11.10.98

    Last night on the news they were showing an aerial of this older, black man getting out of a white, four-door sedan. It seems that he was the reason behind yesterday's car chase. Car chases are about the most everyday thing in Los Angeles. There's one or two a month. The suspect gets caught nearly every time and all the news stations pull out the helicopters and it's all really exciting the first five or six times it happens. This story is a little different, though. The guy in this car chase had done it before.

    Apparently, he did this a few months back and led the chase for about an hour or so before parking on the curb in front of his house. The pattern was the same this time. I find that so incredibly hilarious that this guy could possibly have some sort of psychosis that would enable him to get kicks off of a car chase. You've heard about people that will invent reasons for surgery... this has to be a similar thing. Unfortunately, I don't know why the cops decided to take off after him in either case. Maybe he was just going home after work.

    Today, I walked a few dogs up in the Brentwood area. It's a pretty area with lots of trees and hills. The first set of dogs I walked down by the foot of Rockingham. Michael, my boss at the dog business, walked with me as these were new dogs . He explained how frenzied the activity around the area was after the murders. Nearby, of course, is Bundy drive where Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were slain. He said that that was even worse with tourists coming by to snap pictures and steal shrubs as souvenirs. Do people do bizarre and thoughtless things or what?

    One of the dogs I walked today was a Doberman. I'm not partial to Dobermans because we once lived across the street from a guy who owned a mean Doberman. The dog was always in the yard and would snarl and bark at anyone walking by. He was terrifying.

    This dog is not so terrifying but I'm told that he gets pretty nuts around other dogs. He is really, really smart and perfectly mannered. I've never been around a dog this well trained. It's amazing. However, I will be cautious around this dog. He needs to be "on command" at all times. He needs control. If a Lab can take advantage of me I wonder what a whip-smart Doberman can do?

    My ankles are killing me from all this walking around. The first week I was fine except for blisters but now my joints are aching. I hope that goes away. What I really need is a jacuzzi.

    Here's an excerpt from Permanent Midnight: A memoir:

Writing, to me, still packed an aura bordering the divine. An attitude that Hollywood renders absurd, to say the least. My first visit to chez Sandra, I saw piles of writing. A gaggle of scripts stacked high as a Shetland pony from her Navajo throw rug halfway up to that cottage cheese ceiling your low-end L.A. pads all seemed to have. Casting a panicked gaze around the living room, I saw every corner had its own leaning tower of creativity. The coffee table supported another fifteen or twenty efforts; the couch and rocking chair were cluttered with still more.

Call me naive. I felt like a jeweler who'd landed on some planet where diamonds were shit from dogs. And treated accordingly. "Who writes these?" I murmered, still dumbfounded so many souls were partaking of this holy act.

"Who writes them?" Her expression said she couldn't tell if I was insane or just slightly retarded. "Are you kidding? Everybody writes them."

"But why?"

Until then, for the most part I'd circulated in magazineland, an arcane branch of reality where something called prose was practiced. Sure, I'd helped pen a stretch of celluloid myself. But it was all just treading water while working on the Big Book. The novel. The thing that real writers really write. I just didn't get it. The vision was inescapable: all over Los Angeles there were houses and offices, apartments and car trunks, all full to bursting with some earnest soul's attempt at crashing the entertainment barricades. It was like Day of the Triffids, with scripts instead of Triffids. I imagined them one day rising up, growing teeth, and simply eating everyone in sight. First they'd chomp the boneheads who'd put them on the page, then they'd go after the development drones who judged them harshly before attacking en masse the studio smoothies who denied them life. Abortions could pile up for only so long, and L.A. was a city stinking with excess.

    Permanent Midnight, once again, is the story of this teevee writer, Jerry Stahl, who starts out in Hollywoodland at Hustler and then as scriptwriter for Alf. He also went on to write for thirtysomething and Moonlighting. In the course of his youth and subsequent climb into the background of the teevee elite he becomes a hard-core junkie. It's too bad Stahl turned the majority of his mind and body to mush because his writing really takes us into his head and into another world. I find it amazing that he has the capacity to write so horrifically and deeply about the lowest of his lows. Here's a bit from one of his attempts to get off drugs:

The pain came back. First the knees, the neck, then the burning tongue and the twisting pangs in my stomach. There was, at last, this banging in my skull, a rusty spoon scraped in the hollows behind my eyes, some vicious dirty music that made me want to flush my brain down the toilet, drop this useless, throbbing head in a bucket of acid, a hydrochloric broth. Until the pain was scaled out of me, all flesh and sensation burned away. I could see a skeleton grin in a hissing toxic puddle...

I don't know if that's what it's really like to kick hard drugs but it sounds sufficiently awful.

    The best part about this book is the real ability to capture the self-loathing. At no point did I feel direct sympathy for Stahl and the problems he got himself into. I don't think he pities himself, either. There's lovely bits of stream of consciousness narrative which take us out of the story and into his present frame of mind which is vulnerable and a bit frightened. I think it pains him to write about what was once his reality.

    All in all it's a right riveting read. It made me a little freaked about L.A. To see the city through his mind is at once amusing and horrifying. I found myself wondering if I shouldn't pack up right now and run screaming from a city which houses freaks like Stahl. His analysis and view of his environment seems to ring true is some cases. I do, after all, have a cottage cheese ceiling.