Panorama City Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinker, I like that. We shook hands, which was awkward, which was difficult in the bus seats, he was seated to my right, he could turn in his seat to face me and bring his right arm around, there was plenty of room for his right arm, but my right arm was trapped, the more I tried to turn toward him, the more trapped my right arm became, trapped between my body and the seat, not to mention that I could barely turn because my knees pressed against the metal bar separating us from the steps. I suppose we could have shaken left hands, but I heard somewhere, source unknown, that it is unlucky. The man introduced himself as a thinker also, his words, named Paul Renfro. At the age of two, at two years old, he told me by way of introduction, he’d seen a butterfly trapped in a cobweb and concluded that life had no intrinsic meaning. I did not know what
intrinsic
meant, he explained it,
intrinsic
was the first word I learned from Paul Renfro. As a result of his advanced development, he told me, he skipped two grades in school, he skipped ahead of those who followed conventional wisdom, which was no wisdom at all. At university, after three semesters of straight A’s, he experienced the first of several total and complete breakthroughs and quit to pursue his own projects beyond the academic kabuki, his words. I mentioned earlier that one of the qualities of life is that there are periods when nothing changes for a long time and then suddenly everything changes. Well, another quality is that any event no matter how small could happen a different way and change everything that follows. Meeting Paul Renfro on the bus was one of those events, because in not finding a place to sit farther back in the bus, and in having the bus driver seat me next to Paul, I had, without even arriving in Panorama City yet, made the acquaintance of a true man of the world from whom I would learn powerful methods of thinking and countless facts not to mention hundreds of words.
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    While Paul talked we drove across a flat landscape, we cruised down a very large and long highway, which was almost totally flat, to the sides were foothills, golden grasses, probably a million birds and bugs, but the bus didn’t bother with that stuff, that was not the stuff of a bus ride, we were stuck to the gray ribbon, eating it up mile by mile, the only bugs we saw were expired on the windshield, I imagined a bus with no windshield and no back window, the bugs could pass straight through. While he talked Paul shuffled through his briefcase, he showed me many sheets covered with his writings and diagrams, with his patents pending, his words. The bus groaned into a lower gear and started climbing, we were climbing and winding. I had been watching Paul and his papers, I hadn’t noticed the hills until we were in them. Paul called it the Grapevine and said that L.A. wasn’t far. He said that was the real world down there, which I did not understand until I got there and saw that it meant a place where it is impossible to make friends with everyone, there are too many people, you’d run out of time. He said that we thinkers had to stick together. That’s when I got the idea to show Paul Aunt Liz’s address, I showed him the card Officer Mary had made for me with Aunt Liz’s address on it, I suggested he copy it down, so that when it was convenient for him he could drop by. I hadn’t seen Aunt Liz in many years but I had a feeling she would want to buy what he was selling.
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    At the station in North Hollywood I recognized Aunt Liz immediately, she looked the same as when she had visited us in Madera years before, when she had taken over my bedroom, when she had alphabetized all of your grandfather’s books, which had made him very angry, they had been sorted according to his own private system. She wore the same animal print shirt, it was a blouse I guess you’d call it, with a cheetah spot pattern on it, every time I’d