THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES
by James Killough
Global warming has left my former city of residence, London, sweltering in spring, and Los Angeles gloomy and chilly. While Tuttle and I were driving back from the gym yesterday, he looked at the sky and sighed, “I feel so sorry for the homeless people. They come out here for the good weather, and they get this.”
It was a Marie Antoinette moment that reminded me of the time my mother and I were walking back from a cinema in the dead of a New York winter, black slush seeping across the sidewalks. Mum was clad crown to ankles in mink, so we walked over an area that was free of frozen guck whenever we could, which meant the subway grates. A train passed beneath us, and a gust of warm air surged from the grates. “Oh, how lovely!” she exclaimed. “No wonder people like to sleep on these things!” There’s an upside to everything when you’re in fur.
Those gusty subway grates really know how to fluff a girl. Kirsten Dunst flutters through Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette."
Today’s weather is markedly more like it should be in LA right now, with highs in the low paradise. I was pondering the Marie Antoinettes in my life when a Hollywood schizo outside the CVS pharmacy on Cahuenga stopped me and said, “Excuse me, sir. Do you know if it’s going to be May 21st?”
“It’s bound to be at some point,” I replied.
“So it’s the end of the world on May 21st?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Praise the Lord!” he said.
“Praise Him!” I shot back. No use disappointing my beloved schizos by getting into a theological debate when cigarettes awaited purchase. Best just to agree.
