Not Fade Away
On Sunday morning, Jimm and Celeste and I go to the Roosevelt Hotel to see the David Hockney swimming pool—one of the things on our Things to Do in L.A. list. (We’ve already done the Griffith Observatory and the Hollyhock House and Musso & Frank.) I tell them that I saw the pool in the late '80s when it was freshly painted, invited by Raymond Foye (my Hanuman publisher) to view it with him and curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler. I have no memory of Geldzahler—I was shy and not particularly adept at making small talk, especially with famous people. But I do remember the dark blue brushstrokes that Hockney had painted all over the pool. Brush- strokes described online as “squiggles, caterpillars, slugs, commas, apostro- phes and parentheses.” To my mind, they look like blue boomerangs. Forty-odd years later, those brushstrokes are faded, nearly nonexistent, even though they were restored, we are told, as recently as last year. Hotel guests swim and sunbathe, oblivious as Hockney’s “squiggles” disappear under the water. After brunch at Shirley Brasserie, the three of us retrace our steps to the parking structure. The Boulevard is teeming. Hollywood has a way of turning you into a tourist in your own town, so we stop to look at the cement blocks in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. In blinding sunlight, I read the names of celebrities and note that the im- pressions of their hand- prints and footprints and signatures are wearing away. And think, of course, of Ozymandias: “No thing beside remains.” One block is cracked into so many pieces— as if Godzilla himself had stepped on it—it’s impossible to tell which celebrity it is. Side- stepping tourists, I locate Jean Harlow and Gena Rowlands and the one I really want to see: Joan Crawford. “May this cement our friendship,” she wrote. A movie star with wit! I take a few pictures with my iPhone and observe a moment of reverence. Which is broken by the voice of an astonished fellow tourist: Look what tiny feet she had!
Photo Credit: Holaday Mason
David Trinidad’s latest books are New Playlist (Pitt Poetry Series) and Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden Press), both published in 2025. Thank you, Anne, for Visiting My Dream: A Nocturnal Diary is forthcoming from What Books Press in 2027. Trinidad lives in Los Angeles.
Love Joan!
Not the weird AI bot reading tho