The woman gave the boy everything he believed he needed. She fed him canned black beans and apple pies and clothed him in fancy ruffled shirts and let him tell her about his heartbreak.  In turn, she told him hers and he comforted her. Then she told him he was a wonderful human being, so wise and kind, almost like a saint, as handsome as a god, with his pale eyes and smooth, strong features like the marble statues of the blind angels in the Hollywood Forever cemetery where the boy’s alleged father had been buried eighteen days before the boy was born.  What more could the boy want than that?

The boy had a very small room in the basement of a stone house in the Hollywood hills but he didn’t mind; he found it cozy. The woman’s clothes and shoes filled up most of the room. Fancy dresses with ruffles and floral prints and high-heeled pumps with sharply pointed toes.  Sometimes she would come to the boy’s door, combing her hair, in her red satin kimono, and tell him things. She observed the behavior of the birds outside in the sycamore trees, how they were so efficient, eating up all the crumbs so none were left.  There was a flock of wild parrots that lived in those hills and the boy especially liked stories abut these birds with their tropical colored feathers (like his mother’s dresses) and their fierce, monstrous faces.  The woman told the boy about how the weather felt on her skin—a soft mist of rain, the metallic heat of the Santa Ana winds--and about the girls she had seen walking around the neighborhood.  The flowered dresses they were wearing, what their hair was like, how they smelled of coconut lotion and salt.  The reason the woman described them was because the boy never left the stone house anymore, after his last heartbreak. He believed he did not want to leave, but that may or may not have really been the case. The woman may not have let him leave. But he was not aware of this. He was afraid of the world because it seemed so big and bright and full of sound and pain. He liked to hide out and read old philosophy history, psychology art and poetry books from his slightly moldy leather-bound, first edition collection in the dark, cool room filled with the woman’s clothes and her scent on the clothes.  He found the bowls of beans she brought him to be delicious and comforting.   Sometimes, for a treat, she would bring him a gluten free apple pie that he would eat whole from the pie pan in between the cans of beans. It tasted so good!

Things were not always this way. Once while attending college up north in Santa Cruz, the boy lived in a small house built into a hill with a fair-skinned, emerald-irised girl.  The boy and girl ate fresh acorns, apples, avocados and figs from the trees and honey from the honeycombs they tended.  They bathed in a brook and wore clothes they made from woven grasses and leaves.  They had sang ballads to each other every night and danced naked on top of their little green hill under the moon.   The boy was hardy and strong.  He had color in his cheeks and breadth to his shoulders.

One day, the girl left. The boy woke in the morning and found her gone.  The sheets were still warm and smelled of her—like honey and sage.  The boy wept into the menstrual blood-stained sheets of the tiny bed in the house under the hill and when he was dry of tears he gathered his books and bedding and returned to the tower where he had once lived.