RUBICON BEACH

California primary was in June. Llewellyn’s candidate won. Llewellyn stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the victor claimed the election, and as the young poet went up to his room to pack for his return east, the would-be President crossed from the podium to the hotel pantry where a man fired a shot that killed him in a way protracted and bitterly inefficient. Llewellyn waited the twenty-five damn hours or whatever till the man died. I was a poet, he thought to himself one day at the end of an altogether different decade as he was driving up Sunset Boulevard, and I supported the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it. If I’d supported the man who wrote poetry, I would have been on the losing side of that campaign, and while I would have grieved for the martyr, as did everyone, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to stay while he died. I would have gone back to New York and continued being a poet. Moreover, if enough people like myself had supported the man who wrote poetry rather than the man who quoted it, the man who wrote it might have won the primary. This means the man who quoted poetry might not have been at the podium that night claiming victory; he might have come at a later hour or the next morning or not at all. There’s a strong possibility that he would not have been murdered, and would have become President, not that year but another year. This logic led Llewellyn to believe that in choosing the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it, whatever the political virtues of such a choice might have been, he had changed his whole fate and betrayed his own destiny. He never went back to New York. He was no longer a poet. Who’s to say, Llewellyn asked himself, how many others made such choices and betrayed themselves, not with choices that in themselves might have been meritorious but with choices that were wrong for the individuals who made them, with choices not in the spirit of those who made them? A country is different today because of it, because I’m different, and everyone is different.

It was on the day he died, the man who quoted poetry, that Llewellyn first became a part of the city in which he now lived. But it was not the city that made the choice, it was not relativity physics that chose who he was rather than who he was not. He chose to let them call him Lee but he did not choose the name himself, and almost any name he had chosen himself, even his own name he hated, would have been better.

He lived in Venice Beach two years, his only address a local café on the boardwalk to which his furious father sent a stream of letters. When Llewellyn’s younger sister drowned that first summer in Lake Michigan, the tragedy reinforced both the son’s alienation and the parents’ burden of heartland dreams. Llewellyn found a group of poets at the beach who published a little magazine and turned their verses into rock-and-roll songs. He wrote his first movie with a local filmmaker who saw his work as personal exorcism; when he felt nothing left to exorcise, he committed suicide by wrapping himself in a bed sheet and lying on the southbound San Diego Freeway just beyond the Mulholland off-ramp. By the time someone got him out of the road he’d been hit by twenty-three cars in less than a minute; the obituary mentioned his ironically titled sixteen-minute movie, Unmarked Graves, which had no narrative or characters or dialogue but rather the hallucinatory images of martial nightmare that were the vocabulary of the day. The “screenplay” was credited to L.E. Edgar.

This bit of dilettantism notwithstanding, in four years Lew found himself, in large part through his proximity to a friend of a friend, working on a screenplay with an Italian director who’d been brought over by a major studio to make his American debut. The project had all the earmarks of disaster; the writer and director disagreed bitterly over a climactic section of the picture. The studios were wary of the director as a successful but mischievous maker of successful but mischievous art films, their wariness justified by the director’s conflict with the writer, who fought for a resolution more in line with what the studios wanted. The director won the conflict because he was somebody and Lew was nobody; but the incident endeared the young man to the studios, who saw in him a possible “quality” writer with the right instincts, that is the studios’ instincts. To Llewellyn this was a peculiar paradox. At that point he still saw in himself someone who might be an artist someday, if anything destined to be at odds with the marketplace; that he wound up on the studio’s side of things in this particular picture was an accident, he’d opted to resolve this particular picture in this particular way because he thought the dynamics of the picture called for such a resolution; the embrace of the studios was quite unforeseen. At least that was what he told himself at the time. Later, in the midst of his ongoing paroxysms of self-doubt, in the midst of the crisis of integrity that was beginning to overwhelm him, he questioned that he’d ever believed such a thing at all. He questioned whether in fact his instincts were not those of the studios and the industry all along, and whether his new crisis was not one that found him at war with those instincts, trying to persuade himself he was not who he was and that he was who he was not.

This movie, which opened in America as White Liars, was a success, the director’s prevalent instincts to the contrary. It proved fortunate for all parties involved, even as none of them was on speaking terms