The Shadow Catcher

take fountain

All writers have these moments — all people do — when Realization forms from air.

I associate the phenomenon with finding a perfect word, a telling gesture, an insight into character, a crux on which a plot must turn. But that’s because most of my Realizations strike during work and are related to the shape of my profession. My work is strung on moments when I realize something — a novel is, by nature, one long Realization, which is not to say other pursuits aren’t dependent on discovery: sailing is. Cooking is. Playing music is. Sex always is. Loving is a series of discoveries: it starts, significantly, with a Realization: that moment when you know that you’re in love. If writing were as exciting as falling in love, I’d get a lot more written, but most of my Realizations come as pinpoints of light while staring at the dismal tundra of an empty page. Given my average event horizon, most of my ideas don’t have the bursts, the color spectra of world-altering discoveries like Newton’s did, or Galileo’s. Mine are minor stellar occurrences, but strung up as a necklace of small lights, my bright ideas dot the boundaries that define my life. When one occurs, then, it’s a Birth Day, like the birth of a new star far off in the universe.

Won’t necessitate the reinvention of the calendar.

But it makes another piece of heaven, all the same.

So when one of these Realizations struck one day when I was crossing Melrose after lunch with my friend David, I thanked my lucky star(s).

David likes to go to Angeli’s on Melrose, where, at lunch, only the sound of steam from the espresso maker at the bar enlivens the lacunae in the sullen dialogues between distracted screenwriters, including between me and David. He was well and truly disillusioned with writing for Hollywood that afternoon, as was I, and I was seriously planning to start picketing the studios to CUT THE CRAP and start funding films with socially responsible story lines. Stop being pipelines for product placement, a propaganda machine for consumer consumption. Stop waving guns and tits at everybody. Between the two of us, though, David made the more convincing opponent to the way Hollywood is operating these days, because he’d actually written scripts that had been made into films, whereas all I’d done was write, get the boot, and grouse. His complaints had validity, whereas mine gave off the scent of sour grapes. I had tried to work, and failed. He, at least, had worked with Hitchcock. In another century.

When we finally wandered out into the hyper-daylight, pausing, curbside, waiting for the light to change, David said, “Hey. Where are you? You’ve left your face.

“Are you writing? Christ. Can’t it wait ’til you get home?”

“Actually,” I confessed, “I was trying to decide if it’s better to take Highland to the 101, or quicker to take Crescent Heights.”

“George Burns story.”

I looked at him.

“George Burns is in a restaurant, and there’s a kid busing tables, just in from, let’s say Nebraska. Recognizes Burns, goes over to his table. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Burns, I’ve admired you all my life,’ he says. ‘I’ve just come to Hollywood from Omaha to be an actor, Mr. Burns, and I wonder if there’s some advice you’d care to give?’ Burns takes a puff on the cigar and — not even looking up — says, “‘Take Fountain.’”

This is no split-your-sides laughing kind of story, it’s a corny story, but because I understood the punch line, A Realization struck me: I’m an Angelena, subject to the whims of Pacific coastal heat inversions, San Andreas fault temblors, and — more to the point — subject to the traffic. Subject to the unwanted obsession of shaving minutes off the time I spend in traffic, in my car. Shortcuts are printed money—gold—and anyone who drives on Sunset, Hollywood, or Santa Monica Boulevards thinks she’s struck the motherlode when she discovers Fountain running parallel, in between those three other avenues, and she actually believes nobody else has ever thought of taking Fountain, even though every other sentient being in town has made the same discovery years ago.

Every shortcut in Los Angeles was glutted long before I got here, but I spend my journeys — and time before, and after, too — calculating odds.

The only remedy is to avoid the freeways whenever other cars are on them, never travel when it’s raining, and never under any circs make an appointment to leave the house at lunchtime or when kindergarten’s letting out or there’s a Lakers’ game or a terrorist alert or some celebrity’s on trial for murdering his wife in Santa Monica.