The Beast God Forgot to Invent by Jim Harrison

Author:Jim Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2000-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

In the lobby of the Westwood Marquis both guests and staff nodded and smiled at him under the careless assumption that he might be an important rock musician, many of whom stayed at the hotel, while B.D. was confident that it was the combination of the tropical shirt and his natty fedora. When he found Bob in the lounge drinking a martini out of a beer mug Bob looked at the hat and said, “Nifty.” The hat had the extra advantage of hiding his stiff and unruly hair. During his childhood visits to the barber for his twenty-five-cent haircut the barber would whine that it would take a quarter’s worth of Brylcreem or butch wax to mat down B.D.’s hair.

The hardest thing for a rural stranger in a huge city is to figure out the relationship between what people do for a living and where they live. On home ground you can drive down a street and say butcher, baker, candlestick maker as you pass successive houses. In Los Angeles, of course, you immediately give up to the nagging grace of incomprehension, as you do in New York City, with its layered oblong onions of life, its towering glued-together slices of separate realities held together by plumbing pipes and brittle skins of stone. In New York you can at least imagine you are way up in a childhood treehouse and those far below are not woodland ants but asthma-producing roaches. But then a pretty girl walks by with nine goofy dogs on tethers and you can get the feeling that these folks know what they’re doing. In Los Angeles any sort of comprehension is out of the question for the initiate, though after a number of visits there are certain buildings, streets, and restaurants that become comforting landmarks. This is also true of the locals, most of whom become quite blind to their surroundings, like, say, the citizens of Casper, Wyoming. The sophisticate, the student of cities, soon understands that Greater Los Angeles resembles the history of American politics, or the structure of American society itself. The connection between Brentwood and Boyle Heights is as fragile as that between Congress and the citizenry though the emotional makeup of both resembles the passion and power of the Jerry Springer Show.

Thus it was on the way between the Westwood Marquis and the Sony Studios in Culver City that Brown Dog could bark out fondly on passing the Siam Motel, “That’s where I live,” to Bob Duluth who had his nose in his brightly lit laptop computer.

“Ah, yes, the wonderful Siam. Beware of a faux-French girl who lives there. That means she’s not actually French. She’s from Redondo Beach. Real French girls find it impossible to get green cards, you know, permits to get work. I was deeply in love with Sandrine for about three days. I introduced her to a couple of friends from Paris and they were amazed. They thought Sandrine was more French than the French with an impeccable Auvergne accent to boot.

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