Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

You know those couples who say they can’t live without each other? Sometimes they mean it. Undying Love The Coleus under Bob and Helen’s front porch window look a little scraggly, nothing but tall leggy stems bending in their bed of dry cracked earth. The gardener would never let them go like that if Bob hadn’t been so sick. If Bob had been up and around, standing tall the way he used to, those plants would be standing tall too, their leaves firm and perky, the ground blanketed with a soft, moist layer of mulch. Well tended, that was the best way to describe Bob’s garden, and come to think of it, Bob too. I try to remember if I saw the gardener this past Wednesday, his usual day to mow and blow. Who will notice if Bob’s plants die now? Not Bob who is sick in bed. Not Helen who uses a walker and rarely ventures outside. Bob told me once that Helen wouldn’t allow him to get her a wheelchair. She couldn’t stand the idea of looking like an invalid. That sounds like Helen, the kind of w

The Improv is a fairly famous LA comedy club on Melrose here in L.A. where hundreds—thousands—of comics have sometimes bombed and sometimes soared to new heights on its' stage over the years. I've been to the Improv countless times, but rarely for the laughs. For me, The Improv belongs to that period in the mid-eighties when I was in the last stages of a long, flagging relationship with an old boyfriend. For once, the nomenclature fits; I was twenty seven when we met, Ben was twenty five years older than me. Hardly a 'boy' friend, some might say. We were living together, fast approaching the suffocating, seven year itch mark, and I was twitchy, longing to find a way out, but lacking the guts to get out. Telling myself staying was the more noble course, that I didn't want to hurt him, that I couldn't leave after everything I'd done to get there, that he deserved better. What a load of crap. I was just a little coward. A passive aggressive whiner.

HOW MEN ARE #14, 14th Street, Santa Monica LINK TO MORE FICTION HERE:  DIAMOND GIRL LAST DANCE KISSES AS DEEP AS THE OCEAN They carried sunshine with them; sand filtering out the bottom Of their woven bags from Guatemala, the smell of Coppertone in the air. Linda and Marissa went to the beach almost every day that summer, the summer they were seventeen. They'd walk down Wilshire in cut-offs and crocheted bikini tops, laughing at the sound of their huaraches  flapping against the sidewalk, tripping on the way the ground glass in the cement sparkled in the sun like a zillion tiny diamonds, checking out their reflections in the store windows. They'd cross the Pacific Coast Highway on the Arizona overpass, stopping only for a second to take in the buzz of the cars careening along PCH beneath them, barely breathing until they could escape the stench of urine and what that stench implied. Some smelly bum might be anywhere, pulling his thing out of his pants and waving it around

I only worked on a couple of movies during my short-lived career as a production coordinator. By a couple, I mean two. Literally two. The Favor was one of those movies, a film most of you will have never heard of even though it starred Elizabeth McGovern, Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt.  Brad Pitt was just a beautiful young man back then, only twenty four, with the beginnings of a resume; some small parts in episodic tv, nothing noteworthy. The director cast him based on some footage his agent had sent from LA up to our location production office in downtown Portland. It was from the as yet unreleased Thelma & Louise ; my boss had seen the video clip and trilled that he was delicious. And we all knew that instead of flying up from LA, he’d driven up in the cutest little sports car with Juliette Lewis by his side.  Brad played Elliot, an artist and Elizabeth McGovern's love interest, Emily, who runs an art gallery. The film is called  The Favor  because Emily's friend