Los Angeles Read Online Free

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     of the space, I had an old, creaking swivel chair and a gray metal conference table on which my computers nestled amid piles
     of junk mail and scraps of note paper. There was nowhere for anyone else to sit, really, other than the floor, which was covered
     by a soft, black, fuzzy rug called a flokati — something my mother had bought me as a housewarming gift years before, when
     I moved in. Even more embarrassing were the stacks of colored paper all around my desk, each color representing a draft of
     the movie I had supposedly been writing and arranged according to the hues of the electromagnetic spectrum.
    “This is so… weird,” Angela said finally.
    “Yeah, well,” I said from the kitchen, “I don’t really have people over very often.”
    “You’re a writer?”
    “I edit technical manuals, professionally.” This was a lie, of course. I only said that because I was embarrassed to explain
     that I accepted money from my father and that I had never had an actual job. “But I’m writing a screenplay, you know, which
     is my real work.”
    I heard the sound of her fingernails tapping on a stack of paper. “Is that what this is?”
    “Yeah.” I stepped back into the living room. “An early draft.”
    “What’s it called?”
    I told her the truth because I didn’t have time to think of a better answer.
“Los Angeles.
But that’s just a working title. I have a number of other —”
    “Wow, I like that.”
    “Really?”
    “Sounds important.”
    No one had ever expressed any interest in my writing before, not even my psychiatrist, and I have to admit, I didn’t know
     how to react. “Important?” I said. “Do you really —”
    “Why is this on?”
    Angela had turned around to stare at my television, the colors muted, the sound impossibly faint. At the moment, it was the
     scene where Deckard is attacked by Pris, the most beautiful of the replicants. A pleasure model, Pris leaps up and wraps her
     legs around Deckard’s neck, then pulls his head around by his nostrils, then punches him.
    “Are you watching this?” Angela asked, touching a finger to the screen.
    I experienced a wave of panic.
“Don’t touch that.”
    ______
    Frozen dinner entrées followed, chicken with wild rice on the flokati, a shared exchange that gravitated imperceptibly toward
     talking and drinking, me sipping Jack Daniel’s and coffee, Angela bringing over her bottle of Stoli and a carton of orange
     juice. Then, over the course of the next few weeks, there developed between us an even more indistinct transition from talking
     and drinking to kissing and sampling the prescriptions that cluttered my kitchen countertop. I fell into a delirium, a waking
     dream fueled by all those meds but also by a fathomless infatuation. Amazingly, Angela’s eyes, which I had first thought were
     so blue, changed mysteriously — from blue to brown to green, even violet, virtually every color of the spectrum. Some people’s
     eyes appear to change slightly depending on what they’re wearing or the ambient light, but Angela’s morphed completely, dependent,
     it seemed, on her state of mind, like a pair of mood rings. Her heels would clack noisily on the steps outside my door, and
     minutes later she would appear, smiling, eyes transformed.
    We would lie on the flokati and listen to the messages on the answering machine: Dr. Silowicz calling to reschedule sessions,
     so deeply concerned about my psychological well-being; Melanie, my father’s young wife, inviting me, no,
begging
me, to visit little Gabriel and my dad; my father’s lawyer calling, too, the satanic Frank Heile, Esquire, ostensibly to
     relay some practical detail, to question a cash advance on one of my credit cards, but really to remind me I was a drain on
     the system, a character who was dragging the whole production down and was better off cut from the story line. Angela and
     I — we ate, drank, fed each other’s appetites. We slept, we kissed, we