Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

“How much are those cigarettes?”

“Eight dollars,” he said.

That’s a pound of carrot cake, I calculated.

“I’ll come back for these.”

I looked both ways and crossed Fairfax into the beaming spaceship of Canter’s. On the right were pickles in brine and gravlox and layers of cream cheese in tins that looked like marshmallow whip. And pickled herring.

To the left was what I wanted. The smell of yeast was overwhelming. The carrot cake came in loaves, white cream cheese frosting in tufts on top.

“Whatever I can get of that for eight dollars,” I said.

The man behind the counter with the heavy black mustache pulled it out of the case, cut it, weighed it, made a face, put it in a pink box, wrapped it with string, and gave me a ticket. It said $8. I had to pay the woman stooped in the cubbyhole of a seat near the bakery counter. She had a sweater clipped around her shoulders and she was using a calculator and she was writing down the amount of each ticket and then she took mine and I got my carrot cake in its pink box and I was out of there.

The carrot cake had large pieces of walnuts. That’s why I liked it. The crunch. It was salty against the sweet of the frosting, so good that it made me want to cry. I ate it all, one mouthful after another like someone was going to take it away from me, as I sat and watched the fires on television.

They were coming closer. The acrid smell was faint, but already hitting this part of the city although the fires were still smoldering on the outskirts of the grid. The valley fires were moving to Angeles Crest. They said it might be a marijuana farm in the National Park. They said that they would probably never find out who did it.

I shoveled the cake in my mouth and watched the reporter on TV with a yellow rain slicker talk to the people in the studio.

“There’s ash positively everywhere, Chuck. Blinding.”

She was right. It was coming down all around her like snow. It was getting stuck in her hair, her lip-gloss. As she tried to free herself from it all they cut away to a commercial. When I stuck my head out the sliding glass door I could smell the smoke and the sky was a deep orange. Nuclear-style. I looked down at the cake and saw that it was gone. Just the outline of the frosting, like crime scene paint. I had to leave the house; I was feeling sick and anxious. I got into the car and started to drive east, toward the 5, the way to the mountains. In Hollywood, I realized I didn’t know how to get to Angeles Crest and so I pulled into the Hollywood Downtowner motel again to see if they had some local attraction maps with directions.

It was still silent at the Downtowner. The pool lights were on and there was a shell of ash on the surface of the water. It wasn’t moving, just clinging. I brushed off a lawn chair and sat down and positioned myself to be facing the mountains. It was harder to breathe at the Downtowner. I hadn’t anticipated the choking and I wished that I had a gas mask or one of those surgical masks. An older couple rushed down the stairs. They were both wearing surgical masks. I wanted to ask them where they had gotten them but they ran past me too quickly.

I saw them talking to the front desk attendant through the glass and the old man was waving his hands around. The woman was trying to hold them down. He wasn’t having it and the attendant ran into another room and disappeared. They waited a while. Tapped on the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell. The husband started doing it over and over again. I could hear it outside, by the pool. His wife pulled him away and he dragged their suitcases out of the office and down the street. The attendant came back. He put the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell back in its place and started cleaning up the pamphlets the old man had strewn around. I walked up and into the glass room. He looked startled when I came in, like I was going to throw something at him, like I was the old man.

I walked over to the wooden case of Los Angeles attraction pamphlets and touched them all, slowly. I could feel him staring at me but he didn’t say anything. There were pamphlets for the Griffith Park Zoo, the beautiful beaches of Malibu! Las Vegas, Sea World and the San Diego Zoo, Lake Havasu, and Reno.

“Are there more Los Angeles attractions?”

“They’re all there,” he said.

I turned to look at him. He was trying to look extra official; he had interlocked his fingers and made his hands into a fist, smiled at me through thin lips. “There’s only two about Los Angeles. The rest are about Lake Havasu.”

I picked up the pamphlet. It was covered in pictures of girls in bikinis and speedboats and personal watercrafts.

“Where are you looking to go?” He was getting annoyed.

“Angeles Crest.”

“It’s on fire.”

“Well, I know.”

“Were you sitting by the pool earlier?”

I stared at him and tried to decide what the right answer would be. I wasn’t sure so I kept silent.

“I think you were. Are you a guest here?”

“No.”

“What were you doing out there, then?”

“The pool looked nice.”

“It’s covered in ash,” he said.

“Maybe you should clean it.” I narrowed my eyes at him and he didn’t like that at all. He disappeared into a back room. Like when the old people were yelling at him. He was waiting for me to leave too, so I walked back to the pool, to my seat, and wiped the ash off again and sat down. The wind had picked up so the water was rippling and moving the ash to one side, thick like mud. The desk boy came out and took the wand to clean the pool and started skimming it over the surface. The pool lights made him look blue and dead and he wouldn’t look at me. I stared at him to try and unnerve him, and finally it worked.

“I don’t think you can just sit here if you aren’t a guest of the motel.”

He kept skimming as he talked. I didn’t move. I just looked at him. The water rippled around the skimmer. He let it go and the basket of the wand floated to the bottom.

“Who says I can’t?”

“The sign says so.” He pointed to the red and white sign. It was yellowed with age, the face cracked and bubbling. Guests of The Hollywood Downtowner Only.

“I just want to stay a few more minutes. No one’s here anyway.”

He stared at me and thought about it for a moment. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“No one’s here.”

“My boss might call.”

“So what?”

“He’s going to ask me if anything’s going on.”

I thought for a moment. “Nothing is.”

He inhaled slowly, walked back in the office and left me alone. I went back to staring at the pool, ash floating down and coating it. The gate jangled and I sighed, thought he was coming back after me. I turned and saw a man, back turned, closing the gate behind him. The back of his shirt was wet with sweat. He turned toward the pool and I thought, he’s not bad, strong-looking. He didn’t look at me or the pool and just headed up the stairs, to room 214 and struggled to find his keys. I wondered if he could sense me watching him, if he did, he did not turn around. Instead, he closed the door behind him and walked inside. I turned to the office and the desk clerk was watching the door too. And then me. I closed my eyes and listened to the pool water hitting the tiles. It did make a sound if you listened closely.

“Is the water cold?”

He startled me. I opened my eyes and stared at the man from room 214. He was wearing shorts. Not swim trunks, just shorts. I told him I didn’t know. He put his things on a chaise lounge under a yellow and white metal umbrella covered in ash.

He was sandy-haired and brown-eyed. He didn’t look like he was from anywhere, just white, and he was what my mother liked to call a mutt. Someone who had been in America so long that they were completely washed of where they came from. He was probably 1/12 of everything and nothing at all. He was American.