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I packed my well-worn copy of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem as we waited for the car service to pick us up and take us to the airport, and Terry looked over and just rolled his eyes, saying "you're taking Joan Didion to read on the plane?"
Maybe it's too obvious.
Maybe I'm trying too hard.
It's hard to say, really.
The jet took off with the thumps and jarring, rumbling roaring that most air travelers just let slip into the background noise of their busy lives, but I sat there, peering out the window, wondering, as I always do, what it would feel like if we ended up cartwheeling down the runway in flames. We cleared the runway and the clouds and, soon enough, we were in the air, sailing over the landscape in cinematic slow motion, halfway between the earth and the stars.
I sat and watched the huge blue jet engine shudder and vibrate in the currents and winds of impossible altitudes and everything in the world was more or less just fine, just endless, just everything, all it ever is, just five miles away.
Sometimes I feel like I'm always in flight, always five miles away from the world I'm watching, just looking down on it all from somewhere else.
The sky in Los Angeles is blue, perfectly clear and recklessly open, a halcyon backdrop to the surreal skyline of all those absurd palm trees, and I ride along in the rental car and say "stick tree, stick tree, stick tree" at nearly every one I see, flush with the novelty of being someplace where such things grow.
This is not a green place, not a lush landscape by far, but there's life everywhere—preposterous imported trees with tufts like Dr. Seuss at play, shaggy Australian trees with foliage like impressionist paintings and bark that peels off in papery sheafs of soft fiber, and rubbery succulents that stand in every yard like props from 1920s cartoons.
I ride along, a passenger on the trip, and can't help but point out the ubiquitous palm trees, as if I were the only one in the world noticing how strange they seem, as if I was the only one who could see them at all.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
I think Terry is tiring of the announcement, so I keep it in my head.
Stick tree
Nothing seems to rust here, but everything is bleached by the sun.
The sun is endless, a friendly face in December.
Our host, Ricky, is a fanatical devotee of Martha Stewart, down to the most microscopic details, and I'm completely irritated by how beautiful his house is, which casts my jaundiced view of the woman into a revealing light. Everything is almost perfect, and even the almost is perfect, making the place seem just human enough, just natural and effortless enough in its arrangement to be real. I squint around, looking for something to get my teeth into, but there's nothing. It's all just right.
We unpack our bags and settle in.
Terry heads to Rose Hills, and Ricky takes me to the beach, to walk the broad concrete boardwalk in Venice, where the perfect weather is just coaxing the first crowds out of their complacency. I have seen this landscape a million times before, in a million movies and TV shows, and it's surreal to see it without the mitigation of a screen. The people are different than I expect, less perfect, less like characters written into the land, but still they are not like the people I am used to seeing.
I am singularly obsessed with a fact I was given, that rats live in the palm trees, and I spend far too much time looking up, hoping to see a rat scurrying through the hula skirts of fading leaves. Ricky humors me.
The ocean here is not endless. It's bounded on either end by mountains, the ragged pointy kind we don't have on the east coast. Our mountains are the oldest in the world, but they're relaxed, reclining, comfortable mountains. In Venice, the arms of the mountains wrap around us and make everything seem safe and comfortable, and give a shape to the place, and to the sky, which does seem endless and perfect, cut with the trails of jet exhaust and nothing else.
A steady stream of jets takes the sky from the airport, down to the south, and the tiny glittering pods of airplanes make me think of an uninterrupted chain of seed pods, heading off into the world full of American dreams. In the clear sky, you can make out the planes when they're a million miles away, and it just makes the world seem impossibly large and open and inviting.
Ricky points out Terry's former apartments on the beach as we go, and the numbers mount. By the end of the trip, I will have seen dozens, all those places where his life took place before I was ever aware that he even existed. The architecture of Venice is odd, a mixture of the old and shabby and the new and appalling, all punctuated by those insane trees.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
The phrase becomes a mantra through endless internal repetition, almost, a tool by which I remind myself this is not where I come from, this is not where I come from, this is not where I come from, as if I'm afraid of being drawn in, just like everyone here was drawn to come and seek out something more than they knew.
The place is magical.
I will not see a single rat in the trees over the course of the next eight days, but I am not disappointed, except in a different way entirely.
Terry gives me the tracking number for the gifts he'd shipped before leaving.
I look it up and UPS says that the package was shipped at 1:23 that afternoon.
Terry spends much of the rest of the day on the phone, and eventually, the UPS driver shows up to point out where he was supposed to have left the package. Later, the mailman says he saw it there on his rounds, but we never see it.
Somewhere in Venice, a disappointed thief is stuck with a box of gifts with great sentimental value and little obvious commercial worth. As the gloom settles in, I try to tell Terry that I, at least, am not disappointed, because I know I would have loved and cherished the signed first edition of William S. Burroughs' Queer he got for me, but I'm getting something even better.
I'm most frustrated that the wind chimes Terry and I found in Ocean City, the ones with the wooden anchor and square tubular metal chimes that had an impossibly harmonious tone, were lost with everything else. They'd have sounded perfect hanging in the tree over Billy's memorial bench, just perfect.
I stand by and do what I can, but it's all out of our hands.
In the morning, I will go looking.
I succumb to the lure of the hot tub.
Ricky's is a large, comfortable, incredibly comprehensive model that rests in the bamboo and reed surroundings of a little coveredtiki hut in his back yard. I have always been suspicious of hot tubs, finding them overbearing and unpleasant, but I decide that, while in California, I ought to explore. Something of that attitude just seems appropriate to the mood of the place.
I find Ricky in the tub, strip, and climb in myself, wondering if I should have gone in in my drawers. In the grip of travel madness, I go commando. It seems an almost perfectly Californian thing to do, but I wonder as I climb over the wall of the tub.
The air is cool, the breeze is constant, and the experience is far, far better than I remember.
I will be in that hot tub three or four times a day for the rest of the trip.
All around me, I can see the trees, those tropical trees.
I wake at 3:40 in the morning, and do so throughout the trip.
Ricky complains, somewhat later on, that he's waking up at 3:40 each morning, too, and it's a coincidence that makes me think, that makes me remember. There are strange things in the air out there, a compelling vibe that I think I recognize.
I sit in the hot tub for an hour, just lost in the pale blue light filtering up from the bottom of that churning pool, feeling like I'm being boiled alive in the most wonderful way, and I climb out, naked and steaming, and stand in the threshold of the tiki hut, cooling down in the soft winter breeze. It seems wrong, somehow, to be naked in an unfamiliar back yard, but I cast my doubts into the wind.
I spend the next several hours criss-crossing the alleys and back streets of Ricky's neighborhood, thinking that maybe the thief who stole Terry's package will have opened the box, pulled out the few items which seem obviously valuable, and ditched the rest. All the alleys are the same, and I walk until my feet are sore, but never find a thing.
When I return, I climb right back into the hot tub.
It is becoming a problem.
Christmas Eve is low key, a quiet day tempered by Terry's frustration over the lost gifts. He is generous to a fault and selected his gifts with the childlike glee that is so much a part of his being, in spite of everything, and the loss just adds to the feeling of suspension in the air, the feeling that so many good things have gone so wrong in this beautiful place. Ricky is lost in it, too, in his first Christmas since his lover, Tommy, announced that he was in love with someone else and left, and he tells Terry that he can hardly bear not to be with his baby on Christmas, to be apart from him after all that time, and it is a bond between them, almost, something to find new understanding in. Ricky is muscular and handsome and charming in the best southern manner, an Alabama gentleman in this place where everything comes from somewhere else.
Ricky and I talk about the plants and trees that all seem so strange to me, and we stand in the street as he points out what each thing is and where it comes from. Australia, he says, pointing out a low, bristly shrub across the street, and Hawaii, pointing out a flowering vine. The street is lined with huge, rough-trunked trees with pointed little leaves that blend together at a distance, making them look soft and beautiful and much like all those aging movie stars whose contracts insisted on gobs of vaseline for the lens. Up close, they are glorious and shabby, shedding spongy, fibrous bark that makes them look and feel like books left out in the rain. There is an alienness to everything here, and yet I feel totally comfortable in the midst of all of it, like I've been here before, and not just by way of the movies. The movies I've seen have represented an entirely different California than I am seeing, and I'm delighted to have been so completely misled.
We drive in aimless loops, or rather, in carefully-directed loops that follow an order that is unfamiliar to me, and I see the sights of the obvious Hollywood mixed in with the unknown splendors. Everywhere, there are apartments where Terry's lived, and it makes my own early displacements seem mild by comparison. His friend Mickey is his counterpoint, a sarcastic and playfully vicious wellspring of playground bully epithets that punctuate every one of his announcements with something mean, critical, or cruel.
I adore her.
On the Hollywood walk of fame, I'm disappointed by the stars, which are just stars, just names rendered in brass as if we're supposed to walk along, reading each one and clasping our hands together in midwestern glee as each one invokes the memory of a favorite figure from the worlds of the various media. Still, I stop when Jack Benny's star appears, and I keep an eye open for Ray Milland's star, which is the one star pictured in my trusty sightseeing guidebook to LA, printed in 1959. I keep asking when we're going to see the Brown Derby, or the site of the future Los Angeles International Jetport, with it's luxurious space-age arch, but I'm answered with rolling eyes. I've seen the airport, but I nag anyway. In Hollywood, I think I need schtick.
In time, my ass becomes my schtick, as Mickey and Terry team up and goad me into mooning things for Terry's video camera. I pull my pants down in the middle of the sparse crowd of tourists at Graumann's Chinese Theater, which the entire group refuses to acknowledge as "Mann's" Chinese Theater in protest of the passage of time, and I kneel with Ricky with my hands in Jane Russell's handprints as he kneels beside me with his hands in Marilyn Monroe's handprints at the Gentlemen Prefer Blonds square on the walk, and the scene is curiously charged with the slightest hint of outlaw sexuality. Terry tries to push me to moon Jack Benny's footprints, but instead, I just stand there, in quiet awe, my feet filling footprints surrounded by Jack's scrawl "My ♥ belongs to Mary, but my feet belong to Graumann's," and reflect. I am such an alien in my own time, sometimes, but I grew up listening to Jack Benny, and it is amazing to stand in his footsteps.
The Chinese Theater plaza is much smaller than I expected, and most things here are, in fact, far smaller and far more real than they seem when they're lighted and lensed and framed in film. Having grown up outside of D.C., I know the sensation well, and refuse to take people to see the Lincoln Memorial for precisely that reason. Some things are best left in the mind.
We stop and eat at a hamburger place that the entire group loves, and the food is good, the dessert is impossibly large, and I get to meet Terry's ex, Russell, who is an industrialist of sorts, having founded a musical equipment manufacturing company that is featured prominently in my stage rig. I have heard many, many things about him, and I've heard things that have made me angry, and made me want to dislike the man, but when he arrives, I am adrift in the conversation, with nothing of interest to say, just the guy in the corner, fiddling with the video camera, and all the conversations I've imagined having over the last year just evaporate in my head.
Like so many things here, he seems smaller than I expected.
The day is tense, at times, and Terry is frustrated, inconsolable, and I've have come to know better than to try to break the spell. Sometimes, we can only accept things as what they are, and be frustrated and lonely and sad right along with those we love, because there's just no salve, no saving graces, and so I try to stay back, to resist the impulse to comfort him even as it makes my stomach churn to seem him hurting.
I leave him with Ricky and spend much of the evening with Mickey, who works in television and lives in a nice house off Venice Boulevard with a handsome, but troublesome, roommate and a dozen VCRs. We watch Willy Wonka, a favorite film of mine and possibly her favorite of all time, and it's illuminating to see how much the two of us love this gloriously mean-spirited, jarring film. We snack on a beef summer sausage given to her by her boyfriend, and I playfully antagonize her by pointing out that the boyfriend in question bears more than a passing resemblance to Alan Hale. We go on to watch Bad Santa, a tedious film that we saved by judicious application of mutual distraction, and Terry shows up to watch the last half of the movie and drive me home.
Terry is feeling low, and by the time we climb into bed, he is clearly elsewhere, lost in a downward spiral, and I leap into the morass in spite of my more subtle instincts, trying to blunt the razors he so often turns on himself. Like so many times before, the conversation turns ugly and endless, one more joint recitation of all the things that are wrong between us.
In the end, I curl up at the edge of the bed, so angry and frustrated that I will barely sleep.
When I wake, at 3:40, I climb out of bed, peel off all my clothes, and stagger through the cool darkness in Ricky's back yard, heading for the churning blue pool of the hot tub and that quiet place under the palm trees.
The breeze blows and sets the wind chimes ringing, and I soak until the sky grows brighter.
Christmas is a day for Jewish food and emotional distraction, and the four of us convene for breakfast at Jerry's Famous Deli. The conversation is fast and fluid and I toy with my blintzes and applesauce and keep up as best I can. There's a quality to it all, sometimes, that could easily leave me on the outside, but I hold my own.
Mickey leaves us to be with her family, and Ricky heads to the gym.
Terry senses that I'm out of sorts, and asks me what's wrong, but I will not tell him, not as long as it's Christmas. This is not my holiday, and it's not my place to add one more layer to all the things he's processing. I think about the ugly conversation all day, though, and it just keeps going around and around in my head like so many things do, powered by the neverending sources of doubt and frustration.
Later, he says, with resignation, "I hope those guys are enjoying their first edition of Queer," and I just hug him and listen to the sound of his irritated breathing for a moment. I want to tell him that he's already given me what may well be the best Christmas present I've ever received, but I can't.
I can't say a word.
Terry and his compatriots all have names rendered in the diminutive, all capped with a Y.
There's Terry, Mickey, Ricky, Jimmy, and Tommy, and then there's Joe.
Billy was one of the Y set, too, but his Y is a very different one now.
These dreamers of the golden dream are always younger than they'd be anywhere else.
I do my best to preserve my cynicism, but I can't help but wonder if I'm starting to dream it, too.
In midday, we make a trip that I know will be a hard one, out to Terry's home in Venice where Ricky's recent ex, Tommy, is renting the place from Terry in one of those tricky little accidents of fate that either go very well or very badly. I do my best to steel myself for the trip, but there's no route through the minefield, no map to get us through it without tears.
His house does not show a proud face to the street like so many of the other houses in the neighborhood. It's shy, and modest, concealed behind a thicket of green, and as we step up the front porch, it seems familiar for so many reasons I can't even begin to cover them all. On the most superficial level, it reminds me of so many of the houses in Georgia where my father's family comes from, but that's just the start. I have known this house for nearly two years, but in the abstract.
In reality, it's small and cozy and almost perfectly formed.
We step inside, and all the stories I've heard and all the tiny photographs I've seen and all the things I've imagined of what the place will be like just coming rushing together like the tide rolling in, and I'm there, standing in a kitchen I'd often wondered if I'd ever see, and that feeling is that one that is exactly as I imagined it.
It's hard for Terry to be there, almost as hard as it is for him to spend his days so very, very far away, and he drifts in an out of tears as the memories come. The previous tenants did bad things here, slathering black enamel almost at random over the door frames, ravaging the quiet comfort of this place, and Tommy's done a beautiful job of making it home again, erasing the horrors of slapdash indifference, but still, it's not right, it's not right. For Terry, it won't be right again, not ever, and I see that in his eyes as he wanders the rooms in a kind of daze and I feel my stomach knotting out of a kind of frustration that is painful and beyond succor, even as I wish for hopeless things.
As we tour the landscapes of damage and repair, the contractors Terry'd hired to work on the place live up to my lowest expectation of the breed, of the filthy little animals that people defer to out of fear and the uncertainty of their skills that is generated by the contractors themselves. The woman hired to work on Terry's place was an old, old friend, someone he trusted to do right, and to understand, but she is just another contractor, and things are ruined and destroyed, left dangling even as the money flowed. Before the week is out, I will use the expression, "You should sue the fucking cunt," far too many times, spitting out angry words of raging misogyny when my real fantasy is to meet her in an alley with a rusty icepick. I don't understand how people can be so wrong, sometimes, how they can live with themselves. In all of it, I imagine myself spending my time there, fixing the things that have gone wrong, carefully attending to the woodwork and plumbing and everything else, and it is not a thought that takes me in happy directions.
Terry finds himself overwhelmed, and so it is time for us to leave, leaving Tommy behind to complain that we've not spent enough time catering to his needs, and so we head back out again, out into the quiet of Christmas.
Terry asks me if I liked his house, and I don't know how to answer the question, except with an irritated "yes."
The tour never stops, and it is often my favorite kind of tour, the kind of accidental tour of the truest stories, the moments spent in-between, where everyone just points out the landmarks of their own lives as the scenery rolls by and tells the little tales of their real lives without the framework of irony or bigger intentions. I listen and smile and hope that they will continue to fail to find the particular cross street or junction point that they're all arguing about, so that we can just stay lost for a while longer, wandering aimlessly under the impassive Hollywood sign.
Everything I've ever found that's of value has come from that sort of travel.
I get in the car and ride along the endless highways with Terry and Ricky, and I stare out the windows as we go, noticing the perfect way the landscape unfurls outside the car, so differently from the way I know. I watch the trees rush by and they're a blur, passing too quickly to announce individually. As I watch, I notice strange green cannisters strapped to trees along the way, green cylinders with shiny metal bands at each end, and I try to point them out, but they're always lost in the blur.
Terry and Ricky make fun of my predilection for such absurd details, and I have to smile right along with them, even as I scan the side of the road ahead of us, looking for my proof. In time, the moment comes, and Ricky sees one, and having seen one, sees all of them, just like I'm seeing them.
We wonder aloud what they might be, until Ricky makes the connections in his head.
"I think they're rat traps, Joe," he says, and I think of the rats in the stick trees, in the stick trees, in the stick trees, and I am ridiculously happy to know that they're there, that something I've imagined to be true really is true. This is a trip where such things start to happen, it seems.
The land around us turns to concrete and steel and the trees thin out, enough to make my mantra possible again.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
Stick tree.
It is like old times again, or maybe not.
Not exactly.
That's where the discomfort lies.
Right now, I am finishing this entry in an unfamiliar living room in a gorgeously-Southern house in Clemson, South Carolina, where
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kudzublossom has generously put us up on our way, and I'm listening to the sound of nearby trains and remembering how there are no trains in LA, no distant industrial songs to sing along to, except in one very particular place, and it's odd to write about one curious and magical place when you're immersed in another, but there's nothing to do but manage that lag as best one can and just keep on telling all these endless stories that go nowhere, that just spin in space, circling around between the stars.By the time I tell this story, I'll be somewhere else all over again.
I fear this endless dislocation, but it feeds me.
It feeds me.
Read Part 2
