Seriousness, shock, immobility, anger, resentment, distrust, worry, fear, cynicism, hate, these were some of the reasons why I did not fit in in L.A. L.A. to me was for people who not only had no reason to run from their past but had no past to, begin with. They were a one-dimensional seductress sauntering through life in a fool’s paradise. I always spent my life trying to get away from everything. But this was L.A., a long, boring (and unbearably hot) wait. It seemed that all everyone did was wait. Wait in cars, wait in line, wait in gas lines, wait at the bank, wait in grocery stores, waiting at the In N Out Burger, squinting aimlessly into the golden arrow directing us to the line— to wait. I wanted to scream all the time in L.A. I would go out walking at midnight down the residential streets of Arcadia, Monrovia, Pasadena, everyone was sound asleep in their little bungalows with the doors locked tight, in the quiet. Once in a while, a dog would bark— one bark only— but contradicting the sleepy, darkened, deathly quiet suburban street nonetheless. Dead, dead, dead, that’s what it was like in L.A. in the 70’s, like a peaceful, satisfied death. I thought it was a high price to pay—a breathless achievement.

In this sun-soaked city of pretenders, I met a fumbling fool whom I became friends with, one, because he wasn’t an L.A. pretender, and two, because, well, he was a writer. He was fat-ish, stalky, they call it and always wore a blue sport coat (that was the thing for writers back then), always threatening to rip at the seam at the back shoulder. His Irish completion perpetually sunburned. He had a barrel chest and short legs with wide thighs. But his most repulsive feature (other than his jaw) was his hair, a soft curly bird nest that was receding in front and wildly massive (blowing even when there was no wind) on top and in the back. His most outstanding feature was his robin-egg blue eyes. But the most disturbing of all was his prominent underbite, which made him look like a Russian hitman, which strangely offset his blue eyes and made them look sinister. This naturally scared most people, so it is no wonder Nick was a loner. He did love words, though, and that is what endeared him to me and how we became friends. He was always clasping a pen and scribbling on a pad, possibly one of his nine-line long verse poems where every third line rhymed with the sixth and the first and second were couplets, but the second also rhymed with the fourth and so on… I couldn’t keep track, but he had special symbols that he placed next to each line to make sure he kept up a consistent rhyme scheme. We did both adore the words, especially songs with oracular words. He was in search of the great poets, and of Bob Dylan. I was faithful to Lou Reed. So, in a reasonable amount of time we did what no one in L.A. does—we got away–We went to New York City.