A/N: The W Hotel is Westwood, Calif., a part of LA. Stars often hang there because movie premieres play at a large theater a few blocks away, in the center of Westwood. There are about 20 W hotels nationwide, very swank.

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So we're sitting on the steps of the W Hotel figuring out what to do with our day when an tall African ambassador (he's wearing one of those hats) walks out the front glass doors toward a waiting car and because the steps at the W are transparent and have water running under them, depth perception, the lack thereof, fools the ambassador in taking a third step when there's only two to take.

His fourth step is a stumble. His fifth step, a hard clap. There is grunt, a catch and suspension of breath that followed unexpected human error. There is no sixth step.

This has happened before.

He ends his crash with his feet smacking up against the car, his bodyguard rushing to cover him, his hat having popped off and spun into the grass. He moans a little and lays on the cement, smiling and laughing, embarrassed but wise, this giant black man bellowing on a street in LA while another young black man, just as giant, scrambles to lift him, while two movie stars inevitably cheat on their tabloid-anointed boyfriends or girlfriends in a room nine floors up as an investment banker calls his wife from the bar, half drunk, angry, because he shouldn't fucking be here, missing her. In LA, one anecdote is three, a story always has seemingly unrelated subplots, because sooner or later, tomorrow or next week or, karma willing, in the next life, these stories will intersect to make a whole tale, and suddenly we will have moments rife with meaning. But for now God stages these events and leaves us to cook the meal.

It's me and Leni on the steps, me all splayed out against a railing while Leni is pretty well packed up in a human ball, her knees drawn up close like she's crouching hard against a fictional chill. I don't know; maybe she feels something. A wind's been blowing in lately, not bringing in rain or anything, but hard blue skies with little haze. Right now I'm watching two singular clouds slowly trying to merge, two puffs trying to get a point where they entangle themselves and start the threads of a storm, the kind that breaks mercilessly in West Texas with tumbling tornadoes and rain that convinces you of our impending doom. Shit starts here, ends there.

I'll admit my lack of depth. I'm pretty cause and effect. I think in movie mind. All straight plot. Nuance is a Symbol, it has Meaning, that kind of thing, it all leads back into God, or a switcheroo plot where that character you thought was wasted in the first act shows up at the café, eating light, dressed too well, looking worried, ready for a cigarette, if only, in these LA cafés, you could smoke.

Smokes. Leni's trying to quit. I look at her now and it basically makes me sick the way she looks. Hard, mean pangs in my tummy. She's trying to quit so she can gain weight, so every other nightclub talent scout will quit hounding her into shoots or auditions; she's worried, frankly, she's about to yes. And I say leave, leave, go somewhere, don't gain weight, stay just this way, make some guy sick, make him ask you out for a steak dinner in Kansas City, the kind of restaurant where you can eat half, take home the rest and after the meal pluck a cigarette and have a room watch you become the most moving moving picture they've seen since fucking Platoon.

But she won't leave.

Leni. After the filmmaker, Riefenstahl, yeah, her parents are two of the thirty-seven people on Earth that buy that the Nazis pressured her to make those propaganda films, and make them so well. Leni likes the name. Cherishes it. Knows the whole story, except leaves out the part that supposedly redeems Leni Riefenstahl. I guess I'm being a little judgmental, because I don't know the whole truth. I spose Jodie Foster's the final verdict. She's the one making a movie about it.