Last weekend I had the good fortune to visit Los Angeles on the hottest day ever recorded. It’s literally 118 degrees and I’m in the concrete monstrosity that is City Walk in Universal City sitting outside a Starbucks and drinking a large hot coffee and wondering why tourists are looking at me as if flags and cuckoo birds are coming out of my ears. But it was great good fun to run around City Walk with a notepad and camera and take pictures and let the place itself tell me how events about to transpire in AVALON BURNING should happen there. City Walk has become even cheesier and more rundown that it used to be, and I cannot wait to put the postapocalypse whammy on the joint.
I was disappointed (but hardly surprised) to learn that UCLA Extension no longer operates a campus there (in fact they seem to have shut down many of their locations throughout LA). I loved teaching writing at City Walk — it was surreal as hell to meet students for coffee before class when firewalkers and jugglers and ogling tourists were going by, and sometimes I had to stop lectures while marching bands or loud performers went by in the street outside.
I got to partially pay back my friend Ken Mitchroney for all his work helping me move to the SF Bay area by helping him move a couch to his temporary digs at Dave Schow‘s house in the Hollywood Hills. This meant getting a 200-pound couch around a Dr. Seuss-like catwalk that was not wide enough for the couch and wound around the house on three sides. In 110-degree weather. Everyone contributed ingenious solutions that worked when they were needed and I got to briefly visit with my old friend Dave. We were bestest buddies in the 80s and had a lot of adventures together. His career has burgeoned and he is a terrific writer. I used to use sections from his work when I taught classes on writing action, which I think is harder to do than a lot of writers (many of them quite lit’rary, donthca know) realize. Dave does something he calls “verb packing,” and it works gangbusters.
Road trips with Ken are always great and the five-hour drive goes by in about 25 minutes. Plus I got to have dinner and a long heart-to-heart with my friend Scott Kelley, squeeze in a lunch with my Burner buddy Kevin, and then go shopping at Ralph’s before heading back. (Ralph’s: they have things I can’t get up here. Like egg bagels. There is not an egg bagel to be found in Benicia. Or a synagogue either. But there is a Baptist church and a Mormon temple across the street from each other not two hundred yards from my house. Hmm.)
Then back to cranking away on AVALON BURNING. More on that next post.