. Bogart. Jimmy Stewart.
Jane Russell. Now and then I glance at these photos while we
talk, and now and then, though I know better, I steal a look at
the assistant. Once she catches my eye and smiles.
When our meeting is over I leave the office determined to
do a good job. I am prepared to be merciless. I am prepared to
cut and chop. To rearrange scenes, create new ones, eliminate
others. I work long hard hours and in three months I’ve whit-
tled a three-hundred-page novel down to a hundred-and-ten-
page screenplay. But the heart of the book is still there. All the
characters survive intact.
“You certainly know how to write a screenplay,” the pro-
ducer tells me after he’s read it. “But it’s too dark. I think we
need a fresh eye on this.”
In short, I am fired and a fresh eye is hired. In this writer’s
version the oldest brother, the aspiring actor, is now the lead
singer of a rock band. The middle brother is the bass guitarist.
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J a m e s B r o w n
The youngest, the runaway, is the drummer. They aren’t tough
kids anymore. They aren’t even poor.
That writer is fired.
So is the producer. The executive in charge of the project
takes it on herself to hire another writer. This one does a fine
job but by the time he’s finished the executive has also been
fired and the woman who replaces her has her own agenda. Un-
fortunately that agenda does not include making my novel into
a movie and it soon falls into that netherworld known as
“turnaround,” where the costs of another company acquiring
the project are astronomical.
The option lapses.
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears
from the bookstores and a few weeks later I receive in the mail
another rejection from the New Yorker. Because I’m depressed I
run out and buy more drugs and alcohol. I invite my friends
over to take my mind off things but half of them don’t show
up. They’re lightweights. The party continues without them.
D E A L I I
I am thirty-six years old and a little less confident. When an in-
dependent producer in New York options my third novel I am
excited but cautious. In a year or two they might make the
movie. Because it will be shot on a small budget, and because
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
it will be only moderately successful, I can expect this novel to
sell better than my last but by no stretch will it land on the
best-seller list. I might appear on a local cable talk show.
Maybe it will be a kind of cult hit. Above all the New Yorker will
undoubtedly catch wind of this independent sleeper, recognize
me for the undiscovered talent that I am, and publish one of
my short stories. In the meantime the celebration begins. I run
out and buy an eight-ball of methamphetamine because it is
cheaper and stronger than coke, a few cases of Budweiser, a
half-gallon of Smirnoff, Dewar’s scotch and Seagram’s 7 and
invite my friends over for a party. But most of them are busy
for some reason, and what few do show end up leaving early
when I make an ass of myself. They’re lightweights anyway.
This time the novel I sold is about an old man who runs a
little theater out of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a hotel
that’s slated for demolition to make way for a freeway. He and
his friend, a young alcoholic playwright, attempt to stage one
last production before the building is razed, and time is run-
ning out. Of course there’s more to it, a lot more, which is one
of the problems in adapting it into a screenplay. But I’m will-
ing to try.
The producer flies out from New York and we meet at
Starbucks in Brentwood. He is an older, impeccably well-
dressed gentleman, and he stands out in this crowd of mostly
college students dressed in tank tops and flip-flops.
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J a m e s B r o w n
“You realize,” he says, “that there’ll have to be some changes.”
“What kind of changes?”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “They’re nothing major.”
He takes a sip of his coffee. He sets it back down and dabs
his mouth with his napkin. “For instance,” he says, “I don’t
think the young playwright should be alcoholic. Alcoholics are
detestable people and don’t make for likable characters.”
I wonder if he realizes that he is working with one. I won-
der if he notices that my hands tend to shake around the time
it is now, happy hour, a little after five o’clock. I need a drink
but any suggestion I might’ve had of carrying this meeting over
to the bar across the street is dashed.
The producer is an articulate, intelligent man, and during
the course of our meeting he gives me several pages of notes,
all of them insightful. I want to do a good job, and once more
I’m willing to mercilessly cut and chop, create new scenes and
eliminate others.
Inside of six months we have a strong screenplay with the
original vision of the novel still intact. The producer shops it
around to actors, directors and studio executives. A year passes.
No luck. The call comes from Vermont, where he’s vacationing,
and I can sense by the tone of his voice that he’s given up.
“You wrote a good script,” he tells me. “But they’re all say-
ing it’s too soft.”
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
from the bookstores. I think it’s all over and then out of the
blue he phones again to tell me, in short, that I’m fired.
“What I think we need,” he says, “is a fresh eye.”
The new draft arrives in a manila envelope a couple of
months later. The story, which originally took place in down-
town Los Angeles, now opens in the jungles of Vietnam. But
I’m not shocked. I’m not angry. I set the script aside after read-
ing a few pages and reach for the other manila envelope that
also arrived in the day’s mail, the one with my own handwrit-
ing on it. It’s from the New Yorker, and I’m hoping, as I split the
envelope, that someone has been kind enough to include a
word of encouragement on the rejection slip enclosed.
Because I’m depressed I invite my friends over for a party
to help take my mind off things. But no one shows up. It’s just
as well. This way I don’t have to share my dope and alcohol. I
party alone with a gram of meth and a half-gallon of Popov’s
vodka.
D E A L I I I
I’m forty-three years old now and not so hopeful anymore.
Maybe I am even a little bitter. When my fourth novel is op-
tioned by another independent producer, this one from Lon-
don, I am guarded. Before the year is up I’ll deliver what I
believe is a decent screenplay and then I’ll be fired. Because the
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J a m e s B r o w n
movie probably won’t get made, and because my book proba-
bly won’t sell any better than my others, I’ll bank the money I
make and be thankful I got it. In the meantime the celebration
begins. I make reservations at a nice Mexican restaurant and in-
vite my closest friends to dinner, the worst of the lightweights,
the ones who prefer me clean and sober. We drink Martinelli’s
sparkling cider and espresso and have a great time.
This last novel is a coming-of-age story, a love story about
a son and his father and an ex-prostitute with a passion for
crime. They’re on the run from the law, beginning on the banks
of the Willamette River in Oregon and ending in catastrophe
in Las Vegas. Of course it’s more complicated than this, and
capturing those complications in a script won’t be easy, but I’m
ready to try. I’m ready to give it my best shot.
The producer flies out from London and we meet at the
Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. He’s a pale Englishman and we
conduct our meeting over lunch under a cabana at poolside.
Like his New York counterpart, he is intelligent and articulate,
though considerably younger. His first movie has just been re-
leased, one of the actors has been nominated for an Oscar, and
it is doing well here and abroad. As we talk a young woman in
a bikini strolls by our cabana, and I think I recognize her. I
think I’ve seen her on TV but I don’t remember where.
“It’s a terrific novel,” he says. “But I’m sure you understand
we’ll have to make some changes.”
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“What kind of changes?”
“Let’s have a drink first,” he says.
He orders vodka on the rocks. I order a seltzer water with
a twist of lime. I like this man. He believes in my work, enough
to invest his time and money, and it’s my responsibility to do
the best job I can. I also know that I’m not getting any younger
and these opportunities won’t continue to fall in my lap.
Once again, when I leave our meeting, I am prepared to
mercilessly cut and chop. The difference this time around is
that the producer has already interested an up-and-coming di-
rector in our project and soon I receive pages and pages of
notes from both of them. I write a first draft.
They like it and want me to do another. They are already
talking to studios, actors and finance companies. There is in-
terest.
There is buzz.
I put in long hours on the next draft. I labor over every
scene, every line of dialogue. In under a month I finish and
send it off. The producer calls after he reads it and he’s excited.
“I like it enormously,” he says.
Those are his exact words, and I can still hear them, echo-
ing in my head, when he phones a week later to fire me.
“The director,” he says, “feels that it’s uninspired. What I
think we need on this is a fresh eye.”
Before he can hire a new writer, however, the director hits
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J a m e s B r o w n
it with a big movie and wants nothing more to do with our
project. The producer’s interest wanes.
The option lapses.
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears
from the bookstores and soon another rejection slip from the
New Yorker arrives in the mail. It sounds like the same old story
but something has changed this time. Something about it feels
brand-new. Maybe it has to do with that third strike. Maybe
it’s about the other close calls, too, the hopes they inspired and
my coming to realize how few ever get the shots I’ve had. I’m
sure of one thing, though. It’s not about Hollywood anymore,
or getting drunk and wasted, and in some ways it never has
been. This is a bigger story now. One about change. Adapta-
tion and acceptance. The drafts are endless but it’s the writer,
not the story, who undergoes the most important revisions.
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S u m m e r 1 9 7 0
A F I N E P L A C E
In the trunk we have four IBM self-correcting Selectrics, five adding machines and three Dictaphones. In the backseat,
hidden under a blanket, are a Pioneer stereo, a half-dozen
eight-track tape decks and a thirteen-inch Zenith color TV,
brand-new, still in the box. I am fourteen years old. My friend
Tito is sixteen, and we are unloading these items from his
mother’s Buick, items I helped him acquire. This takes place in
an alley behind a used-furniture store in Watts, and I remem-
ber it vividly, this summer of 1970, because it is the first time
I used heroin.
The woman buying these things works at the furniture
store. She wears high heels and a tight dress made of shiny blue
1 4 7
J a m e s B r o w n
fabric. She’s shaved off her eyebrows and penciled them in with
black eyeliner, and I find this odd. I find it hard not to stare.
She talks to Tito, not me, because they know each other from
past dealings. He has sold her stolen goods before.
“You can keep the tape decks,” she says. “I’ll give you four
hundred for the rest.”
“Why not the decks?”
“I don’t need them.”
“Ten each,” Tito says.
“Five,” she says.
“Shit,” he says. “The wiring is worth more than that.”
On one side of the alley are the back entrances and load-
ing docks for the different businesses that face Vermont Av-
enue. On the other side are the garages and carports of the
run-down apartments and houses that face the neighboring
street. The woman points to a bright yellow garage just across
from the furniture store. “You boys can put the stuff in there,”
she says. “I’ll walk you over.” Tito reaches into the trunk for
one of the Selectrics. I take another. It weighs about sixty, sev-
enty pounds but feels light in my arms because the adrenaline
is rushing and I am abnormally strong. What I want, and I
want it badly, is to unload the car, collect our money and get
out of here. Tito is experienced at this kind of thing and senses
my anxiousness.
“Relax, Brown,” he says. “You’re sweating like a motherfucker.”
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
Inside the garage are four or five black men standing
around a workbench in the corner. A dim lightbulb dangles
from an extension cord strung along the rafters and the smell
of something burning hangs in the air. One of the men looks
up at the woman and nods. The others glance at us, then turn
away, and it makes me curious, what it is they’re doing, how
completely it consumes them. The man in the middle of the
group is in the process of unfastening a belt from around his
arm, and when we leave the garage, when we return with an-
other load he is slumped in a chair, his eyes closed.
We set the stuff on the concrete floor, and on the way back
to the car again I ask Tito about him, the man in the chair.
“What’s wrong with that guy?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“He looks wasted.”
“Wasted good,” Tito says. “Where he’s at right now no-
body, nothing, can touch him. It’s a fine place, man, a beauti-
ful place.”
Later, when we’ve collected our money, Tito buys two bags
of heroin for forty dollars and we drive back across town to the
mountains of Griffith Park. At sixteen he has already fixed be-
fore. “A couple times,” he tells me. “And it’s a real trip.” But I
am fourteen, a virgin to the needle, and scared. I have heard the
horror stories in school about drug addiction and junkies, sto-
ries designed to frighten, but still, or in spite of them, I want
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J a m e s B r o w n
to go to that fine place where nothing can touch me. I see it as
a kind of test, a kind of dare. With his teeth, Tito tears a strip
from an old beach towel he found in the trunk of the car and
ties it around my arm.
We are parked now along a quiet mountain road overlook-
ing Hollywood, and in the distance, as Tito tightens the knot,
I think I can see all the way to the Pacific. I don’t want to watch
what he’s doing. I don’t want to see the needle going in, and so
I look out on the city spread before me. “Make a fist,” Tito
says. The sun is just setting, a thin layer of smog hangs in the
sky, and the colors, refracted through the fading light, are re-
markable. Pinks. Yellows. Shades of purple and brown. “Hold
still,” he says, and then I feel it, the sting, like a mosquito bite.
The rush is deep, warm and profound. It’s as if I’m sinking
into myself, and for several moments, instead of feeling plea-
sure I am panicked, because I don’t know where or how far it’s
taking me, how deep I’m going down. But then it levels out and
I find myself somewhere between wakefulness and dream. Tito
laughs, but his laughter sounds hollow, distant, like an echo.
In the summer of 1970, after a lengthy battle, my brother re-
ceives a psychiatric deferment from the United States Army.
This is during the Vietnam War and he says he would kill him-
self if he were drafted. He says he would kill those who come
to take him away in self-defense, fully expecting to go to prison
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or terminate his own life. In this memory I am troubled for my
brother. In this memory I am sitting at the table in the kitch-
enette at his apartment and he is standing in the living room in
front of the window that overlooks the rooftops of the shops
and stores along Hollywood Boulevard.
We are drinking Wild Turkey 101 from styrofoam cups
but it’s too strong for me. I’m not keeping up.
“You don’t really mean that stuff,” I say, because I am con-
cerned.
“About what?”
“Killing yourself.”
He speaks casually, with false bravado, and it angers me.
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”
“Don’t mess with me,” I say. “You made it up to get out of
the draft. That’s all.”
He laughs, and for a moment I relax and laugh with him.
I like to believe that it’s all just a smoke screen, an acting role,
another stellar performance that commences years earlier, when
he first sees a psychiatrist. He goes not because he wants help
but because he needs to establish a psychiatric record for him-
self, knowing full well that whatever he tells the doctor will
later appear on the report to the draft board. My brother is a
fine actor and his plan works. I’m relieved that he won’t be
going to Vietnam but that doesn’t stop me from worrying. His
drinking is getting out of hand, though it has yet to take its toll
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J a m e s B r o w n
in physical terms; at his age the body is remarkably resilient.
Barry is strong and handsome, his career is going well, and for
all outward appearances he is a model of success.
A copy of his psychiatric report rests on the table in front
of me, and I read from it, silently, to myself: An induction of this
young man would result in personal catastrophe of either suicide or homici-
dal violence. In either condition he would be of no service or use in the Armed
Forces.
I push the paper aside.
“It’s bullshit, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’d you mean you don’t know?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I’m not being drafted.”
I want to believe him, and I do. In this scene, at this mo-
ment, his rationalizations are enough for me. Free of the draft,
there is no threat to his life or another’s. But some years later,
when I’m going through his belongings and come across the
psychiatric report, I will know I believed a lie.
This takes place at a small Equity-waiver theater on La Cienega
Boulevard in Hollywood. Again the year is 1970. Again it is
summer, and my sister is performing tonight in an experimen-
tal play, an ensemble piece designed to showcase the talents of
the various members of her acting class. The teacher is a vet-
eran character actor who rarely works anymore, who survives
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
now from the proceeds of his teaching, and he is staging this
production for the benefit of his students. He is also the play-
wright and director. According to my sister there will be im-
portant agents, producers and directors in the audience
tonight, and they will all be looking for new talent. Marilyn is
both nervous and excited. She wants what Barry is now getting,
recognition, but so far it has eluded her.
My memory of this night opens in the theater: my mother
and I, sitting on hard wooden fold-out chairs, fanning our-
selves with our programs, waiting for the play to begin. The
place is packed, and with no windows, no fans or air-
conditioning, it is uncomfortably warm, the air unpleasant to
breathe. Still I’m looking forward to watching my sister per-
form and I am sure that our mother feels the same. My brother
is conspicuously absent from this picture.
Because there are thirty students in Marilyn’s acting class,
and because the teacher wants to give each of them the oppor-
tunity to be seen, there are thirty roles in the play. This makes
the story hard to follow with the different actors coming and
going onstage and occasionally all of them appearing at once.
I am confused much of the time but I attribute this confusion
to my inexperience and lack of education. Certainly the play
has hidden meanings, meanings that escape the simple mind of
a fourteen-year-old boy, and because they escape me I am sure
they must be significant and profound. Unfortunately Marilyn
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J a m e s B r o w n
is just one of thirty hopefuls, and in the end, when the curtains
are drawn, I feel that she’s been cheated, the display of her tal-
ents shortchanged, lost in the chaos.
When she meets up with us outside the theater, her cheeks
are flushed and she’s smiling. She’s also with one of the other
actors, a man considerably older than her. He has long hair. He
wears bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt and I have the
feeling that he’s trying too hard to be hip. Our mother puts her
arm around Marilyn and hugs her.
“You did good, honey,” she says. “But how come you can’t
act in something like Hello, Dolly! Or Bye Bye Birdie? How come
you let yourself get mixed up in these junky little plays? It was
so hot in there Jimmy almost passed out.”
“I did not,” I say.
“You did, too.”
“I see Barry didn’t make it,” my sister says.
Clearly she is disappointed. For her, Barry is already a
highly accomplished actor, and she yearns for his approval, his
attention. As a brother. As a teacher. But she rarely gets it any-
more, not since he moved out, and sometimes it angers me—
that he doesn’t seem to care about her more.
“Mom,” she says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
This friend will be the man Marilyn one day marries, and
at first I don’t like him any better than our mother does. For
one thing, he’s too old for her. For another, I know what he’s
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after with my beautiful young sister, and I don’t trust him. At
the same time I can see that she’s happy with him, and in
Barry’s absence I’m somehow relieved that he’s here for her
tonight. In light of his presence, however, our plans to take
Marilyn to dinner are dashed, and the last thing I remember
about this night is my sister climbing onto the back of her
boyfriend’s motorcycle. It’s a classic image from a thousand
movies: two lovers speeding down the boulevard and disap-
pearing into the bright lights of the promised land.
It’s around nine or ten at night and I am home alone. Marilyn
is out with her boyfriend, the one she will eventually marry.
My mother is also with a man tonight. After years of not dat-
ing, she has finally taken off her wedding ring, the ring she
wore to ward off suitors, and allowed another into her life. I’ve
only met him twice, when he came to the apartment for her,
and he seems nice enough, well dressed in a suit and tie. Really
I have no opinion of him one way or the other except to say
that I don’t begrudge my mother for dating, as children of di-
vorced parents so often do.
As for Barry, of late he plays an even smaller role in my life.
This is still the summer of 1970 but he has recently landed his
first starring role in a movie and is gone now shooting in
Kansas. He won’t return for several months.
In some ways I prefer it like this. The privacy. The freedom
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J a m e s B r o w n
that comes with being alone. I have my own key and most of
the time I come and go as I please, do what I want when I want.
But I also miss them, and lately, more than ever, I’ve come to
miss my father. It is quiet in the apartment, and tonight, as I
wander into my room, undress and climb into bed, I find my-
self thinking about him, wondering if he’s alone at this mo-
ment, if he’s asleep already or up watching TV.
Then my mind drifts to Tito and the things we stole. The
eight-tracks come from cars parked around the neighborhood.
The TV and stereo belong to someone who lives in a ground-
floor apartment across the street. The big stuff—the Selectrics,
the Dictaphones and the adding machines—come from an of-
fice building in North Hollywood. I think about the good part
of stealing, the adrenaline rush, the fear of being caught and
the exhilaration of getting away with it. And the money, all the
easy money. But when I close my eyes I see the man who lives
in that apartment coming home after a long day’s work and
finding his place ransacked. I picture the people who work in
the office building in North Hollywood and the look on their
faces when they discover the same scenario.
They are shocked.
They are disgusted and outraged. I bet they think that a
couple of punk kids are responsible, the kind of kids who
shoot dope in parked cars at Griffith Park, who might wind up
in prison someday, deservedly, and they would be right.
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In the living room I hear the familiar sounds of my mother
returning home. The clatter of keys tossed on the coffee table.
The fall of her pumps, first one then the other as she removes
and drops them on the carpeted floor. My bedroom door
creaks open and a moment later she is leaning over me. I smell
her breath, the sour odor of alcohol.
“Jimmy,” she says, “you asleep?”
But I say nothing. She kisses me lightly on the forehead.
She arranges the blankets around my shoulders, and I wait until
she steps back, turning to leave, before I call to her.
“Mom,” I say.
“What is it, honey?”
Up until tonight the thought has never occurred to me. It
has never even crossed my mind, and so it startles me, wherever
it comes from, as I am sure that it startles my mother.
“I want to live with Dad,” I say.
My mother sits on the edge of the bed and looks at me.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “Is this what you really want?” And
what I say next hurts, it hurts us both, that one word, that sim-
ple yes.
At night Los Angeles is a blanket of lights. From my seat, on
this plane, I look down on the neatly sectioned streets and the
endless procession of cars snaking along the different freeways.
I can see the glowing orange ball of a 76 Union station. I can
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J a m e s B r o w n
see the green playing field of a neighborhood park bathed in
bright flood lamps. But over the ocean, as the plane continues
to rise, the sky falls into darkness, and for a while I find my-
self staring at nothing. I have made a choice, and this choice,
for me, is a kind of death. At fourteen I am shedding one life
to embrace another.
Though confident with my decision, I am nonetheless
worried and confused. My mother agrees that a boy my age
should be with his father but tells me that if, by chance, it
doesn’t work out, she will welcome me back. Barry also sup-
ports my decision—by phone from Kansas. “Dad,” he says,
“needs you as much as you need him.” The only dissenter is my
sister, who thinks I am making a mistake. Our father, she tells
me, is not the man I imagine him to be. He failed us once when
he let our mother take us from him and he will fail again with
me. Prepare for disappointment. She reminds me that he is
likely still seeing our old baby-sitter, the woman she believes
ruined our parents’ marriage, and she accuses me of disloyalty
and desertion. I am running away—from myself, she says—
when I should be grateful for the ones who really love me, who
have been there for me in the past.
I will miss my sister.
I will miss my mother and brother. But I am also lonely for
my father and have been for some time. What I need, whether
I’m aware of it or not at this age, and I believe I am, is a
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
stronger sense of belonging, of home. Intuitively I know that my
father can fill this need and I am drawn to him despite my sis-
ter’s warnings.
The flight is a short one, just under an hour, and soon the
lights of the city of San Jose appear outside the window. I am
one of the first to unboard, and I spot him before he spots me.
He is standing toward the back of the crowd, dressed in his
work clothes, khaki pants and khaki shirt. On his face is the
look of anxiousness, and when I approach he smiles, opening
his arms to me.
In the summer of 1970 I learn to hang drywall, tape, sand and
texture. I learn rough framing. I learn how to roof a house and
pound a nail straight and true. Each day, until school begins in
the fall, I work long hours with this man I call my father, a man
who up until this time I know little about.
At home I am expected to pick up after myself, to help
with the dishes, laundry and cleaning. If I go out, I’m expected
back at a certain hour, and if I’m late, I am grounded. I like the
discipline. I like knowing that someone cares, and though I
continue to miss my brother, sister and mother, I feel I’ve made
the right choice. On workdays we rise before the sun and he
makes us a breakfast of eggs, hotcakes, bacon, sausage or ham.
Then we climb into the truck and head to the lumberyard for
material or go straight to the job. My father doesn’t believe in
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J a m e s B r o w n
midmorning or late-afternoon breaks so we only stop for what
he calls supper and I call lunch. Either way we rest only long
enough to eat our sandwiches. He is a driven man. He has al-
ways been a driven man but now that drive is motivated at least
in part by the fear of time.
My father is a dreamer.
My father believes that if he just works hard enough he
will somehow dig himself out from under his bankruptcy and
reclaim the wealth and security he lost because of our mother.
But he is already at an age when most men retire and his pos-
sibilities are limited.
We live in a rented house on the east side, the poor side of
San Jose, and for the first month after I arrive, until we can af-
ford another bed, I sleep with my father. At night he tells me
stories about when he was growing up in the backwoods of
Oregon and how he used to hunt for deer and fish for salmon.
He tells me about the years he worked for the Southern Pacific
Railroad and laid tracks through mountainous terrain that up
until then no white man had ever seen. He tells me about the
Cherokee, how he admired and respected their love of nature,
and he teaches me to count to ten in their language. This is all
before he moved to California. “I came for the work,” he says.
“For greater opportunity. I met your mother, we fell in love
and raised a family. There were good years, many good years.”
Now he dreams of returning to Oregon. He wants to get
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
money enough ahead to build a summer house for Barry, Mar-
ilyn and me on the Chetco River and bring us together again
as a family if only for a few months out of the year. My father
has a talent for detail, and as he describes the Chetco River, the
salmon leaping out of the water, the sun glinting off their
backs, as he describes the mountains of his youth and the
beauty of a grazing deer, I am there with him. It is real to me.
It is a fine place, and I live in his stories as I will someday live
in my own.
At seventeen I will leave for college. A few years after I
graduate he will die. Looking back, I see myself at fourteen in
bed beside him. The room is still and dark. The kid who shoots
heroin, robs and steals is getting drowsy, his father’s voice
slowly fading, and when I fall asleep and wake up thirty years
later as a middle-aged man, I realize that this brief time I spent
with my father has much to do with why I am still here and my
brother and sister are not.
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S u m m e r 1 9 9 6
M I D A I R
On that warm night in July you lift yourself up to the rail of the overpass above the Los Angeles River. All you’re wear-
ing is a T-shirt and panties. In the distance you hear the cars
moving along the Hollywood Freeway and beyond it you see
the glow of the city lights. I want to believe that you can feel
the coolness of the steel rail beneath your bare feet. I want to
believe that as you fall you feel nothing more than the wind
rushing up against your face. There is no pain. No impact. In
my dreams you are suspended in midair.
You are forty-four years old the night you storm out of the
house in the heat of another fight with your husband, the last
fight you will ever have, and end your lifelong battle with alco-
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J a m e s B r o w n
hol and drugs. That it happens in July, the month our brother
lost this same battle, is no coincidence. You have never been
able to reconcile Barry’s death, you see it as I do, as a kind of
desertion, as betrayal, and your pain only deepens through the
years. You have been to psychiatrists of every bent and persua-
sion. You have exhausted the long list of pharmaceuticals,
checked yourself in and out of rehabs and halfway houses, and
none of it has been of any lasting help. I know it is more com-
plicated than this. I know there are other roots and causes for
your illness and that the first symptoms came earlier, in child-
hood, but when I look back over your life I see Barry’s death as
the trigger for your destruction. You’re only in your twenties at
the time, you have a child and a husband, and your dream of
becoming a successful actor is still very much alive. Then one
morning soon after he’s gone you tell me you are standing at
the sink doing dishes and it sweeps over you, like a wave, this
knowledge that nothing will ever be the same. At that moment
something dies inside of you and you know that you will never
get it back.
The night I drive in from San Jose for Barry’s funeral you
are high, as I am, we are both very high, and a few months
later, when mourning is no longer an excuse for drowning your
sorrows, you have already slipped across that line into addic-
tion. Your husband follows. He is a plumbing contractor and
makes enough to keep you both well enough supplied. Of
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
course I am not far behind. In another year, when I graduate
from college and return to Los Angeles, I will be in that dark
place right alongside you. Your husband will give me a job dig-
ging ditch and running pipe, he is generous with his dope, and
almost every day for the next several years I will be strung out
and wired. At night I work on my novel while I drink to steady
my nerves and then in the morning, after a few restless hours
of sleep, the process begins all over again. Sometimes after
work, instead of returning to my apartment, you and I hang
out in your living room and get loaded. Behind the liquor and
cocaine you talk freely where normally you are quiet and shy.
You have never thought of yourself as pretty. You have never
had confidence. Growing up our mother tells you that your
nose is too big, that your breasts are too small, and for your
sixteenth birthday she buys you a long blond wig to wear
when you go out on auditions. “Maybe it will change your
luck,” she says. “I’m only trying to be helpful, honey.” But
when you’re high the shyness disappears and you feel pretty,
you feel smart. You like to talk about actors. You like to talk
about the movies you’ve seen or the books you’ve just read or
the play you plan to audition for at that little theater on
Lankershim, the ninety-nine-seater. I encourage you, try to
build you up.
“Go for it,” I say. “I know how good you are. I’ve seen you
act.”
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J a m e s B r o w n
Compliments make you uneasy, and when you smile, when
you give a nervous laugh, you cover your mouth with your hand
because you are self-conscious.
As proof of your talent I remind you about your close call
for a role in a Woody Allen movie and how he found your shy-
ness charming and took you for a walk around the block to
help put you at ease before you read for the part. And you did
well. You said so yourself and you are anything but a braggart.
I don’t mention that this close call was years ago or that you
haven’t auditioned for anything since. The longer you are out
of the loop, the harder it is for you to regain the courage to get
back in, and I worry that you have given up. You live in our
brother’s shadow but you have your own dreams and I know
that if you let them slip away you will be bitter with regret for
the rest of your life. So we have another drink. We do another
line. What we share, you and I, is a sadness for our brother and
this constant need, this craving to somehow make ourselves feel
better.
The odds are against you and have been for some time. At
nineteen you marry the first man who shows you love, that one
who rides the motorcycle. He is fifteen years older than you
and you tell me you marry him because he is a tradesman and
reminds you of our father. That you like his rough hands. But
the real reason is to escape from our mother and begin a new
life. That you are already two months along only makes the de-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
cision easier, and over the weekend you fly out to Reno, to one
of those gaudy chapels along the strip. Afterward you get
drunk on champagne and they kick you out of Harrah’s for
gambling because you’re underage and you laugh it off, you get
drunker, and by Monday you’re back in L.A. with your hus-
band just in time for him to go to work.
For a while you are happy in your new role as housewife,
as mother-to-be, and you spend your days getting the room
fixed up for the baby. You hang wallpaper with bright rainbows
and big white clouds. You take down the old blinds and replace
them with curtains that let in more light. You shop for cute
outfits, jumpers, bottles, diapers, and a mobile of stars and
moons to hang over the crib that you’ve already put on layaway
at Sears. These are good times. They fill you with a sense of
pride and satisfaction in a way you’ve never known before.
Then the baby arrives. It isn’t as easy as you thought and you
don’t get out much anymore. Movies and restaurants seem a
thing in the past. You want to be the best mother you can, and
you try, you really do, but when the newness of it all wears off
you start feeling frustrated again. Where you were once quick
to answer your baby’s call, now you sometimes shut the door
and let her cry herself to sleep. Soon your house, like your life,
seems smaller, and you feel as if you’re caged in. There are mo-
ments when your heart races for no apparent reason and you
can’t quite catch your breath. Your doctor says it’s just a typical
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J a m e s B r o w n
reaction to the stresses of motherhood and prescribes Valium.
He tells you that you need rest.
A drink in the late afternoon takes the edge off your hectic
day, and when you mix it with the Valium it works even better.
So long as you keep it to one or two, and no more than a bot-
tle of chardonnay at dinner, you don’t see the harm. God knows
it’s not easy caring for a colicky baby, and of course you love
her, that’s not the issue. It’s just that sometimes you feel over-
whelmed and it creeps up on you, especially late at night when
the house is quiet and you’re stretched out in bed with your eyes
wide open, staring into the darkness and wondering if this is
what it’s all about, if this is all there is. As your husband lies be-
side you snoring it comes over you again, this vague sense that
something is wrong, something is missing and maybe, just
maybe, you married the wrong man. These feelings scare you
and you want them out of your head, you want them gone now.
A nightcap will help, just a shot or two of vodka in a little warm
milk. That and another Valium always does the trick.
But when you wander down the hall to the bathroom and
open the medicine cabinet you find that the bottle is empty.
You can’t believe it. You don’t understand. Just last week it was
close to full. You’re certain of it because you remember explic-
itly how the pharmacist cautions you about refilling it early
again and has to call your doctor. He puts you out. He makes
you wait and it’s all for nothing, since you end up getting ex-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
actly what you came for anyway. You give him a curt smile as
you pay, and you pay quickly so he won’t notice the trembling
in your hands. In your car you take double the dose and swal-
low them dry. The taste is acrid and bitter and nearly makes
you gag. You remember that part too well.
On your way back to bed that night it occurs to you that
for some crazy reason maybe your husband hid your pills. You
can’t fathom why but just the possibility of it, the very idea
that he might think you have some kind of problem infuriates
you. This is your medication. This is doctor prescribed. You
shake him awake. You ask him point-blank what he did with
your Valium and he pretends like he doesn’t know what you’re
talking about. It’s not so much what he says as that sleepy
dumb look on his face, that bullshit innocent look that makes
you even angrier, and for what happens next you have no ex-
planation. Something just snaps. You don’t know what it is, or
where it comes from, but suddenly you’re out of control,
screaming and pounding on him with your fists.
Tonight he doesn’t strike back but eventually, as your ad-
diction grows, as you continue to rage, he, too, will lose con-
trol. You will both fight. You will both hurt each other. I am
living in San Francisco, going to college, when you phone in
the middle of the night in tears.
“I’ve had it,” you say. “It’s over. I’m leaving the son of a
bitch . . .”
1 6 9
J a m e s B r o w n
In midsentence he yanks the phone from your hand and all
I hear is your screaming. A moment later he’s on the line.
“Jimmy,” he says.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“I’m really sorry but it’s crazy around here. She’ll have to
call you back.”
From some other part of the house I hear your child cry-
ing, and before the line goes dead there is another sound, the
thud of a hard blow, your fist landing solid in the hollow of
his back. All night long I try to get ahold of you but the line
is off the hook. It’s not until late the next afternoon when it
finally rings, and when you pick it up your voice is cheerful.
You even laugh.
“I guess I owe you an apology. We were drinking last night
and things just got a little out of hand. You know how it is. You
remember Mom and Dad.”
“But he never hit her,” I say. “It never was that bad.”
You give me a heavy sigh like you think you know some-
thing that I couldn’t possibly understand.
“Married people fight. That’s just how it is. Don’t make a
big deal out of it. We’re all right,” you say. “I mean it, really,
everything’s fine.”
At the time I judge you. I think you’re lying to yourself and
that your problems go far deeper than you’re willing to admit.
How, I wonder, can you be so blind? But my drinking and
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
drugging will one day take me down the same path in my own
marriage, and I will fight with my wife. I’ll explode for no rea-
son and phone you late at night, drunk and wired, while my
children cry in the background. These memories hurt, and I
have others, many far worse. They accumulate over the years
and instead of fading with time they only grow more vivid.
The shame and remorse builds. The load grows heavier as we
age and I understand now how every day you find yourself a
little closer to that overpass above the Los Angeles River.
After Barry dies the vodka and Valium are no longer
enough. The cocaine works for a while, makes you pretty and
smart, but where a few lines once took you to a better place
now it requires much more. Between you and your husband the
supply often runs out and soon he’s pulling money from his
contracting business, charging up the credit cards to cover the
difference, bouncing checks and borrowing from friends. Stay-
ing high is a full-time job and you begin to let the small things
slide. The beds don’t get made. The dishes aren’t washed. The
laundry piles up and there’s no point in vacuuming when you
have a little brat who can’t remember to wipe her feet no mat-
ter how many times you tell her.
What is she now? Four, five? I lose track of time. But she’s
growing up fast, and occasionally it strikes you, how you’re
missing out on some special years, how you can’t ever get them
back. Half the day you keep her in preschool and as soon as
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J a m e s B r o w n
she gets home she locks herself in her room and stays there,
watching TV, afraid to come out, afraid of what mood she
might find you in. Sometimes you feel as if you hardly know
her, your own daughter, and it pulls at your heart. You try to
go without the drugs and booze for a couple of days and make
plans to do something together. Go to a movie. Have a picnic
at the park. Your intentions are good but somehow things just
never seem to turn out right. The traits you see in your daugh-
ter are the same ones you see in yourself and have never liked.
Her shyness. Her constant fidgeting and nail biting. The worst
is how she always walks with her head down as if she has no
pride, no confidence in herself. Part of you sympathizes with
her while the other part, the sick part, condemns. You are al-
ready a person with little patience, but without the drugs and
alcohol you’re far worse. Inside of twenty-four hours you’re de-
pressed and tired and beginning to feel nauseous. Your moods
swing from one extreme to the other. One moment you are rag-
ing at her for spilling her milk, and the next you are cooing in
her ear, promising to read her a book. That fear you see in your
daughter’s eyes is a fear you know well. Later you’re sick with
remorse and you have a realization, one that’s visited you be-
fore, and that is that you are a better person and a better
mother when you’re stoned out of your mind. For your sake
and that of your child you have to feed the demons or they
will destroy what is left of the goodness in your heart. I un-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
derstand how you feel because I have done similar harm to my
sons.
Going straight, even for a couple of days, isn’t and can
never be a viable option. You are convinced of this. You are re-
signed. If you need more evidence just remember the time that
your dealer got busted and it took your husband two long ag-
onizing weeks to hook up with another. Meanwhile you’re
crawling out of your skin, jonesing bad and drinking more
than ever to kill the pain. You have to do something so you pay
a visit to one of your old friends from high school, though he’s
not actually a friend, in fact you’ve never liked him, he’s a seedy
motherfucker but he’s a seedy motherfucker with dope. The
trouble is, you don’t have enough money, and there you are
again, doing something that you promised yourself you never
would.
The shame and guilt eat at you until one night you can’t
take it any longer and you get so drunk it just spills out. Even
as it’s happening, before the words escape from your mouth,
you know that you are making a terrible mistake. You tell me
that you confess out of respect for your husband but you know
that it’s really about saving yourself. Add this to your list of
best worst memories. It’s another that only gets heavier through
the years. I know this from my own experience. Though I’m
not foolish enough to confess, my wife senses my infidelities
well enough, and trying to carry on as if nothing has hap-
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J a m e s B r o w n
pened, as if I could ever reclaim her trust, is just another act of
deception. But we are drunks. We are addicts and we behave
recklessly without regard for the consequences of our actions.
Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, we destroy the ones we
love as surely as we destroy ourselves.
The years slip by. I quit your husband and the plumbing
trade and return to school. I know you don’t begrudge me for
attempting to make a better life for myself but you also can’t
help seeing my leaving in the same light as you do Barry’s sui-
cide. You see it as a form of desertion, a kind of betrayal rem-
iniscent of the first time I left you, years before, to live with
our father. You feel I’ve used you and your husband and taken
advantage of your generosity with drugs and that the only rea-
son I ever came around was to get high.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
What is true is that I care about my writing, as you once
cared about your acting, and I had to make a break or my
dream, like yours, would fade away. So I make that break and
marry my first real love, as you married yours. Heidi and I met
back in high school and she is good for me, she gives me
strength, love and purpose, and for this I will always be in-
debted. Although she knows going into our marriage that I
drink and use she believes that it will pass in time, that I’ll grow
out of it. In the early years she even does some experimenting
herself, but drinking makes her feel out of control and cocaine
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
just puts her on edge. “What’s the point?” she says. “I wouldn’t
exactly call it fun, being wired or slurring my words.” So she
quits, except for an occasional drink or hit of marijuana, and
this is why our marriage probably lasts as long as it does. Imag-
ine if Heidi and I both used, how far we would’ve made it.
For a while I comport myself well enough. I keep my
drinking and drugging to a minimum, and in trying to make a
better life for us I enroll in graduate school at U.C. Irvine and
continue work on my first novel, a novel that eventually gets
published, gets optioned for a movie, sells paperback rights and
sets us on our way. Meanwhile Heidi and I have our first child
and I am there for her in the delivery room, stone-cold sober,
holding her hand and giving whatever support a husband can
give his wife when he is powerless to ease her pain.
I’ve never liked children.
They annoy me. They’re loud and often obnoxious. They
cry and make too many demands and I’ve never had the pa-
tience for them. But when Andy comes into the world I love
him immediately in a way I never before knew I was capable of
loving. He is a quiet, easy baby with few demands, and when
Heidi returns to work as a display artist, while I’m completing
my last year of graduate school, I take our son to classes with
me. I carry him in a pouch that straps around my shoulders
and rests on my stomach. I feed him. I change him. I love and
comfort him.
1 7 5
J a m e s B r o w n
I have not always been a bad father.
Later I will become a professor of English and jump from
job to job—Irvine, Santa Clara University, Hayward State—
until I settle, back in Southern California again, in the desert
wastelands of San Bernardino. In that time my wife and I have
had our second child, and this one is harder on us. He is col-
icky. He is hypersensitive to light and noise and prone to ear
infections. His needs put an additional strain on our marriage,
and I am strangely proud of myself, for despite my growing ad-
dictions I am for the most part there for the boy when his
mother has reached her limits. Somewhere in through here I
also publish a second novel, this one about the family, mainly
Barry, and I fail to include you, my sister.
“Where am I?” you ask me, after you’ve read it. “Don’t I
matter? I lived this story with you. I mean, Christ, I was there.”
Now that I’m older I realize the magnitude of my mistake.
I realize that you are right. I do you and the novel a serious in-
justice by not sticking closer to the truth and the story ulti-
mately suffers because of it. But at the time, in my selfishness,
I tell you that you don’t understand the constraints of the
novel, what can and can’t be included, and if you just look
more closely you’ll see how I leave out all sorts of things, all
sorts of people, and it’s not because these things didn’t happen
or that these people don’t exist. It’s because they don’t fit. Don’t
belong. After all it is just fiction. After all it is about making
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
things up, and you know it is easier to lie about the dead than
the living.
By now your daughter is all grown up. She is your age when
you gave birth to her and despite her childhood, or maybe be-
cause of it, she turns out to be a fine, responsible young
woman who’s seen what drugs and alcohol did to you and her
father and won’t touch them herself. You’re in your late thirties
now and still going strong. You’ve racked up three DUIs. You’ve
wrecked two cars. Your husband has filed for bankruptcy but
the coke is still plentiful, and your marriage, like mine, contin-
ues to erode. But there is hope. People change. Addicts and al-
coholics can get better instead of sicker and I’ve seen it in you.
You break the news to me over the phone.
“Are you sitting down?” you say. “Because you won’t believe
this. I don’t believe it myself but I’m pregnant again.”
Maybe neither of us voice it but we both know that this is
your chance to turn your life and marriage around. This is the
motivation you need to quit drinking and doping, and for the
most part you do. In the months to follow you cut back to just
a couple of drinks a day, and in the evening, to quell the with-
drawal symptoms, you only take one Valium or Xanax instead
of your usual three or four. And so far as the coke goes, be-
cause you’ve heard all those terrible things about crack babies,
you use it only on the weekends and in moderation. Those who
know little about addiction might see it as a moral weakness
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J a m e s B r o w n
and expect nothing less from you than complete sobriety. But
for someone who has drunk and used so much for so long I
know that any step forward is a tremendous one and I am
proud of you. At least you acknowledge your problem. At least
the desire and effort to change is there, and even if it is not yet
enough, you deserve a certain respect.
Your daughter is off at college, her room is empty, and
again you begin making preparations. Because you never ex-
pected to have another child, you gave away the crib. You gave
away the bassinet, threw out the old clothes and broken toys,
and now you rise early in the morning, with a renewed sense of
purpose, and look for replacements at garage sales and swap
meets. You scour the papers for good deals. Hunt for bargains
at department stores. You are eager to fill that room back up
but mostly you are eager to fill yourself up again, and the baby
offers you this chance, the promise of a new start. Things will
be different this time. You will be a responsible mother, you
will do the job right, make amends with the past and free your-
self of your guilt and shame. The old wounds of your marriage
will heal and you and your husband will fall in love all over
again, only this time it will be a stronger, more mature love be-
cause you have had to overcome so many obstacles to finally get
there. In some ways you see this baby as your last hope for a
so-called normal, happy life, and it takes you back to earlier
days when you were a churchgoer, a firm believer in God.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“I know you’re not religious,” you say, “and I’m not big on
it either anymore. But I really believe this is my wake-up call. I
really believe this baby is a gift from God.”
Since you are no longer a young woman, you have an am-
niocentesis done. You take a sonogram. The doctor tells you
that everything is fine, the baby is perfectly healthy. Is it a boy?
you ask. A girl? Where with your first you wanted to be sur-
prised, this time you want to know up front so that you can be
better prepared, if only for the baby shower. You say it’s the
practical thing to do but I have a feeling that you’re just too ex-
cited to wait, and I like that about you. It’s part of your charm.
You and your husband name her Katherine and paint her room
a light shade of pink.
When your water breaks and the contractions start, your
husband drives you to the hospital. You don’t have medical
insurance so the care isn’t what it should be and they hook
you up to a fetal monitor and leave you in the room alone.
The intervals between contractions grow closer together and
more intense. You’re nervous. You’re scared. You feel the baby
moving inside you and know the time is near. But where is
your husband? He should be here holding your hand and
dabbing your forehead with cool, damp washcloths. He calls
me late at night, shortly after you’re admitted. I worked with
this man for several years and I suspect, by the way he speaks,
that he is high.
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J a m e s B r o w n
“Congratulations,” he says. “You’re about to be an uncle
again.”
“How’s she holding up?”
“She was doing fine when I left.”
“What’d you mean? Where are you?”
“At home,” he says. “I couldn’t find a parking space and I
had to run back and get some money. I forgot my wallet.”
It doesn’t make sense. You double-park, you take a ticket or
let your car be towed, but you don’t leave your wife alone in the
hospital when she’s having your baby. Did he really need the
money? Or did he really go home for more dope? Either way
he now has to live with this. While you are alone in that strange
room in that hospital, the fetal monitor makes an odd noise
but at first you think nothing of it and there’s no one around,
no doctors or nurses, not even your husband to tell you differ-
ent. Still, to be on the safe side, you press the button on the rail
of the bed. A minute passes. No one comes. You press it again
and then you feel something or maybe it’s that you don’t feel
anything at all. The baby is floating motionless inside you with
the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
Maybe if your husband had been there he could’ve gone
for help. Maybe because you don’t have any insurance the
nurses don’t respond as quickly. This is a busy hospital that
serves more than its share of the poor and they’ll get to you
when they can. The Christian God is a punishing god and here-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
after you will believe that He has taken your child in payment
for your sins as a drug addict and alcoholic. The guilt and
shame weigh heavy on you but the loss of baby Katherine is in
one way still a gift: For the next four years you and your hus-
band remain clean and sober.
He quits cold turkey. You check yourself into rehab. You
join A.A. and replace the compulsion to drink and use with the
compulsion to attend meetings twice a day, seven days a week,
and they add up to possibly the best years of your life. Some-
how you rebuild your relationship with your daughter. Some-
how you and your husband are able to put the past behind you
and love one another in ways you were both never before capa-
ble. You are a different person, even-tempered and calm, and
now you assume a role in my children’s lives. You read them bed-
time stories when they spend the night. You throw them birth-
day parties and take them to movies and surprise them with
goblin and ghost costumes for Halloween and insist that we
visit every Fourth of July to light fireworks in your driveway.
“It’s like the old days,” you tell me. “It’s like when we were
kids and could still enjoy life without having to get loaded.”
I hardly remember those times myself, since I was even
younger than you when we first started drinking and using, and
I have only a vague sense of what you mean. Dope and alcohol
are still my good friends and I’m not yet willing to let them go.
While you are busy staying sober, I am busy getting high. I
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J a m e s B r o w n
have graduated from cocaine to methamphetamine. Where a
gram of coke might last you a day, the same amount of this
dope wires you for a week, and it’s taking me down fast. I have
to drink more in order to sleep at night, if I sleep at all, and in
the morning I have to double up on the meth to offset the
hangover. I wake up mean. I wake up angry at myself and the
world and my moods swing from one extreme to another as
yours once did. I belittle my wife. I ignore my children. One
moment I am raging, the next I’m apologizing for saying or
doing something I should never have said or done.
Then there is the other side that surfaces from time to
time, the better side when I’m in control of myself and my
moods and I take my family out to see a movie or involve the
boys in soccer, Little League and wrestling. I can be good even
in the midst of my addiction. I can be responsible. It’s within
me and always has been. Remember, too, that I work hard.
That I’m under considerable pressure and we all get moody
now and then. So long as I have a good job, I reason, and
money enough left over after the bills to buy my liquor and
drugs everything is fine. After all I’m still writing. I’m still pub-
lishing, and in my five-year teaching evaluation the chair of my
department refers to me as an “outstanding citizen with a
record of excellence in and out of the classroom.”
And I actually believe it.
I’m the first to admit that I occasionally drink a little too
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
much, and I know I should quit the speed, or at least cut back,
but it’s not as if I have a problem. This is why after a three-day
bender, and my wife and I have another big fight, I let you talk
me into going to an A.A. meeting. I do it to appease my wife
and children. I do it to appease you. The meeting is held in a
church in North Hollywood and the place is packed. People
I’ve never seen before greet you as if they are your dearest
friends. You hug them. You smile. It’s too much for me, these
public displays of camaraderie and affection, and the meeting
itself strikes me as nothing less than a mass confession.
One after another pours his heart out to the group. I am
stunned that anyone in good conscience could bare their feel-
ings in front of so many strangers, and I see them as weaklings.
As whiners. The religious overtones, the constant references to
God and a Higher Power, put me off. Everything is a “mira-
cle” to these people, from finding a parking space to lasting an-
other day without a drink, and after a while all their stories
begin to sound the same. They have lost wives and husbands
because of their drinking. They have lost jobs, been jailed and
institutionalized. They are housewives and dentists. They are
lawyers and hairdressers, carpenters and waiters, clerks and ac-
tors and nurses strung out on Vicodin.
If I learn one thing that afternoon it’s that there are a
whole lot of others out there more messed up than me and
knowing this somehow makes me feel better about myself. I’ve
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J a m e s B r o w n
never wrecked a car. I’ve never been busted. I’ve never lost a job.
All this goes to show is that I don’t have a real problem with
alcohol or drugs. In the car, on the way back to your house, I
tell you these things and you laugh.
“Those are what they call the ‘yets’ and it just means you’re
lucky. So far anyway. Trust me, they’ll happen if you keep
drinking.” You laugh again. “Never underestimate the power of
denial.”
I don’t like the tone of your voice. I don’t like how you
laugh. You think you know something about me that I don’t
and I resent you for it. I am offended because your words are
true and I’m not ready to hear them yet. In time I will, but not
now. You’re a convert in what I see as a cult and I know better
than to argue. What concerns me is you. And I don’t care what
it takes. If believing in God gives you hope, if confessing to
others helps you through another day, then you need to stick
with it. It may not be right for me but it’s clearly working for
you and that’s all that matters.
Tell me, then.
What happened?
Why after four years of being clean and sober do you get
up out of your seat in the middle of the movie that night and
say to your husband that you have to use the bathroom and in-
stead leave the theater and walk across the street to the liquor
store? I know the rationalizations. I know my own typical ex-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
cuses. This time, you think, it will be different. This time you’ll
be able to control it. Four years without a drink or a drug
proves only one thing—that you’re all better now, absolutely
cured. You consider it a test, one you’re certain to pass, and be-
cause you’re so certain, you see no harm in opening the bottle
and raising it to your lips. You only plan to take one drink and
then hurry back to the theater. But one doesn’t prove anything.
You need a second. You need a third and after that, in a mat-
ter of minutes, you’re not thinking about your husband sitting
by himself in the theater waiting for you, wondering where
you’ve gone.
There’s a park nearby. It has some picnic tables where you
can relax and drink under the cover of darkness. The night is
cool and you wish you had brought your sweater but you have
the vodka to warm you, so you drink a little faster. You are not
there long when a man approaches. The alcohol has clouded
your judgment and you have no fear. You offer him a drink. For
a while you just talk and pass the bottle back and forth, but when
you get up to leave you find out that he wants something more,
and he takes it. The police pick you up the next morning wan-
dering naked through the park, and later you tell me that you
don’t remember a thing after he dragged you into the bushes.
That’s when you blacked out, and this is good, because this is an-
other memory that only brings you closer to that overpass above
the L.A. River. Your husband calls me from the hospital.
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J a m e s B r o w n
“Marilyn was raped last night.”
“Oh God.”
Silence.
“Is she all right?”
“How can she be all right after something like this?” he
says. “If you mean did he beat her up, no. She’s not hurt that
way.”
“I want to see her.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“What’re you talking about,” I say. “She’s my sister, man.”
“She got drunk again. That’s how it happened. She got
drunk again and ended up in the park. I don’t want her around
drunks and you’re a drunk, Jimmy, you’re a fucking drunk.
Don’t call her. Don’t come around. You’re not welcome in our
house anymore.”
He hangs up.
Ever since baby Katherine’s death I have blamed your hus-
band for failing you, for feeding your addictions, and now he
is turning my logic against me. We are both guilty. We are both
somehow responsible but I’m not ready yet to accept my part.
All I feel for your husband is anger. He is keeping me from see-
ing you, he is suddenly self-righteous about his sobriety, and I
resent him for judging me even if what he says is true. If I were
any kind of brother I would not have let him drive this wedge
between us, but I am deep into my own sickness, deeper than I
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
ever imagined possible, and I am of no use to you or anyone in
my life. This is how I rationalize it, anyway, why I’m not there
for you, why I barely try.
For all intents and purposes my marriage is over. I still love
her, she is a good woman, but the damage we’ve done to each
other over the years is irreparable, and now I often find myself
sleeping at a friend’s apartment or passing out in my car along
some deserted mountain road. Anything but come home to an-
other fight. I don’t know how I keep my job. The days just
bleed one into another in an alcohol and drug-induced haze.
That period of my life is blurred, the memories fractured, in-
complete. But somehow in this haze I meet another woman,
the woman who will later become my second wife, and if there
was ever the slightest chance of rebuilding my marriage it is
lost now. The divorce is long. The divorce is bitter, and my chil-
dren, close friends, relatives and in-laws, everyone seems to take
sides. My oldest son has seen me hurt his mother too often
and chooses to stay with her. Nate, he’s only three when we di-
vorce and has no voice in the matter. Our middle boy wants to
live with me but Heidi files an emergency order with the
court stating that because of my alcohol and drug abuse I am
an unfit father. If I don’t agree to all her terms and condi-
tions, she threatens to take the children away from me per-
manently. There will be no shared custody. No visiting rights.
“You’ll never see the boys again,” she says. Even you, my sis-
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J a m e s B r o w n
ter, condemn me for a deserter, a failed husband, a failed fa-
ther. This is another reason why we lose contact near the end
of your life.
The last time I see you is at a place called the Friendly
House on Normandie Avenue on the outskirts of downtown
Los Angeles. It is a live-in recovery home and you are there
because once you started drinking again you’ve been unable
to stop. You’ve gotten another DUI. You’ve passed out in
your bathroom and split open your head on the hard porce-
lain sink. Your husband has come home from work and
found you in the kitchen, facedown in your own vomit, and
another time in the hallway soaked in urine. Your alcoholism
has advanced to its final stages, and sobriety is now a simple
matter of life and death. But when I visit you at the recov-
ery house you are several months sober, and I have nine days
behind me, more consecutive clean time than I’ve had since I
was twelve. You look good. I’m still shaky. We sit in the
kitchen and drink coffee, a far cry from the earlier days of
vodka and cocaine.
“Those first thirty days are a bitch,” you tell me. “But the
bloat’s going away and your eyes are clear. You should be proud
of yourself, Jimmy. I am.”
I hand you a small jewelry box and you open it up. Inside
is a gold cross on a thin gold chain. You smile.
“I haven’t had one of these since I was a little girl,” you say,
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
as you unfasten the clasp and slip it around your neck. “Don’t
tell me you’re getting religious in your old age.”
“No,” I say, “I just thought you’d like it.”
“I do.”
“It’s made in Italy.”
I don’t know why I mention this. I guess it’s supposed to
matter since we are half Sicilian from our mother’s side but
they just hang there, those words, empty of meaning.
Long visits are not encouraged. You have a strict daily
schedule of meetings, counseling and chores, and we part on a
good note, hugging each other, wanting to believe that we will
both be all right. And for the moment that possibility seems
real and true. That we can change. Yet inside we are scared be-
cause we know this hope is fleeting and that the better life we
imagine for ourselves may just be another illusion. The bottle,
pills and powders own us and we are fooling ourselves if we
think we can survive without them. I make it something like
twelve days. You last four months and then, because you’re
doing so well, the counselors let you go home for the weekend
to be with your husband. But on Monday morning, when
you’re supposed to return to the recovery house, you’re too
drunk to get out of bed. Your husband is disgusted. Your coun-
selors have had it and won’t take you back.
So you’re on your own now. For a while you double up on
your A.A. meetings, call your sponsor five or six times a day
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J a m e s B r o w n
and work the twelve steps religiously. But it’s the same old
story, you get a day or two sober and then go out again, each
binge worse than the last, and eventually, inevitably, you alien-
ate all the people who love and care about you. You have
drained all your resources. You have cut all ties. Ruined all re-
lationships. You are now among the living dead who for what-
ever reasons cannot or will not stop drinking.
This is when your late-night calls begin again, while I’m
still going through my bitter divorce, struggling to stay sober
and living with the woman who helps me toward this end, the
woman I will later marry. I’ve put together three months at this
point, and like the others in your life I have run out of pa-
tience. Each time you phone you are drunk, full of anger and
self-loathing, and you direct it at me because it is eating you up
inside. Your husband doesn’t understand you. He never has.
You cry over the death of baby Katherine and blame me and
yourself for Barry’s suicide. Mom is a petty criminal. Dad is a
dumb redneck. You cry over our rotten childhood and tell me
you were never loved, never felt love, that it was all a big lie. The
rape, you never talk about.
Sometimes I let you carry on. Sometimes I just have to
hang up. All the calls are the same except for one, the last, and
you’re sober. But when I answer the phone that morning and
hear your voice again I immediately assume the worst.
“What do you want?” I say.
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
“I just called to talk.”
“I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time to fight right now.”
“I don’t want to fight, either,” you say.
But I don’t believe you.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Jimmy,” you say. “Don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up.”
There’s a long silence. I twist the cord of the receiver
around my hand.
“What,” I say. “What do you want?”
“I want to apologize.”
“For what?”
“These last few months. I know I’ve been acting crazy and
taking it out on you and everybody else and I want to tell you
I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m not any better when I drink.”
“No, it’s not okay. I need to know if you still love me.”
“Of course I do.”
“I love you, too. You know I do, no matter how I act, no
matter what I say.”
Another silence passes.
“Can I ask a favor?”
“Maybe,” I say, because I’m still skittish. I’m still on guard.
“Do you mind if your kids spend this weekend with me? I
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J a m e s B r o w n
know it’s your time with them but I’d really like to see them
again. It’s been a while.”
“Sure,” I say, and when we hang up I feel better about my-
self and you.
What I do not realize is that this is your way of saying
good-bye to them and me. I understand that last weekend with
my boys went well, you took them to a carnival near your
house, everyone had a good time, and I respect you for this
final gesture. I love you all the more for it. But on Sunday, after
their mother picks them up, you drink again and begin to rage.
Your husband takes the bottle away and empties it into the
sink. He hides the car keys. He confiscates your purse, your
money and credit cards, and then locks himself in the bed-
room. You pound on the door. You scream but he just turns up
the TV and you storm out of the house in the heat of another
fight.
This is July, the month our brother killed himself, and the
night is warm. All you’re wearing is a T-shirt and panties. The
overpass on Lankershim Avenue is just around the block, and
soon you are there, lifting yourself up to the rail. The Los An-
geles River is no river at all but a narrow concrete channel that
runs thirty, maybe forty feet below. In the distance you hear
the cars moving along the Hollywood Freeway and beyond it
you can see the glow of the city lights. The steel rail is cool
beneath your bare feet and you feel a warm summer breeze
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
pass along your face. Do you think of baby Katherine? Can
you picture your husband and daughter? Do you see me, your
brother?
Because I am standing beside you.
The following morning a passerby spots your body and
phones the LAPD and soon the patrol cars are on the scene. A
police helicopter hovers overhead. The noise and commotion
bring your husband out of the house, and because he’s been
looking for you, because you’ve been missing for thirteen
hours, he hurries to where the crowd has gathered. I find out
that same night, from Heidi, who despite our bitter divorce
takes me into her arms as she delivers the news: Your sister
killed herself. She’s gone. I’m so sorry.
Later, when your ashes are scattered at sea, I learn from
your husband that you had talked about taking your life for
some time. Had I known, would it have mattered? Could I have
made the difference? Marilyn, you know I would’ve tried.
In the beginning the alcohol and drugs bring you relief.
They give you courage and confidence and then, slowly, over a
period of years, they strip it all away and you spend your final
years struggling to fill the emptiness that it’s left inside you. It’s
futile, it’s madness, and for you and our brother there is only
one way to end the pain. This is the choice you make. I have no
right to judge what you are capable of enduring. But in my
dreams I am standing beside you on that rail of the overpass
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J a m e s B r o w n
above the L.A. River, and I reach for your hand. You look at me
and smile.
“Don’t worry,” you say. “There’s nothing to be afraid of
anymore.”
Then you squeeze my hand and let go and I watch you fall,
again and again, as I will for the rest of my life. There is no
more pain. No impact. In my dreams you are suspended in
midair, the wind rushing up around you, captured in the mo-
ment of flight.
1 9 4
S p r i n g 1 9 9 7
S O U T H D A K O T A
First I feel chilled. Then come the cold sweats and this tin- gling sensation up and down my arms like ants are crawling
just beneath the surface of my skin. Except for that part the
symptoms resemble the flu. I run a slight fever, too, and there
is definitely nausea. But I keep right on talking, a real trouper.
I don’t miss a beat.
If I seem fatigued, or disoriented at moments, it’s only be-
cause I flew in a couple of nights before. This explains the
bloodshot eyes and the dark circles. As for that gaunt look,
everybody knows skinny is fashionable in California. These are
the things I want the students to believe but the truth of the
matter is much different. I am a visiting writer-in-residence at
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J a m e s B r o w n
the University of South Dakota, on leave from my permanent job
at Cal State San Bernardino, and this is the first session of the
first week of class. The month is March, and outside it is cold.
Outside a thin layer of frost and snow covers the school grounds
but inside this building, in this classroom, it is stifling hot.
I take off my sweater. Underneath I’m wearing a V-neck
T-shirt, an old one, thinning, not long for the rag pile. But
right now it’s hard to care about how I’m dressed. The sweat-
ing hasn’t stopped and the nausea isn’t going away, either. It
comes in waves and the intervals between visits seem to be get-
ting shorter. At some point I get around to the student story
that we’re supposed to be discussing.
I know I read it carefully on the plane. The chair of the En-
glish department mailed it to me before I left San Bernardino,
at my request, this story as well as several others, so that I
would be prepared for the first week. No downtime. That’s the
way I like it. They are paying me well and I believe that the stu-
dents deserve their money’s worth. Then, an hour before class,
I read it again. Ask me what it’s about now, though, and the
best I could manage is a sketchy description of its main char-
acter, a young thief. I don’t mean this as a comment on the
quality of the story, that I can’t remember it.
The fact of the matter is, I read a lot of stories. It’s what I
do for a living, that and try to write them myself, and after a
while I just forget, even the best ones. And my own, too, I es-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
pecially forget my own. In this case, though, it is not a good
story, because the writer doesn’t know much about thieves and
is bent on sermonizing. I remember feeling that as plainly as
the tingling sensation under my skin, those ants, and trying not
to scratch at them.
The writer, a Ph.D. candidate in American literature, isn’t
thinking like a thief. He’s looking at the character from too far
away, a good distance for judging maybe but not intimacy, not
understanding. I like to let the students have their say first so
that my point of view doesn’t unduly influence their own, and
after we’ve gone around the room, when everyone has had a
chance to comment on the story, I raise my own concerns. I am
careful with my words. I am conscious of how my criticism
might affect the writer, and so I choose the gentler road, up
and around the subject, even if it takes a little longer to get the
point across. I want to be helpful. I want to be liked. There are
ways, I believe, to express yourself without unnecessarily of-
fending the writer.
When I’m done, a student raises her hand. She is a bright
woman who later proves to be one of the more talented writ-
ers in class, and she’s upset.
“Let me get this straight,” she says. “According to you,
we’re supposed to like this lowlife? All he does is go around rip-
ping people off. I don’t see why we have to sympathize with
him.”
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J a m e s B r o w n
Sympathy isn’t the right word, and I don’t recall using it. It’s
understood that stealing is wrong. Thieves know it, too. That
it hurts people, even themselves. What I want to know is that
they might otherwise live respectable lives, or at least that this
thief does. Make him a family man, a loving husband at one
time. Give him a couple of kids and show him coaching Little
League on the weekends. Or wrestling. That’s big out here in
the Midwest. This man leads two lives and theft is a passion, a
rush, a need that both sustains and destroys him. Call it com-
pulsion. Call it a sickness. By any name there is no logic to his
behavior, no sense or sensibility, and above all, though on the
surface it may appear otherwise, his story is not a simple one
of moral weakness.
These are the things I want to say. But I don’t. The hour is
nearly up and the nausea has grown stronger. Dizziness sets in.
I let the class go early and find an old bar on the edge of town,
the kind I like best, where it’s always dark inside and the air
smells sour from the night before. Nobody knows you here and
doesn’t care to and these are the people I am most comfortable
with. There are no judgments. We share a common bond. I
have earned my place beside them.
The nausea subsides with my third shot of Kessler’s and
soon the sweating and shaking stop. Those ants, though, they
keep crawling because they want something else, something
stronger that you can’t find very easily in a small town like Ver-
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T H E L O S A N G E L E S D I A R I E S
million, South Dakota. It’s the meth, the speed. I ran out
shortly after I arrived, and until now I don’t think I realized
just how badly I needed it. That I am strung out.
The next day, when I come to in my apartment, it starts all
over again. The tremors. The fever. I know what will help, at
least temporarily, but instead of reaching for the bottle I wrap
myself in a blanket and weather it out. I am sick of being sick.
I am tired of living a lie. Of waking up each morning and
looking into the bathroom mirror at the bloodshot eyes and
dark circles and thinking only of the next drink. The next line.
The next fix. Anything to make me better.
Change or die, I tell myself.
The fever breaks early the following morning. They say the
first forty-eight hours are the hardest, and I want to believe it’s
true, but I know they are only talking about the physical part
of withdrawal. What’s left, when the shaking and nausea sub-
side, is far more insidious. It doesn’t go away, either.
Not ever.
And that’s the point I’m at. Here and now. Present time,
looking back on that morning in South Dakota when the fever
breaks, and I bathe. I dress. Then I take the rental car out onto
the highway and drive, just drive. The sun is rising and I’m
alone on this road.
Beyond the town there is nothing but open field. The land
is flat and dusted white with snow. A wind blows like the wind
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J a m e s B r o w n
at sea, rippling where the yellowed grasses still cling to the
earth, shining with frost. There is no obstruction but the sky,
and the sky is big, the sky is limitless. Out here there is no
place to hide, and I park the car on the shoulder of the road.
I get out and walk into the fields. The wind pulls at me, and I
feel it in my ears, a ringing, a burning cold. Snow off the yel-
lowed grasses blows down the neck of my jacket and dampens
my chest and I look out across the fields, out across the sky,
and in that vastness, as I close my eyes, I see my sons. Andy.
Logan. Nate. I see their mother standing behind them. I see my
own mother and father and the woman who will one day be-
come my second wife. I see my brother-in-law. I see my niece.
I see baby Katherine, I hear her cry, the first gasp of life.
I see my brother and sister, too. I see them clearly, and they
are smiling at me. The wind grows stronger. I feel it cut into
my skin. I feel it lifting me. I feel it carrying the three of us
past the boundaries of our lives, and in our parting, when I
open my eyes and the land rolls up toward me, endless and dis-
tant, breaking like a surf across the sky, I see my own story
come to rest at a moment of beginning.
2 0 0
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
For believing in this book, I am indebted to my agent, Lisa
Bankoff, and my editor, Claire Wachtel. I also need to thank
those who have stood the true measure of friendship, Art
Monterastelli, Manuel Palacios and Orlando Ramirez. I am
likewise thankful for the love of my sons, Andrew, Logan and
Nate, and their mother, Heidi, who endured too much. I am
grateful to Amanda, Frank Ferro, Donna French, Maury Hirsh-
berg, Kerry Kohn, Peter Schroeder and Jervey Tervelon. Special
thanks go to Oakley Hall for his support from the very begin-
ning. And to the woman without whom this book would never
have been written, I credit my wife, Paula Priamos-Brown, for
giving me a new life.
About the Author
JAMES BROWN is the author of the novels Lucky Town, Final
Performance, Hot Wire, and The Second Story Theatre. He’s received the
Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a
Chesterfield Film Writing Fellowship from Universal/Amblin
Entertainment, and fellowships in fiction writing from the
Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference,
and the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, where he is also on
staff. His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times
Magazine, New York Times Magazine, and New England Review. He lives
in Lake Arrowhead, California.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your
favorite HarperCollins author.
Also by James Brown
Lucky Town
The Second Story Theatre
Final Performance
Hot Wire
Credits
Designed by Jo Anne Metsch
Copyright
THE LOS ANGELES DIARIES. Copyright © 2003 by James Brown.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted
the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of
this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced,
transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in
or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any
form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of
HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader January 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-135477-9
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Photographs and illustrations excluded for e-book edition.
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- Title Page
- Dedication Page
- Contents
- Fire
- Snapshot
- Daily Rushes
- My Papa’s Waltz
- The Facts
- Touch
- Daisy
- Personal Effects
- On Selling a Novel to Hollywood
- A Fine Place
- Midair
- South Dakota
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by James Brown
- Credits
- Copyright Notice
- About the Publisher
