The Los Angeles Diaries by James Brown

Author:James Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582438733
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

I am sitting on the floor in the basement. This is where I write. It is night and my wife and children have gone to bed. Daisy is asleep in her box in the kitchen above me and the house is quiet. Surrounding me are five neat piles of handwritten manuscript. I am struggling to get another novel off the ground. In fact, I am struggling to get five novels off the ground all at the same time and that’s the problem. I can’t focus. I can’t make up my mind. This has been going on for months, long before Daisy’s arrival, and I have sixty pages of one book, forty something of another. The others are shorter but they all have one thing in common: Each peters out, coincidentally, when the drugs wear off and I see them for what they are, these awful things I’ve written under the influence of methamphetamine and alcohol.

Tonight I am relatively sober. I’ve only drunk a few beers, and in terms of narcotics I haven’t touched a thing in two miserable days. But trace amounts of meth are still coursing through my veins, and as I read over the first sentence of one of the five manuscripts I am far from clearheaded. On a notepad, in long hand only I can decipher, I write and rewrite that opening sentence nine different ways. I excogitate on a single word. I contemplate its deep symbolic meanings in relation to the profound themes of my work. I am brilliant. I am divinely inspired. Then I apply this divine inspiration to the opening lines of my other four manuscripts, believing that if I only concentrate long enough, hard enough, that some grand truth will soon reveal itself to me and I’ll know, once and for all, which story most deserves the full attention of my genius. Only there’s a short circuit somewhere in my brain. The traffic of ideas runs in circles, round and round, and then shoots off down a thousand different streets. I don’t know which one to follow. I don’t know which way to turn or where to get off and I’m on this crazy ride now when a piercing squeal, like the screech of brakes, brings the traffic in my head to a sudden standstill.

I am not, by nature, a mean or intolerant man. After all, she is still a piglet. At this point we’ve only had her a couple of weeks, and like a puppy you have to expect a certain amount of whining and crying. But we all have our limits, and when she squeals again, instead of losing my temper, I give in. I give up for the night and head upstairs to the kitchen. Her box is beside the stove so that the heat from the pilot lights will keep her warm and snug. But it’s too small for her already, this box. Just the week before it was roomy and now she can hardly turn around in it. As of this morning Daisy weighs exactly twenty-nine and one-half pounds.

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