Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir

The glass poodle broke. Guess I tapped it too hard that time. It fell on the tile floor and shattered. After that I was careful to wear my shoes. Even in the middle of the night. I enjoyed the crunch when I went into the bathroom to pee in the dark. It sounded as if I were walking on potato chips. That made me laugh. I pretended I was an explorer in the Amazon and I was crushing cockroaches the size of hamsters. I imagined I was king of the world and I had jewels strewn before me wherever I might walk-even to take a shit. Eventually the pieces were all broken down in a fine, annoying grit that stuck to my rubber soles. When I started trailing glass dust all over the house, I cleaned it up.

Cleaning was good. I cleaned a lot. I moved the TV cabinet and cleaned behind it. I found a Christmas card from 1979 when I was six years old. I remember that Christmas. I remember wanting something so badly and praying for it as hard as I could, but what I got was something different. I liked it too, but it wasn’t what I’d been asking for. I can’t remember what it was, only the want like a tight place in my chest. I pushed the couch to the middle of the room so I could get the dust bunnies along the baseboard. I hoisted the armchair on top of it. That looked pretty good to me, so I climbed up and sat in it. Of course I tipped over and fell. I banged my arm hard on the colonial-style coffee table. As if they had coffee tables in the Colonies.

Immediately, I carried the coffee table out to the curb. That was enough of that. Someone driving by would take it home to his mother and she would be so happy. The front door opened in the house across the street. I didn’t know those people. Out came a young black girl, in candy-pink capris and a tight white tank top with glitter in a heart on the front. The neighborhood was mostly black people now. Not that it mattered to me or my mom-even before she was dead.

The girl was carrying her car keys, but she stopped at the door to her little red Chevette. “Sorry about your ma.”

She made me notice the flowers in the yard next door and the blue sky.

“She was old,” I said. “And sick.”

“You puttin’ out that little table?”

“I always hated it.”

The girl laughed. Her teeth were as white and sparkly as her shirt. She nodded. She knew what I meant.

“Do you live there?” I asked.

“It’s my brother’s house. I’m just staying with him for a while.”

“Welcome to the neighborhood.”

She shrugged and her brown shoulders gleamed in the sunshine.

“Wanna come in? Have a drink or something?” I asked.

“I got to go. I’m late for class.”

Loyola Marymount University was right nearby. She didn’t look like one of those stuck-up Loyola students. Stupid Jesuit school. I’d been destined for it starting at about, oh, maybe two years old, but that was another way I’d disappointed my mother. Too dumb to get into Loyola.

“Not LMU?” I asked her.

“Over to the aviation college. I’m gonna be a flight attendant.”

“See the world.”

“Exactly.”

She got in her car then and drove away and I was glad to know she’d be back. I left the coffee table out, but I pulled it off the sidewalk and onto the edge of my lawn. Just in case she wanted it for her mother. Then I went into the house and sat down on the couch. I could see the table through the big picture window. I could see her brother’s house across the street. Later, I’d be busy doing other things and I’d walk through the room and look out the window and see her struggling with it. I’d come out and lift it into her car. Then she’d have to take me over to her mom’s with her so I could help her get it in the house. We’d have fun and then she’d be a flight attendant and fly away.

And one day, awhile after that, I’d see her on an airplane. I’d be sitting in first class, in a really nice suit, blue, no, maybe dark charcoal-gray, and I’d be flying on my way to some big deal and there she’d be.

“Would you care for a beverage?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

And of course she would and she’d be so impressed and she’d look great in her cute stewardess outfit like a military uniform and we’d go right to the airport bar after and talk and talk and talk. Every tired businessman in his wrinkled old suit that came in would be jealous and looking at me, and she’d be looking at me too.

I practiced walking through the living room and glancing out the window. The phone rang and I lost my concentration and I realized I might actually miss her coming to pick up the table if I wasn’t watching every minute. I got the phone out of the kitchen and sat down on the couch with it.

“Hello?”

“Gabe? That you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How they hangin’?”

“Who is this?”

“Who the fuck do you think it is?”

Guess I was concentrating so hard watching for her to return that I wasn’t listening very well. It was Marcus, of course. He was my one buddy left from high school, the only other kid I knew who didn’t graduate. He had his own apartment and some kind of import business.

“I got some more work for you.”

I didn’t want to work right then. I was waiting. If I left and went to his office and did something, I might miss her.

“I need you, Gabe. And don’t tell me you don’t need the money.”

Of course that got me thinking. If I had some money, I could ask her out someplace, not just over to the house. I hadn’t showered in a few days or changed my clothes, so I told him I’d be there in a while.

“Hurry,” he said. “It’s important.”

I drove my mother’s car over to his office on the south side of the airport. I went past Dockweiler Beach, the noisiest oceanfront in America. I pitied the tourists who parked their RVs down there for some fun in the sun and then had to shout over the planes coming and going all day. When I was a kid there were houses nearby, but the land had been bought up for the airport expansion. Now it was just weeds growing through cracked cement-the roads were there but the houses, the streetlamps, everything else was gone. It was the driveways that gave me the creeps, parking for no place.

Marcus’s shop was in an industrial park. Row after row of white industrial buildings, like carryout boxes stacked on a metal shelf. They all looked the same except for the company logos. Marcus’s shop was the only one without a sign, just a glass door up three cement steps. I always told him he needed to hang something up.

The same old tired secretary, Kimberly, was sitting behind the desk. Her hair had gotten blonder and more and more like broom straw over the years. She smiled at me and I saw how her maroon lipstick was bleeding up into the wrinkles over her lip.

“Hey, Gabe.”

“Hey, Kimberly.”

I sat and waited. Actually, it was nice to be someplace other than the house. I’d been to the funeral home, of course, and the funeral, but other than that I hadn’t been anywhere. The brown-and-beige-flecked carpeting was soft under my feet. I could feel the glass grit from the broken poodle coming off my soles into the fibers, and I felt bad, but I was glad to be rid of it. Marcus had someone come in and clean anyway. I shuffled my feet back and forth, back and forth. Kimberly looked up at me.

“I like the new carpet.”

She nodded and went back to what she was doing. Whatever that was. I sat on the same beige Naugahyde couch Marcus had always had. I think his parents had it back when we were in high school-in the den. I picked up a magazine off the end table. It was about golf. I tossed it back on the table.

“What the hell you got golf magazines for?” I asked Marcus when he came out.

“Come on,” he said.