Geoff Nicholson - The Lost Art of Walking

It was on Valley Oak Drive, a long, quiet, traffic-free dead end, like many of the streets in the Hollywood Hills. I walked all the way to the end of the street, then immediately turned and started walking back. It was the natural thing to do but I feared it made me look shifty and up to no good, as if I was casing the neighborhood.

As I turned on my heels I saw walking toward me down the middle of the street what at first appeared to be a child, or at best a very young teenage girl. She was incredibly thin, had brassy, dyed blond hair, and was wearing minute hot pants. She was looking lost and she spoke before I had a chance to.

‘Have you seen a dog?’ she asked me.

‘No’, I said, and then, even though I have no interest in dogs and can barely tell one breed from another, I asked, ‘What kind is it?’

Either sensing or sharing my indifference to dog breeds, the little girl said, ‘Oh, it’s just a tiny dog’, and she mimed holding a puppy that wasn’t much more than a single handful.

It was then that I realized the little girl was a fully grown woman, was in fact the movie actress Christina Ricci. I’d have realized sooner if she hadn’t had the blond hair. Of course I didn’t tell her I knew who she was, but my eyes probably signaled recognition — I’d thought she was great in the Addams Family movies. She evidently lived nearby, and as I found out later, had just moved into a Lloyd Wright house on the street.

‘Oh, well’, said Christina Ricci, and she then seemed to be at a loose end. Having reached the dead end of the street, she, too, had to turn back, which would mean walking along with me.

I like to think I look reasonably presentable when I’m out walking. I don’t think I look like a stalker or pervert, but as Christina Ricci had seen, I was certainly a man who had walked to the end of the street and then turned on his heel and started walking smartly back. Was that a man you could completely trust?

An odd, socially awkward, and in my experience unique, interaction took place. Christina Ricci and I walked half the length of Valley Oak Drive in each other’s company. We weren’t quite walking together, but we weren’t quite walking separately either, and we both felt obliged to make some polite, stilted conversation as we went. We talked about dogs. It was excruciating. And as we walked, a chorus of canine barking came at us from behind various neighborhood gates and fences. None of the barks sounded as though it came from a dog of the size she apparently owned.

What I didn’t tell her was that as I’d been walking that afternoon, I’d seen a lot of handmade signs attached to trees and lampposts: WANTED posters for lost dogs and cats. Some generous rewards were being offered. The fear, a reasonable one, in fact a strong probability, was that these family pets had been snatched by the coyotes that roamed wild in the area. If Christina Ricci was going to find her little dog, she had a strictly limited amount of time in which to do it.

♦

I felt I was starting to get the hang of L.A. My walks, perverse and contradictory and laborious as they sometimes were, became a profound source of pleasure and satisfaction. I was making the city my own, asserting my own version, marking territory, beating the bounds, drawing my own map.

I was doing myself good. I was feeling much, much less depressed. I can’t say that I finished each walk and thought to myself, ah yes, this is precisely the kind of serotonin-stimulating activity that those boffins at Duke University were talking about, but then I didn’t need to. When you’re not depressed you don’t spend much time thinking about depression. And that was the state I was in when I went walking in the Hollywood Hills two days before Christmas, fell, broke my arm, stopped walking, and got depressed all over again.

So after a couple of months of nursing my arm, of inactivity and escalating misery, as the opiates ceased to deliver much in the way of painkilling, I knew I had to start self-medicating again. I did what I had to do, picked myself up, dusted myself off, and started walking again.

I undertook a series of long, unfocused but serious walks on the boulevards that run more or less east and west across L.A.: Pico, Olympic, Sunset, Santa Monica, Beverly, Melrose, Wilshire. I referred to the walks, only somewhat ironically, as ‘transits’. There was nothing conceptually rigorous about these expeditions. I went at my own pace, without specific expectations or goals, and I noticed what I noticed.

One of my enduring memories of Sunset concerns a couple I saw walking along ahead of me, near the Hollywood Freeway. The man was middle-aged, lean, bearded, a bit raddled perhaps but essentially holding it together. His female companion was not. She was younger than him, as wide as a house, disheveled, with huge flopping, untethered breasts, and I guess she was suffering from some mental problems. Suddenly, she looked down to the side of the road, at something in the bushes, and she reacted with delight. I looked to see what she’d found. There were twenty or thirty medicine bottles lying there, empty as far as I could tell, but still containing some powdery residue. The woman swooped down on them with absolute joy, and the man wasn’t able to stop her, though he tried. About a week later I happened to see them again, in a supermarket some miles away, and I fell into conversation with the man. He told me he liked my shirt. He said it was the kind of shirt worn by men of influence.

On Wilshire Boulevard I saw a man with no legs, indeed nothing at all below the pelvis, with a sort of thick plastic diaper around the bottom of his torso — he was not actually walking, I suppose, but he was propelling himself at some speed. He had a block of wood in each hand, like wooden door handles, so that his hands didn’t have to touch the sidewalk, and as he moved they made a noise somewhere between the sound of clogs and high heels.

As I was walking down Rampart Boulevard, a car pulled up next to me. I looked over and saw the driver was a woman talking on her cell phone, with an unruly little girl bouncing around in the passenger seat. I thought the woman was lost and stopping to ask me for directions, but no, she’d actually stopped the car so she could give the little girl a good slapping, which she then did, with her cell phone still at her ear.

Some of these walks could be tough. It gets damned hot in the middle of the day in L.A. in the summer. I nearly got run down once or twice. Dogs endlessly snarled and yelped at me, and street people hassled me with varying degrees of seriousness.

On Los Feliz Boulevard, a young black man who appeared to have all his worldly goods scattered at his feet gave me a bright hello, which I returned, and when I was past him he called after me, ‘Dude! Are you in the movies?’

‘Nah’, I said laughing.

‘You look just like that dude in Die Hard 2 ’, he said.

For no good reason I said, ‘I wish’, and then we both had a good laugh.

When I got home I went through the cast list of Die Hard 2 and I’m damned if I could see anybody there who might look like me. Not Bruce Willis, I think I can safely say. It’d be flattering to think it was Franco Nero, but putting all other objections aside, we aren’t even remotely in the same age bracket. And surely not Dennis Franz. Surely. Not even my worst enemies would say I looked like him. Whatever my physical failings, I do have plenty of hair.

And then there was the time I was walking in downtown L.A., a place where a lot of others walk, too. It was a busy weekday lunchtime. The streets were full of people. There was a lot to look at, a lot of distractions, and that was why I wasn’t paying much attention to the youngish, hippieish white guy who was standing not very far away from me as I was waiting to cross the street. He was a panhandler, however, and thought I was pointedly ignoring him. I might have if I’d been aware of him, but I wasn’t. After failing to get my attention for a while, he said loudly, in a sneering tone of voice, ‘Hey, who do you think you are? Jack Kerouac?’ As insults go, I couldn’t have asked for better. I didn’t respond. The light changed and I walked across the street smiling fit to bust.