"Terrible News" by Ryan Mach
“You only lose what you cling to.”
-Gautama Buddha
In the summer that I left April in Ohio and moved to Los Angeles, I was not in a very good place. My landlord and her two dogs lived directly below me, and not one of them could go very long without making a hell of a lot of noise. I couldn’t read on my very nice balcony before work because my landlord would strut though the small back lot we shared carrying her tennis racket over the small lawn of grass and into the driveway and tell me good morning and ask me what I thought about the weather or the President or her pear tree, which was very beautiful. It’s very easy for me to cordial with people and I’m often told that I am a very polite person, but I am not proud of this. I would rather not talk to most people most of the time, and yet there’s a compulsive sort of spinelessness that has pushed me headlong into hundreds of tedious conversations. I don’t like to discuss politics in California, the weather rarely offers anything new to talk about, and I’ve never had much of a vocabulary for describing plant life.
The dogs were very large boxers who spent most of their time staring through my back door. Between the helicopters, the sirens, and the screechings of the mentally ill, the only sound I ever heard in Los Angeles was the ceaseless barking of those goddamned dogs and the ceaseless scratching of their goddamned paws against my back door. Even worse, they scared the piss out of my cat, a very neurotic animal that had now taken to urinating in every conceivable crevice of my house besides the one in which the litter box was located. I might have complained, but the last thing I wanted was to have a conversation with my landlord that could conceivably turn into a losing argument. Besides, I rarely slept at night – it felt petty to try to blame the dogs for that.
One Thursday in July, April called me as I was leaving work. She would call me very often that summer, which I expected, but didn’t like. Sometimes I wouldn’t pick up, but I did many more times than I should have, not because I wanted to, but because it seemed as if I didn’t have a choice. She would sometimes call at night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the day, but no matter what time it was or what we were doing, the conversation would go in the same useless direction.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“Can I do something for you?”
“Just checking in, I guess.”
“Alright.”
“Was your day okay?”
“It was okay, yeah.”
“What are you up to now?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you coming back?”
“No.”
“Why are you trying to punish me? I don’t know what you want me to apologize for, I have no idea what you want me to do! It’s so fucking ridiculous that you just left like you did and it’s even more ridiculous that I have to beg you to come back! Will you just tell me what I did wrong?”
“No, you didn’t do anything, this isn’t about anything. It’s nothing.”
“You packed up everything you own, rented an apartment, and left me alone here over nothing?”
“That doesn’t seem so unbelievable to me.”
“Are you trying to make me sad?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you love me, Thomas?”
"Mmmhmm."
“So you love me then? That’s what you’re saying, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then what the hell are you doing in California?”
“I have a job. I don't know. It doesn't matter. What's the weather in Ohio like right now?” I started to miss Ohio very badly and think about the rain falling on my bare back as I sometimes do when I am no longer in control of my thoughts, so I hung up on April and called Bobby.
Bobby had moved to LA a few years ago, which is part of the reason I came. I enjoyed talking to Bobby, which was not particularly common and probably the principal reason that we were friends in the first place. We arranged to get dinner at some usual restaurant on Pico where the people were young and attractive with interesting haircuts and good teeth. It was one of those places that refused to decide if it was a café or a bar or a restaurant and demanded that an expensive salad be included in whatever meal you ordered and required you to pull your water from an industrial-looking metal spigot, but I liked it because of those nice-looking people who made you felt like somebody when you were there. When I arrived, Bobby had already reserved us a table outside (it was warm and sunny that day), so I immediately ordered one of those cheap domestics that it is better not to mention by name and sat down. Bobby was a tall, attractive man with a thick head of dark, wavy hair and a beard that would have been very full were it not being constantly pulled apart by his fingers in fits of nervousness. His high cheekbones, rigid jaw and strong nose made him look very noble, an impression he constantly contradicted with his somewhat forward, energetic mannerisms and his rough way of speaking and dressing. He wore a faded Daniel Johnston t-shirt with a noticeable hole in the armpit and a pair of dirty-looking, thin-fitting jeans. “Feeling inspired today? Anything worth writing into an ad about testosterone pills is worth writing into poetry,” he said, grinning and leaning in.
“I’m not talking poetry with you, you hate poetry.”
“I don’t hate poetry! How can you hate poetry, I love poetry, I just don’t understand it, that’s all. Can’t you write something that will make you some real money, though? Like music or a screenplay?” Bobby tended to speak and gesticulate exuberantly, which was helpful because the cars on the street behind us were barely moving behind the traffic lights. The hum of motors and the dissonance of different radio stations tended to blot out the more subtle facets of conversation. “Money’s what I write the ads for.”
“I don’t mean ad money, I mean money money, as in famous money, as in ‘move out of the city’ money.”
“I thought you liked the city.” “I love this city, I fucking adore it, but you can’t live here when you’re famous – you have to go to the Palisades or something, or maybe even La Jolla. God, wouldn’t that be nice, Tom? In fucking La Jolla?”
“I don’t want to be famous.” “You’re a goddamn liar is what you are. Everyone wants to be famous, you’re rich when you’re famous, everybody loves you when you’re famous.” “Why the hell would I want everyone to love me?” “Because love is the whole point, Tom, what kind of a question is that? Love is the whole center of happiness, it’s what keeps this all from becoming some huge pissing contest, it’s the only good reason to do anything at all!”
“Jesus, the drinks haven’t even come yet.” “Well if I were famous – oh, hold on.” An ambulance dragged its load in and out of traffic as it rolled towards the restaurant like it was stuck in neutral, pulled towards its destination only by the ineffable forces of fate and gravity. The flashing lights and unbearable siren screeched for our attention as loud as almost anything in Los Angeles, and it was nearly five minutes before it could crawl through the congestion of Pico boulevard far enough to let my ears stop ringing.
As its whine began to fade away, Bobby simultaneously pulled at his beard and sipped from a glass of water. “If I were famous,” he started, halfway through swallowing, “I’ll tell you one thing, Hallie would marry me in a heartbeat. There would be no hesitation, no question, no nothing. That, my friend, is what fame does for love.” Bobby would always talk half-seriously about marrying his girlfriend, which didn’t seem to cause either party any discomfort. He was a funny guy and she was a good sport. “Is that why you want to get famous, Bobby? So you can get married?”
“No, of course not, it’s not like that, good God! I love that girl, dammit, I want to get famous so I can marry someone I love!” “You are so full of shit, nobody wants to get married anymore. Things change too quickly for people to get married, it’s an absurd institution. You sure talk about love a lot for somebody who doesn’t care for poetry.” “What does that have to do with anything?” The waitress arrived with our beers and she was very pretty with perfect skin and nice glasses and a charming little gap between her two front teeth and I forgot where I was going with that point about poetry.
The conversation moved haltingly but enthusiastically like this for a few hours as the beers we drank turned to whiskeys we ordered. We were many drinks past dinner when Bobby had learned the waitress’ name and started asking her all these questions and giving her all these compliments, so I dropped nearly enough money on the table and told him I had to catch up on some work. It was nighttime now, and I was drunk, and the cars drove slowly enough down the street so that you didn’t have to run where there wasn’t a crosswalk. The moon occupied the very same space it always did and the street was as empty as it usually was and so my mind began to function predictably and I became very bored. Walking the three blocks back to my house, I tried to improve some copy I was supposed to finish by the weekend that was bouncing around in my head.
A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. It’s what everybody wants and now it’s what everyone can have. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less.
A couple in a beat-up Honda Civic parked ahead of me was having a violent argument and I hurried past them with my hands in my pockets. I turned at the fluorescent beacon of the McDonald’s sign and started down a residential street. No, that wasn’t a strong enough sell – people don’t want to have a good smile, they want to have a smile better than everyone else’s.
A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. It’s what everybody wants and now, it’s finally what you can have. Now, you can have a visibly brighter, more radiant-looking smile in just 20 days or less.
Sounded wrong, awkward. About fifteen feet away, a pit bull in someone’s yard was straddling another pit bull against a chain link fence, snarling and biting as it thrust against her. With each push against the steel, the female’s lips would peel farther and farther back until there was nothing but shiny white teeth. I crossed the street. Advertising should make people feel like they don’t already have what they want, like it feels bad to not have it and it will only get worse.
A dazzling…red-carpet…celebrity smile. You’re either born with it – or you’re not. Right? Well, not anymore. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less.
Having reached my house, I promptly stumbled over a crack in the sidewalk and started to feel self-conscious, though I didn’t think anyone was around. I walked up the stairs and fumbled with the key a bit, struggling to remember which parts of the big wooden door I had locked and which keys were supposed to fit into them. As soon as I was inside, I dug out the bottle of my nicer whiskey, poured myself a drink, kissed the cat, threw it out of the bedroom and slipped into bed. “It’s so easy to go to bed drunk,” I thought, leaving the whiskey on the bedside table. When you aren’t drinking and you aren’t working, you tend to think quite a lot, and when I’m not drunk or worried about anything I think about nothing, which is very bad for me. I used to spend a lot of the time I wasn’t spending drinking or working writing poetry or reading the news, but when all that was done I had nothing to think about. Sometimes I would think about sex, but thinking about sex eventually led to thinking about April, and then I had to think about nothing again. But when you’re working, you’re thinking about something, and when you’re drinking, it isn’t so unpleasant to think about nothing – nothing seems fine and you can fall asleep and gradually fade into nothing yourself. Still, it’s much easier to fall asleep with the TV on, so I turned on the news and let the sounds of middle-eastern chaos drown out the roar of the dogs outside.
–
Every morning I would make the coffee and feed the cat and go out to the balcony to read the paper before my twenty-minute commute to Santa Monica. The front page was mostly made up of things I vaguely remembered from the night before: the fighting in Egypt, the new general, the Muslim Brotherhood, the failed negotiations. I read about how the general wasn’t really at all interested in talking things out with the Muslim Brotherhood, how he’d told the U.S. and everyone else that diplomacy had failed when he hadn’t actually tried it, he was really only trying to justify shooting Islamists through the windows of parked buses. Senator Graham would speak to the general for hours at a time, the conversations being lengthened considerably by the use of translators. Although the two men got along well, the general was unreceptive to the Senator’s arguments for peaceful negotiation with the Muslim Brotherhood, insisting that the group was made up of reckless and violent terrorists who couldn’t be reasoned with. Though the general was widely regarded as a sober and reasonable leader, “the way things were going seemed to leave him rather intoxicated with power,” according to Senator Graham. As of press time, over 500
“Hey Tom, any good news for me today?” My landlord stood outside of the house, holding her tennis racket above her eyes in order to squint upwards at me. She was alarmingly pale in the sunlight, and her garishly colored athletic wear left so very little to the imagination, and yet so much more than it could have possibly wanted to consider. I peered from my chair over the plain black steel of my balcony’s handrail onto our gaudy back lot with its absurdly verdant lawn and its constant sprinklers and its bizarre foliage that hung and twisted and bloomed in manners that seemed unnatural and smiled as hard as I could. “Oh no, you know, only bad news, gloom and doom in the middle east and all that,” I said, reluctantly putting down my paper. “How are you this morning?”
“Ugh, I can’t stand to read the newspaper,” she replied loudly, “not in the morning. If I’m in a terrible mood I play terrible tennis.”
“I’m sorry the news makes you feel so terrible.”
“I just get so angry hearing about all those people hurting one another! So much hatred! I tell you, if you live here long enough you just can’t understand why people can’t get along together.” Her jaw grinded mechanically around a wad of gum as she spoke.
“I suppose people don’t feel as strongly about politics or religion here.”
“And is it any wonder? That’s all that stuff ever brings is anger and bloodshed and misery. I say believe whatever you want to believe, it’s all the same when you really get down to it. Just feel love for everyone, you know? Not just people like yourself. Those Buddhists were on to something, if you ask me.”
I really didn’t want to talk about this with her any longer. “Very sensible of you,” I said. “I don’t want to get you all worked up over this, will you be any good at your tennis match?”
“Oh it’s just practice today. But thanks so much for thinking of me, Tom, you’re so sweet!”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Well, I’ve gotta run, don’t want to be late – please don’t forget to take the trash out tonight.”
I bristled at the obligation. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I smiled.
“And don’t let the dogs out. Thanks, Tom!”
“Any time!” I picked the paper up again and resolved that ten was as sensible a time to go to work as nine. As I read, I knew the sky in Santa Monica was making promises of rain that it wouldn’t keep.
Writing advertisements is not particularly challenging or glamorous work, at least when you are writing smaller spots to appear in print. The work I did would usually be tucked away in some tiny corner of a local newspaper, or sometimes flashing urgently along the margin of a web browser, intended to reach only the small-minded, elderly, and naïve. There is a sort of basic psychology involved in writing such things, but it’s only slightly more difficult to grasp that science than it is to be fooled by it. It is a good job to have early in your adult life because it introduces you to the fact that supporting yourself almost always involves manipulating or somehow injuring someone else.
Sitting at my desk, I typed out the wording that I’d decided on the night before. One advantage I had in this business was how readily I could memorize phrases and sentences. I’d trained myself to grasp each concept or phrase that entered my consciousness and focus on its particulars, the ordering of the words and intended messages on a billboard, or the timing and phrasing of a punch-line in a movie trailer. This is a good way to think in Los Angeles because the city expends so much effort and money on giving you useless information that it becomes very easy to ignore it and let it subtly influence and manipulate you. It is also a good way to prevent boredom.
A dazzling, red-carpet, celebrity smile. You’re either born with it or you’re not. Right? Not anymore. Now, you can have a bright, radiant smile in just 20 days or less!
This ad seemed to be a satisfactory length and would only need a tagline and a phone number before it was published, given that it would occupy a fairly small space in a fairly obscure section of the Santa Monica Mirror. I started to peruse the more useless annals of the internet. There was always much more work to be done, but the work was easily shirked and quickly forgotten. Except for a few necessary assignments, being a low-level “creative type” did not require much dedication, tenacity, or enthusiasm. In fact, I found it expedient to be as impartial and unenthusiastic as possible about the work I did because enthusiasm fosters attachment to one’s work. Serious attachment to anything is necessarily a hindrance of some kind, but attachment to one’s work seems plainly absurd to me. While the other things we grow fond of over the course of our lives are usually characterized by convincing illusions and engaging mysteries, there are really no decent reasons to care about what happens to the lies we construct, however carefully we construct them. I stood up to take a walk and discovered that Bobby had been standing behind me.
“Wow, it makes me immensely uncomfortable to think about how long you’ve been back there,” I said, noticing that he was wearing the same shirt he was wearing yesterday. “Don’t you have anywhere to be?”
“Out to lunch,” he said absently, pulling at his chin and half-forgetting where he was. He looked up at me and regained some consciousness of his surroundings and purpose. Only half of Bobby’s anxious energy was directed outwards, the rest of it contributing to these fits of something near paralysis. “Drinks tonight? With me and Hallie? There’s some loud-ass bar near Melrose and Fairfax, sometimes they have burlesque shows.”
I knew exactly which bar he was talking about and the idea didn’t interest me at all. The bouncer would be wearing a fedora and a vest and spending most of his time telling kids with flip-flops that they’d have to come to the bar later with different shoes. The drinks would be served in mason jars so as to inconspicuously sell less liquor. The men would be aggressive and the women uninteresting. “I’d rather not go there,” I responded.
“Great, of course, wonderful. Do you have any other suggestions?”
“Well, there’s a wine bar on Broadway that’s halfway between here my apartment-“ I stopped short, noticing that Bobby was looking at the carpet and not at me, pouting and twisting his fingers in his pockets. I’d offended him by rejecting him outright and he was pouting about it. If I’d considered the bar before telling him I didn’t prefer it than none of this would be difficult, but I’d complicated things by being direct. “Oh, nevermind,” I said. “You already told Hallie your plan, we’ll go down Melrose.”
Bobby smiled. “Great, knew you’d come to your senses, was a little pissed off that you didn’t want to go, honestly, but forget about it. Want to get lunch?”
I looked outside. The marine layer had cleared away and it was warm and sunny again. “Thanks, I’ve actually got some work that I was going to do,” I lied. “I’ll see you tonight.”