Jonathan sat down on a bench to wait for a big blue bus. The backrest was covered in a painted advertisement for a funeral home. Gleeful, thought Jonathan, but at least my back is toward it. He looked at the shadows cast by the giant buildings. They marched in rows like morons and gleamed like glaciers. Poor old silver-coated Barrington Plaza looked ancient now beside them. When Jonathan had first come to Los Angeles in the early seventies, the Plaza had been the biggest building all the way from the ocean to the Veterans' Hospital. Jonathan could see the ocean, four miles away at the end of the wide straight road. The sea sparkled in sunlight. Everything was blue with fumes.
Jonathan remembered his contract.
Okay, he told himself, I'm waiting for a big blue bus in Oz. The sidewalks are perfectly laid, because if someone is dumb enough to trip on the edge of a paving slab, they can sue the city. Because the paving is perfect, people roller-skate to work. They wear shorts and shades and a Walkman.
Can I imagine Munchkins here, little people flooding out of shopping malls and insurance offices the size of mountains? Do Munchkins wear mirror shades now? If this is the Emerald City, then the towers are tall because of the value of the land underneath them. And all the windows and doors are sealed because the air inside them is temperature-controlled. If Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went tripping by, no one would notice. They'd think they were high.
It was a twenty-minute wait for the big blue bus. Jonathan read a free paper. It listed courses in adult education. On the cover an attractive woman pouted in a leotard and tried to look as though she were selling fitness courses and not SEX. RELAX, said the headline, IT'S SO EASY.
There were courses about making money. How to Sell Real Estate in Your Spare Time. How to Make $ in Catering. How to Get Credit Cards.
And there were courses in Self Discovery Through Metaphysics. Coming Alive with Love. How to Flirt and Not Get Hurt. Courses in counseling or shiatsu or how to begin a conversation.
And there were courses that were an odd mix of the two. One offered instruction in Interviewing Techniques for Selecting a Husband:
Dating is time-wasting and inefficient. Before accepting that time-consuming invitation to dinner, you need to apply the techniques of market research to discover if the man is really interested in marriage. Manipulative? Yes-and we make no apologies for that. If you change your makeup and put on a nice new dress for a date, then you're manipulating. This course will simply help you to learn to manipulate for success.
And I was thinking of learning Spanish, thought Jonathan.
He thought of bars where the men all wore nothing but leather harnesses or Dodgers T-shirts, baseball caps and jockstraps.
Oz, he reminded himself, I'm supposed to be in Oz.
HOW TO FIND A LOVER OR A LOVING PARTNER
A solid, proven system for finding that special someone who's fun to be with, able to carry on a sparkling conversation, financially stable-maybe even rich.
Which, thought Jonathan, is why they haven't found love: And never will.
The bus finally came, and Jonathan got on it, wrestling with coins. He had never, in all his thirty-eight years, learned how to count out change quickly. The door whooshed shut; the bus lurched; the driver said nothing, his face blanked out by sunglasses.
Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them. As Jonathan was doing.
On the seat in front of him, a very fat man in dirty shorts sat reading the Style section of the Los Angeles Times. The person across the aisle from Jonathan stood up and moved two seats farther back, to be more alone. He was reading People magazine. He was thin and smelly, in what looked like standard-issue Veterans' Hospital couture-a tartan shirt with rolled-up sleeves and khaki trousers. UNITY BY THE SEA, said a passing billboard, JOIN US FOR A LOVING EXPERIENCE.
The bus stopped with a slight squeal of brakes. The squeal came and went with the rhythm of a kiss. An old man got on. He was very thin, very brown. His skin was somehow translucent and splotchy. He stumbled unsteadily toward his seat, and when the bus lurched forward, he fell into it, swinging around one of the support poles. The old man was almost too frail to walk, but he wore a jaunty tracksuit. A yellow plastic Sony Walkman whispered disco music into his ear.
Lighting-fixture shops and banks passed by, with acres of parking in the back. Beside a large drugstore, a sign said PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY, in lettering that imitated nineteenth-century script. Jonathan loved that word "patrons" and that word "only." An old-time, old-fashioned drugstore with an admissions policy?
At the next stop, a middle-aged woman got on with a boy. Her hair was yellow and she wore black tights that showed how far and loose her hips had spread. The boy was about seventeen and wore long, boxy swim trunks and a vest and a bomber jacket. His upper lip was trying, and failing, to grow a moustache. They sat down just in front of Jonathan. The jacket was shrugged back and the woman began to peel sunburned skin off the boy's back. The windows of the bus were open. Patches of skin were caught up in the wind and were whirled about like snow.
A few moments later, the boy got up and started to ask people for money. "Don't have any, man," said Jonathan, wondering if that was how seventeen-year-olds still spoke. He went back to reading about adult education. If this is what they teach adults, he thought, what are they teaching the kids? He finally found his course in Spanish. It was opposite Hot Air Ballooning.
He got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and across Wilshire Boulevard there was a billboard, an ad for chocolates. IT'S NEVER TOO LATE it said, TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.
Jonathan lived on Euclid-Thirteenth Street, except that people were too superstitious to call it that. Euclid Avenue was tree-lined and residential and quite pleasant, but it was as if the shrubs and the flowers and the sprinklers and the sunlight and the glimpses of the Santa Monica mountains were all lying. They could bring no real comfort.
Jonathan's property was quite extensive. There were two bungalows in front that he used to rent out in his days of relative penury as an actor. Behind them was his garden, and backing the property, a two-story house for him and Ira. Downstairs were the garage and Ira's office. Upstairs was the house itself. Jonathan trudged wearily up the steps and pulled out his keys.
The key for the house wasn't on it.
What? Jonathan tried to remember what he had done with it. Who could he have given it to? He had his car keys. What could he have done with the key to his house?