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joebelknapwallIt was on this trip that I realized that I'm becoming a reporter, needing to scrawl out cryptic notes as I fall forward through the world so I'll be able to remember the things that I encounter along the way. Before I learned how to open my eyes, the details just kept their own places, and the stories I found on my way just stayed with me, but these days, the pace of discovery is accelerating, the images flickering by faster and faster until I'm lit up in the strobing pulse of truth truth truth, until I'm hanging on the edge of a seizure all the time.
On this trip, I filled my pockets with scrawled notes, stopping to write down "tiny xmas tree, pelican, arc of trolley, did I like it?, I dream I dream I dream, pacific, pier, endless beach, staggering down Electric Avenue" in a paroxysm of self-documentation that all means something, somewhere, even if it's only in my head.
Life is only in our heads.
I got ahead of myself in my first entry on LA, carried downstream on a whirling narrative thread, and left out a whole day, and not an unimportant one, either.
Because this is my journal and my life, I reserve the right to be my own Stalin and revise.
Let's step back for a moment.
I wake up at 3:40 again, and it is the morning after Christmas, a cool and quiet Sunday morning, and Terry snores quietly beside me, making the gentle buzz saw that's my favorite of his snores, and I'm tempted to just lie there and watch the blades of the ceiling fan beating overhead in the fuzzy electric flicker of the TV, but I'm already getting crazy from lack of exercise after just two days in this place. I edge over, slide quietly out of the bed, retrieve my towel from the bathroom, and tiptoe to the back door and the pocket paradise of Ricky's back yard, where the silhouettes of unlikely trees and strange, shrubby succulents surround me. I lift the bulky, insulated cover of the hot tub, folding it away to the side, press the dome of the touch buttons for the lights and motors, and stand there for a moment, watching the foam churning in a cauldron of theatrical blue light, listening to the symphony of sounds of the moment, the hum and rumble and soaring fizz of a thousand recently-opened cans of ginger ale.
In the darkness, I strip, fold my clothes and leave them in a fussy square stack instead of just casting them onto a chair, climb over the rim of the tub, and descend into the blue. This morning, it does not soothe me as it should, and I find that I'm feeling agitated and anxious, just floating there in the wash and thinking too much, processing too many new things and too many old ones, too. In time, I give up, climb back out, clean myself up, and dress for a walk.
I head east on Venice Boulevard, heading for the ocean, except I'm really heading west, heading for where the ocean lies in this place, in the direction of those perfectly magical sunsets. Orienting myself is a continuous issue for me here, even with the mountains to guide me, and I stroll the empty sidewalk with an assurance borne of bravado and the bolstered feeling of importance that comes from having my ears plugged with the cords from my iPod and the comfort and security of all my familiar musical landscapes. The walk seems endless, though it is so in the very best way, and I walk in the blackness with my eyes open wide, scanning the windows for the lights and activities of another me, another soldier of the early morning, but no one seems to be awake. The 33 bus passes me and its passengers pose in the blue-white fluorescent lighted windows like portraits of the tedium of servitude. I came to California wanting to ride the bus, and was informed by every quizzical person I told that only Guatemalan maids ride the bus.
Looking at the faces in the windows, I suspect that that supposition is true.
Still.
There are a thousand little apartment buildings along my way, an unbroken path of stucco sculpted into lo-fi deco birthday cakes, and I step up to the front doors of a few, where I see signs advertising apartments, alternately shocked by the high and low prices spelled out in inkjet-printed Arial, and I wonder why I'm so curious, what possible reason I'd have for making such notes. On Christmas morning, I'd gone on my first long walk, but I'd followed the wrong mountains and the wrong instincts, veering off course until I was in a whole other part of town , skirting the searing blue flanks of the block-long fabric store with a story to tell, one more story about Billy in a narrative landscape where he is the bedrock underneath it all, or was, and the houses were all just houses, little cottages like they are back home. On Venice Boulevard, the story architects tell is far more linear, a tale of beach town rental living that just goes and goes and goes on, and I cannot decide if I am inspired or appalled. Everything here looks as if it leaks in the rain.
I pass a strange, half-finished park with no entrances and then the library and the sight of the library makes me feel warm, makes me feel like I feel when I'm curled up in my corner in my library, breathing in the smell of books and old carpet and everything just like I have as long as I can remember, and something in my head is looking, looking at the shape of the place and wondering if there's a corner there, too.
No one is out here, out on the sidewalk with me.
How can I be the only one awake?
I pass the first of a series of strangely-appended vehicles, trucks and buses and trailers encrusted with homemade additions and hand-painted signs, where shopping carts cling to the flanks of retired inner city express buses living insane new lives like see-through chrome piglets, suckling at the teats of a fading hippie dream world. As I pass by the biggest bus, a huge old veteran of the years before I was even born, I wonder if there's anyone sleeping inside, and how a bus with Canadian license plates and sitting on four flat tires can be allowed to stay there. Back home, it'd be crawling with tickets, but in this place, the absurd sleeps with the expected, and I wonder if one notices the other snoring, or if it's all just below the threshold of awareness for all these people.
I reach the end of the road, and the gatehouse of a sprawling parking lot tells me its time to turn northward, to follow the route of all the beachgoers who come here to dream under the impossible sky. As I head up the pavement, I suddenly realize something I'd noticed the last few times I'd been to the beach here in the previous days.
No one was flying a kite, even though the wind was perfect.
Hmmm.
Like a good little lemming, I find a distant point of reference to pull me along.
The lights of the Santa Monica Pier sparkle in the hazy distance, the pinwheel of the big Ferris wheel there shining like a flickering badge of hypnotic light, and I decide that I will see it up close before I stop walking. The whole world here is eerily deserted, and I should wonder why those lights are all out there, blinking out a dozen messages in a code that I only kind of understand, but I know better than to ask such questions.
It is far better to dream that the whole world is the way it is for some kind of reason, that every sign means something, even if I know perfectly well that it's all just the machinery of heaven churning away like it always does, and always will, a million years after we're gone.
The Ferris wheel calls me, and I heed its call.
By the time I will reach it, I will have been walking for eighty-three minutes and still not have passed another soul on my way.
This is how much of my life is played out.
The deserted boardwalk is oddly calming, an arcade of locked-up shops and shut-down venues, and I drift by the signs and symbols of the city's cinematic alter ego while they're static, sets on a studio back lot, and it's easy enough to imagine that it'll all coming roaring back to life with the flick of a single switch, the denizens of the place just boiling out of thin air to set up their stands on the sidewalks, the performers and musicians just coming into being in a curl of brass as their saxophones twist out of nonbeing and unfurl like golden flowers, sprouting dreadlock-wearing leaves that tootle out the standards and nod expectantly at upturned hats that twirl out the cracks in the sidewalk like weeds. I walk at a brisk pace, halfway between my fantasies and the reality that I'm entirely alone in an empty land, and I wonder if there's street crime here in the wee hours, something wrong to break the spell.
In time, I clear the main stretch of the boardwalk and emerge into a string of in-between spaces that are just as I love them, just endlessly full of the kind of nothingness that's the geography of my dreams when I'm feeling uncertain, and the beach is just impossibly deep to one side, a completely different morphology to the rolling, interrupted dunes of our east coast barrier island seascapes. There's no one to see me, so I walk in time to my music, letting my fingers spell out the twitchy sign language of the little mechanical flourishes in the hyperkinetic electronica I'm listening to, and it's joyous, to be able to surrender to those instincts. The lights fade, I realize I'm in the midst of a vast empty stretch, and the Pacific calls me.
I shuffle through the sand, looking up and down the beach for anyone, still wondering how I can possibly be the only person in Los Angeles with the need to be here in this blue hour, and I stand there, just watching the whitecaps in the thin pre-dawn light and letting the world slip into the background noise of the surf. I unplug from my iPod, roll up my earphones, and listen.
The instinct comes, the reminder that life is short, and opportunities few, and I respond.
I slip off my shoes, tucking my socks into the open mouths, peel off my jacket, shirt, skivvies, and shorts, leave everything in a neatly folded pile with my iPod resting on top, and run screaming into the surf.
The Pacific in December is cold, but not like the Atlantic in May. I am comfortable.
I swim out, just enough, just until I cannot stand on the bottom, and I can hardly catch my breath, and I wonder why I'm here, treading water in this dark and unfamiliar sea, but it's all just one more puzzle to be solved, so I just paddle lazily until it feels like I've done it, like I've successfully passed one more test. A rolling wave catches me by surprise and almost churns me under, but the genes I inherited from my mother hold sway and my hair stays dry. I think of my clothes on the beach and what a ridiculous picture they paint of spontaneity and fussiness, and what people would think if the rip tide catches me and drags me out into the open sea. I hear myself laughing and something brushes my calf, something that could be seaweed or something else.
I beat a hasty retreat from the ocean, gather up my clothes, and walk at the edge of the surf, surrounded by the scurrying hordes of sandpipers, until I'm dry enough to get dressed again, enjoying the surreal pleasure of being the only naked fat guy on the beach.
The Pier is disappointing, though it's mainly so because it's so familiar, so much like the pier in Ocean City, and I'm irritated to feel so easily at home here. I stand on the end of the pier for a long, long time, just letting my thoughts flow, looking down into the dark water that beats at the pilings and thinking about how many millions of people have been here, how many footsteps the ocean washed away before it washed away mine.
As I stagger off the pier, my legs starting to cramp from the walk, I pass the first person I'd seen, a shady figure who passes me by with his head down.
"Good morning," I say, but he does not answer.
My feet hurt from the walk, so I return by way of the beach, walking barefoot at the edge of the surf, with the rails and sandpipers running away from me as I head southward. The sky lightens, the people I expected to see start congealing out of thin air, and I arrive in the built-up part of Venice with sparse groups all around me, all looking at me with tilted heads as I walk by barefoot, as if it's a ridiculous thing to do, and maybe it is, if you're from here. To me, it's gorgeously temperate, preposterous in December, so I bear the stares with an eastern sort of smugness.
The joggers I'd expected to see finally appear, thundering by in groups of identically-attired athletes, and I can't help but wonder if its some sort of cult. Another group does sloppy Tai Chi under the weird sculptural assemblage of palm trees that make me think of the big W from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, and I almost want to slip into the periphery of the group, put my hands out, and follow along.
I find my way home without a problem, which is a relief.
On my previous attempt to find the beach, I'd wound up on the other side of the complex I took to calling Auschwitz Junior High, a mile-wide compound of tall, impenetrable chainlink that protected more baseball fields and handball courts than I've ever seen in one place, and I skirted the fence in a panic, wondering how to get from one side to the other without the exhausting chore of circumnavigation.
Things are big here, sometimes, in contrast to the things that seem so much smaller, and maybe that's how it all balances out, all coming together in the law of averages.
I reached Ricky's place, slipped in quietly, and headed straight for the yard and the hot tub, stripping as I went.
That night, still sore, I'm delivered in the hands of my old friend Allen, who lives in Long Beach, for the night and the next day.
I walk a gimpy walk, having realized too late that I shouldn't have taken such a long journey just before going somewhere else where I will have to walk. Allen does not have a car in California, one more way in which he is a quiet rebel.
"I hope you've got your walking shoes," he says, leading me up the stairs to his apartment.
I groan and mount the steps in a silly, bowlegged way, cursing myself.
We meet Allen's friend Dennis and ride in his glossy gold special edition PT Cruiser to the side of town where there are people and places to go. Long Beach looks oddly familiar in places, oddly like places I've known, but somehow, subtly, off. There's a train that runs down the main drag here and I smile as it flanks us, enjoying the proximity. I love the sound of trains, the mournful cry they make as they're coming or going, and there are no distant horns in Los Angeles, no reminders of the ages of industry, and I don't hear them in Long Beach, either, but the light rail is close enough, close enough to settle the part of me that's always listening for points of reference. The train rumbles by and I smile.
We have Thai, and it is good Thai, too.
The conversation is easy and aimless, and Dennis is easily provoked into gales of high-pitched laughter, while Allen gives me his old familiar smirk. It's been so long since we were friends, so long since he was an everyday presence in my life, and I listen to him speaking and ask him questions about the directions his life's followed since he fled Maryland.
Sometimes, we have friends where it seems like years can go by and still, you meet up and it's just like you last left each other a day earlier, like the time was nothing, and that is a joyous thing. I sit with Allen and his friend, and it's not like that at all. I can feel the passage of time like the effects of continental drift, and I feel sad that I don't know him like I did, that so many stories have come and gone that there's no catching up, no going back to the rapport that used to be there. He's still Allen, though, just a dislocated Allen, run through a fast-forward to these disorienting days.
Somewhere in the conversation, the topic of my cabin in West Virginia is raised, and Dennis takes the mention of West Virginia and runs with it, rambling on in one more predictable recycled string of jokes about sibling marriage and missing teeth, and I look at him and see the face of the great gay city of Long Beach, which supposedly has the second largest gay pride parade in California each year.
I used to think I had some toehold in whatever the hell they called "gay culture," and when I was a kid, trying to figure things out, it was a glorious thing, but now it's just as ugly and insular as suburban life, just as ignorant as the "hillbillies" of my beloved third state of West Virginia, and I have to try hard not to scowl at the irony of being so cruelly ignorant when you're someone who suffers from society's cruel ignorance. The suggestion is made to take me to a gay bar, but I refuse, not wanting to see one more gay bar in one more gay district. In the end, they're all the same, just one fuckin' endless bar hovering in hyperspace, connected to all the cities in the world by a million interdimensional doorways. As we drive through town, heading for a coffeehouse, I watch the endless displays of rainbow neon and think that maybe organized queers are a cybernetic gestalt being, taking over the world with social machines powered by neon.
We pass a store alarmingly dubbed "The Lubery," and I decide I need to beat up a fag on this trip.
The Lubery. A whole fucking store that sells condoms and lube.
Yeesh.
That night, we bid Dennis goodbye, smoke a little grass, and sit around talking until I start to drift off in Allen's gorgeously-overdone bed, which protrudes from an open archway in a mantle of velvet curtains. The sounds of the street are loud and nearby, voices and overbuilt motorscooters and traffic, and I slip into sleep lulled by the songs of another new place.
The next morning, we meet Dennis again, have a decent breakfast at a little corner diner, and pile into the golden PT Cruiser for an extended tour. Dennis originally intends to show us a few things in town before leaving us to our day, but we rope him into being our tour guide and driver, and he is a game and friendly face in that role.
All along the coast, there are islands, covered with strangely-decorative structures.
"What's that—a night club or resort?" I ask, pointing out one especially ornate island.
"Oil drilling platform," says Dennis, and I'm floored by the idea of being in a place where there's raw material underground, just waiting to be pumped out. All over town, the whirling sculptures of pumps and other such things churn up the primordial ooze, pumping oil in schoolyards and church cemeteries, and it's almost as novel to me as all the stick trees. I start mumbling "oil, oil, oil," as we go. I tend towards obsessive thoughts, it seems.
There's a lot to see here, and the dual running narration tracks start to blur as the novelty overwhelms me as it will often overwhelm me in California, and I just smile and nod and try to take as many mental notes as I can. After a while, I beg a piece of paper off Dennis, and a pen, and start scrawling little words as we go. He says something about a fallen city, and it has the quality of something I'd love to see, so we head onto the highways, pointing our golden nose to San Pedro.
I can see the Queen Mary as we go, and she is beautiful, just as majestic as I imagined. In Los Angeles, my two destinations have been the Queen Mary and Watts Towers, not because they're the only things I want to see, but rather because they're the only stories I know by heart.
We ramble through San Pedro, and suddenly we find ourselves at the edge of the sea, in exactly the place we're meant to be, and it's a moment that's just right. I climb out of the car, just in front of the endless fence there, and stuff my crumpled paper and pen into my pocket.
We ready ourselves to enter the fallen city.
Dennis is unclear as to the origin of this place, whether it's something formed in a day, by an earthquake, or something that just sort of unfolded gradually, but the quiet neighborhood roads lead into the chain link fence, and then suddenly start sloping insanely downward, into a jumbled canyon of sunken ground that drops all the way to the ocean below. I stand there, waiting as Allen and Dennis lock up the car, and it's just amazing, the kind of place I always dreamed of living near.
Just on the other side of the fence, right where the broken pavement of the road starts to bend downwards, a tiny Christmas tree stands, a little monument to someone or someplace, and it's a poignant reminder that life's full of such places, places where the whole world fell apart, only they're just not as literal as this one. We climb through the ragged hole where a section of the fence has been cut away, and step into the fallen city.
As you get farther in, it just starts to unfold in an unbelievable way, just revealing more impossible detail with each step, and we step out onto the slabs of the old road, which lie in crazily-tilted blocks along its old track as if trying to stay at their original elevation. From the side, the road is like a layer cake, with old road on older road on even older road, until you find a pair of trolley tracks that lie slung across the gaping gaps like rope. Every piece of asphalt and concrete has been a canvas for a million graffiti artists, and the surreal landscape is bright with color and swirling lines and little fragments of language that lie in broken lines that mirror the broken landscape.
I step from slab to slab, making my way further in, noting how the driveways reach out over thirty-foot earthen cliffs until their breaking points, and the concrete just continues on, thirty feet below, to the broken blocks of old foundations, where terra cotta sewer pipes jut out like open mouths, calling out to their other halves, which hang out of the clay and stone of the cliff faces. I cannot help but wonder if this place came into being in a Atlantean tragedy or a sadder, slower one, where everything just sort of gradually slid down the cliffs, giving everyone a grand view of their own loss. Like a kid, I hop from stone to stone, even as my calves still burn and cramp from the endless walk I took to Santa Monica.
I take a different route from Allen and Dennis, looking for a little solitude in this perfect ruin, and the columns and crevasses just take my breath away. On an upturned section of road, still connected to a low curbstone, the graffiti goes into lush handwriting, spelling out "KILLER DREAMERS DREAM FEARLESSLY" in letters rendered in stylized flames, and I just stand there in quiet observance like a congregant in an impossible cathedral, wondering if I'm about to cry, or if I'm just standing there, dreaming fearlessly, dreaming of the life I've had for the last seven years, where I've had to make a home in my own broken landscape, dreaming of where I'm going next.
The last year has been a year of constant earthquakes.
I am a killer dreamer, or I will be.
Allen and Dennis head down the sculptured channels that lead ever downward, all the way to the black stones of the beach, and I take a moment to try to climb to the highest slab of painted asphalt. With my whole body still sore, it is hard, but I mount the highest peak there, standing to look out to sea, where all the ships are coming and going. A foghorn on a buoy calls out constantly, every ten seconds or so, just moaning a plaintive call for all the fearless dreamers, saying "watch the rocks."
Watch the rocks.
In the wind, a huge pelican cruises by, just a dozen feet from me, and I throw my arms open to embrace the wind as it gets stronger and stronger, until the pelican is just suspended there, right in front of me, hanging in space over the calamitous drop of the cliff, and I just stare, overwhelmed by the majestic wonder of the bird and how it takes the wind and shapes it with the slightest movements and muscular adjustments until it becomes magic, until it is the repudiation for all the forces in the world that just yank us downward, out of our daydreams and onto the jagged rocks below.
Right then, I know it's one of those moments that will be hardwired into my brain.
I scrabble down the chimneys of clay and rock, following the downward trails of low garden walls that once stood fifty feet farther up, and land on the shiny black stones of the beach, where my friends follow the shoreline and talk quietly to each other. I find a few polished stones and two pieces of beach glass and pocket them, stumbling around for the rest of the time with my pockets clattering.
In time, we climb the cliffs, heading nearly straight up a different path than the one we'd descended and coming up on the other side of the sunken neighborhood, and that route puts us where we can stand on a section of road that once took people in and out of that place. I stand on the painted lines down the center of the road and marvel at the clean break on that end, where the road just goes to the precipice and disappears. In one way, I wish I had brought my camera, but I'd never have caught the feeling of the land, never with just pictures. Even in words, it's impossible, just impossible.
We follow a path back to our car that skirts the cliff, and it's all there below us, the polychromatic artworks of reclaimed asphalt and the outlines of once-loved homes and the ridiculous accidental topography of subsidence, and I can barely catch my breath every time I look down, as I'm overwhelmed by so many things at once, by strangeness and danger and the perverse logic of it all there, in the place where the sun goes to sleep every night, where killer dreamers dream fearlessly.
As we follow a meandering route out of San Pedro, we pass a huge, open field with a few lonesome buildings standing in the midst of the scrub, and Dennis points it out as a former internment camp for Japanese Americans, and I am rendered completely speechless by that last insane detail.
Out here, so far from home, I wonder if I've always been like one of those slow-moving fish living in the deepest parts of the ocean, struggling for sustenance in a nutrient-starved world, just finding the best and most beautiful things in every place because that's what I had to do, and it's a good question to ask who I'd have been if I'd grown up here, if I'd had this million mile landscape of the strange and glorious to explore.
Would I have still been me?
Would the richness of all that's to be found here have fed my soul or suffocated it?
I sit in the car and watch it all going by and feel overcome by everything, and as we climb into the sky again on the huge green bridge that slices through the sky over the endless beds of heavy industry, I dream and dream and dream and try my best to be fearless in the face of an impossible world.
Read Part 3
On this trip, I filled my pockets with scrawled notes, stopping to write down "tiny xmas tree, pelican, arc of trolley, did I like it?, I dream I dream I dream, pacific, pier, endless beach, staggering down Electric Avenue" in a paroxysm of self-documentation that all means something, somewhere, even if it's only in my head.
Life is only in our heads.
I got ahead of myself in my first entry on LA, carried downstream on a whirling narrative thread, and left out a whole day, and not an unimportant one, either.
Because this is my journal and my life, I reserve the right to be my own Stalin and revise.
Let's step back for a moment.
I wake up at 3:40 again, and it is the morning after Christmas, a cool and quiet Sunday morning, and Terry snores quietly beside me, making the gentle buzz saw that's my favorite of his snores, and I'm tempted to just lie there and watch the blades of the ceiling fan beating overhead in the fuzzy electric flicker of the TV, but I'm already getting crazy from lack of exercise after just two days in this place. I edge over, slide quietly out of the bed, retrieve my towel from the bathroom, and tiptoe to the back door and the pocket paradise of Ricky's back yard, where the silhouettes of unlikely trees and strange, shrubby succulents surround me. I lift the bulky, insulated cover of the hot tub, folding it away to the side, press the dome of the touch buttons for the lights and motors, and stand there for a moment, watching the foam churning in a cauldron of theatrical blue light, listening to the symphony of sounds of the moment, the hum and rumble and soaring fizz of a thousand recently-opened cans of ginger ale.
In the darkness, I strip, fold my clothes and leave them in a fussy square stack instead of just casting them onto a chair, climb over the rim of the tub, and descend into the blue. This morning, it does not soothe me as it should, and I find that I'm feeling agitated and anxious, just floating there in the wash and thinking too much, processing too many new things and too many old ones, too. In time, I give up, climb back out, clean myself up, and dress for a walk.
I head east on Venice Boulevard, heading for the ocean, except I'm really heading west, heading for where the ocean lies in this place, in the direction of those perfectly magical sunsets. Orienting myself is a continuous issue for me here, even with the mountains to guide me, and I stroll the empty sidewalk with an assurance borne of bravado and the bolstered feeling of importance that comes from having my ears plugged with the cords from my iPod and the comfort and security of all my familiar musical landscapes. The walk seems endless, though it is so in the very best way, and I walk in the blackness with my eyes open wide, scanning the windows for the lights and activities of another me, another soldier of the early morning, but no one seems to be awake. The 33 bus passes me and its passengers pose in the blue-white fluorescent lighted windows like portraits of the tedium of servitude. I came to California wanting to ride the bus, and was informed by every quizzical person I told that only Guatemalan maids ride the bus.
Looking at the faces in the windows, I suspect that that supposition is true.
Still.
There are a thousand little apartment buildings along my way, an unbroken path of stucco sculpted into lo-fi deco birthday cakes, and I step up to the front doors of a few, where I see signs advertising apartments, alternately shocked by the high and low prices spelled out in inkjet-printed Arial, and I wonder why I'm so curious, what possible reason I'd have for making such notes. On Christmas morning, I'd gone on my first long walk, but I'd followed the wrong mountains and the wrong instincts, veering off course until I was in a whole other part of town , skirting the searing blue flanks of the block-long fabric store with a story to tell, one more story about Billy in a narrative landscape where he is the bedrock underneath it all, or was, and the houses were all just houses, little cottages like they are back home. On Venice Boulevard, the story architects tell is far more linear, a tale of beach town rental living that just goes and goes and goes on, and I cannot decide if I am inspired or appalled. Everything here looks as if it leaks in the rain.
I pass a strange, half-finished park with no entrances and then the library and the sight of the library makes me feel warm, makes me feel like I feel when I'm curled up in my corner in my library, breathing in the smell of books and old carpet and everything just like I have as long as I can remember, and something in my head is looking, looking at the shape of the place and wondering if there's a corner there, too.
No one is out here, out on the sidewalk with me.
How can I be the only one awake?
I pass the first of a series of strangely-appended vehicles, trucks and buses and trailers encrusted with homemade additions and hand-painted signs, where shopping carts cling to the flanks of retired inner city express buses living insane new lives like see-through chrome piglets, suckling at the teats of a fading hippie dream world. As I pass by the biggest bus, a huge old veteran of the years before I was even born, I wonder if there's anyone sleeping inside, and how a bus with Canadian license plates and sitting on four flat tires can be allowed to stay there. Back home, it'd be crawling with tickets, but in this place, the absurd sleeps with the expected, and I wonder if one notices the other snoring, or if it's all just below the threshold of awareness for all these people.
I reach the end of the road, and the gatehouse of a sprawling parking lot tells me its time to turn northward, to follow the route of all the beachgoers who come here to dream under the impossible sky. As I head up the pavement, I suddenly realize something I'd noticed the last few times I'd been to the beach here in the previous days.
No one was flying a kite, even though the wind was perfect.
Hmmm.
Like a good little lemming, I find a distant point of reference to pull me along.
The lights of the Santa Monica Pier sparkle in the hazy distance, the pinwheel of the big Ferris wheel there shining like a flickering badge of hypnotic light, and I decide that I will see it up close before I stop walking. The whole world here is eerily deserted, and I should wonder why those lights are all out there, blinking out a dozen messages in a code that I only kind of understand, but I know better than to ask such questions.
It is far better to dream that the whole world is the way it is for some kind of reason, that every sign means something, even if I know perfectly well that it's all just the machinery of heaven churning away like it always does, and always will, a million years after we're gone.
The Ferris wheel calls me, and I heed its call.
By the time I will reach it, I will have been walking for eighty-three minutes and still not have passed another soul on my way.
This is how much of my life is played out.
The deserted boardwalk is oddly calming, an arcade of locked-up shops and shut-down venues, and I drift by the signs and symbols of the city's cinematic alter ego while they're static, sets on a studio back lot, and it's easy enough to imagine that it'll all coming roaring back to life with the flick of a single switch, the denizens of the place just boiling out of thin air to set up their stands on the sidewalks, the performers and musicians just coming into being in a curl of brass as their saxophones twist out of nonbeing and unfurl like golden flowers, sprouting dreadlock-wearing leaves that tootle out the standards and nod expectantly at upturned hats that twirl out the cracks in the sidewalk like weeds. I walk at a brisk pace, halfway between my fantasies and the reality that I'm entirely alone in an empty land, and I wonder if there's street crime here in the wee hours, something wrong to break the spell.
In time, I clear the main stretch of the boardwalk and emerge into a string of in-between spaces that are just as I love them, just endlessly full of the kind of nothingness that's the geography of my dreams when I'm feeling uncertain, and the beach is just impossibly deep to one side, a completely different morphology to the rolling, interrupted dunes of our east coast barrier island seascapes. There's no one to see me, so I walk in time to my music, letting my fingers spell out the twitchy sign language of the little mechanical flourishes in the hyperkinetic electronica I'm listening to, and it's joyous, to be able to surrender to those instincts. The lights fade, I realize I'm in the midst of a vast empty stretch, and the Pacific calls me.
I shuffle through the sand, looking up and down the beach for anyone, still wondering how I can possibly be the only person in Los Angeles with the need to be here in this blue hour, and I stand there, just watching the whitecaps in the thin pre-dawn light and letting the world slip into the background noise of the surf. I unplug from my iPod, roll up my earphones, and listen.
The instinct comes, the reminder that life is short, and opportunities few, and I respond.
I slip off my shoes, tucking my socks into the open mouths, peel off my jacket, shirt, skivvies, and shorts, leave everything in a neatly folded pile with my iPod resting on top, and run screaming into the surf.
The Pacific in December is cold, but not like the Atlantic in May. I am comfortable.
I swim out, just enough, just until I cannot stand on the bottom, and I can hardly catch my breath, and I wonder why I'm here, treading water in this dark and unfamiliar sea, but it's all just one more puzzle to be solved, so I just paddle lazily until it feels like I've done it, like I've successfully passed one more test. A rolling wave catches me by surprise and almost churns me under, but the genes I inherited from my mother hold sway and my hair stays dry. I think of my clothes on the beach and what a ridiculous picture they paint of spontaneity and fussiness, and what people would think if the rip tide catches me and drags me out into the open sea. I hear myself laughing and something brushes my calf, something that could be seaweed or something else.
I beat a hasty retreat from the ocean, gather up my clothes, and walk at the edge of the surf, surrounded by the scurrying hordes of sandpipers, until I'm dry enough to get dressed again, enjoying the surreal pleasure of being the only naked fat guy on the beach.
The Pier is disappointing, though it's mainly so because it's so familiar, so much like the pier in Ocean City, and I'm irritated to feel so easily at home here. I stand on the end of the pier for a long, long time, just letting my thoughts flow, looking down into the dark water that beats at the pilings and thinking about how many millions of people have been here, how many footsteps the ocean washed away before it washed away mine.
As I stagger off the pier, my legs starting to cramp from the walk, I pass the first person I'd seen, a shady figure who passes me by with his head down.
"Good morning," I say, but he does not answer.
My feet hurt from the walk, so I return by way of the beach, walking barefoot at the edge of the surf, with the rails and sandpipers running away from me as I head southward. The sky lightens, the people I expected to see start congealing out of thin air, and I arrive in the built-up part of Venice with sparse groups all around me, all looking at me with tilted heads as I walk by barefoot, as if it's a ridiculous thing to do, and maybe it is, if you're from here. To me, it's gorgeously temperate, preposterous in December, so I bear the stares with an eastern sort of smugness.
The joggers I'd expected to see finally appear, thundering by in groups of identically-attired athletes, and I can't help but wonder if its some sort of cult. Another group does sloppy Tai Chi under the weird sculptural assemblage of palm trees that make me think of the big W from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, and I almost want to slip into the periphery of the group, put my hands out, and follow along.
I find my way home without a problem, which is a relief.
On my previous attempt to find the beach, I'd wound up on the other side of the complex I took to calling Auschwitz Junior High, a mile-wide compound of tall, impenetrable chainlink that protected more baseball fields and handball courts than I've ever seen in one place, and I skirted the fence in a panic, wondering how to get from one side to the other without the exhausting chore of circumnavigation.
Things are big here, sometimes, in contrast to the things that seem so much smaller, and maybe that's how it all balances out, all coming together in the law of averages.
I reached Ricky's place, slipped in quietly, and headed straight for the yard and the hot tub, stripping as I went.
That night, still sore, I'm delivered in the hands of my old friend Allen, who lives in Long Beach, for the night and the next day.
I walk a gimpy walk, having realized too late that I shouldn't have taken such a long journey just before going somewhere else where I will have to walk. Allen does not have a car in California, one more way in which he is a quiet rebel.
"I hope you've got your walking shoes," he says, leading me up the stairs to his apartment.
I groan and mount the steps in a silly, bowlegged way, cursing myself.
We meet Allen's friend Dennis and ride in his glossy gold special edition PT Cruiser to the side of town where there are people and places to go. Long Beach looks oddly familiar in places, oddly like places I've known, but somehow, subtly, off. There's a train that runs down the main drag here and I smile as it flanks us, enjoying the proximity. I love the sound of trains, the mournful cry they make as they're coming or going, and there are no distant horns in Los Angeles, no reminders of the ages of industry, and I don't hear them in Long Beach, either, but the light rail is close enough, close enough to settle the part of me that's always listening for points of reference. The train rumbles by and I smile.
We have Thai, and it is good Thai, too.
The conversation is easy and aimless, and Dennis is easily provoked into gales of high-pitched laughter, while Allen gives me his old familiar smirk. It's been so long since we were friends, so long since he was an everyday presence in my life, and I listen to him speaking and ask him questions about the directions his life's followed since he fled Maryland.
Sometimes, we have friends where it seems like years can go by and still, you meet up and it's just like you last left each other a day earlier, like the time was nothing, and that is a joyous thing. I sit with Allen and his friend, and it's not like that at all. I can feel the passage of time like the effects of continental drift, and I feel sad that I don't know him like I did, that so many stories have come and gone that there's no catching up, no going back to the rapport that used to be there. He's still Allen, though, just a dislocated Allen, run through a fast-forward to these disorienting days.
Somewhere in the conversation, the topic of my cabin in West Virginia is raised, and Dennis takes the mention of West Virginia and runs with it, rambling on in one more predictable recycled string of jokes about sibling marriage and missing teeth, and I look at him and see the face of the great gay city of Long Beach, which supposedly has the second largest gay pride parade in California each year.
I used to think I had some toehold in whatever the hell they called "gay culture," and when I was a kid, trying to figure things out, it was a glorious thing, but now it's just as ugly and insular as suburban life, just as ignorant as the "hillbillies" of my beloved third state of West Virginia, and I have to try hard not to scowl at the irony of being so cruelly ignorant when you're someone who suffers from society's cruel ignorance. The suggestion is made to take me to a gay bar, but I refuse, not wanting to see one more gay bar in one more gay district. In the end, they're all the same, just one fuckin' endless bar hovering in hyperspace, connected to all the cities in the world by a million interdimensional doorways. As we drive through town, heading for a coffeehouse, I watch the endless displays of rainbow neon and think that maybe organized queers are a cybernetic gestalt being, taking over the world with social machines powered by neon.
We pass a store alarmingly dubbed "The Lubery," and I decide I need to beat up a fag on this trip.
The Lubery. A whole fucking store that sells condoms and lube.
Yeesh.
That night, we bid Dennis goodbye, smoke a little grass, and sit around talking until I start to drift off in Allen's gorgeously-overdone bed, which protrudes from an open archway in a mantle of velvet curtains. The sounds of the street are loud and nearby, voices and overbuilt motorscooters and traffic, and I slip into sleep lulled by the songs of another new place.
The next morning, we meet Dennis again, have a decent breakfast at a little corner diner, and pile into the golden PT Cruiser for an extended tour. Dennis originally intends to show us a few things in town before leaving us to our day, but we rope him into being our tour guide and driver, and he is a game and friendly face in that role.
All along the coast, there are islands, covered with strangely-decorative structures.
"What's that—a night club or resort?" I ask, pointing out one especially ornate island.
"Oil drilling platform," says Dennis, and I'm floored by the idea of being in a place where there's raw material underground, just waiting to be pumped out. All over town, the whirling sculptures of pumps and other such things churn up the primordial ooze, pumping oil in schoolyards and church cemeteries, and it's almost as novel to me as all the stick trees. I start mumbling "oil, oil, oil," as we go. I tend towards obsessive thoughts, it seems.
There's a lot to see here, and the dual running narration tracks start to blur as the novelty overwhelms me as it will often overwhelm me in California, and I just smile and nod and try to take as many mental notes as I can. After a while, I beg a piece of paper off Dennis, and a pen, and start scrawling little words as we go. He says something about a fallen city, and it has the quality of something I'd love to see, so we head onto the highways, pointing our golden nose to San Pedro.
I can see the Queen Mary as we go, and she is beautiful, just as majestic as I imagined. In Los Angeles, my two destinations have been the Queen Mary and Watts Towers, not because they're the only things I want to see, but rather because they're the only stories I know by heart.
We ramble through San Pedro, and suddenly we find ourselves at the edge of the sea, in exactly the place we're meant to be, and it's a moment that's just right. I climb out of the car, just in front of the endless fence there, and stuff my crumpled paper and pen into my pocket.
We ready ourselves to enter the fallen city.
Dennis is unclear as to the origin of this place, whether it's something formed in a day, by an earthquake, or something that just sort of unfolded gradually, but the quiet neighborhood roads lead into the chain link fence, and then suddenly start sloping insanely downward, into a jumbled canyon of sunken ground that drops all the way to the ocean below. I stand there, waiting as Allen and Dennis lock up the car, and it's just amazing, the kind of place I always dreamed of living near.
Just on the other side of the fence, right where the broken pavement of the road starts to bend downwards, a tiny Christmas tree stands, a little monument to someone or someplace, and it's a poignant reminder that life's full of such places, places where the whole world fell apart, only they're just not as literal as this one. We climb through the ragged hole where a section of the fence has been cut away, and step into the fallen city.
As you get farther in, it just starts to unfold in an unbelievable way, just revealing more impossible detail with each step, and we step out onto the slabs of the old road, which lie in crazily-tilted blocks along its old track as if trying to stay at their original elevation. From the side, the road is like a layer cake, with old road on older road on even older road, until you find a pair of trolley tracks that lie slung across the gaping gaps like rope. Every piece of asphalt and concrete has been a canvas for a million graffiti artists, and the surreal landscape is bright with color and swirling lines and little fragments of language that lie in broken lines that mirror the broken landscape.
I step from slab to slab, making my way further in, noting how the driveways reach out over thirty-foot earthen cliffs until their breaking points, and the concrete just continues on, thirty feet below, to the broken blocks of old foundations, where terra cotta sewer pipes jut out like open mouths, calling out to their other halves, which hang out of the clay and stone of the cliff faces. I cannot help but wonder if this place came into being in a Atlantean tragedy or a sadder, slower one, where everything just sort of gradually slid down the cliffs, giving everyone a grand view of their own loss. Like a kid, I hop from stone to stone, even as my calves still burn and cramp from the endless walk I took to Santa Monica.
I take a different route from Allen and Dennis, looking for a little solitude in this perfect ruin, and the columns and crevasses just take my breath away. On an upturned section of road, still connected to a low curbstone, the graffiti goes into lush handwriting, spelling out "KILLER DREAMERS DREAM FEARLESSLY" in letters rendered in stylized flames, and I just stand there in quiet observance like a congregant in an impossible cathedral, wondering if I'm about to cry, or if I'm just standing there, dreaming fearlessly, dreaming of the life I've had for the last seven years, where I've had to make a home in my own broken landscape, dreaming of where I'm going next.
The last year has been a year of constant earthquakes.
I am a killer dreamer, or I will be.
Allen and Dennis head down the sculptured channels that lead ever downward, all the way to the black stones of the beach, and I take a moment to try to climb to the highest slab of painted asphalt. With my whole body still sore, it is hard, but I mount the highest peak there, standing to look out to sea, where all the ships are coming and going. A foghorn on a buoy calls out constantly, every ten seconds or so, just moaning a plaintive call for all the fearless dreamers, saying "watch the rocks."
Watch the rocks.
In the wind, a huge pelican cruises by, just a dozen feet from me, and I throw my arms open to embrace the wind as it gets stronger and stronger, until the pelican is just suspended there, right in front of me, hanging in space over the calamitous drop of the cliff, and I just stare, overwhelmed by the majestic wonder of the bird and how it takes the wind and shapes it with the slightest movements and muscular adjustments until it becomes magic, until it is the repudiation for all the forces in the world that just yank us downward, out of our daydreams and onto the jagged rocks below.
Right then, I know it's one of those moments that will be hardwired into my brain.
I scrabble down the chimneys of clay and rock, following the downward trails of low garden walls that once stood fifty feet farther up, and land on the shiny black stones of the beach, where my friends follow the shoreline and talk quietly to each other. I find a few polished stones and two pieces of beach glass and pocket them, stumbling around for the rest of the time with my pockets clattering.
In time, we climb the cliffs, heading nearly straight up a different path than the one we'd descended and coming up on the other side of the sunken neighborhood, and that route puts us where we can stand on a section of road that once took people in and out of that place. I stand on the painted lines down the center of the road and marvel at the clean break on that end, where the road just goes to the precipice and disappears. In one way, I wish I had brought my camera, but I'd never have caught the feeling of the land, never with just pictures. Even in words, it's impossible, just impossible.
We follow a path back to our car that skirts the cliff, and it's all there below us, the polychromatic artworks of reclaimed asphalt and the outlines of once-loved homes and the ridiculous accidental topography of subsidence, and I can barely catch my breath every time I look down, as I'm overwhelmed by so many things at once, by strangeness and danger and the perverse logic of it all there, in the place where the sun goes to sleep every night, where killer dreamers dream fearlessly.
As we follow a meandering route out of San Pedro, we pass a huge, open field with a few lonesome buildings standing in the midst of the scrub, and Dennis points it out as a former internment camp for Japanese Americans, and I am rendered completely speechless by that last insane detail.
Out here, so far from home, I wonder if I've always been like one of those slow-moving fish living in the deepest parts of the ocean, struggling for sustenance in a nutrient-starved world, just finding the best and most beautiful things in every place because that's what I had to do, and it's a good question to ask who I'd have been if I'd grown up here, if I'd had this million mile landscape of the strange and glorious to explore.
Would I have still been me?
Would the richness of all that's to be found here have fed my soul or suffocated it?
I sit in the car and watch it all going by and feel overcome by everything, and as we climb into the sky again on the huge green bridge that slices through the sky over the endless beds of heavy industry, I dream and dream and dream and try my best to be fearless in the face of an impossible world.
Read Part 3
