Far Afield

II

9 II For, you see, it was a death, among other things, that led me to this island. Not the death of a loved one, or a close relative, or even anyone I’d known. No, it was a thankfully anonymous passing, but it occurred close to me—that is, the building where I live—and I was among the first to discover the body and that is its impact on me. Several weeks later, it remains very much a live matter in one of my more guarded emotional cells, and I have been at great pains to resolve the experience. Perhaps for all this to make sense, you should know a little about where I come from. I live in Los Angeles, the city where I was born and raised, and a place that I’ve left several times but to which I’ve always returned. It is an area with too many elements to adequately explain, yet the tendency is for people with an opinion of it to sum it up simplistically, both for the good and the bad. To avoid a similar failure of judgment, I will make no such pronouncement , and only say that the main reason I continue to live there is because it never fails to keep me interested, though not on the level of culture or politics or art as with other cities. Instead, for me, the city’s most attractive feature lies in its ongoing collective failure. That is, the way its people recycle the energy they’ve spent pursuing their defeated dreams into celebrations of their own struggle, and thus try to retain their individuality. In this gesture (which is either tribally ancient or adamantly postmodern, depending on how you view it), there is something vulgar, yet touching and illuminating. 10 Far Afield Failure, as I remember from the many psychology courses I took in college, is always a more powerful instructive than success. Still, it can be a difficult place, especially for a person living by himself. In other large cities (New York comes to mind), the alone life is acceptable; that is, considering the number who do it, the residents wind up alone all together. In Los Angeles, which undergoes a daily transformation from arrivals at both ends of the economic spectrum, one is forgotten if not moving hurriedly in the pursuit of something bigger. Yet to do so requires either a profound ignorance of, or cynicism toward, the surroundings. And for natives familiar with the counterfeit history of the city (again, both in its good and bad elements), neither alternative is correct or available. This also explains why I chose to live where I do—in an old, urban-bound residential hotel that seems oppositional to the city’s nature. In Los Angeles, as far west as you can realistically go, such a choice presumably refutes the promise of the desert expanse (which, to me, instead promises infinite amounts of nothing). If there are such hotels, they must be for the old and infirm, the criminal at heart, the veteran transient or the permanently poor, so the thinking goes. Yet several of these dowager places still exist and mine, the Pimlico, is lucky in that its nearness to downtown has allowed it not to deteriorate but instead to prosper with ever-fresh cycles of Asian businessmen, high school groups from the Midwest, and earnest new screenwriters living on trust accounts or welfare. It is an anomalous thing: a bustling old hotel half-filled with residents of low and modest means and half-filled with purposeful visitors. Moreover, it is a beautiful building: ten stories of ether white, tricked out with flaking balconies, languorous stairwells, vaulted ceilings, and lion’s head moldings, the standard finishes of off-therack luxury. Once, I suppose, the hotel was envisioned as one of those grand statements about the triumph of the American century , but at the time it was being completed, the Depression had struck and the money for it ran out in midstream. As a result, even today there are hallways festering away unfinished and nailed shut, and the plumbing is erratic on the building’s east side. Still, I have liked it ever since I moved there following my divorce eight years Scott Brown 11 ago, and occasionally, I even manage the night desk for a deduction on the rent. It is only since the suicide that I have...