But most of my prospect was the blank wall of the depository across the lot, and – something to watch – there was lighting-up time at the Bunker Hill towers up the safer end of the road. They were the LA Law credits: that one with triple blue fours, the Four-Four-Four, was the office block. Only they were not dressed overall in internal neon as on film. Several floors went missing into darkness, and there was a different configuration of blanks nightly. But still plenty of gassy blue colour-washed the room. That night I spent in. I had a beer in Hank’s bar down in the lobby, an early beer, just Big John, the quiet vet barman from Wyoming, and me. Too early to trade Churchill quotes with the joint’s owner, an old guy whose face as a dapper bantam fighter I could see on a memorial board behind the till: he was standing behind his wife, a classy dame of the Bacall era. There was another picture of her alone on some boulevard under palms. ‘You are beautiful, you are loved eternally,’ said the words. She had died a few months back.

It was a regulars’ bar, hung with flags and photos of cops around drugs-bust bags. The laundry service van driver drank there, and a silver-haired corporate lawyer from 444. ‘The Way We Were’ was always on the juke and the game, any game, on the screen. I drank, not too much, not too often, and kept on my limewashed sombrero, because it made me safely an outsider. I could get tacos from the coffee-shop across the lobby, nodding politely in passing to the Sikhs who ran the hotel, which put up old men and midwest kids. But the diner was closed that day. And the waiter – who had said one morning that he understood when he saw me crying – was not home. He was here and his family were somewhere else, and his heart was swollen and burnt, he said. Mi Corazon. Behind the closed door the waitress was hanging up baby shower signs in Spanish. I wasn’t foodless, I had a bag of the new crop’s golden raisins in my room, and a quart of ginless lime rickey from a stall in the city market. Stall, too improvised a word: a juice fountain. It dispensed health drinks from chrome tanks, their names lettered on old plastic slot-ins. Its laminate counter was old, too, and the enamelled blenders that smashed up the fruit: it realised all Europe’s post-war dreams of eggs, fruit and milk in a peaceful America. The man who ran it was Hispanic, but from way back: his daughter couldn’t take in that there could be countries like mine where you bought limes singly; they crushed a cartonfull daily, and it flowed from a tap. Rich. Ricos.

Lime juice; raisins; chilli-powdered beef jerky. Nights I wasn’t hungry. Most nights I walked back from the mid-city bus stops late, sometimes almost all the way back from the Wah Wah Sing and Gutierrez Mortuary at the end of Sunset; walking fast but calmly, hat on and clutched against the warm off-building gusts, never through the lots, the cop cars already shrieking. Nights I was tired. My eyes were sore with street grit and dazzle off the pool in the garden at the Getty. Or I’d walked up a canyon, Laurel say, where the traffic had not met a solo pedestrian before and whumped by in waves, hurling out empty cans. Or lingered all afternoon at the Gene Autrey museum listening to a reading of the journal of an overland immigrant in an epidemic moment – not knowing, she wrote, if ‘the high side boards of the wagons might not be our coffins tomorrow’. Upstairs in the dream galleries, Yakima Canutt – filmed in old age among his rodeo trophies – explained his stunts. One Sunday I walked seventeen miles to Santa Monica for a first look at the Bay, bussed home, flossed the teeth by eating the jerky, fell asleep in my clothes.

The television was on but the sound low. The kids a few doors along had the Shopping Channel on loud. The screen had shown the dramatised weather – a young woman with big hair describing the haze, and its burning-off, as if it were her audition piece. Reception and colour patchy.

I was patchy. The morning I flew there I left a letter for a man of whom I had held hopes for a year. The letter made desire explicit; asked for an end to ambiguity; promised to take a no to the jaw like a pro. He was a movie fan, downstairs in the front rows in the local Odeon or Gaumont, for 40 years. Almost everything I came across was shipped back to him. Like sourdough toast in The Pantry, and the clear-eyed no-longer young man on the next stool to me: ‘How’s the steak, Dave, worth the drive?’ said the counterman. Dave had been on the road for two hours coming back from location for a steak. He’d been a farmer, he said, till his back went. Then a stunt driver, twenty years. It got easy when there was a Jacuzzi in a truck out on site, you pulled your tricks relaxed and flexed. The thick white diner showed as the steak diminished, but he couldn’t quite finish it. Trashing new cars, he said, nothing better: get into a new car, close the windows, savour ‘that bitchen new car smell’, light a cigarette and let it burn down to scar the dashboard. ‘I had one this show, three miles on the clock. Only three miles. And I totalled it.’

That would travel the Atlantic. Also Dietrich’s gold-dusted, almost ginger wig, from the old Max Factor HQ, and the photographs on its wall of Max’s first shop in Hill Street. Mrs Max and the hired help were wig-making – postiches and transformations and toupées in the old sense, complex false structures for women. (All that would be here was implicit in those re-presentations of desirability. Heads of hair were bought, for cash, in village Europe.) The movies, a name for people not pictures, would just have arrived at this rail-head town, where wildflowers grew either side of the tracks. Mrs Max knotted dyed peasant hair on a mesh base, and the sons stirred the liquid whitening vats: it was any immigrant’s basic business. A bakery. A grocery.

I wanted to offer the man in his London attic a present from his dream America, and I couldn’t afford The Searchers scenario in its clear sealed bag from the memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard. But under the remains of an arcade at Venice Beach was a store selling old clothes, machine washed into a sanitary limpness, and I had bought a patchwork quilt for him. I could pretend it cost no more than the 50-buck note he gave me, left over from his own tentative trip. Other quilts piled at the back were silk crazies, or expensive because they had been made by the stricter sects, but this quilt was a weathered old glory flag, faded burgundy and ivory, indigo diagonals. To the sales-girls, 60s minifrocks were mythic, beyond historic. But quilts of the Twentieth Century were a local commonplace, goods bought in yard sales when the house was cleared by death. We folded and curled it up tightly, a blanket roll for that pale sand outside – that was cold to sit on before the sun broke through.

Grains fell from the quilt when I spread it across my bed. Several machine-tumblings for cleanliness had partially pulled it apart. Most of the thread ties, each of six strands of cotton (in that quiet green of kitchen paintwork 70 years ago) were unknotted, but they were sewn right through, and none were missing. The stitching of the patches was going, sand grains had seeped inside through the gaps. I lay on the bed by the light of the TV, waiting for the movie Hondo to begin. It was cold and I wrapped the quilt over me during the film, re-tieing the green threads in reef knots with my eyes on the screen.

Nightly for the next week, the quilt was neatly laid over the back of the one chair in the room when I got home, late. I’d been to the movies, for the picture palaces rather than the footage, coming out warmed by the red lanterns of Grauman’s, hazed with the glow of the newly wired-up El Capitan. Film houses, like the shops there, were only barns: four walls bare externally, inside mostly holding electric light. (Their goods looked no good isolated under the flat sun.) The buses back from Westwood, from along Wilshire Boulevard, were cold, and tenser after dark, despite the polite and stoic drivers. On almost every bus, the same poem in Spanish, something like: ‘Don’t go for the man who wants you, he’ll say and do anything. Look instead for the man who has given up on desires.’

Another night, one of the bar’s temporary regulars (regular regulars were firemen, narcs cops, partying secretaries) took me to see his job. Brad, the lighting man out of Las Vegas, second generation – his father had made the hitching thumb sign. D’ya ever see somebody blow those tubes, he said, as I drew on the napkin the fantastic lettering of the Stardust sign. I hadn’t thought of their creation, not even in the LA Museum of Neon, looking up at the old Kinema signs that might briefly be press-buttoned into life. Blown glass tube is naturally baroque – you never saw it used for Roman letters. Brad named the colours: magenta, hot pink, pool blue. He wasn’t neoning, though. He was fixing the old Myron Ballroom a few hundred yards down the road as the new Shark Club, a spin-off of the Vegas place. Ya don’t know it? Oldest dance-hall in town, several thousand could circulate on its sprung wood floors. Then Miz Myron bought it in 1945, 46, ran it through jive and jitterbug and black GIs and rock ’n roll, and she was still the owner, still a sharpie, 84 or that might be 86. When he put in his estimates for lighting the lots around she queried whether he needed round or square cable. Not to be bilked.

He was an enthusiast, he walked me down to the Ballroom. On its middle layer they’d almost finished the disco. The sound waves there would have physical force, would toss the girls’ hair like wind. The young workers were sitting on carpets slutty with food cartons, and treated Brad as an old dullard. At his request one switched on a laser that turned a chandelier to rubies and blood drops, or at least Max’s Blondeen lipstick, and the arrhythmic flashes of the strobe lighthoused far out of the crush doors, open for an evening wind. Brad and the chief rigger bivouacked on cots in W C Fields’s dressing room, deep in sweaty basements barricaded by chairs. Absolutely the pits. We clambered up into the loft. Three filth-clarted witchballs still hung there, a gone magic among the Kliegls; and you could see the original wall and roof ribs, they looked to be about 1911 or so, studded with the sockets for the first excitement of electric bulbs. A box of darkness put up to be lit. Brad wanted to shine pearly white across the lots around, which would make girls feel safe as they parked their cars for a night at the Shark.

We walked across to the old Mayan Cinema. In the yellow darkness between two street lamps, it was a lump. He had a proposal to reclaim its sandstone facade. First, he would shoot out those sodium horrors on the pavement. Then, he would restore savagery to the shallow bas-reliefs copied from temples – with ambers to deepen shadows, pink-white mobilising the bones of the flat faces. And tiny brilliant beams to awaken the eyes. Roberto Salvatore at Max Factor described the making-up of a movie face just so, and recited colours too: sallow, Spanish, Mexican, Arab or Hindu, Mulatto, Mikado, Lavender, and Light and Dark Negro.

Brad wanted to drive me to Las Vegas to meet his father and see the Strip signs. To him, LA was fertile city. Wet. The multi-colour light of a city rises, he said, until it makes one beam of whiteness that pierces to the ionosphere.

My room seemed warmer. The maid, who had spoken once, to ask if my hat was from Michoacan, which it was, had laid the folded quilt on the end of the bed. Every floor of 444 was alight.

I picked over the quilt in daylight. (The salt haze reached even there, cold: I lay in. The coffee shop was open again. I think the baby was christened José.) Most of the materials must have been around 1930. Its backing was coarse flowery calico, strips machined together, texture so crude that they might have been the flour or feedgrain sacks merchants had printed decoratively so farmers’ wives would favour their firm for the cloth. But the pieces seemed too large even for opened-up sacks. The main fabric of the right side was a cotton print that felt mealy and cheap, yet had a far higher warp count than the back. The patches were mostly a dull rose or blue, from a limited supply of ill-matched cloths. Some sombre Sunday-meeting textiles, cream stars or spots on dark backgrounds. A rough shirting, washed thin but still too heavy, and stockinette, meant for underwear, its knit construction distorted by use. A few square inches of a far older voile, so fine that most of the weft had worn away: one such patch had been crudely re-covered with a paisley, the kind of material used in the 40s for wrap-over pinafores. There were tiny fragments of cottons, a yellow one, unique and so small that it must have been a mail-order sample clipping.

I bought a second quilt for myself a few days later in Venice Beach, a skilled piecing of Art Deco lawns and ginghams, not tied but quilted in a frame. The curves of the stitching rippled through the squares. It was spare but its makers had enough yardage, all of it unworn: there was cash, and a store in town, and girls young enough to have pretty frocks they out-grew.

This quilt’s patches had a different narrative. All but the samples had been recovered from exhausted clothes. That shirting, that voile was pre-1920. Before marriage, or at its start? She must have been without company: on a farm? She had nobody to exchange pieces with, and the sewing was all by one hand except that cobbled-on forties job. No sociable frame.

It would have to be mended and strengthened before it was given to him.

The Hollywood Boulevard Woolworth’s had a plastic-bubbled sewing kit, but the threads were synthetic and the needles rusty. That salt haze penetrated. The telephone book listed an embroidery shop just past the Beverly Wilshire hotel, so I walked down there, in the now-familiar long curve ambling through the western oases, on ribbons of sidewalk, sprinklered cool, the pressured mist rising past the ankle. Green shade all the way, or violet over half the court of a low Spanish apartment block. Most of the dogs that threw themselves at fences or gates, barking, were twice human bodyweight, but the fences were distant, across the lawns. Between dogs were five and ten minute lengths of birdsong. Some orioles. There was no other company. I used to carry a small shoulder bag, and the security firm cars badged with liveries would slow to pace with me, surveilling. Once I was bagless, they drove past.

Off Wilshire, the English saleswoman had cotton thread, even had the kind of size ten German needles I like, so fine both ends will prick. On a bed of curlicued iron wire upstairs in the Ralph Lauren shop on Rodeo Drive there was a comforter in the same Old Glory colours as the quilt, but it was a certified antique and cost over $2000. Its makers must not have been desperate for warmth. It was almost unwadded.

The panhandler on the bus back had a clever line, worth more than the two bucks I gave him. He flattered his marks they were too good-looking not to have cars. (I don’t drive.) The dollars were loose in my pocket, drawn $100 at a time from the bank nearest the Wells Fargo museum – an excuse to call in to look at the black lacquered safes with Japanesey paintings, at the company telegraph code book which reduced whole sentences for those in transit to a few near-nonsense words. (For instance, Kroog, very low; Krore, be prepared for the worst; Kubus, will not recover; Knug, died last night, and Kirat, arrange to ship the body home.) A bundle of a hundred clean bills was too thick to carry in my pocket. Twenty would do. I could feed to bursting for days on that, and the coin change paid for transport. The girls at the Venice Beach rags store thought their sister homewares shop up Topanga Canyon might know more about their sources of quilts, so I walked up from the Pacific Highway. Two black hawks patrolling high over the wildflowers, hot colours only, no blues. Smells of Sunday dinner from the sagebrush. Two wan blonde girls reading the stapled-up notices by the health food store: ‘These cats have a protective grey coloring which prevents them from being seen by owls and coyotes.’ ‘Vegi-Match: We will computer match you with three other vegetarian singles for $25.’

The homewares proprietor was in his element, floating in the settlement’s 1970 suspension. Where was the stock from? Well, maybe, some of it, it might come from yard sales in Valley towns. Closer than that she couldn’t go. She was animated only when she wrongly thought she could sell me a silk throw over a century old. It was amateur, a rich girl’s amusement, never used, no abrading even on the untwisted floss of the satin-stitched flowers. She had no idea of its past. It didn’t look as if it was from this city, unless it came out by train in the founding years of the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe railroad. I couldn’t imagine the red plush whorehouse girls labouring on this between tricks. And the piece was too early to be the time-killing project of some retiree’s wife from the Middle West, shaded from the sun behind holland blinds. Did a lodging-house keeper, a woman – getting by in the state of the new canned fruits – stitch this as parlour work?

Rules of behaviour don’t translate. Randolph the lawyer and manicured Johnnie, veteran of the race-tracks, wouldn’t understand why I couldn’t accept the offer of beer, or only accepted after I’d bought them a round first. Refusing meant I could get two beers relaxed with them, and say yes to going on to Mak’s Bar for a third. They drove, two cars, though it was only minutes away on foot. The Vietnamese waitress was 20 years older than her girlish fall of black hair, her skittishness. Randolph biographed everyone: she was putting her son and daughter through USC. A customer to whom she said ‘spe-she-all’ often and deferentially was Japanese, a nisei grown up to be a judge. We moved on for a last drink at the Tender Trap at Sixth and Alvarado – where, said Randy, none of us should be. Though I’d walked through there, too. I was trying to remember the mouth diagrams which are Korean Hangul syllables on the shop signs – enjoying the pavement crowding and the way you bought any drink, even ginseng tea, by the generosity of a quart cup.

To salvage those quilt patches of voile where the warp threads only were left, I had to tramline –ºwhich is to re-invent the weft with parallel rows of stitches. They were secured into the sheet of calico, bleached by use, which backed the pieces. One morning, sleepless at four, I unpicked the ends of the quilt, sealed like an envelope by a crude line of machining. Inside, not shop-bought cotton wadding, but an old, worn-thin counterpane of a striped hand-weave in sand and dirt colours. Initials RL, roughly stitched, hardly call it embroidery, on the border. The maid draped the chair with the finer quilt, but spread that one over the bed each morning, carefully, never dislodging the needle, never loosening work in progress. She wouldn’t tell me her name. Her black plait of hair bounced off her spine as she worked.

I’d been tramping the sea-coast highway for days trying to keep on the beach and off the roadside. The first few body shocks from the air displaced by trucks of sixteen wheels almost exhilarated, then physical fearfulness set in. It was slow going through sand, unless on the water-firmed margin along the tideline. We were outside the bathing season, and the beaches were unpeopled all week, except for a few hard boys, suited-up on their boards off Dan Blocker. When I came out of the beach washroom at Zuma, turning towards the road, a police-car stopped, waited for me to catch up. Window down. Empty vista. Heads out. You know a woman got murdered in there? Killed for her red foreign car by a couple boys out of New Mexico? (Were they being courteous or trying to induce nervousness?)

‘Nobody gets into my house without they call me first,’ said the girlish woman in the bar at Trancas. ‘I have a quarter taped to the front door with a note, says take the quarter and call me if you want to see me. Unless the canyon’s on fire, don’t knock.’ She was talking to the hostess. Another old girl entered, with long hair past her shoulders, escorted by a meaty man. She’d been east to be hypnotised out of smoking, cleaning her lungs for her fiftieth birthday. I kept fingering the packet of new needles in my pocket. We went to Point Dume, a melancholy settlement, its salt-resistant foliage dark, the sun setting through it. I knew some wistful zones — the concrete villas, say, behind the cemetery in the Budapest hills early in a winter’s morning — but this was sadder. They’d lived here twenty years. He acted. Second villain on Magnum. Saw you repeated yesterday, said the barman. At the stop, a grave old gentleman asked in Spanish if I would put out my hand to flag down the bus. It will stop for you, he said. Second in the queue was a film-maker from Mexico City: talking, talking, in English, of the proposal he dreamt of making to Cher for a special. He imagined her as a stream of Bob Mackie diamante, and the hair, the cherry hair.

What I thought of as I restored the quilt, as the light came up one morning, was this. On Santa Monica Pier, a long horizontal photograph, framed, of California beauty queens, near the boardwalk in the first years of the abbreviation of bathing costumes. Their faces, their bodies were within the stencils of their period, their brows were monumental, their legs not elongated. They had dry curls. But perhaps every tenth female in the line registered as modern, since the soft, tight, black of their mono-garments was near enough to what was strutting the boulevards. Those tenth ones couldn’t be disregarded as safely defused by time.

In the carousel pavilion at the pier’s end was a flicker book machine –  a quarter a go. Chaplin, of course. But I kept seeing behind him the long-gone sunlight on a wooden wall.

The old patch of seamstress’s skin on the second joint of my index finger had hardened again with driving the needle.

Brad was sullen in Hanks, complaining audibly to his rigger of my neglect. My good-talking company was a Hispanic law student on his way to Barcelona. A laundry delivery-man remembered his native Watts as the towers went up: no, too fast a verb, we agree on accreted. And there was Randolph. Nothing was explicable to Randolph. Not the walking on the tide-line, not the pleasures of the buses. What was the best time I had? The Saturday at Our Lady of The Angels, when there was a first communion feria. That court between church and its offices, black and white with tux’ed little grooms and veiled bridelets thwacking each other with ribboned candles. There were stalls of melon and pineapple slashed open, ices. The midriffs of the mothers had happy fat, the first generation of surplus. Some grandmothers in black seemed even to have replumped under their wrinkled skins. And the exuberance. ‘Like the Chico stuff?’ asked Randolph. I can remember how the first surplus tasted, the first excess sweetness, the beginnings of hope – through the bananas and Whitsunday white nylon dresses – that we would not have to follow the narrative of our families. Time since was never so rich.

At Mak’s bar, Randolph wanted to dance to Andrew Lloyd Webber on the juke, wanted to buy me dinner, at least in The Pantry. No. Despite his glamour, despite his Angeleno pronunciation (that world-wide-broadcast local dialect of sexual attraction). I’d almost completed the full length of the coast. There were only a few nights more when I’d make it back to my room to sew up the quilt’s ends.

There was a possible history for the quilt. Guesswork. It didn’t feel Californian, no matter how poor the Valley towns in the Depression. It seemed farm, lonely farm, mid-West farm; an urgent necessity for coverings gussied up, just, with what little could be reclaimed within one building. It could be (was that merely should be?) Okie. The comforter on the journey out there, hard-worn before, and then in, this state. That patch from the 40s nagged. The quilt was repatched only the once, about a decade after it was made, when the first of those frail voile pieces went — only tufts remained beneath. But the substitute was roughly cut, folded, sewn. If the same hand that made it, had also stitched that on, she had changed. Her patience had gone, or her tendons. The quilt had still been needed. That was a running repair.

Randolph stopped his silvery Jaguar on Figueroa, made an offer. His warmth would have been welcome to ameliorate the dryness. Yet the coast – no, the quilt – was the imperative. It had to go to the movie fan with strength restored to it, a chance of surviving into his future: he had said, again and again, his middle-aged move would be, green-carded, to America. That was his final new-start dream. And I wanted him to take the quilt once more west, optimistically.

The size of the steaks.

On that last stretch of walking from car door to room, the sidewalk derelict sat up from under his blanket right at my ankle, and yelled soundlessly.

The quilt was out full, over the bed, over me, needle in hand, about five foot more of ladder-stitching. The Shootist on the television: 444 half-lit. The telephone rang. Randolph was in the lobby, ignoring the disapproval of the Sikh proprietors.

He hadn’t taken a negative for an answer.

Folded and rolled again by the maid, still refusing her name; roped and tied with Woolworth’s bandannas from the branch on Broadway; boxed for security by Panam, which had them sniffed, the quilts went east. Mine lay in a chest, unused, until I gave it to a pregnant friend, shivering with fear despite summer. ‘I have slept under the quilt almost every night since you gave it to me,’ she wrote later, ‘it usually travels with me – and I regard it as having magical healing powers.’ Her son (the baby was a boy; he was christened Samuel) felt the same way. The movie fan did not reply to the letter, but after a month and over a beer, he said no, not interested. His sole attempt to get a green card was to send his name to the pan-European lottery. Although he was a Liverpudlian, almost Irish, he was not lucky. When he married the perfect woman some years later, she found the quilt in his cupboard, loved it, threw it over their sofa. She took him to live in America.