I was watching that movie "Choke," and I was watching the guy stagger around while pretending to choke, after I had watched another TV show about a guy who ran Ponzi schemes on people who like to gamble, and for some reason I thought about this guy who got into a car accident in front of an apartment in which I lived years ago.
I don't know. Maybe the trigger was all the noise from outside. New York City really is the city that never sleeps. You can tell because it never stops talking to you. So, that was in the back of my head, too, when I thought about this kid. I lived in the back of the building of this place on Los Feliz Boulevard. That's on the east side of LA. The road there is big, and busy, and, sure enough, about once a week there was a pretty bad accident somewhere along the road. You could hear it.
But this one was particularly bad, as I recall. Big enough a smash to send me running out the door, for some reason, and down a couple flights of stairs, and out the front of the building, where there was this kid sitting in this car that was all smashed and spun around so it was facing the wrong way, and all the traffic stopped. I went up to him. He was dazed, and bloody, and he kept saying over and over again something to the effect of, "I don't know what happened." I took off my hoodie, I think, or another shirt that I was wearing over a wifebeater or something like that, and I gave it to him, and I think we wrapped his arm in it. I don't know what happened to him after that.
Traffic brought strange things in LA. There was another time at the big intersection where there's a Blockbuster on -- I don't remember, Sunset or something. And I walked out, and everything was stopped, all the traffic all ways, and a car in the middle on the other side, and nobody doing anything. For some reason, I trotted over to the car, and I went over to the passenger seat, where the driver, who had gotten out of the car, was standing in front of the guy who was still in the passenger seat. I guess there was a drive-by shooting right before that, because the Hispanic kid in the passenger seat was dead, from being shot, and the driver was screaming, in Spanish, so I didn't know what he was saying. The front of the passenger kid's white shirt had two big bloody handprints on it that were from where his friend, the driver, had put his hands on him, except he was already dead.
I don't know why I thought about all this stuff, watching some stupid movie on the couch, listening to this truck that has been running outside for what seems like forever. I mean, is there even enough gas in it to have run this far? I guess I am trying to sort things out in my head. Like, LA was crazy, and where I went after that was something else altogether, and I thought maybe, I thought this exactly, actually, in New York City: This is where my future lives. And the movie kept playing.