Because of my new hairstyle I don’t think he remembered me, or if he did, he made no acknowledgment. He stood by the railing with his cinderblock and his handcuffs, and no one else seemed to be moving so I said, “I think I’ve seen you before.” But he wasn’t listening. He was trying to build an audience. People were filling up the jetty and he was working the crowd, holding the cinderblock out to me, for me to inspect it, telling me, “Check it out, check it out.”
The sky was overcast and the light seemed to be slowing things down, or else I was slowing down. I stared at the porous material of the cinderblock for a long time before I told him, “It looks fine.”
“You sure?” he said. “Come on, don’t let me off the hook,” and he told me to test the weight of the cinderblock. But now, instead of the cinderblock, I was looking at the handcuffs. He had two handcuffs, one around each wrist, with a cable running between them.
“Why do you have two handcuffs?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Why not just one?”
“It’s all the same, man,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
I was looking at the slightly gray stubble on his cheek, and beneath his cheek I could see his muscles tense. He’d probably jumped off this pier a hundred times, and he probably wanted to keep jumping, but when voices in the crowd began mumbling about the extra handcuff he acquiesced. He let the P.R. person take off the second pair of handcuffs, binding him with just the one.
And then, holding the cinderblock, he got up on the railing. His white, slightly pink toes were curled, as before, over the edge of the railing, and he stood there, as before, looking into the water and hyperventilating. He was waiting. We were all waiting, and as I watched him standing there, his legs trembling, proclaiming something about Houdini or the Great Houdini, I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to jump. “We all know you can do it,” I wanted to say.
And that’s when he jumped.
Holding his cinderblock anchor, attached by the one handcuff, he finally jumped into the water. It happened suddenly, and we all hurried to the railing, leaned over and looked down. The ripples were spreading out from the spot where he jumped. A few bubbles came up and we waited. Again, the water where he jumped was smooth. No kicking, just the unbroken water, and all of us waiting for the kicking. And at first I thought it would probably come, that if I waited long enough he would probably come back up. But the kicking never came.
All these people had gathered around, looking into the water, wanting him to come back up and hoping he would come back up, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
I took a deep breath and held it as long as I could. There were still a few people standing on the pier when I walked away, mainly fishermen holding their poles. I walked to the beach, listening, but not looking back. I wanted to look back but I only listened. I knew that he was dead. I was sad that he was dead. And I was also happy. He was dead.
I wasn’t dead, but my time at the Metropole was over. I’d told myself that I was only going to stay a month there, and now the month was over, and although Earl, the night man, had said I could stay as long as I wanted, I decided to check out. The Metropole had become comfortable to me, and however pleasant it was, I didn’t want to keep staying in a transient hotel. So I packed up my computer and my clothes and what few books I had, said goodbye to Earl, and my plan was to drive out to the desert, to camp in the desert for a while as a way to sort things out. But Los Angeles was my desert.
So I drove around, looking for a hotel that would be an upgrade from the Metropole. I started in the downtown area, and when I didn’t find anything there, I enlarged my search, driving into various neighborhoods. It had already gotten dark by the time I drove up Chávez Avenue and found a motel that was called The Paradise. But it was too expensive. So I kept driving, and Chávez turned into Sunset, and I found another motel, which had no rooms, and then another, farther down Sunset, where an Asian man told me to come back the next day. I ended up spending the night sleeping, or trying to sleep, in the backseat of my car.
In the morning I got up, had coffee and a chocolate doughnut at a Chinese doughnut shop on Sunset and Fountain. And then I started driving again, not driving back to the Metropole, and in fact not driving anywhere, just randomly driving the streets of Los Angeles, driving without direction until, my bladder full and my gas tank low, I stopped at a taco stand. On the corner of Beverly and Normandie. There were mini-malls on three of the corners, but my corner was occupied by this taco stand, a brick structure, not the ideal taco stand with a lady standing by a fresh mound of cornmeal, but there I was, my hands on the polished cement counter. I bent down to talk into the small window, and it wasn’t well lit back in there, but I could see a young man waiting to take my order. I asked him if he had a bathroom in his taco stand and he said that he didn’t, but that the Korean restaurant across the street did. I could see his cheekbones in the dim light, and without a lot of effort I was able to see the skeleton he was beneath his skin and muscle, like a tar-pit animal in the middle of its dream.
I’d been trying to eat tongue tacos lately, partly because of Jane, but also because tongue, or lengua in Spanish, means language, and languages are founded on words, and it was a kind of invocation. Words can precipitate change, and even if cows themselves were incapable of using words, I thought in some undefined way that if I ate enough tacos de lengua the tongue might facilitate some. . I didn’t know. I ordered a tongue taco, paid the man, told him I’d be back, and went across the street to the Korean restaurant.
It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a fast-food place with an ordering counter in front of the entrance doors. I looked up at the menu, as if I was thinking about making an order, and then quietly and quickly, I walked around the corner to where the bathrooms were, down a gauntlet of brightly lit tables, past people eating food, vaguely aware that lives were being lived in the moment of my passing.
I tried the door to the men’s room but it was locked. I noticed the coin slot in the door. It was a pay-for-use bathroom, a quarter to pee, and I didn’t have a quarter so I went back to the counter. I waited in line with an older man and a young couple, and oddly, no one had any change. When I got to the front of the line I asked a thin kid in a purple uniform if he had change for a dollar, meaning would he give me some change for the bathroom.
He said I had to order something.
“I can’t just use the bathroom?”
“You have to order,” he said.
People were behind me in line and he was standing by his computer, waiting for me to order some food. I looked up to the colorful photos on the menu and said, “You must have tea.”
I ordered a tea, with milk, and when he brought my tea and the change from my twenty-dollar bill he was very efficient, like a robot. And that was fine except my change ended up being bills and about seven cents. Maybe a third penny was in there, but still not enough to get me into the bathroom.
“Could I have change?”
He told me I had to buy something.
“I did buy something.”
He asked the couple behind me what they wanted.
“You’re not done with me yet,” I told him, but he was talking to them.
“Your order please,” he said to the couple, and they moved forward in the line so that they were standing to my left.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m still here.” But he didn’t notice, and they didn’t seem to notice, and I looked at the older man, who I thought might offer some support, but he was looking at the illustrated menu.