SUN VALLEY—Jason halted on Mulholland Bridge and hopped out of the car despite his young daughter's grating groans. He saw the man poised to jump, and there echoed in Jason's mind the words the man had uttered this morning at the Dharma Cafe, "People start listening when you're dead. I'd be better off dead."

The Mulholland Bridge. Photo courtesy of metro.net

“Da-ad, What are you doing?” screeched Kit.

She shared her generation's knack for adding an extra syllable to words when irate. Which added just the right note of insouciance to make Jason flip his lid.

“Don't jump!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs.

Rattled by the sharp shout, Kaminsky wildly flapped his arms backward, as his shoulders stooped into the abyss. Below, the variegated flow of traffic shot out from under the bridge at the speed of a bullet out of a rifle chamber. He just caught himself from plunging onto the freeway below. The elderly director was thrown off balance once more when Jason bellowed:

“Don't jump!”

“Ha, are you kidding?” The muffled roar of traffic, punctuated by the occasional whinnying motorcycle, closing in around their ears. “Jumping is the last thing on my mind. For godsake, I was scraping chewing gum off my shoesole. I'm out here where nobody walks and some clod leaves chewing gum on the ground and I step in it. I hate chewing gum. People are such idiots.”

“I gotta run,” Jason said.

He practiced that delicate Los Angeles art of desperately attempting to show a modicum of civility while constantly minding the clock. They were now 10 minutes late because of his suicide prevention deed. Candy made no effort to mask her disgust for the venture and her distaste toward the new passenger: she pinched the end of her nose to spare herself his street reek as he accommodated himself amid Jason's clutter.

“I'm going to rehearsal in Sun Valley.”

In the back of the car, the Academy Award-winning personage sat upon a blitz of papers, files, memos, text books, stuffed animals, Barbies and indefinable debris, to which a red backpack was added.

Next to the dry-cleaned pants fluttering in the breeze sat Kaminsky, and he fiddled with the electric window control. He got more and more frenetic with his finger and finally voiced, as the dry cleaner plastic sleeve whipped in his face, “I hate technology. Hate it. I can't get the window up and the plastic whips me in the face,” he groused. “We directors used to say 'print,' a magical moment in the cinema that combined intuition, art and sheer awareness. I could boast of a two-to-one shooting ratio. These monkeys who use digital, shoot and shoot and never say 'cut.' Where's the art? They're the monkeys that pound enough typewriters and one finally writes Hamlet.”

Jason said, “The control is broken.”

“I hate the electric window controls. I liked the crank. They break and you don't have to replace the whole thing.”

“You know, Mr. Kaminsky. With all due respect, I recommend that you read a book that's changed my life.”

Just as Jules Kaminsky was about to voice there was nothing in his life that needed changing, Jason was nearly sideswiped by a van. Candy gasped in a manner that reminded him of being married again and made him wonder what he'd had in mind by inviting Candy. Then, exiting the Hollywood Freeway, he looked over and saw her sleeveless blouse and he knew again what he'd had in mind.

Once at San Anselmo Church, they trod up the creaky wooden stairs. A plume of fresh-brewed coffee smell curled down the staircase and ravished their lungs. The teal blue door to Mr. Leonard's room creaked open. Jason saw people he didn't expect to see.

Abigail Fenwick sat in a corner, studying a paper. There was his student Maria Virginia and his old nemesis from Jefferson, Gudelia, as well as Eraclito. Intermittent laughter spilled into the hallway. In front of the group, two students had their noses buried in sheets of paper and read with a mind-numbing expressionlessness.

(to be continued)

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