BUYING TIME

It’s about 10 PM at the Hollywood Royale Rest Home, the one on the corner of Beachwood and Franklin Ave. It sits right across from the La Mirage Motel where recovered addicts are born, but I don’t think many people know this. It backs right up, maybe twenty feet away from the 101 Freeway, but no one seems to give a fuck. There’s a lot of good oblivion being lived right on those two corners. In the Royale though, all the rooms are dark except for one. Somebody up on that second floor is trying to squeeze another sit-com into their final days. Down the road is a French producer, actor, writer, an impotent impresario, a Jill of all trades. Her window is always open on hot summer nights like this. And as I walk, I pull from my inner bowels a deep belch and deliver it at her window as I stroll. The curtains are always drawn, but I know she’s in there, rolling her painted eyes. Watching her candles burn, waiting for the blue spark that will be her life. The one she’s always imagined. She bites at her time, waiting for her phone or email to ring. Just once, before she heads that hundred yards down to the Royale. Where she can join the other lives. The tremblers, trying to warm themselves from a dying fire deep within. Shaking their soul to life, as the last of them fades. Never having used their spark. Never having set their forest on fire.