Trace at the Roselawn Hotel

Trace awoke from an unsettling dream in which he was compelled to soak in a bath of hot vegetable broth and then consume the fetid juices from a tin cup for fourteen days as a curative for his severe psoriasis.

“Talk about stewing in your own juices,” Trace muttered to the faded yellow wallpaper as he settled a pan of lukewarm tap water onto the hot plate to boil for his morning cup of Folger’s instant coffee.

After being evicted from his efficiency suite at the Glendale Days Inn, his home for six years following his divorce, for non-payment of rent, Trace moved across town to the Roselawn Hotel in Santa Monica. The Roselawn was situated over a yoga academy and a dance studio; a single flight of rickety stairs behind a glass door emptied onto a dark windowless hallway with doors on either side stenciled with the numbers, thirty-four through fifty; behind each door was a shabby room with threadbare beige carpeting, a queen-sized box spring and mattress that reeked of urine, semen, blood, and flop sweat, and a two-burner hot plate that rested atop a chest of drawers whose three drawers were inexplicably sealed shut. There was a rusted sink and tap, the bathroom and shower was a communal affair at the end of the hall. A combination writing desk and mirrored vanity table sat next to a barred window that looked out upon the smog-choked traffic of Santa Monica Boulevard, completing the picture of a pensioner’s flat in the Czech Republic, circa 1967, just before the Soviet invasion.

In the traditional Gideon’s Bible that Trace located in the nightstand drawer upon taking occupancy on a weekly basis (expressing the optimism that this was a temporary situation), a previous dweller had torn out all of the pages of the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelations in the New Testament (Alpha and omega, Trace thought).

Trace dropped the last teaspoon of granulated coffee into an L.A. Zoo mug — emblazoned with the promotional tag line, ‘You Belong in a Zoo’ —  and married boiling water and a packet of non-dairy creamer, stirring the mix with a plastic spoon until it resembled something closely akin to actual coffee.

Scalding mug in hand, Trace rested on his cane and hobbled across the room, perching on the edge of the mattress. He lit his first cigarette of the morning, exhaled with a pleasurable sigh, and cracked open a dog-eared paperback copy of Plutarch’s Lives, picking up from where he left off the night before, Chapter Five of The African Wars by Julius Caesar:

Caesar had now continued a day and a night before the town, without receiving any answer from Considius; the rest of the forces were not yet arrived; his cavalry was not considerable; he had not sufficient troops with him to invest the place, and these were new levies: neither did he think it advisable, upon his first landing, to expose the army to wounds and fatigue; more especially, as the town was strongly fortified, and extremely difficult of access, and a great body of horse was said to be upon the point of arrival to succor the inhabitants; he therefore thought it advisable not to remain and besiege the town, lest while he pursued that design, the enemy’s cavalry should come behind and surround him.

“Shit!” Trace burned the tip of his tongue on the rim of the piping-hot L.A. Zoo mug. He sent the book flying across the room in reflexive anger, rose to his feet, and tossed the instant crap down the sink, resolving to get dressed and walk to Hi-Lo Liquors where he could buy a cup of fresh coffee, a new pack of smokes, the L.A. Times, and a six-pack for the evening.

Hi-Lo Liquors was a brisk two-block stroll from the Roselawn Hotel, situated on a corner between a Taco Bell and a vacant lot of hardened dirt and sand and loose gravel, a graveyard for a demolished retail establishment or apartment building. Trace hated crossing the lot because it meant picking small pebbles out of the tip of his cane with a pocketknife after the effort but Hi-Lo was a damn sight cheaper than the Von’s grocery store further west on the boulevard.

It was a cloudy afternoon with a mild offshore wind; Trace emerged from the glass door of the Roselawn, cast a glance into the plate-glass windows of the yoga academy and dance studio (never anything to see) and ventured toward the lot separating the sidewalk from Hi-Lo. As usual, the empty space was a resting place for fast food wrappers, soda cans and beer bottles, a stray tennis shoe, political signs from municipal elections long in the past, colored shards of broken glass, plastic cups and water bottles, plastic sheeting from a construction site somewhere nearby, a cancelled bus pass, postcard advertisements for Hollywood dance clubs, and a beat-to-shit Tickle Me Elmo doll.

Trace pulled the brim of his sweat-stained Dodgers baseball cap lower to shade the harsh morning sun and kicked the dirty Sesame Street toy out of his path.

“Elllmo … loves you,” a faint mechanical voice greeted him from the dirty and deflated chest of the battered toy.

“Fuck you,” Trace muttered. “I need coffee.”

Trace’s Exegesis

“Very interesting choices,” said Dr. Viridian with a little cluck of her tongue that always annoyed Trace. “First of all, there’s a significant undercurrent of homophobia in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and, as for Tender is the Night, well, just consider the name ‘Dick Diver’ and the fact that he pursues a young woman half his age — there’s a lot of homosexual panic to be found there, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Trace said curtly. “I’ve never been into that sort of exegesis.”

Trace had successfully lobbied Medicare to foot the bill for a limited series of talk therapy sessions to complement his steady diet of ant-depressants, but he was beginning to suspect that the therapist they stuck him with, Dr. Irene Viridian, a woman with the profile of a buzzard and a temperament to match, was assigned the task of souring the patient on the whole affair in her dark and gloomy office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard a few blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits.

“There you go with those five dollar words again, Trace. Exegesis? Do you think that you reach for that thesaurus in your brain to isolate people or to make them feel inferior to you?”

Trace squirmed in his seat. The chair that he was urged to sit in at every session was a straight-backed, wooden torture contraption from IKEA with seat and back cushions manufactured from thin pads of what he guessed was foam rubber, resembling an exhibit from a museum display of Torquemada’s instruments of interrogation and sublimation, or that was the sense that unfolded to Trace every time he achingly angled his arthritic limbs into the device.

“Why say ‘critical interpretation of text’ when a single word like exegesis is so much better?” Trace said. “Skillful use of language is not necessarily a psychological weapon … or should I say ‘cudgel’?”

“Is that what you believe?” She hastily scribbled a passage in a Moleskine notebook on the desk.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it. What’s that you’re writing there, your shopping list?”

Viridian ignored the question. “But don’t you think that people often say the things that they do not mean? You’re the writer, you should know that.”

Trace wanted a cigarette. “Was that some kind of cheap shot, Doc?”

She smiled blandly. “Not at all. But you use the profession to justify a lot of your bad behavior. You smoke because you’re a writer, you drink, sometimes to excess, you admit, because you’re a writer, and your skill with words, which you appear to value at the exclusion of all else in life, is to blame for your inability to successfully commit to a relationship.”

Trace searched his coat pockets for a pack of smokes. “Look, five minutes ago you asked me to name two favorite literary works off the top of my head, without pausing to think, and I came up with Julius Caesar and Tender is the Night; from there you went from accusing me of being a repressed homosexual to attacking my command of the English language and my chosen profession as a peddler of words in said language … all the while writing notes in a fucking Moleskine notebook. Now, you tell me who’s the pretentious ass?”

Trace fished an unfiltered Camel out of his coat pocket, lit it with a click of his plastic Bic lighter, and exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “And you need to get an ashtray in here if you expect me to keep coming back.”