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Anniversary - Sunday Night - February - Downtown L.A. |
How to hold on to this sense - this Sunday becoming night - walking down 7th from Grand to Hill - I can't stop myself - it was getting very dark, very quickly, and chilly, but I had to go - I had to get there, I had to look in at 742 South, where we got started - had to see it up close, touch it - I had the time - you were resting, in our boutique hotel room, a few blocks away - Go. I hurried by what was, maybe one or two still are - landmarks I didn't have time to remember - not now. I turned the corner at Hill, my hands stuck in my jacket pockets - slowed at the driveway into the shallow parking lot - still there, the chain still down - We could be spotted, even on Saturday night, late - It will be ok, you said - We won't get caught - Meet Me. stopped at the crosswalk - just beyond th driveway - middle of the block - and
peered at my shoes, sneaking a look across the street. pushed the 'walk' button.
The lobby was lit - fake pink marble walls - fake? pink? - and so small for such a momentous place. A dowdy coffee stand in the front left corner with portable shelves of cellophaned danish , fat cookies, and plastic condiments - when did that happen? And only 2 - maybe 3 - elevators "I can't tell. And the floor to ceiling doors to Union Bank on the right are boarded up somehow. Another door too - straight back - to where?
I glance up the street - a pre-Disney Times Square-looking street now, though it was hardly Madison Avenue then: the street people are street people now, not office people; they notice me, don't stare, maybe figure I've got as much business there as they, maybe not. I turn back to the lobby, look past a grid of bars through windowed doors that must be the same - those bars - when did they put up those bars? I want to pull closer, press my face to the metal - empty beer cans, the smells of piss and fast food wrappers make me leery but how else to see my 25 year old self standing there, at the elevators - 8:45am - a little late, as usual - anxious to get up to the 4th floor - high-heeling to my tiny cubicle in the corner, to be there, when you walk by on your way to your office, barely giving me a glance, sometimes deliberately not. Proverbial knots swell again in my stomach, the glories of adulterous lust, an all-star array of sensation culminating in this Sunday Night victory over white ribbons.
Tensions tease me - I can't tell one from the other tonight, this Sunday Night, peering through my own time machine, holding onto this luscious tension in my heart, in my head, in my mouth just a few minutes longer - even if I'll have to run all the way back, back to the hotel, not be late, not this time - I have a celebration to create tonight, another proof for remembering, luxuriating in, later, our sure, pure, only-and-forever past plus a day - run - back to our hotel room - away from the tension that blocks the recall that you're resting, that you must rest, the terror that nothing lasts forever.
copyright 2003
Angela Consolo
Mankiewicz |
