I trudged up the stairs of Los Angeles City Hall. I finally made footfall upon the top floor and there be Bale. Her camera fixed upwards as she took pictures of the upper cornices of the art deco high ceilings. She snapped away as I hit the shutter of my own mental camera myself. Pretty, her. No little and quite some. I start my own photo series on the subject of perfect architecture.
Bale hailed from Malaysia. Your brain becomes coated in Pam the moment she starts talking. You’re so distracted by her perverse attractiveness do you find yourself realizing you aren’t really listening to anything she’s saying. Or none of it is really sticking. Which is why her name is Baleen in this narrative. She told me her real name upon introduction. But that name is now hurtling through a deep dark abyss of never-had-a-chance.
Ticking off the perfunctory quiz questions: Loves, fears, and possessions.
Her answers were on the tip of her tongue. Lucky answers, them.
She adores flowers. And clouds. Things, I gathered, you would find on inspirational calendars. Bale is not at all unabashed in her subscription to sentimentality nor is she diffident about revealing her fears. She’s wary of the dark. A primordial fright I think we all harbor a skosh in our quietest lone moments. She digs into her pocket and brandishes a motley assortment of change. This one jangles when she walks.
She was armed with Studs Terkel’s eminent expose on the Great Depression. I had an incongruously grand time with a girl hefting a paperback Hard Times. I had the singular privilege of explaining to this rare and delicate flower what a hyacinth is. The more people that know what is and isn’t a hyacinth; the more closer we are to achieving something like societal harmony methinks.
Baleen boasted Little Mermaid socks and shoes with laces in a vicious state of white. The glare of which assiduously assaulted the retinas as my gaze frequently wandered south to avoid being consumed alive by those prodigious and pert peepers of hers. Eyes so cavernous one can spill and freefall into them for days.
Still logy. And my sensibilities as fragile as thistledown thanks to Baleen.
Topics waded and coasted from one shore of the conversational sea to the other. She backstroked and slalomed around each theme and matter with a stubborn grace. A raconteur of the rarest rank. She had enough charm to last two or three lifetimes. We spoke of the veracity of artificial plants and the minute distinctions between Los Angeles and the facsimile city found in Grand Theft Auto. She also may have expressed not quite acceptance but inchoate compassion for people suffering from necrophilic fetishism. Odd?
Not odd. Death would almost be worthwhile if just for the day she might arrive at that acceptance.