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city, and we began to pass through built-up neighborhoods, places where you could look down the cross streets and see pepper trees arching over the pavement in a shadowy tunnel lined with automobiles, or dry, rustling palms in long rows leaning into the front yards of stucco bungalows. And then we were in swarms of cars and streetcars, the jangle of trolley bells, honking horns, sidewalks packed with people walking fast through a wilderness of billboards and neon signs and telephone poles weighed down crazily with wires. The bus went on threading through the traffic, mile after mile. By the time we got into the downtown proper we were crawling through the shadows of eight- and ten- and twelve-story buildings, and people on the sidewalks were making better headway than the cars.
    We rolled into the terminal just after three and milled around in the garage waiting for the driver to haul our luggage out of the hold. Lily disappeared for a minute, walking off to talk to somebody out on the sidewalk. When she came back, I was standing with my bag at my feet, trying to figure out what the hell to do next.
    She said, “We have to catch a streetcar that goes to Hollywood from downtown. The yellow cars just go around downtown, but the red cars go out to everywhere else. We have to go to the Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street and catch a red car that goes out to Hollywood.”
    This went right past me; she might as well have said it all in French. She picked up her suitcase and started off as if she knew where she was going, while I just stood there trying to work out whether I wanted to follow her. When she got to the sidewalk she looked back at me as if asking a question. I guess I must have made up my mind, because I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and caught up with her.
    We walked beside a street with four car lanes and two sets of trolley tracks, and when we got to the corner we had to wait for the electric signal, the first I’d ever seen. When it bonged, Lily took off across the street and led the way up Sixth Street four or five blocks, turned on Hill, and went right to the entrance of the Terminal Building as if she’d been living in the city all her life.
    I remember that building as something grand. We walked into a marble-floored arcade flanked with shops and down a sloping floor to a big vaulted lobby as ornate and elegant as the head office of a bank, and I just thought,
Jesus.
    Crowds of people were walking in and out of the branching passageways, so Lily stopped to study the signboards and then said, “We could both take a Santa Monica car,” and led the way down a long, winding ramp to a lower mezzanine and a waiting room, and another sloping ramp to the huge cavern at track level.
    The banks had closed, and we were in a stream of people headed home at the end of the day. We waited on the platform while three or four red streetcars came and went, and the line of people waiting to get on a car shuffled slowly forward. Around us the men—it was mostly men in that crowd—were dressed for the office in gray or brown suits and fedora hats with narrow brims. If I expected them to take note of my wide-brimmed buckaroo hat and high-heeled boots and maybe mistake me for Ken Maynard, I was disappointed; they went on reading their newspapers and magazines without giving me a second look. The fact is, if you lived in Hollywood in those days you were used to seeing men like me hanging around on street corners hoping to get a day’s wages loafing on a movie set. And I guess if I were Ken Maynard I would’ve been riding around in a limousine, not waiting in line for a streetcar.
    When we finally got onto a Santa Monica car, a man gave up his seat to Lily. She had been full of energy when we walked over from the bus station, but now she slumped down, resting her chin on the suitcase standing in her lap and looking out the sooty window with a dull stare. I stood in the aisle, hugging my duffle