Tears on the Pavement

I bummed around Sylmar in the hours past midnight last week, like a cat prowling dark alleys, sniffing out whatever I could find. It was on a Thursday and there was a quarter moon.

I do that sometimes when I can’t sleep. Trivial anxieties become mind-chewing monsters in the psychedelic madness of insomnia, and it’s better to run than fight.

So I get in the car and wander.

L.A. is always awake anyhow. Freeways hum with traffic, markets and laundromats go all night, tennis courts stay open and 24-hour restaurants are almost always busy.

My angry old stepfather, who also never slept, used to go out in the yard in his underwear at night and dig in the garden, no matter what time it was.

“It was the Great Depression,” my mother explained one day, when I asked why he did that.

She blamed everything on the Depression, no matter what, and while I never did quite understand why it made him garden by moonlight in his shorts, I didn’t pursue it.

I was fully dressed the night I ended up at Denny’s, just off the Golden State Freeway at the foot of the Roxford Street off-ramp.

I was having a cup of coffee at the counter, studying the tattoos of an old guy about three seats away, when a woman sat deliberately next to him and struck up a conversation.

It was The Night Harry Met Sally.

At first I didn’t pay much attention but then she said, “Do you come here often?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard that.

It was like she was a dark-eyed beauty at some swinging singles bar trying to score with a Sagittarian.

But this was Denny’s, not T.G.I. Friday’s, and Sally was no dark-eyed beauty. She was maybe on the dumpy downside of 35, and had skin like the face of the moon.

Her hair hung in tangled bunches and looked like it hadn’t been washed in a long time. She had teeth missing.

Harry was no great catch either. He was maybe 70-plus, wrinkled, balding and wore a scowl like the fires of hell were burning in his gut.

He reminded me of my stepfather, whose name was Harry, and who had naked-women tattoos up and down both arms. That’s why the name of that movie, “When Harry Met Sally,” popped into my head.

But trust me when I say this was no encounter between Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal.

Harry slurped his coffee like a dog drinking from a bowl and hardly looked up when Sally talked. He was reading a National Enquirer and grumbled in response every once in awhile.

The place was noisy so I couldn’t hear everything Sally said and I couldn’t hear Harry at all. Truckers, bikers and retired people traveling in motor homes came and went, and surly young guys who looked furtive and predatory.

A woman sat by herself in a corner drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the night. Her eyes glistened in the flashing headlights of passing traffic, and I wondered if she were crying.

I had kind of drifted away from any interest in Harry and Sally, but then I heard Sally’s voice in a metered cadence and glanced over to see what she was up to.

Damned if she wasn’t reading poetry from a scrap of paper. Harry had even put down the National Enquirer and was listening.

Pieces of the poem fell through the noise like leaves in winter, and I only got a word or a phrase here and there.

There was something about a child crying and “small gasps of desperation.”

Small gasps of desperation . . . .

Had Sally written that? She didn’t look like a poet, but then how does a poet look? Art is where you find it.

I once heard a junkie describe the long, dark halls of his addiction in a poetry of pain that wrenched the soul. I heard a guy with a guitar playing music in a tunnel that haunts me to this day like a half-remembered dream.

Why not art in Denny’s?

Sally finished reading the poem and Harry just stared at her for a moment, the way a lion stares at an antelope when he isn’t hungry, without interest or passion.

I heard her say something about a place to stay. Harry mumbled in reply, put money on the counter and got up and left without looking back.

Sally had given it everything she had but Harry wasn’t buying. In a moment or two, she was gone too, and so was the woman at the window with tears in her eyes and the couple with the motor home.

I kept thinking I was a lot like Sally, trading words for a place to stay, only luckier. By whose caprice does one succeed and another fail? Who choses?

I finished my coffee and headed for home. Small gasps of desperation. Not bad. Not bad at all. She should’ve been paid.