Amnesiascope: A Novel (3 page)

I don’t have to write it down, because in the L.A. of Numbers I am Memory Central, just as in the L.A. of Names I am Memory Void. I seem not to be able to remember any thing or any one anymore, and I guess I’ve insulted a few people in the process; I run into somebody here or there and he starts jabbering at me and pretty soon I realize I’m supposed to know this person, I’ve met him before, maybe ten or twenty times, maybe a hundred. And after he goes on awhile I can finally only look him straight in the eye and say, “Excuse me, but who are you?” and then he’s not too happy about it. But at the same time that I’ve cut myself loose of memories of people and events, the memories of dates and times and phone numbers attach themselves to my brain like gnats to fly paper. At the same time that I’m the deep well into which one can drop a bad love affair, a death, a childhood trauma and never see it again, never even hearing it hit bottom, assuming there is a bottom, I remember not only my own dates and times and phone numbers, but yours too. I’m a walking Filofax for everyone’s appointments and vital statistics. I remind Viv of her lunch date at this gallery or that studio, I let my friend Ventura know when it’s time to pick up his laundry. I’m the man of deadlines and itineraries and bank account codes; even Carl in New York calls in to check his schedule for the afternoon. So remembering Justine’s phone number, written so inconspicuously at the bottom of the billboard that I have to figure she would really rather not hear from me at all, is a snap. I don’t even have to repeat it to myself out loud. Instead, with the woman in the next car looking aghast that the man in the car next to her is having an unduly animated dialogue with no apparent passenger, I figure maybe I should put a lid on it again, no more talking to myself. I’m beyond the point anyway where, even to myself, I really have all that much to say. …

Over the two days I spent moving into my new suite, I panicked. Not about the extra rent but because, situated in this apartment, in the big wide open front room with all the windows, I might be generally expected by others to become more productive, even inspired. I have no intention of becoming either inspired or productive; to the contrary I intend to sit in the dark at night in my big black leather chair staring out at the Hollywood Hills like a man gazing on an approaching tsunami.
Here comes the present
. On my monitor I run the same movies over and over with the sound off:
The Bad and the Beautiful
,
Out of the Past
,
Pandora’s Box
,
I Walked with a Zombie
. Studying the films on my shelf, Ventura remarks that I don’t own any funny ones. “What the hell are you talking about?” I answer in outrage. “You don’t think
Scarlet Empress
is a funny movie? You don’t think
Detour
is a funny movie?” Last time I was up the hall in Ventura’s apartment I took a look at his film shelf, and
there’s
a guy who doesn’t own a single funny movie—except Charlie Chaplin, and he and I both know he doesn’t watch
City Lights
because he thinks it’s funny, he watches it because he thinks it’s
profound
. The truth is I don’t own anything but funny movies. Every one of them is hysterical.

On the walls of his apartment Ventura tacks little sayings written on paper, maxims he’s scribbled from his readings, words of wisdom. He even has up there one or two things I’ve said. Starting at one end of his apartment and reading to the other, one comes away with a sum total of the Twentieth Century that’s rather different from what the century itself might have concluded. Ventura has been having a dispute with the Twentieth Century, and now that it’s over he just goes on disputing it, first the century and then the whole millennium. Ventura’s whole life is a dispute with the Twentieth Century and I’m the moderator, the referee. I watch for the low blows, the groin kicks, the cheap shots, while trying not to get belted myself in the process. I’m neutral not only on the century and the millennium but on God himself; let’s just say I’m reserving judgment. … Over the years Ventura and I each move from one apartment to the next in the Hamblin, trying to better situate ourselves, though for what I have no idea. He moves up the hall as I move down; he used to be in a larger apartment and moved to a smaller one, before I moved from my smaller apartment to the larger one. As he moves to smaller spaces he accumulates more and more pearls of wisdom on paper until there’s no more room on any more walls, at which point he begins to layer over: he never throws anything out, God forbid. Just once I’d like to see him throw something out, one of these little pearls of wisdom scribbled on paper, just so I could see which one it was; I wouldn’t even mind if it was mine. When the universe stops expanding and starts contracting, Ventura will start eliminating all these revelations until there’s only one left—and
that’s
the one I want to read. That’s the one I want to take with me to my grave.

As for me, as I move to larger spaces I get rid of more things. I lose things as the universe expands; I’ll start accumulating when the universe contracts. There you have it in a cosmic nutshell, the difference between me and Ventura. Soon he’ll be living in a closet with more paper than the Library of Congress, and I’ll be living on the roof naked in my black leather chair. This morning when I go up the hall to see him he’s staring at his tarot, dealt out on the floor in the shape of a cross. He’s contemplating the meaning of the Queen of Cups, at the nexus of the cross. On the broken-down table that stands in the middle of his ever-shrinking apartment is the usual volume of mail he receives for the column he writes for the newspaper. Ventura’s sense of purpose is such that he will answer all these letters; he’s been writing the column since the first issue of the newspaper almost fifteen years ago. But now, between his fan letters and his empty typewriter, sitting in his fedora and his cowboy boots and the same shirt that’s always rolled up at the sleeves, he stares at the Queen of Cups. He almost always wears his fedora and cowboy boots, even in his own apartment; only very occasionally does he take off the hat, and every once in a while, if he’s feeling really familiar, he may even be seen in his socks. Staring at the Queen of Cups, he’s wondering who she is. He’s wondering if she’s his ex-wife or his current girlfriend or the woman who was his last girlfriend and may be his next. One of the most enduring and gratifying things about my friendship with Ventura is that when it comes to women, he’s even more screwed up than I am, the best and most compelling evidence of which is that he actually thinks I’m more screwed up than he is. “I’m not going to ask,” he says, “what it is they want. You haven’t heard me ask that.”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking.”

“Oh, go ahead,” I say.

“No,” he shakes his head, “I wouldn’t think of it. It wouldn’t even occur to me.”

“Actually, it’s easy.”

“What?”

“It’s easy. What they want. It’s the easiest question in the world.”

“It is?” For a moment he’s alarmed. “All right, so … tell me.”

“Everything.”

“What?”

“They want
everything
.”

An ashen look comes over his face. “Then we’re fucked,” he says hopelessly. Ventura is so confused about women that when I explain to him my Three Laws of Women, he actually writes them down. “One,” I count off, “they’re different.”

“One, they’re different,” he repeats, jotting it down in his little notebook. He always carries a little notebook where he jots things down, so he can write about them in his column or tack them up on his wall.

“Two, they’re crazy.”

“Two, they’re crazy.” Scribble scribble.

“Three, they’re funny.”

“Three, they’re funny.” He reads it over. Ventura is convinced every woman is irresistibly attracted to him. “That woman’s looking at me,” he moans in a restaurant, “I wish she would stop. I have too many women in my life right now.” Every woman in every restaurant, every woman on the street, every woman who exchanges two syllables or a burp with him, wants him. It’s his burden in life to disappoint all of them. The ones he doesn’t disappoint sooner, he’ll have to disappoint later. Those are the ones he becomes involved with, the ones he casts in the movie he thinks he’s living in; like him, they’re larger than life. Each affair is a singular turbulent drama. “You two don’t have a relationship,” Viv said to Ventura one night at Musso and Franks, about one girlfriend or another, “you have a weather report.” Lately I’ve been noticing something. Every woman in Ventura’s life gets larger and more mythic than the last, until the new one is the most remarkable of all, the smartest and most beautiful, the one who in another world was a movie star and is now reincarnated as a Sufi goddess—and then he breaks up with her, as always, for no reason I can fathom. He just broke up with one recently for the simple reason that there was
absolutely nothing wrong with her
; she was a woman with no vices whatsoever. “How was I supposed to be involved,” he asks plaintively, “with a woman who has no vices?”

“You don’t understand,” I tell him. “
You
were her vice.”

“That’s it! That’s it exactly!
I
was her vice. How was I supposed to be involved with a woman whose only vice was me?” Weeks from now, of course, if not days, he’ll regret it. “I was driving out of the desert,” he’ll explain, pacing his apartment in a frenzy, “when it hit me like a lightning bolt,” and he’ll hit the back of his head, nearly knocking off his hat, to show me what it was like to be struck by this epiphany: “I should have married the Sufi goddess.”

“Do you know,” I finally confess to him, “that in all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never understood a single thing about any of your relationships with any of your women? That in fact I understand your relationships with women even less than I understand mine? That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Other people’s fucked-up relationships are supposed to be easier to understand than your own. I’ll bet,” I pointed out, “that you think
my
relationships are easier to understand than yours.”

“You’re right. I do.”

“You’re supposed to. Except that, in this case, my relationships really
are
easier to understand than yours. Even
I
think my relationships are easier to understand than yours.” I’m not a man of hidden meanings, he once said to me, there are no hidden meanings in my life. “It’s interesting that the only time there are any hidden meanings in your life,” I say, “is in your relationships with women.” When we’re this confused about women, we turn to the only option left us: we write. We write as though we understand everything and it’s up to us to sort out the world. I only write about movies, but Ventura writes about Life. This morning, still contemplating the Queen of Cups, we head down to the newspaper. I drive because he doesn’t want to take his car, an old sixty- or seventy-something Chevy that he also considers larger than life, even more larger than life than his women. All the way down to the paper he’s in the next seat to me muttering it like a mantra: they’re different, they’re crazy, they’re funny. And then: Shit! he exclaims, they want
everything
? “Well,” I answer, “to be fair, we do too.” I’ve worked at this newspaper about three years now, ever since things ended with Sally. It’s published once a week out of the hollowed-out cavern of the old Egyptian Theater, not far from the mouth of the sunken L.A. subway. First few months I’d arrive to the theater every day to find that during the night someone had carted away another memento of the theater foyer—a pharaoh s chariot or a slab of fake hieroglyphics, or a mummy and its papier-mâché sarcophagus—until all that was left of the grand entrance was a dirt plot. Inside, amid the decor of tarnished gold that ascends in decay to the ceiling, the advertising department is located up on the stage where the screen used to be, and the editorial staff is strewn among the ripped-out seats of the audience section. The editor-in-chief’s office is in the balcony and the receptionist works behind the snack bar. The publisher took the projectionist’s room, small but offering an obvious vantage point.

My desk, happily, is near one of the old emergency exits. When I first arrived at the paper no one on the staff talked to me except some of the editors and the art director, a brilliant but tormented homosexual who was always raging at everyone. He admired a book of mine he read back in his more impressionable years and so we struck up a friendship of sorts, and I became the one others recruited to calm him down or negotiate various truces. I like the people at the paper but they tend to complain a lot about jobs I would have killed for when I was as young as they are. The level of envy is superseded only by the level of resentment. There’s all the usual political infighting and turf warfare; gossip pervades everything. At a party not long after I split with Sally, drunk and depressed and an all-around basket case, I wound up going home with one of the advertising reps, a cynical noirish blonde who chain-smoked and told me every last thing there was to know about everyone on the staff. Mid-seduction it occurred to me, in my drunken haze, that tomorrow everyone in turn would know everything there was to know about me, first and foremost that on this particular evening I was less than my most sexually formidable. Certainly enough, as Dr. Billy O’Forte put it to me later, “your wick wasn’t wet twenty-four hours before phones all over L.A. were ringing.” In the years since, every time I’m seen talking to this woman more than five minutes, the flames of rumor flare anew. People on the staff who have fucked everything that moves within the confines of the newspaper’s walls sadly shake their heads and whisper to each other their “disappointment” in me.

What can I say? I’m a disappointing character. I only began to feel like I actually belonged at the newspaper when, having quickly mastered the art of disappointment, I went on to become completely practiced at the science of disillusionment. By now I’ve totally dismayed anyone still innocent enough to expect I’m capable of anything admirable, let alone heroic. When Ventura and I arrive this morning we immediately run into Freud N. Johnson, the paper’s publisher. Johnson is a five-foot-five failed movie producer who publicly and bitterly mourns the world’s lack of respect for him and deep down inside suspects he’s a homosexual. He often ends arguments by whimpering, “I know you’re right and I’m wrong. But you
always
get to be right.” He’s been trying to figure out how to fire the editor ever since I first came to this job, though what he’ll actually do once he succeeds is an open question, since he doesn’t appear to know the first thing about putting out a newspaper and all the best writers have said they would quit, something that in one of his stupider miscalculations he may not believe. I’ve made it clear to anyone who cares, for instance, that I would go, if only because the editor in question hired me against what would have been any more reasonable person’s better judgment. In the meantime Freud N. Johnson constantly prowls the bowels of the Egyptian Theater, his entire being broadcasting a variety of messages in the neon of the psyche. “I’m not a homosexual!” howls one. “I’m tall!” squeaks another. “You’re taller than I am and I hate you!” blurts a recurring favorite.