The Active Side of Infinity (14 page)

"Your malady is a very simple one," don Juan said, shaking
with laughter.

Apparently my situation delighted him. It was a delight I could not
share, because I failed to
see the humor in it.

"Your world is coming to an end," he said. "It is the end
of an era for you. Do you think that
the world you have known all your life is going to
leave you peacefully, without any fuss or
muss?
No! It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail."

Los Angeles
had always been home for
me. My choice of Los Angeles had not been
volitional.
To me, staying in Los Angeles has always been the equivalent of having been
born
there, perhaps even more than
that. My emotional attachment to it has always been total. My love
for the city of Los Angeles has always been so
intense, so much a part of me, that I have never
had to voice it. I have never had to review it or renew it, ever.

1 had, in Los Angeles, my family of friends. They were to me part of my
immediate milieu,
meaning that I had accepted them totally, the way
1 had accepted the city. One of my friends
made the
statement once, half in fun, that all of us hated each other cordially.
Doubtless, they
could afford feelings like that themselves, for
they had other emotional arrangements at their
disposal, like
parents and wives and husbands. 1 had only my friends in Los Angeles.

For whatever reason, 1 was each one's confidant. Every one of them
poured out to me their
problems and vicissitudes. My friends
were so close to me that I had never acknowledged their
problems
or tribulations as anything but normal. I could talk for hours to them about
the very
same things that had horrified me in the psychiatrist and
his tapes.

Furthermore, 1 had never realized that every one of my friends was
astoundingly similar to
the psychiatrist and the professor of
anthropology. 1 had never noticed how tense my friends
were. All of
them smoked compulsively, like the psychiatrist, but it had never been obvious
to me
because 1 smoked just as much myself and was just as
tense. Their affectation in speech was
another thing
that had never been apparent to me, although it was there. They always affected
a
twang of the western United States, but they were very aware of what
they were doing. Nor had I
ever noticed their blatant innuendos
about a sensuality that they were incapable of feeling, except
intellectually.

The real confrontation with myself began when 1 was faced with the
dilemma of my friend
Pete. He came to see me, all battered.
He had a swollen mouth and a red and swollen left eye that
had
obviously been hit and was turning blue already. Before 1 had time to ask him
what had
happened
to him, he blurted out that his wife, Patricia, had gone to a real estate
brokers'
convention over the weekend, in
relation to her job, and that something terrible had happened to
her. The way Pete looked, I thought that perhaps
Patricia had been injured, or even killed, in an
accident.

"Is she all right?" 1 asked, genuinely concerned.

"Of course she's all right," he barked. "She's a bitch
and a whore, and nothing happens to
bitch-whores except that they
get fucked, and they like it!"

Pete was rabid. He was shaking, nearly convulsing. His bushy, curly
hair was sticking out
every which way. Usually, he combed it
carefully and slicked his natural curls into place. Now, he looked as wild as a
Tasmanian devil.

"Everything was normal until today," my friend continued.
'Then, this morning, after 1 came
out of the shower, she snapped a
towel at my naked butt, and that's what made me aware of her shit! I knew
instantly that she'd been fucking someone else."

I was puzzled by his line of reasoning. I questioned him further, 1
asked him how snapping a
towel could reveal anything of this
sort to anybody.

"It wouldn't reveal anything to assholes!" he said with pure
venom in his voice. "But I know
Patricia, and on Thursday,
before she went to the brokers' convention, she could not snap a towel!
In
fact, she has
never
been able to snap a towel in all
the time we've been married. Somebody
must have taught her to do it,
while they were naked! So I grabbed her by the throat and choked
the
truth out of her! Yes! She's fucking her boss!"

Pete said that he went to Patricia's office to have it out with her
boss, but the man was heavily
protected by bodyguards. They threw him
out into the parking lot. He wanted to smash the windows of the office, throw
rocks at them, but the bodyguards said that if he did that, he'd land in jail,
or even worse, he'd get a bullet in his head.

"Are they the ones who beat you up, Pete?" I asked him.

"No," he said, dejected. "I walked down the street and
went into the sales office of a used car
lot. I punched
the first salesman who came to talk to me. The man was shocked, but he didn't
get angry. He said, 'Calm down, sir, calm down! There's room for negotiation.'
When I punched him
again in the mouth, he got pissed off. He was a
big guy, and he hit me in the mouth and the eye and knocked me out. When I came
to my senses," Pete continued, "I was lying on the couch in
their
office. I heard an ambulance approaching. 1 knew they were coming for me, so I
got up and ran out. Then I came to see you."

He began to weep uncontrollably. He got sick to his stomach. He was a mess.
1 called his
wife, and in less than ten minutes she was in the
apartment. She kneeled in front of Pete and
swore that she
loved only him, that everything else she did was pure imbecility, and that
theirs
was a love that was a matter of life or death-The others
were nothing. She didn't even remember
them. Both of
them wept to their hearts' content, and of course they forgave each other.
Patricia was wearing sunglasses to hide the hematoma by her right eye where
Pete had hit her-Pete was left-handed. Both of them were oblivious to my
presence, and when they left, they didn't even know I was there. They just
walked out, leaving the door open, hugging each other.

Life seemed to continue for me as it always had. My friends acted with
me as they always did.
We were, as usual, involved in going to
parties, or the movies, or just simply "chewing the fat,"
or
looking for restaurants where they offered "all you can eat" for the
price of one meal.
However, despite this pseudo-normality, a strange
new factor seemed to have entered my life. As
the subject who was experiencing it,
it appeared to me that, all of a sudden, I had become
extremely narrow-minded. I had begun to judge my friends in the same way
I had judged the
psychiatrist and
the professor of anthropology. Who was I, anyway, to set myself up in judgment
of anyone else?

I felt an immense sense of guilt. To judge my friends created a mood
previously unknown to
me. But what I considered to be even
worse was that not only was I judging them, I was finding
their
problems and tribulations astoundingly banal. I was the same man; they were my
same friends. I had heard their complaints and renditions of their situations
hundreds of times, and I
hadn't ever felt anything except a deep
identification with whatever I was listening to. My horror at discovering this
new mood in myself was staggering.

The aphorism that when it rains it pours couldn't have been more true
for me at that moment
in my life. The total disintegration
of my way of life came when my friend Rodrigo Cummings
asked me to
take him to the Burbank airport; from there he was going to fly to New York. It was
a very dramatic and desperate Maneuver on his part. He
considered it his damnation to be caught
in Los Angeles. For the rest of his friends, it was a big joke, the fact that he had tried to
drive
across country to New York various times, and every time
he had tried to do it, his car had broken
down. Once, he
had gone as far as Salt Lake City before his car collapsed; it needed a new
motor.
He had to junk it there. Most of the time, his cars petered out in the suburbs
of Los
Angeles
.

"What happens to your cars, Rodrigo?" I asked him once, driven
by truthful curiosity.

"I don't know," he replied with a veiled sense of guilt. And
then, in a voice worthy of the professor of anthropology in his role of
revivalist preacher, he said, "Perhaps it is because when I
hit
the road, I accelerate because I feel free. I usually open all my windows. I
want the wind to
blow on my face. I feel that I'm a kid in search of
something new."

It was obvious to me that his cars, which were always jalopies, were no
longer capable of
speeding, and he just simply burned their motors
out.

From Salt Lake City, Rodrigo had returned to Los Angeles, hitchhiking.
Of course, he could
have hitchhiked to New York, but it had never
occurred to him. Rodrigo seemed to be afflicted by the same condition that
afflicted me: an unconscious passion for Los Angeles, which he wanted to refuse
at any cost.

Another time, his car was in excellent mechanical condition. It could
have made the whole
trip with ease, but Rodrigo was apparently not in
any condition to leave Los Angeles. He drove as
far as San Bernardino, where he went to see a movie-
The Ten Commandments.
This movie, for
reasons
known only to Rodrigo, created in him an unbeatable nostalgia for L.A. He came back,
and wept, telling me how the fucking city of Los Angeles had built a fence around him that didn't
let him go
through. His wife was delighted that he hadn't gone, and his girlfriend,
Melissa, was
even more delighted, although also chagrined because she
had to give back the dictionaries that
he had given
her.

His last desperate attempt to reach New York by plane was rendered even
more dramatic
because he borrowed money from his friends to pay for the
ticket. He said that in this fashion,
since he didn't intend to repay
them, he was making sure that he wouldn't come back.

I put his suitcases in the trunk of my car and headed with him for the Burbank airport. He remarked that the plane didn't leave until seven o'clock. It was early
afternoon, and we had plenty of time to 20 and see a movie. Besides, he wanted
to take one last look at Hollywood Boulevard, the center of our lives and
activities.

We went to see an epic in Technicolor and Cinerama. It was a long,
excruciating movie that seemed to rivet Rodrigo's attention. When we got out of
the movie, it was already getting dark. I rushed to Burbank in the midst of
heavy traffic. He demanded that we go on surface streets rather
than
the freeway, which was jammed at that hour. The plane was just leaving when we
reached
the airport. That was the final straw. Meek and defeated,
Rodrigo went to a cashier and presented
his ticket to
get his money back. The cashier wrote down his name and gave him a receipt and
said
that his money would be sent within six to twelve weeks from Tennessee, where
the
accounting offices of the airline were located.

We drove back to the apartment building where we both lived. Since he
hadn't said good-bye
to anybody this time, for fear of
losing face, nobody had ever noticed that he had tried to leave
one
more time. The only drawback was that he had sold his car. He asked me to drive
him to his
parents' house, because his dad was going to give him
the money he had spent on the ticket. His
father had
always been, as far back as I could remember, the man who had bailed Rodrigo
out of
every problematic situation that he had ever gotten
into. The father's slogan was "Have no fear,
Rodrigo Senior
is here!" After he heard Rodrigo's request for a loan to pay his other
loan, the
father looked at my friend with the saddest expression
that I had ever seen. He was having
terrible financial difficulties
himself.

Putting his arm around his son's shoulders, he said, "I can't help
you this time, my boy. Now
you should have fear, because Rodrigo
Senior is no longer here."

I wanted desperately to identify with my friend, to feel his drama the
way I always had, but I
couldn't. I only focused on the
father's statement. It sounded to me so final that it galvanized me.