These are from a series of micro-fictions I wrote in Los Angeles in early 2018. Two more stories from the series can be read here.

“Los Angeles”

The cafe is on the other side of the hill, not even a far walk. The tables are wood slabs bonded in a blue steel frame. The tile is blue and white and contemplating the floor while drinking coffee I realize there is no wrong way to lay the pattern; turn them any direction and they’ll match, one after another. Any way you want.

I moved here because I thought I was someone else. I wrote a script about an action hero that wants to retire. I made short movies about a taxi driver. I went to meetings and asked people for jobs. Someone suggested I could be a checker at CostCo.

I asked a friend over email if she thought it was too late for me to get into advertising.
“I think I’d be good at it,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied. “You’re probably too old.”
I’m 46.
“How is the movie business?” she asked.
“With or without me,” I replied.
We didn’t have much in common anyway.

I like to think of a television show called Television Show. It opens with a surgeon operating in a round room with stadium style seating. The patient is in real trouble. The surgeon is a good, capable man. But he’s perhaps wrong about something. There are a lot of closeups on people’s eyes.
We cut outside the operating room and there are students watching the procedure on a video feed.
The girl sits next to the boy taking notes. Her hand snakes up his leg and he pretends not to notice. Years ago it would have been the boy pressing his palm inside the girl’s thigh but those days are over. Maybe that’s good. Anyway, as the Polish say, ‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’

I don’t know if the patient lives or dies. It’s a real cliffhanger.

Yesterday I saw Gizelle and we went to a vegan restaurant for dinner. We ordered soup and spicy eggplant. I recommended lentil quesadillas and she recommended I get a therapist.
“Therapy is expensive,” I told her.
“Depends what you can afford,” she said.

We drove through all the neighborhoods north of downtown. We took 3 highways and lots of side streets. I ran out of things to say so she put on music.
“How are you doing,” she asked.
She played Flight of the Conchords and we sang along as we drove south on I-5 facing the sky scrapers, the insurance buildings, and the Ritz Carlton.
That was the end of the night. Before that, over dinner, she’d told me about voices, connections she could make, when to listen and when to turn a deaf ear. I told her I regretted everything. She asked what I meant. I said that this moment was on the horizon my entire life. I was going to regret my choices no matter what they were.
“Unpack it for me,” she said.
I said I wished I had stayed in one place. But instead I jumped, as if from a burning building. My past was always right behind me. And it was unbearable.
“And that’s how I ended up here,” I said.
“That’s not how I see you,” she replied.

“Earthquake Weather”

It rained last night, something it never does here. And today the sky is full of tall white clouds but otherwise clear and blue so it’s possible, from the East Side, to see the cumulus perched above the Santa Monica Mountains like hats.

After the 7am meeting I followed Dale Anne across the wet street to smoke. I like her. She paints her nails 10 different colors and has tattoos on her knuckles and she makes me feel calm. She said she met her boyfriend in rehab.
“I tried not to,” she said. We were leaning against the Elliott Smith mural; the building felt like a block of ice. “I was engaged to my girlfriend at the time. But after I got clean I didn’t know her anymore. Then I realized I never did.”
“I had a relationship like that once,” I said, referring to her boyfriend, not her girlfriend. “We were engaged but I really wanted to marry her family.”
“You don’t get to do that,” Dale Anne said, exhaling.

I’ve been thinking about getting a gun but there is a ten day waiting period for a gun license in California. I called a store in Nevada and they said I couldn’t buy a gun with an out of state license. I thought it would be quicker to get new I.D. I thought by the time I got the license I wouldn’t want a gun anymore.

“Did you get any work done,” Dale Anne asked over the phone.
“Some,” I said. “But it isn’t worth much.”
“You’re not very good at conversation,” she said.
“I’ve only lived here 10 months,” I said.
“Keep going that way you won’t make it a year,” she replied.
We discussed getting together some day, without a meeting. Just to talk. But we didn’t make definite plans.

In college a creative writing teacher told me if you keep writing about something long enough you’ll come to the end. She said every story is a love story or a story about loneliness. She said writers block was just another idea. She said the best poets all wrote criticism.
When I finished college I moved to Chicago and took up heroin and dancing. That’s what I said at the meeting when it was my turn to share.
I said there was no trajectory but when I got out of the hospital the walls of my rented room were a different yellow than when I went in.
I said the best thing about those days was how difficult it was to get a plane ticket.

Dale Anne said they got Ryan Seacrest. “We got him,” was how she put it.
I already knew but wanted to hear her explain. We must’ve been bored talking so much on the phone, pretending we were in recovery.
“She said his former assistant alleged he’d grabbed her by the vagina.”
“I thought he was gay,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” she said.
“Fine,” I said.
There was a corroborating witness but also an independent investigation citing insufficient evidence. Already there were boycotts planned and E! was handing out talking points for the red carpet.
“We’re taking over,” Dale Anne said.
She must have sensed I wanted to get off the phone because she asked if I had a few more minutes. It was already 4pm and the sky was swelling for another downpour. She wanted to tell me about a dream she’d had. She said she’d woken under arrest, like Joseph K. in The Trial. She worried she would never learn what the charges were.
“I had a dream too,” I said, and she murmured in a disappointed tone.
“OK,” she said finally.
“I was being chased.”
“What did you think about that?” She sounded like she was trying to teach me a lesson, or lead by example. For a moment I wished I knew how to surf. How to disappear. How to commit.
“It’s just the medication,” I told her. “It’s the meds.”

“What The Editor Said”

An editor told me never to set a story in a coffeeshop. “There are too many cafes,” he said. “When I enter a coffeeshop in a story I stop reading.”

Yesterday I met Paul at the Cafecito Organico on Hoover. I told him about a heist movie. “It’s like Point Break and Narcos,” I said. He mentioned a book he liked. I said I had a couple of TV show ideas. I was surprised by his clear complexion. He looked young, even with the bright red beard and baseball cap. You knew right away he was from somewhere like Ohio. I wanted him to save me but I played it closer to the vest. It was strange to think that between the two of us I was the one most likely to go to church.
Paul mentioned a website and I nodded. I wouldn’t confirm or deny. He didn’t know the things I didn’t want him to know but how long could that be maintained? I didn’t want to think about the weather.
“I just want a job,” I said. I assured him I’d like to sell something original, even though it wasn’t true. I was trying to slip under the radar. Get inside without being noticed. Working for other people wasn’t a skill I’d cultivated and the opening was small, but that’s what there was.

I wrote a story and I avoided mentioning any cafes. I knew a couple of women visiting from Japan and I picked them up from the Burbank Airport. At my apartment they showed me pornographic pictures taken in San Francisco and spoke to each other in Japanese.
I was reminded of an old girlfriend from when I lived in San Francisco. Her name was Jolene and she was a terrorist. When I told her I’d been accused of rape she said there were a lot of ways to take that. She had a collection of knives from all over the world. I told her the truth was a choice and she didn’t have any better grasp on it than the NRA.
Then I thought about the Russian Revolution, the second one, where the Bolsheviks slaughtered the Mensheviks. And the Iranian revolution where the Islamists slaughtered the Marxists. It’s just human nature, I thought. The enemy of your enemy is rarely your friend.

I fell asleep like that, my friends watching porn and speaking Japanese, the coffee table littered with cartons of vegetables and cups of tea. Tomorrow we would all go to Disneyland. One day at a time.