Word: sidewalkers
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...SALVADORAN SOLDIERS moved ever so slowly down a sidewalk, hugging the buildings and doorways with their backs. They looked right, left, in the air, behind themselves. Suddenly a movement, and shots from machine guns pierced the silence of the scene. For a moment, there was confusion. Then the situation became clear. The soldiers had shot someone, and they gathered round their victim in an attempt to identify him. One stepped forward, the eldest-looking, and picked up the dead man by the hair. Then he smiled at the camera and said simply, "Communist...
Both camps were gone by the time the wet sidewalk was jammed with a Hollywood pantheon of the Reagan generation, full of wine and weariness and all wanting their cars (CHUCK'S PARKING - PLEASE STOP HERE read the sign out front). "Bloody undignified," grumped a silver-haired BBC man, "standing in the rain in an alley in Los Angeles...
...looked nervous for the first time. After a lightning search, he tossed it toward a green wooden planter near the hotel entryway. In doing so, he let fall a single dollar bill. Caught by a little twist of wind, it skittered an inch or two across the sidewalk...
...bent to retrieve the lost bill. Then the two thieves loped easily away down the sidewalk. He stood and watched them go. They wore new jogging shoes and beautiful down jackets of the kind that after some argument, he had recently bought for his son. They were good-looking too. Clear-eyed, strong, giving off a kind of energy, like athletes. It seemed to him that for them the whole thing had been a sort of game. And there they went, jogging away in step, knees high, heads up, shoulder to shoulder like some Damon and Pythias of the inner...
Save for the celluloid immortality enjoyed by a few of the residents here, they are all, of course, as defenseless against decline as any other aged flesh and mind: the tolerance is gone for noise, harsh light, the unexpected; a sidewalk curb is no more easily managed than an escarpment. But it is different in here. There isn't, for example, the palpable sadness that is so striking in other institutions where people are growing very old. It isn't happy all the time, exactly, but neither is the air so thick with loneliness, to say nothing...