WPOM
He was a little late for everything until the time when he finally caught up with fate. You only need the once.
The Greenwich Village Scene was over by the time he arrived. Left to the tourists and businessmen in suits looking for the next Dylan or the next lay. Beatlemania had left all the folkies and their empty passing-the-hats more cynical & thundercloud shadowed than the mushroom cloud.
The ride across the country landed them in LA a little late.
His first wife was beautiful. And frankly, not interested in him. He wasn’t very ambitious, except when it came to the ladies. He went after what he wanted; trouble was, he never could tell when to stop. Until he found his wife in bed with the Comic from the group. And then with the Cute One. And by the time she was interested in the Mysterious Cowboy, he had stopped trying. Stopped trying, but hadn’t stopped caring. He had been living off a steady diet of a new drink every night, a new woman every week, a new drug every month, and a new mansion every year (he kept it up for 2 years, so it amounted to 2 houses in the Hollywood Hills after crashing with his friend on living on his porch for 6 months. Laurel Canyon days seemed like living in dog years. 1 year there was like 7 anywhere else. Burn out was all too common.
The same for the second, who was more than happy to give into a man who seemed so happy to be in love. One day she told him, Sometimes that’s the gift you give to another human. You let them play out their love on you. Maybe it makes you a better person, maybe it encourages you to open up. I never opened. I’m sorry.
He was drunk permanently at that point. When he thought about that period in his later life, his stomach would clench. Same thing with taxes, he didn’t want to ever account for time he couldn’t recall.
In his later years, he dreamed of the feeling of being late. Again and again, he was wandering the streets of a dream NYC, a village where the side streets ran in a circle, there were no corners. When he went into buildings, there were only stairs and never any exits.
His dreams of California were similar, not the endless sunset highways which he thought of in his daydreams, but dark traffic nights. He’d be blocked in, somehow. stuck against a building on one side and a cliff on the other and traffic both in front and in back of him. Even if it were a convertible, he couldn’t climb out.
Meanwhile, all the other men in America that lived parallel yet alternate versions of his life dreamed of his one perfect moment of timing. If only they had cut their teeth in Greenwich Village and then gone to LA and walked into the agent’s office on cue. The right place at the right time. They’d be superstars, with women falling all over them, as many drugs and drinks as you could handle. More. What was the difference between him and them? Not much, they reasoned. If only I had been at the right place at the right time.
Not even his own perfect timing, it was a lot of knocking on doors, 3 years in hat-passing clubs and 6 months of dish-washering. And in the end, it was his friend’s lucky break. a friend, or a friend of a friend. A doppleganger. “Hey, you’re the guy who’s supposed to look like me,” they would echo when they found each other on 12th street. They joked about performing as a duo, like brothers, who would insult each other. It was an idea which would resurface with actual brothers
Of walking into the agent’s office, as if on cue, “Where can we get a cute young boy who can play guitar like that? You, except handsomer.”
NOTES
6:09pm, 4/4/15, Sat
Listening to Mixed Bag
Brina/Brian Wilson
Life goes on and on/like your favorite song (Beautiful Day)
What ever happened?
On the island (with Zoe Deschanel)
(Like Kokomo-Hollywood, California, couch potato heaven, beer belly heaven
Dickie-Do, My Stomach Sticks out further than my Dickie Do)
Grabbed book: For What its Worth about Buffalo Springfield
(at the BOX Hotel, fancy!! Had seen it from the bridge the first times I visited the hood, and crossed the bridge, LOOKING at the neighborhood from a different perspective, going in the direction of the Lobster Claw)
Reading about black hearse going one way, and a white van going the other
UTurn in heavy traffic, they caught each other
4/5ths of Buffalo Springfield
Neil Young (Hollywood Indian) and Stephen Stills (impatient cowboy) best of NYC & Canada
Boy Next Door, COmic, Dark one who played with his back to the audience (druggie)
Richie Havens doing Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, starts out instrumental (“Sooner or later, love is gonna get ya”)
