Sunday, Bloody Sunday

It was shortly after 6:00 PM, with a lush full moon presiding over the downtown Glendale skyline, when David and Julie Scott dropped me off in front of the hotel after a pleasant dinner in Atwater Village. David writes at Perrero:

It was a beautiful night when we said goodbye; balmy and warm, a massive full moon so low as to light the street below. Moonlight has a certain magic to it, a glow that illuminates like no other, and it gave the night a fey feeling beyond the base oddness of coming up to L.A., of having dinner with Rodger, of being on the way back down to have a pit barbecue. I glanced back at the hotel as we left, knowing Rodger was returning to his high perch, to observe the city below and to chronicle it.

By 6:30 I was in for the night, wrapped in my bulky gray bathrobe and confronting the computer, writing to assuage depression as usual. I was perhaps fifteen minutes into my Kafka essay when the night sky filled with the banshee-like wail of police sirens. Glendale police were responding to what was initially a domestic violence call at one of the Extended Stays rooms on the sixth floor.

When officers arrived, they found 28-year-old Justin Harris on a sixth-floor balcony, allegedly throwing drugs and paraphernalia off the side. Harris and a friend were detained and handcuffed.

Harris, a fugitive from Texas with an extensive criminal history, then opted out of an extradition back to the Lone Star state by leaping from the balcony to his death in the driveway below.

Life is never dull at the Extended Stays Days Inn.

But back to David and Julie. The late lunch/early dinner was a nice distraction, even if it did precious little to pull me out of my wrestling match with the black dog. David writes:

For some reason, I generally preferred to keep the L.A. Press types at a distance, maybe to maintain their aura of mystique, maybe because I was afraid I would dislike them in person.

Rodger, on the other hand, seemed to be a very open person, and much like his various online personas; just before we left, he told us about his times as of late, personal complications and struggles with depression that he had been going through. Some of this I had garnered from certain blogposts or the lack thereof, but just hearing some of the things I had guessed at was interesting, and I was touched by being trusted.

Oddly enough, I sound an awful lot like Trace in this passage:

Rodger seemed to live the dream, to a large extent; everything about him shouted ‘writer’, from the notebook to the blog to the demeanor. He was famous, at least within a certain culture, and he lived day to day by his wits and by his words. Which was not to say that his life was easy—I had known it wasn’t even before tonight. But apparently even Rodger’s life could become boring, could become a grind. That was somehow instructive to me.

You can read the whole adventure here and photographic evidence is here.