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Show 350 The people leaving the bleachers are now unmasked and appear to be young girls, and one by one they go past and stroke the poor devil's scrotum until the marble is black and shiny. Versions of this dream had contained hands from which all the fingers had been removed and whose palms itched uncontrollably, a full bladder which he could not empty because someone was always standing by the urinal watching him. He resented these dreams, he decided by the time he had left the San Bernardino Freeway and negotiated the tricky interchange that put him on the Hollywood Freeway, as he resented the persistence of the gnawing sense in his viscera that something was wrong with him, because they seemed to penalize him for being a serious person. He had returned to Los Angeles, he decided as he drove past a salmon-pink building on Sunset Boulevard that had once been Ciro's and was now called Le Crazy Horse, to regain perspective. You defined yourself by entering your past. You healed yourself by returning to the places where you had been happy. * * * * * * For the first few days he drove up and down the winding coastal highway, as far north as Ventura and as far south as El Segundo, east and west along Sunset and along winding canyons. Not until he had steeled himself by driving past the little house on Goshen across from the VA cemetery (now needing paint worse than ever, a battered white pickup parked in the driveway and a dirty child with no pants playing in the front yard, a finger in its nose) and past the Coach and Seven (now a thrift shop with a used-clothing rack and a bird cage in front) did he feel ready to confront the past directly. He had slept in his car in state beach parking lots and eaten unwholesomely at drive-ins, and had not taken a bath since |
