As I sat looking out my hotel window into the garden of other windows, I remembered when I was seven and my family stayed in a hotel on the beach. It was old, big and smelly. There was a game room, but never any games for kids to play, just games that I had never seen before with ancient people playing them. This was the summer before my father died. I can't remember if we knew he was sick then, but we were happy. Even my sisters and I had a few successful conversations.

I was intrigued sitting in this hotel window now, safe from Ned's home and the bomb threat, watching guests and bellmen go into other rooms. Like doorways into foreign worlds, I watched and deciphered what these creatures did and said merely by their movements and actions.

Above me to the right in a smaller room was a couple. The man was handing over a dollar to the bellman and the woman was insisting that he tip more. All was jovial until the bellman left-- then the couple separated. I don't mean physically, I mean spiritually. I could feel that these two were living two lives, public and private, and I wondered if my father had lived-- would my parents have become this as well: two entities sharing the same space, barely needing each other? And I pondered if I someday too would become this-- a person in a room.

Below this couple was a group. It was a one bedroom suite with two windows facing me. The group was scattered in the living area, smoking and drinking. Guys and girls, sophisticated, talking about Volvos and politics. Oh God, what a bore. Thank God I gave that scene up long ago. Besides that scene doesn't color well with male dancers. I'm a burnt sienna, they're burnt orange. Maybe I am a fag? Shit!

Then a light glowed from the corner of my left eye. I turned and there in a dimly lit room was an LA night Creature. Someone you never saw buying clothes at the mall or ordering a double mocha at Starbucks. Her hair was black and lumpy. Her skin was white and blotchy with a shiny glow decorating her face. She had a bag of food and beer. A Molson, which belonged in the party suite, where I glanced and noticed no one had moved. When I returned to the LA Creature, she was gone. The beer had been opened and left on the table, running over with foam. It looked good; I wanted one, I wanted to be in that room when she returned. She was in the bathroom and came out zipping her fly.

She sat and waited and I waited with her, watching. She had no idea I had come into her world.

Finally, she took off her jacket and my eyes lit. Shapeful colors spread across her back. The lines blurred from the shadows making it uneasy to read her body language.

Never did I see anything like this at the beach with my parents. The most eccentric memory was a man without an arm from the war. My mother yelled at me for staring incessantly at the man's accomplishments with a single fluke. He could ride a wave at the beach, then eat a grapefruit at breakfast (something I couldn't do with two arms). He could talk about dealing cars with the skill of a Las Vegas dealer, and hug his wife with the affection of a great love. That's what intrigued me; the intimacy he and his wife displayed without cause. Other couples would speak nicely to each other about their kids and the good old days, but they never gazed at each other the way this one armed man and his wife couldn't stop doing.

The LA Creature moved. I told Ned to bring me binoculars and, of course, he did...