Low Life Read Free

smiled. He was supposed to laugh at a joke so he laughed. He was supposed to talk to his friends about television programs so he
watched television in order to have something to talk about. But he felt apart from it – separated from it by some invisible membrane, stuck outside even himself, in some no-place, watching
himself interact with the world from a distance – unable to join in, even while he appeared to be doing so.
    They headed to a place called Wally’s on Broadway and grabbed a table. Robert and Chris ordered their lunches. Simon sat and waited for their sandwiches to arrive before unpacking his own.
When he first began eating his lunches here with Robert and Chris – four months ago, three months after he started working in the same building with them, though it felt like he’d been
working here forever: every day was the same and they seemed to stack infinitely into his past like a line of dominoes – there was some trouble with the manager. This was a restaurant, not a
park. He couldn’t just bring his own food in here and spread out. But since then they’d worked it out, and the manager let it slide.
    When Babette brought out Simon’s daily 7-Up, she smiled and said hello. Simon returned the smile, pulled the paper sleeve off the top of his straw, and took a draw. It was cold and
sweet and helped to settle his stomach.
    He fell into his car, the work day over. The car was a gray 1987 Volvo. The paint was peeling from the hood where the heat of the engine had cooked it and from the trunk where
several different owners had set the gas cap when refilling the tank. He started the engine, thumbed the button on the left of the transmission’s handle, and dragged it down to drive. He
pulled out into the slow flow of traffic, edging in with his right fender – this was a oneway street – forcing the car behind him either to stop or hit him. Take your pick, pal. In five
minutes he was back on Wilshire and heading toward home. But then he drove right past the Filboyd Apartments and past the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated forty years
earlier, and onward. The Ambassador was under construction, being turned into a school, its history knocked away with the walls, goodbye Cocoanut Grove, hello detention, and there was nothing left
of it but its steel skeleton surrounded by great pits of earth and a chain-link fence. Los Angeles was a city that perpetually razed its own past. History was for people who hadn’t yet made
it here. This was the edge of the new world and it would remain so. You couldn’t go any further, and who would want to? Just ignore the slums and the dirt and the poor and try not to trip
over any broken dreams while walking down Hollywood Boulevard.
    In another few miles he reached his destination. The front of the place simply read
    ADULT BOOKS & VIDEO ARCADE
    and though he had never seen an actual book inside, there were certainly plenty of magazines.
    He parked his car on a side street just off Wilshire, checked the meter, found that whoever had parked there last had left him twenty-three minutes of free parking, added a quarter’s worth
of time, and then walked along the cracked sidewalk toward the arcade.
    The metal gate which acted as a front door was locked. It was always locked. Simon pressed a button on the wall to his right and heard a bell chime inside. He looked up at the camera mounted
above the door. A moment later, a buzzing sound. Simon pulled on the door. It opened.
    The place was humid and smelled of ocean salt and rotting undersea vegetation or – more likely – of something that resembled those combined odors; it was fifteen miles to the nearest
beach in Santa Monica, where a Ferris wheel spun slowly and bikinied women lay on brightly colored towels, and the only seabirds this far inland were gulls hanging out behind the seafood restaurant
on Fourth and Vermont, picking through the shrimp shells and lobster tails left in its