Journal: Descent

I called on the ad in the Recycler, and we met there the next afternoon: the day was cloudy and cool. I had never been to Echo Park, and got a bit lost in the winding streets. My prospective landlord had a heavy moustache and roundish wire frames - he looked like Gene Shallit.

I've always been a pushover for bohemian funk, and moved in a couple of days later. I called a few friends - friends indeed at such times - to help with the piano: a hundred and one chipped and crumbling stairs, all down. The day after piano day I arrived officially, the rest of my schmettles boxed and bagged and packed in my truck. I made my first trip down the stairs as a resident, groceries in arms.

The sun, hidden for days behind the dreary June haze, had at last broken through, and brought out my new neighbors, whom I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting. I cautiously set down the bags. Dozens of them darted in and out of a crack in the shingles above my front door, taxiing erratically in the humid air above the landing. I was terrified - had been terrified of them ever since I was a child, though I was stung only once, on my big toe. I picked up my groceries, keys ready, and dashed to the door as fast as I dared. I stabbed at the deadbolt and got it unlocked, hopped into the kitchen and slammed the door behind me. I turned and watched them through the doorglass, enraged at this lummox crashing through their home. I called a fumigator immediately.

The next afternoon I was racked with guilt. I had come home again - having left when it was still chilly and they were not yet awake - and found hundreds, maybe thousands dead, my small stone landing a silent carpet of gold and black. One of my neighbors - there were two households off the stairs on the way down to mine - muttered testily about the pesticide dust inside his house as I passed. Under the door was the fumigator's bill - and a note to call him.

"No, nope. I couldn't get 'em all. The main entrance is clear 'round back. Mmm hmm. Yeah, that bamboo is too thick back there, I couldn't get in there. I probably wouldna' got the queen, you gotta get the queen. That whole back wall is probably honeycombed." I hung up and walked through the carnage on the landing, and peeked around the hedge into the bamboo forest beneath the house. He was right: the corner at the far end of my apartment was blazing with activity. I went back in and softly closed the door.

I sidled up to the living room wall and pressed my ear against the plaster. The low hum was everywhere. Great. Lily-livered moi, a queen among bees, had just paid first and last month's rent on a fucking hive.

Over time I befriended the bees, and they got used to me. At night when it was quiet I liked to put my ear to the wall near the dining table, where the humming was the loudest. I imagined the massive queen being groomed and fed, pumping scores of larvae from her womb. There were other peculiarities about the apartment. The rough-sawn beams in the living room formed a Celtic cross on the ceiling, and the bathroom was like a cave: you walked through an arch into a cramped, crumbling shower room which also contained the sink, and the toilet was through another archway beyond that; there were no windows, and the walls and ceilings were always wet.

One day (on a cloudy afternoon while my friends were asleep) I went exploring in the bamboo behind the apartment. I discovered another room underneath my apartment, a sort of basement's basement where I thought there was only foundation. I pushed the bamboo aside and peered through a filthy window. I tried the door - oddly, it was unlocked.

I found junk, mostly: some hastily stacked dilapidated rattan furniture with water damage, and several decaying boxes filled with stained papers and odd bits. The only real light in the room entered through one window on the far wall, and underneath it something caught my eye: a green and blue porcelain lamp in the shape of a fish, with no shade. It was high camp, probably early fifties. I took that and a couple of dusty coolie hats upstairs and tried a bulb in the lamp - it worked! I spoke to the landlord a few days later - Gene Shallit - and thinking to amuse him told of my findings. He became very angry with me for rummaging through his stuff. I apologized - I thought all that junk had been left behind by a previous tenant. I had no idea he had ever lived there, or even owned the house.

A few months later I escaped Echo Park, up the stairs and into my new apartment near Griffith Park. I called my few comrades again for piano duty: the price of having musician friends. I like my place here a lot, but I miss the bees.

But I don't miss the fish lamp. It somehow managed to find its way to Hollywood too, right along with me and the coolie hats.