Hollywood Ghost Story

April 24th, 2008Blog2 comments

I’m driving out to Hollywood again today. I like Hollywood — it’s the closest approximation you can get to being in a big city in LA: Tallish buildings, lots of people walking around. It’s a lot less dirty than it was before — the streets are cleaner and it’s much harder to buy heroin.

I remember once, years ago, I was waiting for a bus on Sunset. And I turned and there was this woman right in front of me — this elderly lady done up with too much makeup, like a perverse zombie version of a fallen Hollywood starlet. Caked on foundation. And she was wearing a 1920s Flapper sorta outfit. But that wasn’t the strange part.

She was missing an eye. And by “missing” I mean there was a big, ice-cream-scooped-out cavern where her eye should have been. And one of her arms had been torn off and healed over. There was just a fleshy nub there. It was like half of her body had been blown up and scarred over by time.

I literally jumped back when I saw her. I usually try to be polite and thoughtful when it comes to peoples’ handicaps, but the visual image was just too much. I was shocked. Scared.

And that moment the bus arrived, and I got on. And I looked back to still see her standing there, just sort of gaping off into the distance.

I’m a real scientist about stuff, but I wonder: Was she a ghost? Thrown up by the lonely, evil, unfulfilled memories of this city? A dead studio mogul’s mistress, crashed and burned on Sunset after she was denied a part?

I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know.