From where I'm sitting, I can stare out my office window and up into the Hollywood Hills. The Hills have a fantastic grade, very very steep. They are covered with houses. Pink houses, white houses, houses on stilts, houses made of concrete. At the very top of the hill is Merv Griffin's house. He's up there like a gay Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, looking down on West Hollywood through a brass telescope, looking down at the gym rats, leathermen, and Abercrombe & Fitch escapees.
Across the street from my office there's a rope, a long nylon climbing rope. It's got two Petzl ascenders on it. I clip onto the ascenders and climb. I climb over the green trees, and the swimming pools, and the security gates and hibachis. I'm like the a master of the wu dan in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, barely touching down as I climb the hill like a ski lift. I'm there, standing on the concrete modernist rotunda of Merv's house.
I look into the cool, dry interior of the home through one of the windows. The window isn't made of glass, it's made of rubbing alcohol that refuses to fall to the ground. I slide through and am inside, vapors offgassing from my body. The maid is there. She's a young, very beautiful latina. She points out the window to Merv looking down at west hollywood, then motions for me to follow. I climb a spiral staircase to the roof behind her.
"He can't see us here, he can only look down. The only things that can see us here are God and the Sun." I can feel the fine down of hair at the small of her back as she pulls the white smock dress of her uniform over her head. It's hot on the roof, mirage hot, and we are blending together in the heat, lost in the convective updraft of the heated column of air, rising up with the smock, the ascenders, the sweat and the turbulent air, above the mountains, away from the computers, out of text and into the body, into the totality of becoming heat, a heated parcel of air, turbulent and moving.