Ephemera: What Catches You Off Guard

Make This a World Worth Writing For

Hotel Cecil, Downtown Los Angeles

Elisa caught me off guard.  You know her story.  In February 2013 guests at the Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles complained about the water quality and pressure in their rooms.  Maintenance workers found the dead body of a 21-year-old woman in the cistern on the building’s roof.  Earlier in the month Elisa Lam had disappeared while in the hotel, and it was her body.  Speculation over her death continues to this day, it’s inescapable on the Web.

When the story turned up on Netflix, a friend read her blogs.  He sent me screenshots.  At the top of each, Lam had a quote. 

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Did you watch last night’s homework? Next week we’ll discuss.

And the Twitter-sharing deal is a pain so I’d appreciate it if you’d flash this around. Thank you!

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At the top of her blog Nouvelle/Nouveau she’d quoted me, “You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.” I wish I had known her.

Around that same time a friend showed me photos in Elle Décor magazine.  There, shelved in a bookcase was my novel Pygmy.  In another photo the same book sat face-up on a table. The unmistakable red-and-yellow cover.  In the Greg Kinnear film Feast of Love my novel Choke sits on the main character’s bedside table.

Until his death in 2019, my father-in law would telephone whenever I was a question that night on Jeopardy.  He phoned a lot.

And let’s not leave out Nike…

Seen at the Portland Airport Baggage Claim. Is This Actionable?

So many lasting blips in the culture.  Don’t get me started on the many lives of the term “Snowflake.” 

Until his death in 2019, my father-in law would telephone whenever I was a question that night on Jeopardy.  He phoned a lot.

Depending on the circumstances, it can be a strange, sad feeling to see your work echo back.  Or it can be a joy.  Or both.  One night, on a long drive through a desert between nowhere and nowhere I pulled off the highway for gas.  This had to be Oregon because I couldn’t fill my own tank.  A young guy sat reading a book.  He set it aside and came to pump the gas.  We didn’t trade six words.  That service station in the middle of that big desert blackness, it might’ve been on the moon. 

As I started the car, he went back to pick up his book.  And, no, it wasn’t Fight Club or Rant or anything dude-centric.  The book’s white cover showed the black cartoon outline of a face.  Turned one way, the face was a young woman.  Turned the other, the face became that of a hag.  This redneck kid in the middle of the night, alone in the desert, he was reading Invisible Monsters.      

Note: This is Not the Service Station Attendant

To introduce myself struck me as wrong.  It would be butting into his experience and upstaging the story.  Meeting an author can break your heart because it means you’ll never meet the characters you love.  So I drove away.  Most of me drove away.  Part of me will always be seeing that kid as he sat on his folding chair next to a gas pump and put his nose into that book.

Forget the literary critics and your professors.  That guy at the gas station — and Elisa Lam — they are the readers worth writing for.

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