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was part of the Syndicate. He was scheduled to hand over his component that night, something called dragon’s tears, and then they would meet for dinner. Before he left, Martine gave her a slip of paper with his address and phone number. He didn’t trust Pantucci; he told her and wanted her to check up on him if he failed to show up for their meal. Of course, he didn’t show up and didn’t answer his phone, and when she went by his apart- ment block, learned that he had apparently committed suicide by leaping from his balcony.
Chun-Hei assured her this was a coincidence, the Syndicate was making a spirit, and there was certainly no need for any- body to die over it. We tried to laugh it off; the vodka helped.
I chimed in that we needed to see this through to the end. We needed, I needed, to have another sip. On this, we agreed: the need for another drink vastly outweighed the fear of death. Chun-Hei told Annie that if she felt uneasy, she would take the component herself and see that it got safely to London and she could go back home. She agreed, apparently relieved, and they talked through the details while I plowed through several more icy shots. In three days, the weather would be perfect to extract the sap.
So there we were, heading back from the forest, our pre- cious sap in several small vials. I flipped on the radio, hoping for some McCoy Tyner to level out my mood and got the tail end of the news: ‘The woman who was found buried in the sand
at Zuma Beach has been identified as Annie Floux, a French tourist. Police are asking anyone who knows anything about this woman to please contact them.”
“Pantucci is trying to fuck us,” Chun-Hei sighed, rolled down the window and tossed out her cigarette. The curves were tricky coming down the mountain, so I had to stay focused, but out of my peripheral vision I saw her pull the syringe out of her bag.
wrecking ball. We cannot see the size or the composition of the wrecking ball: is it made of concrete? Is it made of metal? If it is metal, is it iron or steel? Does it come with the swing of a crane? Or explosives planted deep in the ground, or something else entirely? Does it come in the form of an ordinance passed by the city Council? A decision by the Planning Commission? Or the Board of Supervisors? Or some new unholy force?
Or does the form it takes not matter at all? Is it just the fact of the wrecking ball’s occurrence? No matter what, it seems to come nonetheless—unleashed by a bitter something that we fail to understand, perhaps intentionally or perhaps not.
SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCY: THE ROSALINDA HOTEL – The Desk Clerk
Just two years ago, they found the body of that girl, Alisa Lamb, in the water tank at the Cecil Hotel. I knew Joey, the manager of the Cecil at the time. He’s gone now, he left the
state, after all that publicity. He swore the girl was on drugs. We’ll never know. I mean, the story went worldwide. They did
an episode on American Horror Story, right after the one they did on the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, back in the 80s. I mean, that place seems jinxed, but now they’re renovating it, attracting richer patrons. Now that I saw it in the paper, and I got these notices, and I’m supposed to slip on to all the tenants’ doors, I think the same thing is happening to our place, the Rosalinda, just without all the press and the drama and the fanfare. We won’t be on television, they won’t make specials about us to broadcast worldwide, it’ll just be that whole quiet desperation thing, and the Garcia’s will be gone, and Parker will be gone, and Mrs. Johnston will be gone, everyone else will be gone, including me, and I won’t know where they go, that’s the way it is in Los Angeles now, and I don’t know where I’m going either. SRO ho- tels are a thing of the past. I don’t know where poor people live, but I know it’s not here, not in downtown Los Angeles. Some- one told me that in Europe the slums and the ghettos are way outside the city, like in Paris, 50 or 60 miles away. I know they
say kilometers. I guess here in Southern California, maybe it’s San Bernardino or Riverside, or Palmdale or Lancaster, which
is already the case. But whatever our fates, just like those of the Saint Gabriel Indians, are no longer here—not now and not in the future, at least so far as I can see. Like a dutiful employee
of the hotel, with tears in my eyes perhaps, I’ll slip the notices under the tenants’ doors. I’ll do it reluctantly, in the middle of the night, when no one’s awake, well, except maybe Parker, but
I still don’t understand the kid, though I’ve come to like him,
of course I don’t feel good about it, I’m being a wimp, but I tell myself it’s not my decision, it’s the developer’s decision, and if
I don’t give them any notice, that’s not gonna help them either, but as soon as their evictions take place and they’re gone, I’ll be out of a job, and I’ll be gone too. I read Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaugh- terhouse Five in high school. I don’t read a lot of books, and I know it’s not what he meant, or maybe it is, but so it goes. I was never a good student.
PARKER:
I’ve lived here, on and off, at the Rosalinda Hotel for
almost three years now. The neighborhood has become over- whelmed with tents and cardboard boxes. There are more
tents now. It used to be more cardboard boxes. I heard that
a camping company donated a shitload of tents, and now the homeless have more tents than they did just a few years ago. But it blows my mind. I look at the news, sometimes they say the homeless population has exploded. I see it everyday. I try to sell my poems to people who have less money than I do. Now I give them away to anyone who wants them. But I have shit for income myself. Maybe I should apply to that camping company to get myself a tent.
PARKER’S INJURY:
I mean, I was a skating down Broadway, and I thought I
was in the bike lane, but maybe I’d veered out, I’m not sure, I’d had a beer or two, but no more, and I smoked a little weed,
PARKER, EL JARDÍN, & THE
NEW POBLADORES
Written by Larry Fondation
PROLOGUE:
Los Angeles is the embodiment of parallel universes, of the
many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Perhaps there is a past. Perhaps there is a future. Perhaps
there is neither. Perhaps there is both. Perhaps they are the same fucking thing. Perhaps they diverge.
Maybe everything exists at once.
It’s no wonder that Hugh Everett’s son formed a band in LA. The band is called “Eels.”
No definite article. Like: “Beatles”. No “the”.
The strata of the City cannot see the other—cannot see one another, do not perceive the other, drive past one another as if they were passing in different directions on the freeway—some above ground on buses, others below ground on subway cars, though not many, too new. Not our style. “I do not see you”. Life in bubbles; the Brentwood lawyer barely sees the Guatemalan immigrant who cares for her children; knows not the man who washes the dishes at Il Fornaio on San Vicente; observer created reality; splinters; all these realities branch off until they can no longer; the multiple universes crash—riots, uprisings, rebellions; 1965; 1992; 2020... and on... the Red Car system ripped out; Riv- erside to the Beach; no more; no longer; hidden reality; a corpse in a trunk; but the replication is infinite; the road not taken is just another road taken.
SINGLE ROOM OCCUPANCY: THE ROSALINDA HOTEL— We the Residents
We, the residents of the Rosalinda hotel, we await the
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