8763 Wonderland

There is no grace to the wrecking ball. It takes down walls with a bland and dispassionate fury, a machine not capable of even vague interest in the decades of memories trapped within the fading wallpaper and the musty rose-colored carpeting. The architect’s pen is forgotten, the bricklayer’s labor lain to waste, all falls down in a heap of forgotten rubble. They are putting up a school, I am told, where this once grand hotel once stood. It looks like a graveyard now, a graveyard waiting for the tombstones and the crypts, encircled by temporary fencing to keep whom out? I wonder as I stand on the sidewalk outside the Gaylord Hotel, smoking a cigarette and staring at the sad ruins of the Ambassador Hotel across the street.

Sirhan Sirhan took the life of Robert Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, we all know that, but more important to me is the fact that Dashiell Hammett stayed there every so often when he was in L.A., drinking in the same bar that I am now drinking in, the HMS Bounty, an Old Hollywood kind of establishment complete with booths of plush red vinyl with plaques to honor the ghosts of Jack Webb and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burton. There’s no plaque that I can find to honor Hammett but he drank here, I am told. Or I read it somewhere once. The father of the modern detective novel loved cocktail parties and was reportedly a lousy drunk.

“Flat on his face in The Trocadero, I remember,” Mildred La Veaux told Hammett biographer Diane Johnson. “He fell flat on his face. Sometimes in gutters, too. He was a shy man, but when he had a few, he got talkative, you know? Then he was very funny. Sober, he was kind of quiet.”

Physically, Hammett looked like a ghost. He was lean and gaunt and tubercular . He had a closely-cropped mane of white hair and his eyes were hollow and sunken. He was handsome as a younger man but life’s battles, including a stint in jail for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy witch hunts, made him look even more like a cadaver as he got on in years. I always wanted to write a piece called “Hammett’s Ghost.” A piece of what I don’t know. A short story maybe, about a writer visited by the spectre of Hammett but that would be the most obvious route and the most obvious road is the most boring and most well-traveled.

Why Hammett came to mind today I don’t know. An hour or so ago I took a Vicodin to battle severe pain in my left hip from psoriatic arthritis. The pain is gone and some opaque and rather pleasurable sensation has taken its place.

Hold on. I do recall why Hammett persists in my mind today (Let me just shake away a few of these Vicodin cobwebs). It’s because I’ve been watching the boxed set of the MGM Thin Man movies that a friend kindly loaned to me; that and the fact that I was at the Bounty last Thursday evening.

Hammett died in 1961 but he never wrote another novel after 1934; this, after creating Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and the classic novels, “The Maltese Falcon”, “The Dain Curse”, and “Red Harvest”. In 1936 Hammett wrote a letter from New York to his daughter Jo, asking: “Have you heard the little verse that goes something like this?”

Yesterday, upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away!

Ah well. It’s just so much Vicodin and some sort of melancholy that has me feeling this way today. Never mind me.