Nothing Lonely

           I drove east on Sunset but i didn't go home. At La Brea i turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down onto Ventura Boulevard past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast-boys in stripped down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch but somehow missing them. Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west and home to dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them. The sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colours, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed car-hops, the brilliant counters and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad.

Raymond Chandler
The Little Sister
1949

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Bar in Sherman Oaks
1955