There are black birds hunched in the oleander bushes. As we drive home, we pull up next to a truck with metal bars. Inside, something roars, some caged thing pacing, lashing its tail.

We drive up the canyon under the Hollywood sign. It used to say Hollywoodland like Alice in Wonder or Disney but now it just says Hollywood as in wood of hollys. Or Holy Wood. I think people have tried to leap off of it and die, or is that just in books?






Below the canyon stretches out like an umbilical cord to the belly of the city and up we go past the Spanish-style apartments where the girl got raped last week, some man prowling outside her pink stucco walls while she lay on her bed. Broke the glass. Past the canyon market where I worked last summer, packing bags full of yogurts, avocados, peaches, and wine for the canyon people-the long-haired, junky musicians from My Animal and Shocks and Struts, the beautiful lesbian models Rebecca and Sophie, shaved punk kids, artists in paint-spattered clothes and bone jewelry, film types in cowboy boots and jeans carrying scripts.Past the cafe -they all hang out there too-where Claudia and I drink coffee (mine black, hers sugary and milky brown) and smoke at the window booth with the sun dusting in like some kind of drug we want to put in our noses and mouths and veins.

And up where it winds toward the crest of the hill, past the old stone castles, Spanish villas, Moroccan palaces, gabled fairy-tale cottages-all built for movie stars a long time ago. Charlie Chaplin's house that was a fancy whorehouse after that. And the house where Victoria and her daughter, Perdita, and Victoria's various boyfriends all live. It's covered with hibiscus in front and the blue glass windows must make Perdita feel like she is in some kind of a fish tank.

Tucked in the hills is the lake where the runners circle, passing the rusty metal tubing I have nightmares about, going over the bridge with the carved lion heads and the water below getting sucked down into a whirlpool drain.At the top of the canyon are our two houses-Claudia and her mother, Eva's palace and our house. Both of them under the Hollywood sign looking down over the stretch of canyon to the mother belly city like children attached to an old cord.

We live in a house with a tower. The man who built it was a toymaker; he carved the faces over the fireplace and planted the vines that cover the walls and the oleander in the garden. It smells like cedar and eucalyptus, smoke and lavender in this house. There are things everywhere: books, shells, fossils, dried flowers, bird skulls, the antique wooden cherub, the miniature stone sphinx, ivory monkeys, the brass menorah, china dolls with little teeth, the ancient Roman tear vessel that came from a tomb'-hat looks like a fossilized tear itself; the three bronze women stand erect.

*F.L. Block