The Los Angeles Diaries Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Winter 1994 - FIRE

  Fall 1961 - SNAPSHOT

  Spring 1995 - DAILY RUSHES

  Summer 1962 - MY PAPA’S WALTZ

  Fall 1988 - THE FACTS

  Summer 1968 - TOUCH

  Winter 1995 - DAISY

  Summer 1977 - PERSONAL EFFECTS

  Spring 1984 - ON SELLING A NOVEL TO HOLLYWOOD

  DEAL I

  DEAL II

  DEAL III

  Summer 1970 - A FINE PLACE

  Summer 1996 - MIDAIR

  Spring 1997 - SOUTH DAKOTA

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Copyright Page

  Praise for The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir

  “The Los Angeles Diaries is one of those rare memoirs that cuts deeply, chillingly into the reader’s own dreams. It is a dramatic, vivid, heartbreaking, very personal story of human responsibility and guilt, of alcoholism, of suicide, of marital struggle, of the uncertainties and ambiguities of a writer’s life in modern America. The book is cleanly and beautifully written, and it’s also incredibly moving.”

  —Tim O’Brien

  “Each chapter shows the tool marks of the well-crafted short story, carefully and even lovingly shaped and polished until it shines . . . The stories amount to a memoir of stunning intimacy and unforgettable impact.”

  —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “With The Los Angeles Diaries, [Brown’s] written a beautiful book. It’s a miracle . . . It’s the balance of agony and grace, of course, that makes life so ferociously interesting. Brown has perfectly captured that balance in this unpretentious, very profound book.”

  —Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World

  “This gemlike collection . . . materializes in such delicate strokes that the emerging theme becomes one of almost miraculous forgiveness, any pain and rage all but hidden between the lines.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year)

  “The book is a classic, deeply moving and expertly crafted.”

  —Sydney Morning Herald

  “Vivid, shocking and funny . . . a darkly bright, hugely compassionate and oddly redemptive story of loss and failure, guilt and addiction.”

  —London Independent on Sunday (Best Books of the Year)

  “Remarkable . . . Rises about the commonplace to the true art of comprehended pain . . . Brown’s cadenced, plain prose sings with a deadpan grace, at once hard-eyed and vulnerable, eschewing either false emotion or frigidity . . . The hallmark of his prose is gravitas. His truths are definitive.”

  —Boston Globe

  “As tragic as Brown’s life has been, the memoir displays neither pathos nor self-pity but elegiac wisdom . . . How moving is Brown’s Los Angeles Diaries? While double-checking the quotes and facts, I simply gave in and reread it again, struck even more by its pain, its beauty, and its craft.”

  —Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

  “Riveting . . . priceless.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (“A” review)

  “The Los Angeles Diaries is terrific. It’s one of the toughest memoirs I’ve ever read, at once spare and startlingly, admirably unsparing. It glows with a dark luminescence. James Brown is a fine, fine writer.”

  —Michael Chabon

  “Novelist Brown mines the explosive territory of his own harsh and complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir . . . Brown flays open his own tortured skin looking for what blood beats beneath and why. The result is a grimly exquisite memoir that reads like a noir novel but grips unrelentingly like the hand of a homeless drunk begging for help.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly (Best Books of the Year, starred review)

  “The unfolding tragedy of James Brown’s doomed family, torn apart by drugs, alcohol, madness and suicide, makes one consider the possibility of curse, of haunting . . . The Los Angeles Diaries is unsparing and clear-eyed, a heartbreaking story, and yet oddly inspirational, the tale of the last man standing.”

  —Janet Fitch

  “A stark, affecting memoir about a writer seeking to comprehend and overcome his demons.”

  —Sunday London Times

  “James Brown, novelist, college professor and screenwriter, writes straight-up in lucid, unadorned prose. This book is about humanity and love, not just addiction.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “This is a compelling tale of addiction and fear . . . a harrowing story that doesn’t ask for your pity, but merely to look at what’s crawling about under the rock in this starkly powerful memoir.”

  —The Glasgow Herald

  “The Los Angeles Diaries is spare and unsparing, a beautifully written account of how a child can process anger and pain and turn it into art, self-destruction and redemption. Brown’s book is a moving account of addiction and recovery and a signal that a talented writer is back and at the top of his game.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Brown is a fine writer. His prose is lean and crisp and the heartache is written between the lines, like the loaded space in a pregnant pause . . . The writing is crystalline.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “This complex memoir defies pat interpretation. Brown’s prose is direct and confessional as he . . . fuses stark, poignant tales of woe and authorial insight without descending into self-pity or self-indulgence.”

  —Seattle Weekly (Best Memoirs of the Year)

  “This is a ghost story, and James Brown should be dead. That he is not is a remarkable tale of perseverance in the face of staggering loss and tragedy.”

  —Charles Feldman, CNN: Paula Zahn Now

  “Brown’s blackout days make for a darkly alluring read. This is the kind of book that becomes an underground classic for all the wrong reasons.”

  —Booklist

  “What sets the book apart is the toughness of the prose, the clear yet compassionate way that the missed and thrown opportunities, the endless fruitless pitches to Hollywood, his own broken marriage and his current position as, quite literally, the last man standing in his family are relayed in unflinching yet strangely beautiful detail.”

  —Arena

  “Unflinchingly honest, beautifully written and utterly heartbreaking, The Los Angeles Diaries is a haunting and powerful tale of love and loss.”

  —Ink

  “A riveting read. A supremely powerful and depressing memoir, then, one that seeks to evoke and express—rather than in any way explain—the misery that engulfed one ambitious American family.”

  —Kirkus

  “Searing, gut-churning but ultimately luminous . . . The Los Angeles Diaries reads like the best—and darkest—fiction . . . Uncompromisingly bleak yet surprisingly beautiful, a passionate testament not only to how one can survive what should shatter and sunder irreparably, but that one can survive and in surviving, begin anew.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “The book’s extremely clean and fluid prose is a pleasure to read. With The Los Angeles Diaries, Brown has written a disturbing, sad, but ultimately uplifting tale.”

  —The Denver Post

  “From the worst of deprivation springs the greatest inspiration . . . [Brown’s] honesty is as important to the success of his memoir as his style of writing. His sentences are short and pointed, leaving little room for sentimentalism; flowery language is non-existent. This is a writer who has no one to impress.”

  —The Irish Post

  “The Los Angeles Diaries is no ordinary memoir, and Brown is one fearless writer.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Clear
-eyed, unsentimental . . . It invites comparison with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and James Ellroy.”

  —London Observer

  “In this uncompromising memoir, Brown has the skills to step outside of his life and write clean, driving sentences about characters and situations as rich as the finest fiction.”

  —Book Sense

  “I’ve never read a better story about addiction. It’s also one of the best modern autobiographies I’ve ever read, addiction notwithstanding . . . Inspiring, witty, and bleak, James Brown’s book will appeal to anyone with an interest in addiction—and anyone who enjoys tough, spare prose.”

  —Dirk Hanson, author of The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Addiction

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Lucky Town

  The Second Story Theatre

  Final Performance

  Hot Wire

  This River

  In memory of my sister,

  Marilyn, and my brother, Barry

  Of this memoir, three pieces appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine: “My Papa’s Waltz,” “On Selling a Novel to Hollywood,” and “Fire,” under the title “A Taste of What Falls from the Sky.” “Fire” was also published, in different form, in the New England Review. “Daily Rushes” was published in the Denver Quarterly and “The Facts” appeared in the Santa Monica Review.

  The author wishes to thank the editors of these publications and to express gratitude for the generous support received from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Although this work contains descriptions

  of people in my life, many of their names and other

  identifying characteristics have been changed

  to protect their privacy.

  Winter 1994

  FIRE

  Winter is the season of the arsonist in Southern California. The manzanita and chaparral are dry and brittle and the Santa Ana winds have begun to blow. They move at gale force. They cross the arid Mojave and whip through the canyons of the San Bernardino Mountains, through the live oak and the pines, the ponderosa, the sugar and coulter, white fir and incense cedar. I know these names because I live in these mountains, eighty miles east of the sprawl of Los Angeles, and I worry when the winds come. I worry about the possibility of fire. I know he’s out there, the arsonist. I know he’s waiting, like me, for a day of opportunity very much like this.

  I’ve seen the Santa Anas uproot trees. I’ve seen them strip roofing from houses and shatter windows. I’ve seen them topple big rigs, and once, along the same freeway I’m traveling now, I saw a stop sign flying through the sky. I keep a firm hold on the wheel. The winds hit in sharp gusts and can blow you clean over the line. You have to be ready. You have to hang on tight and keep your eyes on the road.

  Traffic moves slowly, carefully. No one’s taking any chances, making abrupt lane changes, cutting you off or tailgating. I would like to believe that it’s courtesy that dictates our caution, our good manners, except this is Southern California, I grew up here and I know better. Danger or its potential sometimes brings out the best in us, and I wonder, as I reach to turn on the radio, if maybe it would be a good thing if the Santa Anas blew every day all year-round.

  From time to time I find myself having to drive into Los Angeles on business, and just the thought of it always fills me with a sense of dread and anxiety. The city has changed and grown immensely since I knew it as a child, and sometimes even the most familiar streets, streets I grew up on, seem barely recognizable. Gated communities have replaced the bungalows and tract homes and the signs in the windows of the shops and stores are in Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, occasionally Arabic. Where corner markets once stood you’ll now find minimalls, and Hollywood landmarks, places like Schwab’s and Pandora’s Box and the old Brown Derby restaurant, have gone the way of the bulldozer. There are more freeways, too, bigger and wider ones, but the traffic has never been worse.

  But it isn’t the unfamiliar that makes me anxious. It isn’t the traffic or the crowds or the evolving landscape of architecture and ethnicity. I am a fiction writer who doesn’t make enough money at it not to have to do something else for a living. So I teach. So I am a professor. And what Hollywood offers me is the chance to escape the classroom and tell stories full-time. Trouble is, I’m not very good at telling stories that pay better and that’s what this is about. It’s what it has always been about: my driving into Hollywood to talk to producers and executives who like my work but want me to write something more commercial. In this case that less commercial work is my last novel and the screenplay I wrote based on it, a screenplay commissioned by Universal and Amblin, both of whom passed on it when I was done. “I don’t know why you ever bothered to write this,” an executive tells me, after she finishes reading my script. “It’s no movie. It’s too real.” Now the rights are mine and my agent, who feels differently than the executive, is sending it to other executives and producers in Hollywood. As a sample, he calls it. The idea is not so much to sell the script as it is to sell myself as a scriptwriter. Already I’m looking forward to the end of the day.

  The Santa Anas die down as I approach Los Angeles and I ease up on the wheel. I take a deep breath. But I know it’s only temporary, this calm. I know better than to let myself relax. That thing called the L.A. River borders the last stretch of the freeway into Burbank, and I look out on it, the dirty water, moving sluggishly through the narrow concrete channel that contains it. Over the rush of the cars I try to imagine it as I was told it used to be, a real river, filled with trout and salmon and lined with sycamores and willows instead of chain-link and barbed wire. But I’m not successful. I think about my brother. I think about my sister. We are children down by that river on a day very much like this with the wind blowing lightly and the smell of fire in the air. I’m nine years old, the youngest, and we’re passing a bottle around, a bottle I’ve stolen from a grocery store nearby. My sister points to the sky.

  “Look. Look,” she says. “Snow.”

  Only they’re ashes. Ashes are falling. Ashes are everywhere, and in the sunlight they appear white, almost translucent. My head is spinning and I laugh. My brother laughs. I can hear us all laughing as we look to the sky, opening our mouths, catching ashes, like snowflakes, until our tongues turn black.

  In the rearview mirror I check to see if my eyes are clear. They are, and they should be. I’ve gone without a drink or a drug for four days, four long miserable days of white-knuckling it, all because I want to look my best, and I like to think I do. I’m clean shaven. My hair is freshly cut and neatly combed and I have on my best oxford shirt and a brand-new pair of Levi’s. But for some reason my heart is beating faster than it should and every now and then I can’t seem to catch my breath. It’s nerves. I’m under pressure. I see today’s meetings as an opportunity and I’m keenly aware that the older I get, the less these opportunities will come my way. It’s been six years between novels and now with a new one out, and a new agent working hard to set up these meetings, there is renewed interest in my writing. But that interest is always fleeting. I think about stopping at a liquor store but decide against it. Only alcoholics, I tell myself, drink before noon.

  Everything, I tell myself, is under control.

  My first meeting is at Disney Studios in Burbank and I arrive early enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes and try to collect myself. There are no soundstages at this end of the lot, and except for a gardener gathering up his hoses, I am alone on a path that divides two generations: On the one side are the older offices, the Hollywood bungalows with stucco exteriors and terra-cotta roofs and well-manicured lawns; on the other are the multistoried buildings made of steel and glass. And at the end of this pathway are the executive offices where I soon find myself, on the third floor, seated across the room from a woman maybe twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. I wonder how she came into her position so young and the only scenarios I come up with have to do with her mother or father or some very good friend. This is j
ust like me, though, to think in the negative, and because I’m aware of it I’m able to check myself. I don’t know this woman. I shouldn’t prejudge. I’m here for a job, if not today or next week then maybe it’ll happen for me a year or two down the line, and I need to remember that. I need to keep an open mind.

  For a while it’s small talk. I tell her about my drive from the San Bernardino Mountains, the wind and the traffic. She tells me about how bad it used to be when she worked for a law firm in downtown L.A. “Now,” she says, “I can walk to my job.” Her office looks as if she’s in the process of moving into it, or out, I can’t tell which. There’s a stack of pictures, big framed pictures propped against the couch and it’s either because she’s taken them down or hasn’t hung them yet. Same with the bookcases. They’re empty and there are boxes and boxes of screenplays all over the place that need to be unpacked or hauled away.