Mort Is Back in Town

I was in a restaurant just outside of Portland when I heard a voice directed at me that said, “You from L.A.?”

The place was called Christie’s, and it served mostly burgers and fries and hot apple pie smothered in melting ice cream. I was having chicken strips and coffee.

I couldn’t figure out the source of the voice for a minute and then realized it came from a guy at the counter with his head thrown back, who was putting drops in his eyes.

He was a big-bellied man in his 60s with a T-shirt that said “I’m too sexy for my shirt,” from that TV commercial about perfume or something in which a beautiful young woman does a tantalizing wiggle to a male monotone.

I said yes, I was from L.A., and when he finished putting the eyedrops in he shook my hand and said, “Condolences.”

Everybody around him laughed like crazy, as though this was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and maybe it was around those parts.

I just shrugged and let it go, I’d heard it so many times before. My wife Cinelli, who was with me, said she was proud of me, I hadn’t stuck a fork in his belly or threatened to jam my chicken strips up his nose.

I couldn’t have done the last thing because after he put the eyedrops away, he brought out a nose spray and had his head thrown back again, squeezing stuff up his nostrils.

Cinelli watched for a minute and then said, “I hope to God he doesn’t have hemorrhoids.”

*

We were in Portland to attend a National Writers Workshop, at which I was supposed to speak on how to write a column. I got about halfway through before I realized I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and opened the thing up for questions.

I read somewhere once that a columnist is someone who comes after the battle and shoots the wounded, which I passed on to the young journalists attending the workshop. God knows how they’ll grow up interpreting that.

I was in a lousy frame of mind at Christie’s when the guy started needling me about L.A., but I’ve learned to stay calm. He introduced himself as Harold. He asked my name and thought I’d said it was Allen Mortimer and called me Mortimer through the rest of our conversation.

I don’t hold that against him, though, because I mumble a lot and sometimes people think I’m saying my name is Elmer Teenez or Omar Teenez or Allen Teezy. I don’t know how he got Mortimer out of it, though. That’s a reach.

He said he used to live in the Valley and had gotten sick and tired of L.A. long before the riots or the earthquake or any of the other stuff.

“I could see the way it was going, Mortimer,” he said. “I was getting out while the getting-out was good.”

He sold his place in North Hollywood after his wife died, then bought a trailer and headed out. Now he lives in a little town called Tualatin and spends his time needling people from L.A. His wife’s name was Edna, and he missed her so much he could hardly stand it.

*

It was when he said how much he missed her that I realized he didn’t hate L.A. as much as he wanted me to think. What he hated was the cancer that had taken Edna and had left him alone in a house that still whispered of her presence, in clothes and pictures and faint traces of cologne.

They’d been married a long time. Edna probably made sure he used the eyedrops when he was supposed to, and the nose spray too, I guess. She cooked him good, healthy meals and told him what a sweet, funny, hard-working dude he was. She bought him that T-shirt that said “I’m too sexy for my shirt.”

He left L.A. for the same reason we all try to escape the kinds of misery that sometimes threatens to suck the air from our lungs and strangle us in grief. Haven’t you felt that way sometimes? Haven’t we all?

He just wanted to get away, that’s all, and I can understand that.

I finished my chicken strips and shook Harold’s hand and wished him well. Later I wondered to Cinelli how everyone always seems to know we’re from L.A. Do we emit an odor that identifies us as Southern Californians? Is it the way we walk or talk or scratch?

She said, “Beats me, Mort. But you did OK with Harold back there. You were kind. I like that in a man.”

Then she kissed me and we flew home, and now I’m back wandering the streets of L.A. again, looking for trouble and wondering what everything is all about.