R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson

I am not one of those rabid Hunter S. Thompson fans by any means. In fact, I've always found HST fans one of the more annoying varieties of writer-fans in existence. Almost always, the HST fan is a decently attractive white guy who's either physically in his mid-twenties, or spiritually/mentally/emotionally, forevermore, in his mid-twenties. Either way, he's typically 26, likes to drink and smoke a lot, likes to write about SHOCKING TOPICS like his masturbation habits or his abominable behavior with the female gender, and secretly prizes himself as being a very deep person because he occasionally spends an evening crying in bed, or he's scared of his father, or he actually actively regrets fucking over some poor virgin, etc. Anyway, he has feelings too! It goes without saying that lots of self-loathing is involved, and though he's never had a lost weekend in the desert with peyote, he sometimes tells strangers he has, and that it changed his life, man.

Yeah, you know one of these guys, or you've seen him walking down the streets of Wicker Park/Echo Park with a real sad-sack puss on for no fucking good reason, in his black t-shirt and headphones.

Anyway, I could rip on this type all day, but for all my cynicism, I'd be lying if I said I haven't been attracted to this type from time to time. It's hard, especially when you're physically/spiritually/mentally/emotionally in your mid-twenties, not to get caught up in this young man's particular vortex, as swollen with self-aggrandizement as it is. It's hard not to want to step into the center of it and see how much of it you can push away, if any.

That said, I still find the HST guy pretty annoying, right up there with rabid Tarantino fans circa 1995, and God Help Us All, fans of Ani DeFranco, anytime between 1994 and now. It's OK if you are a fan of either of those people--I liked Tarantino then and I generally do now--but I'm talking about worshipful, emulating, fan-people whose whole personalities get transfixed and then appropriated wholesale, entirely consumed by the 24/7 activity of LOVING AND BEING so-and-so. I'm talking about THOSE people. Like, don't even get me started on the guy I had in one of my writing classes at Columbia College who wrote a story about a jewelry heist and all the characters were named Mr. [fill in something wacky] and they all laid around discussing banalities till someone came in shooting a AK-47 to the strains of not kitschy-good classic rock, but this kid's awful, hapless and sickeningly unoriginal prose.

So when I read this morning that Hunter S. Thompson, at the age of 67, shot himself fatally with a shotgun and that his wonderfully named son Juan found him, I sighed a very complicated sigh. After I got over the simple, joyous fact that Hunter had a son named Juan (c'mon, it's so perfect! So West!), the reality of this suicide set in.

Not long ago, a month or so before the reelection, Thompson wrote a piece for Rolling Stone. It was nice to see his name in there--it had been a while. In junior high, when I first subscribed to RS, the two politcal writers who I remember most were Hunter S. and PJ O'Rourke. I would read their articles, but I was too young to catch a lot of the innuendo and the exact meaning of their contrary, spiky attitudes. As I got older, I think I understood Hunter much better, though I still found his trumpeting tiring, and almost always self-indulgent.

But here was this article before the election that was all about what an idiot Bush was/is and how America will surely send him packing. It was one of the most hopefully rowdy pieces of incendiary writing I'd read in a while. Thompson was so certain, so confident that America was better than this hack they'd barely elected last time, that his enthusiasm became a sort of emotional cornerstone in my own very resolute feelings that Bush's time had come. Though I don't recall articulating it to anyone, whenever I doubted that Kerry would win, Thompson's essay was on the short list of things I'd think about to comfort myself.

Turned out, obviously, that Thompson and I were wrong. Though in a way, I think we were both right, despite the statistics. The only thing that dragged us down was this small but sagging middle, this collective of people who didn't vote or didn't vote our way because, as the saying goes, you can't have a revolution on a full stomach.

Thompson is dead, but I'm glad that after years of reading him and disagreeing with him, after years of feeling like maybe he was even sexist or just a mega-asshole with no redeemable qualities, after years of rolling my eyes at his fan-boys and occasionally against my better judgement, kissing some of those fanboys, that the last thing I read by him before his death, I completely and happily ate up. I smeared it all over my spirit like some kind of salve. His essay wasn't just entertainment-- it was emotional fortitude. It's like Thompson and I held hands for one brief but important moment before all that self-loathing cut him off from this world, up and away from me and everyone else who loved him better and longer than I ever could.

Gently Blogging

Hmm... turns out I'm not so great at this blogging-on-a-regular-basis thing. The only time I really get the urge is when I want to procrastinate, LIKE NOW. I should be reading this Ursula LeGuin book for this essay I'm working on but the book is... it's good but it feels so distant. Her style of writing is so removed that I can't generate much enthusiasm for it.

Every time it rains in LA my apartment turns into the equivalent of a Tahitian shack. (OK, so it's not that bad--it does stay upright in hard winds.) The floor of the hallway is littered with various mixing bowls and buckets collecting water that drips from the a/c vent. The manager of my building has sent the repair guy here so many times now and he either makes it better for a little while, or fucks it up even more for the next time.

Let's talk about Debra, the building manager, for a sec. She's a lithe lady in her mid-upper 40s with dyed chestnut-auburn hair and always meticulously applied dark orange lipstick that looks nice with her tanned skin. She's attractive and strange. Nearly every time she sees me, she compliments me on my clothes. For a while, when I used to carry around this beaded vintage clutch with rose and cherry designs on it, she would stop me every time she saw me (and it) and marvel, I mean really MARVEL at this bag, fingering it and smiling and even sighing a little bit like a person would over an unrequited crush. About a year ago, I put the purse into retirement (cherries are so everywhere now) but I contemplated giving it to her. It's still a possibility, I suppose. Maybe if she gets the hallway leaks permanently fixed, I'll give her the bag.

Her strangeness is due to the way she conducts conversations. She's very friendly one moment ("Oh, I just love that bag!") and the next second she's totally all business, saying nothing more than "OK," and then she'll turn on her heel, exit the building, get into her gold SUV and carefully, with great control, back down the apron of the parking garage, not waving or looking back at the building. It's not an angry OK or a rude OK, it's just "this is over." And, in a way, I'm grateful for this exit because who needs the wierd "who's going to stop this small-talk crap" with the building manager? There's no awkwardness, no tiny steps towards the door or flitting eyes or "well..." It's just "I'm out of here" from Debra.

I'm pretty sure that when she showed me this apartment, somehow she mentioned she was divorced. Either way, whether I actuallly know this as a fact or not, Debra is divorced. I just know it. She's kind of got the classic middle-aged lady "I'm divorced" vibe. I know I'm not really going out on a limb here by assuming that--half of everyone's divorced anyway. But here's the evidence: For one, most married women her age just don't look that good. Even in LA. Unless she's of the trophy-wife variety or a highly successful businesswoman who need to look like a chipped piece of ice with make-up on every second of the day, the married women in her late 40s tends to favor Keds and denim jumpers with maybe some "funky" earrings, very little make-up. Debra is not like this. She's always dressed well, in expensive earth-toned pants or crisp jeans, with her hair blown out and then obviously curled with those big rollers.

Anyway, I get the feeling if you asked Debra if she believed in true love she'd snort and look at you like you were an idiot. I get the feeling she was probably married for about 15 years, and every year was disastrous. And now that he's finally out of her life, she can live it like she wants, dammit. I notice that whenever she's come to the apartment to talk to us about something or another, she talks more to me, and less to Dylan. Now, it could be because I make more of the phonecalls regarding the apartment and its leaks and what not, and it oculd be because she met me first. But I get the sense that she talks more to me because she just likes women better.

All that said, I could see her having a son that she would lavish the world on.

OK, so I've talked about my building manager enough for today. But she is fascinating! Aren't all building managers? In a way?

Studio 1021

A few days after I got home from that mistake in the desert, I decided to get a studio, a writing studio (or an office, depending on my mood). I had been batting the idea around for about a month or so, and after I recovered a proper braincell count (having lost many over the weekend), I made my move.

I combed the Craigslist ads, made a few phone calls, and visited a couple of places. One was a disastrous concrete box with no windows, stuck inside someone's photography studio. And let me tell you, her photography was crazy-awful: one picture was of some prarie-dress-wearing chick holding a clump of dirt in her hands. It's that kind of imagery that makes me want to give the whole art world the "one-finger salute."

The next place I visited was a vast improvement, a building downtown called the Spring Arts Tower. (The Mexican Prostitute was right: downtown is the future.) Originally, the SAT was a bank in the twenties. It's still retained many beautiful Art Deco features, including a marble lobby and lots of dark wood. From the moment I saw it, I knew it was perfect, exactly what I wanted: a beautiful old place, scrappy and cheap, lurking in the anonymity of downtown.

The building manager is a guy named Kevin, who reminds me a little of a good friend who shall remain unnamed but who I once said has "the culinary tastes of a cab driver." (Now that I think of it, that describes a lot of my friends.) Kevin is laid-back, and I felt instantly comfortable around him, though he is weird--he has floppy black hair and horrible fashion sense. But we make each other laugh, and he's probably the coolest landlord I've had yet. He also has, like, forty tins of crackers in his office. The tins (yes, tins, like WWII rations or something) look like they are from the '40s, sort of like Cracker Jack boxes. When I asked him why he had so many, he looked around, and seemed completely surprised to find several tins of crackers crowding every surface of his office. "I dunno," he smiled, and then started laughing. "I just like them." Kevin also published a book of "erotic" poetry he once discovered written by an old Hollywood screenwriter, quite famous in his day, named Ben Hecht. So, points for that, too.

The building is a crazy mess--they're rehabbing so much of it--and charming as hell. Kevin showed me "the bull pen," which is on the 4th floor. Here is where they retained many of the building's original features. They use the bull pen in many cop shows set in NYC, and for period pieces. It looks just like a precinct from back in the day, with frosted glass doors just begging for names like Sargeant Tim O'Riley to be stenciled on them.

My studio is on the 10th floor, #1021. The floor is poured concrete of a coppery kind of color. The walls, for now, are white (wallpaper ventures are planned, more next time). On one side of the room, a cabinet with shelves for my books. There's a closet with an unworking sink in it that will soon be removed. There are two giant windows that don't give the most glamorous view in the world--it shows the other side of the building and the uneventful courtyard--but they let in plenty of light, and that's all that matters.

The other inhabitants of the building include painters, jewelry and fashion designers, lawyers, a couple of other writers, and film and TV people (Miramax has an entire floor). Oddly enough, I am most excited about meeting lawyer friends--I've already got enough people who paint and make t-shirts, blah, blah, blah. I want someone who can give me solid tax advice.

So far, the only thing about this building that gives me pause is the completely freaky elevators. And even those just give me a good kind of pause. For one thing, I've been to SAT three times and each time, the elevators take an eternity to come down. The second time I rode an elevator there, all of us--including a trashy fashion couple and a mute middle-aged man who acted like this kind of thing happened to him everyday--ended up fleeing it as soon as the doors opened. It was doing this stomach-curdling thing where it was "yo-yo-ing" at each floor. I ended up climbing down some eight flights of stairs, trailing behind a pudgy Latina who called out the number of each floor in her heavy accent: "seeben," "seex," "fife," etc...

The other day, when I came to sign my lease, the elevators, once again, were weird. There was a sign on the 10th floor saying "Elevators Out Of Order," but as soon as I called for one, it showed up, like a little eager death carriage, empty and beckoning. In fact, the light above the elevator doors eminated from an ominous and cracked red bulb. The doors jerked open and I paused for a second, and felt a flush go up my legs: Don't go on! Don't go on! But in a rare moment of not trusting my instincts (I've walked up or down many flights of stairs when confronted with these feelings before), I hopped on just as the doors were closing. For the entire descent, I clutched my purse and watched the numbers drop, and maniacally analyzed every flutter of the elavator ride, checking for any inconsistencies that would rationally allow me to pull the emergency knob.

Nothing happened. The doors opened on the ground floor, and I was set free.