The Millennium Hotel by Rudman Mark

Author:Rudman, Mark.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 1996-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

There was no hot tub outside Woody Guthrie’s shack in Topanga Canyon. Only the tattered bark of eucalyptus trees. But the waterfall was swell if you could go there alone, or with a woman, and not some acid-headed goon. Not that I slept well, or slept at all. The cabin was bare except for a few well-thumbed paperbacks.

Cat’s Cradle Flew Over the Divided Self

They said that Woody holed up in the shack in Topanga to drink.

I found it hard to imagine him

binging within

the rough cedar

walls and floors,

and yet it seems right,

here in New

England, to listen to Ramblin’

Jack Elliot—(born

on a “ranch in Flatbush”)

sing Lone Cat’s

San Francisco Bay

Blues tonight.

Light pried upon your eyes in the curtainless cabin that had been awake since dawn trapping heat while you slept in your own sweat, you heard a slow moody strumming coming from the waterfall. Pulling jeans on over nothing you jogged barefoot over the root-congested path and in no time at all you saw a girl with short blond hair and freckles and an acoustic guitar perched between the waterfall and the cave. You had met her in Santa Monica the night before. How did she get here, even as a friend of the friend who brought me here? She looked up as if to say, you don’t have to stay, you don’t have to go. I found beauty in her expressionless sadness. I listened to a few of her five-string-serenades and said I had to go. “It’s been nice knowing you,” she said in such a childlike uninflected way that I swallowed my urge to say I’d be willing to change my plane reservation if she’d be willing to . . . hang with me—leave the canyon and get back to the sea.

I knew enough to know there was something here I didn’t understand.

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