Don't Disappoint - Chapter 3
by Martin Van Cooper
We continue the the third week of our second quarterly PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the next week, we’ll serialize the excerpts of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novel, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
3
Consumption. Transaction. Every person living like they’re the only one on earth, like the Dodgers and the Grove and Santa Monica pier and Sunset, WeHo, Venice or the Valley are realities when in fact they are tableaus, ridiculous sets that performances of lives are staged upon. There is no culture, there is nothing stable, everything vapid and vaporous and ethereal, fleeting and if you think you’re from here and connected here, you’re not, you’re moving through like everyone else, here for the weather, as confused as the tourists as to why everyone doesn’t live here. Because you can’t live here. The timeless story of redemption on the side of the bus, For Your Consideration, will be replaced by a car accident attorney’s ad with her pet dog at the end of the month. To this day when he thinks of the city, even having lived here all these years, when he hears a story about it and has to visualize the city in his head, it’s the corner of Colorado and Ocean, up the bluff from PCH and he is looking down from above, some drone-like panorama, panning up to look north down the coast and the sun is always setting. He had never lived by the coast, in Venice or Santa Monica or Malibu. The closest he got was West Hollywood, his first touch down in the city when he wanted to be in the middle of things and thought this was the closest he could hope to get. But there’s a frenetic stasis, like everyone’s ambition and excitement is stunned by the light and heat. Like hot dogs on rollers at the 7-Eleven checkout. When you relocate west, the experience over the first couple of weeks of wanting to strangle someone to get them out of the soma haze to get something done until they, the transplants, by the second or third month, fall into the soma haze themselves and then just chill the fuck out. Someone even told him that people threw out perfectly good conditioned and high quality furniture and he was so buzzed about the move that he didn’t pause to consider the likelihood that a place would exist where the laws of capitalism and materialism were strangely suspended or nonexistent.
To then encounter the conflagration of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The needle jockeys outside the designer shoe store. The old woman who relieved herself in the mornings outside the laundromat in the alley behind his apartment building. The teenagers in the BMW screaming past at 2 AM on the way home from the club and crashing drunkenly into a street person’s shopping cart, scattering his worldly possessions of mostly cardboard and various beverage containers, some partially full with liquids of unknown provenance, all over the sidewalk, before swerving back onto Highland and off into the night. Of the male prostitutes that hung around the In-N-Out down the street from his apartment, one of whom OD’d in the bathroom twice in one week and was the reason the manager had a keypad lock installed and changed the code twice a day. The shiksas married to Jews telling their goy friends that Jews and Muslims cannot be friends and white women married to black men telling their white friends who can use the n-word and when. He found it impossible to establish a community, a sense of permanence in the city where no one had roots and everyone was, or pretended to be, a transplant. The inescapable history of your past, your family’s past, your history…where you went to church or watched a parade or walked to the park or the pool…this tapestry of experience that made life elsewhere so intolerable and unchangeable and unforgettable found its antithesis in this place, but this was no respite. The city was a bubble just like everywhere, but it was big enough that you could easily hide. Relationships and experience—your past and present—in the city was as ephemeral as an automatically deleting SnapChat message. The mentality is the past never happened, the present doesn’t matter and the future will soon be here and gone. A schizophrenic mix of lethargy and hyperactivity: it’s no wonder the place legalized weed1 in the early 1990’s when it was nearly derailing Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. No one wanted anything to exist for any time beyond the present moment and spent all their mental energy on the next thing. What was happening was old news. Shit going on off Hollywood Blvd across from the Rainbow Room down one of the nameless side streets that looking south gave you a view of the city stretching out down the hill. When you had an affair in the Midwest it upset families and caused drama in the PTA and rumors in the congregation and accusatory looks at the grocery store, maybe even a shouting match outside the high school basketball game—people cared, there was something more tangible and hurtful and meaningful about what you could ruin in a Midwest family than what you could in any relationship here where basically once consummated, the thing was running on fumes. Once consummated it became part of the scenery, part of the endless trip of strip malls and apartment complexes, fast food joints and laundromats, interchangeable people and relationships just like any other consumable. He watched the thermometer in his car creeping from 95 to 100 as he drove past Universal Studios, then Coldwater Canyon and sat for 15 minutes to go one mile because of a crash and the associated rubbernecking on the 405. Ticking up to 103 as he passed through Tarzana and then down to 98 again as he reached Woodland Hills and Calabasas. She had picked Vanvleck because it was far enough from the 101 to have no traffic noise and up off the Valley floor to get away from the circuit board cluster homes, nestled in the canyons west of Topanga meaning little or no marine layer but still nice and cool on the summer mornings and almost cold on winter ones. The dash read 88 as he rounded the corner to his street and saw the late 70’s Ford pickup that as it sped away revealed itself to be a stick shift, with a surf board cockeyed across the bed, back out of his driveway and pause for a moment—considering something?—and then turn to drive off in the opposite direction further up the canyon. Who it was not: his gardener (he didn’t have one), the pool guy (he drove a Tundra and the bed obviously didn’t have a surfboard in it but was full of hoses and buckets and pool chemicals), any neighbor he knew (BMWs, Land Rovers or Subarus were de rigueur in the canyons, and all less than 3 years old).
The blessed anonymity the release of pressure to perform by being in a big city where there’s always someone better than you at everything you could possibly want to do. People who grow up in small towns never get this experience and so think they are all princes with their own duck ponds. He claimed this was part of the reason he stayed and why he thought he could start again here. But she retorted that in fact this is a fallacy because even here, especially here in fact, she feels the need to be the best at whatever she’s doing and she’s not casting stones or anything but it could just be he’s not as ambitious. She never said these things a few short years ago. That she in fact doesn’t feel the way he does at all, that inside she feels the city is just a much bigger and more real world, no microcosm at all, with more competition in every sphere and that’s why she was there, for the stress and the adversity and to feel on top of the biggest heap, not at all to feel buried as she claimed he seemed to want to feel.
When he first moved to the city, he patronized one of the physicians who, due to financial pull or malpractical push (likely both), migrated from the respectable MD world of sterile waiting rooms and scheduled office visits and Medicare reimbursement to the poorly lit 2000 sqft rathole unit between a pawn shop and Pho joint on Venice, to dole out medical marijuana cards for $50 a pop. The office consisted of a filthy antechamber separated from the slightly less filthy exam room, which was a foldable metal chair next to the doctor’s desk, on which perched an ancient mid-90’s desktop plus a mid-80’s super old school TV that was actually tuned to the Dodgers game during his visit. The only decoration was two framed degrees, a bachelors (from some university, northeast or southeast followed by some Protestant denomination he couldn’t remember) and medical (from the Philippines). The exam took 5 minutes and consisted of the doctor reciting a list of conditions as questions (Back pain? Insomnia? Headaches? Stiffness? Fibromyalgia? Impotence? Cancer? Trauma? Can be physical or mental. Depression? Lethargy? Anxiety? Hyperactivity? Anhedonia? Impotence?), looking up a couple times at the TV but not at him and not waiting for or registering any response. He never once actually asked Jason why he was there. The desk and chair the doctor sat in, along with the patient’s chair, were in a sort of a hallway rather than a room, and the entire hallway, floor to ceiling, was manila folders with names and card numbers, like the one he was filling out for Jason. He was maybe 50, Filipino, smelling vaguely of peppers and something linimental, needing a shave and with an impressive gut that he made a feeble attempt to contain under a button-down collared short sleeved work shirt that was half unbuttoned to reveal a sweat stained wife beater.
 | A guest post by
|