Joe in LA: 3 of 3: tinseltown in the rain
Jan. 18th, 2005 04:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joebelknapwallThe rain started while I was still in Long Beach, a soft spattering of rain that came as Allen and I wandered the streets on foot, taking in the last few sights, drifting through the shops and back alleys until it was time to head back.
We headed back and I took a while to take a nap, curling up on Allen's bed with the sound of rain and the city filling my head. In time, I slipped back into my senses and we spent the rest of our quiet reunion exploring the back routes of memory, talking about everything in the world and nothing at all.
Eventually, Terry and Ricky arrived, picked us up, and we drove to the outskirts of town for dinner at a heavily-themed "soul food/southern food" joint with some friends of Ricky's. Dinner was good, albeit only semi-authentic and oversized, the sweet tea was spot on, and the company was pleasant.
We dropped Allen off, headed out of Long Beach, and hit the freeway.
In my head, it felt a lot like I brought my weather with me, and the rain picked up, turned the sky to shades of grey that would hold sway for the rest of my trip, and soaked this endless desert.
I start the day in the hot tub, in the dark, just sitting in the comfort of my own place in an unfamiliar environment, listening to the rain over the rumble of the jets. In time, I'm ready to start the day, so I head back in, clean myself up, and wake Terry.
When he's through cussing and stomping around and otherwise returning to the conscious world, Terry mentions that the key he'd had to have shipped from Maryland, the key to the guesthouse of his home in Venice, came while I was away, and we decide to go and check on the place, the one part of his familiar environment that's just been frozen in place from the time he left for DC, the place I've been curious about, or anxious about, or something.
We drive over there in silence, lost in our thoughts.
Terry's guesthouse is the work of award-winning architects, tall and elegant in a Gehry-esque way, a building featured in a book on architecture of the period, though many of its design elements are failed ones. I love architecture that's gone wrong almost as much as I love perfectly successful design, and the guesthouse is filled with well-intentioned touches that have gone wrong. The stucco sides of the place are lined with a skewed grid of aluminum track, intended to guide vines into a pattern of green and grey, but they were removed after Terry and Billy found that the vines were slowly demolishing the house. We head up the steep concrete steps, Terry opens the door, and I see a place I've known in the abstract for nearly two years.
I'm told I think too much, but the truth is that I'm always tuning in the world on as many channels as I can, turning my senses and intuition to the task of finding everything that's to be found in anything, and the guesthouse is too much, coming in in ever-rising waves like the tsunami we're following in the news.
Billy died here, on the Pee Wee couch, and this is the place where Terry's screams echoed on the still-recent morning when he found him, and for once, I wish I didn't think so much, that I could just be like everyone else in the world, just taking places for what they are instead of tuning it all in, instead of hearing the ringing cries of a man who's lost a whole world screaming in my head.
I look around, and it's all familiar on another level, on a thousand other levels, and I just stand there watching Terry as the feelings grip him, as the tears flow, and I know the feeling of complete powerlessness, of being overcome. Sometimes I miss the way I was, back when I still knew how to turn down the fires that burn in my heart until they were just a tiny, flickering spark in a dark and cold place, when I learned how to freeze my soul by sheer force of will until I became a solid block of ice, immune to everything. I can ramble on forever in a triumphalist celebration of being fully alive, but like any addict who's found a path back to a complete life, I still feel the craving for oblivion.
I just want to fucking help, but there's nothing to be done. It's already far too late.
Terry roots through the place, looking for the things he'd left behind in the rush to get packed for his cross-country move, and it is a search that is tricky and dangerous, a constant invocation of moments, and he pauses, eyes glazed by the passage of a million impossible years, and I distract myself in a listless exploration of the place.
The guesthouse is familiar on another level, and I have known it since the first time I picked up a book on modern architecture at the local library, going home to lay on my stomach on the floor of my bedroom, just falling into all the pictures and diagrams as scratchy Beatles albums played on my record player, dropping one after another down the tall spindle. The guesthouse is familiar and it is so for endless, impossible reasons, and I remember it well, as I drew it in the margins of my notebooks all through school, as I dreamed of another life somewhere else, in the kind of place where I could draft my own existence to my own specifications.
The configuration is just as I've dreamed, one huge open space with a loft at one end, with built-in shelves that rise from the floor to the rafters, serviced by a library-style ladder on rails and rollers, and I have to turn the fires down, trying for that old, old deep freeze, because it's all just too much, too much of everything.
I climb into the loft and there's a little rug that catches my eye, a blue outline of a star filled with blue stars, and I have to beat a hasty retreat into my head. Billy knew the dancefloor at the Blue Star Lounge well, where we beat out our frustrations in the perfect geometry of dance, where the world just turns to music and boils away until we're just windmills of whirling arms and legs, where everything is always right and perfect, and it's all just too much, just too fucking much. I crave the ice—I crave the days when you could tell me a friend died and just get a shrug from me, even though those were such empty years, such empty years.
I help Terry collect his CDs, a few 45s that I'll convert to CDs, and the little star-shaped rug, and we head for the car in silence, just exchanging the most necessary words.
He will ask me more than once if I liked the guesthouse, but I cannot answer.
There comes a point where all the unexpected intersections become too much, when the lines that cross in insane, impossible ways just turn to the slashes of razor blades, cutting the whole world to ribbons.
"It's nice," I say, and the ice finally comes home to me like a long-lost friend.
We drive around Venice for a while, the rain coming in waves, and Terry shares his stories, and shares his home, which is as deep and rich and detailed as my own drives through the town where I've lived for thirty-three years, and it's warm and satisfying in its way, a reminder of one more point of common ground between us. The monologue is packed with minute observances and the continuous repetition of "that's where there used to be" and "I can't believe they tore down the" and more, and it's all gloriously-familiar.
This is a beautiful place, and all my aspirations of distaste go horribly wrong.
I love it here, and that is, in itself, a wretched thing.
Back at Ricky's after a rough morning, I peel off my shoes and pants and curl up on the bed for a nap, and I fall asleep to the sound of the soft rain outside the window, a lullaby of white noise that is almost as soothing as the sound of distant trains, almost as familiar as the sounds of my own town.
I start to dream, and it is not a dream I want to have, one of those dreams that reaches into the future, or one of the futures that's out there, just waiting for me, and I will remember it in microscopic detail for the rest of my life because of the way it ends.
I dream a sad dream, and it is heading towards a conclusion I know will hurt, towards something that may well be inevitable, and with astonishing, terrifying precision, a bolt of lightning strikes from nowhere, hitting the powerlines thirty feet away from the window.
In my life, thunderstorms have always been a focal point, a time when the family would gather on the porch to watch the storm roll in over the Ellinger farm, and we watched storms like most people watch movies, with a kind of joy and excitement and innocence that could hardly be more right. The lightning flashes, we wait for the thunderclap, and smile appreciatively as the rumbling comes.
In California, it seems like thunderstorms operate on different rules, slipping in silently.
The electrical charges build, the islands of potential rise from the landscape, and without warning, a cluster of strikes that come nearly simultaneously over the region.
I am crying in my sleep, lost in a dream.
The explosion is impossibly loud, a sound I know well because of where I live, and it is answered by a second blast that is merely the first again, reflected by the parallel stucco surfaces in the neighborhood.
I leap out of bed in one jarring movement and run to the window.
In the darkness, Terry and Ricky are yelling, and there's a electric feeling of disconnection in the air. They suspect terrorism, wondering if there's a jet raining down over Los Angeles in a burst of shredded aluminum, upholstery, and human remains. I know otherwise, and still I open the back door to look into the sky.
The neighborhood is dark, and there will be no electricity for nearly twenty-four hours.
I think of the hot tub and curse my luck.
In search of food and something to keep himself distracted, Terry takes me out on the streets of the city. We slice through the rain in our rental car, just crossing glistening street after glistening street, and Terry's mood is growing as dark as the hour, as overcast as the sky, and there is nothing I can do to make it better. Every time I open my mouth, he seems to get angrier and more frustrated, complaining loudly that there's nothing to see, that the weather is awful, that it's all just turning into a disaster. I try to reassure him that I'm perfectly happy to just roam the empty streets at night, and he scowls, but I am right, even if he does not see it.
We wander in the dark, looking for somewhere to eat, and we pass all sorts of amazing places, places that I catch in the corner of my eye and turn to look to with a smile, and it is all beautiful, even when it's ugly. I have lived my whole life in an ongoing exercise in finding something glorious in everything, no matter how inherently banal or pointless or ugly, because I've had to, because the alternative is to live like everyone else in the world lives, constantly dissatisfied with what they're given, because I'd sooner just die than believe that the whole world is not a place that is impossibly rich and wonderful.
Perhaps that's just a lie, but I'm a born liar.
Terry points out the La Brea tar pits, which are skinned with water, looking like ponds with inexplicable sculptures of animals struggling, but I am happy to see them, even if they have just mutated into a tourist trap. There's a strange richness to this city, something that flies in the face of its superficial daydreams of what it really is, and I love that we're driving over all this pent up energy, all this oil and all the fault lines that just lie there, building up their energies until its time to send them to the surface again.
We roll by, and the water looks as black and still as the water of the Okeefenokee.
I smile and start to daydream, even though we're well into evening.
We find the tunnel I know from Blade Runner, a glittering, faceted portal through a strange ridge in downtown Los Angeles, and head in. I feel celestial, perfect, and the rain fades, wiped away by the windshield wipers. The scene unfolds in sweet silence, the glint from each polished tile blending together in a sparkling celebration of reflections, and when we clear the mouth of the tunnel, the rain returns suddenly, in an abrupt splash of hard droplets, and the sensation of it takes our breath away.
"Again, again!" we agree, and Terry turns back to try it again.
The next time around, it is not so magical, because we see it coming, because we're ready.
"We need to find a bakery where we can get a cake," says Terry, and my eye twitches involuntarily.
"Why?"
"That's McArthur Park over there," he said, pointing. "We need to leave a cake out in the rain."
In the midst of his darkest moods, there is always light, and it is a brilliant light, at that.
I have trouble deciding whether to kiss him or punch him, sometimes. He spends so much time claiming to be anything but clever, anything but smart, but it's all there, hidden in the sparkle in his eyes, hidden behind the smile. In an evening built out of pure frustration, he's shown it again, and I cannot help but smile, too.
Both of us are used to sleeping in the heroin glow of the television, lulled into unconsciousness by the jittery fans of light sketched into the still air by cathode ray tubes and the burble of unimportant conversation, and as we get ready to get into bed, the silence is oppressive.
I slide open the window, and the room fills with the furry grey noise of rain.
It will have to suffice.
I sleep well, as it turns out.
In the morning, we head back to Terry's house, to check on how the guest house is doing in the rain. As we step inside, I can smell the damp, and I follow the walls, finding damp drywall and an electric outlet turned fountain, with a little trail of rust stains trailing the ground socket, turning increasingly verbal in my frustration with California architects, who seem to have been lulled into believing that weather protection is optional in this nearly-perfect climate.
We visit the garage, underneath the guesthouse, and water is seemingly coming from everywhere, soaking the ceiling and dripping into Billy's things that Terry's saved there. Terry is overcome by the state of the place, hanging in the middle-ground between anger and sorrow, and I think of the contractor he'd hired to fix so many of the un-fixed things we find and resolve to punch her in the face, should the opportunity ever arise.
I take a ladder and beat my way through the dribbling, cold leaves of the thicket down the side of the guesthouse to see where the contractor was supposed to replace the lower twelve inches of composition clapboards. I stand there, looking at a whole wall of exposed studs, weather-battered tarpaper, and rain-saturated yellow fiberglass insulation, and start cursing and making plans.
It is almost too much for Terry, but I am livid and focused. I start to order him around.
We head to Home Depot to pick up supplies. On the way back, the eight--foot length of corrugated reinforced resin panel I picked up rides home jutting out of the side windows of our rented Taurus, flapping and clattering in the wind.
I start to work, and Terry hovers over me, anxious for a million reasons.
I curse the contractor and the architects, who, among other brilliant moves, apparently decided that the rim of fitted galvanized flashing that rings the guesthouse should be canted inwards, probably because it looked cool. Decades of water rolled down the clapboards and pooled there until it finally overwhelmed the protective properties of the zinc and started to eat holes in the flashing. Instead of being a protection from the ingress of water, the flashing became a funnel, guaranteeing that virtually every incoming drop will go right into the drywall ceiling of the basement.
I stand on the rickety ladder, cursing louder and louder as I work, smearing a thick layer of "lay-wet" tar over the rust-flaked places, and Terry gets more and more anxious and frustrated, as if I were doing surgery on a loved one.
I am doing surgery on a loved one, and I know it.
Even my perfectionism is not enough for this chore. I work as though I love this place, as though its my own home, and the thought makes me sick with frustration, overwhelmed by the impossible weight of all of it.
I send Terry off for another panel of corrugated resin, jumping into the task with two feet, and seal one side of the building. and I do not have the tools I need, but I do a good job anyway, cutting the panels down with a paring knife from the kitchen and nailing them into place in a precise way. Midway through, I wipe tar into my eye by accident and run into the house with my cornea searing, running straight to the bathroom.
I finish one side and it is a good job, a neat repair that redeems the ugliness of all the tar I've had to apply, and I feel proud of myself. When Terry returns, he yells at me for tracking mud into the house, and my voice rises instantly, hurling the f-word into the air without reservation. For a moment, I want to just throw down my tools and stomp out into the alley, to just leave the whole insane world behind and walk and walk until I'm somewhere where I don't have to understand, where I don't have to make allowances. I'm told I'm too accommodating, and too forgiving, sometimes, but people don't get it, they just don't get it, and respond to me with the broadest applications of the brush of cheap pop psychology, because that's all they know how to do. I know better, though, and I feel, and I trust my intuitions.
I go back to the ladder and continue my work.
When I finish, I am confident that the leaks will be gone. I cannot stop thinking, though, and cannot stop working on the place in my head. In my head, I remove the ridiculous flashing and replace it with a drip rail that I mill out of of pressure-treated 2x8 stock and wrap in copper flashing, welding the joints with flux and plumbing solder, and it is beautiful and it works. Sometimes I just think too fucking much, and I see myself lovingly attending to this place in my mind, and it's like a last refuge for something inexplicable, a last refuge for faith.
It is all too much.
Terry asks me if I like the guesthouse, and I don't want to answer. I don't want to admit what I know, which is that I've been drawing that place in the margins of my notebooks since I was a little kid, just refining and refining my designs until I've drawn the best place in the world, until I've drawn that place, almost down to the mullions in the windows. Sometimes it's all just too fucking much.
"Yes, Terry, it's a nice place."
When we get home, I peel off my muddy clothes, climb into the shower, and try to wash it all away. In time, the power returns, and I am ready to race for the hot tub, but we are already set to go out on tour again, this time in a larger group, so I use my spare time for a nap.
There is little in the world as perfectly palliative as a nap.
Terry's friend Jimmey arrives, and we all pile into the car, Ricky and Mickey and Terry and Jimmey and Joe, and Billy, too, who's always there, too, always just beyond our peripheral vision, always there as long as we're in his stomping grounds, and we head for the one place I came here wanting to see.
As we track the gritty roads of the "bad" neighborhoods of LA, which just don't seem all that bad to me, not in comparison to Philly and Baltimore and Southeast DC, everyone seems ashamed of the awful landscape they're showing me, but I am happy to see the real faces of this unfamiliar land and the accidental beauty that's everywhere, especially in the places no one ever looks, where it's all unexpected and far more magical.
The banter in the car is complete, a whirling chaos of words and epithets, and we roam the roads in search of Simon Rodia's towering folly, stopping at the intersection of Florence and Normandie for gas and for me to make a little commemoration of the place, climbing out of the car and strapping a ball gag on so I can get a picture of myself being harangued by a mean Latina at the spot where the rioting crowds go hold of Reginald Denny.
I dream of rioting, always waiting for that incendiary moment, but I am always disappointed.
In time, we find our destination hidden in a little neighborhood in Watts, and the sight of the delicate loops and spires of Watts Towers set my heart racing, set me daydreaming even as the rest of the people in the car seem to be unimpressed by it all, just humoring me as I climb out and race for the fence with my camera, eager to document this brilliant work of the boundless heart of a man who toiled to commemorate something he loved, to leave something behind that's as magical as what he'd found in this endless country. As I walk around the perimeter, my breath catches in my throat, over and over, and I force myself not to let the sensation of seeing it for real overtake me, not until the rest of my friends are on the other side of the fenced compound, not until it's safe to surrender.
I stand there, overcome by the perfect scale of this magic garden, overcome by how close I feel to Rodia and that obsessive urge to give something back to the world that's given me so much to explore, so much to love, and it's just too much, just too damn much.
The lump in my throat turns into something else, I gasp in a sudden, inexplicable sob, and all I can do is look up into the suddenly nearly-clear blue sky and let the tears roll.
It's all fucking synaesthesia, this world, all just an endless process of things turning into other things, of all the infinite sources of delight and loss and all these neverending dreams, and I don't know how people get through their lives, sometimes, how they manage to silence all the voices that just keep calling on us as we fall forward into the future, headed for the rocks that claim us all in the end. I stand there, lost in it all, and I regret only that it's behind a fence, that I can't reach out and feel the joyous energy humming in the cement and glass and concrete and steel of these daydreams congealed in a thirty-year process of becoming.
I close my eyes and it comes to me in writhing bolts of lightning, jagged arcs reaching out from the tips of those perfect spires to set me on fire, and I resolve to return one day, to stand here in the middle of the night with my iPod singing in my ears, to dance in the presence of those lonesome towers, to answer the call that Rodia heard and that I hear in nearly every moment of every day. I look for my sign, and it is there, a little blue star among the rest of his signs and wonders, and I wipe my eyes, smile, and head back to where my friends stand.
I'm curious to see what Terry thinks, and he seems only mildly impressed.
Later, he will describe it as sad, as a glass and cement reminder of a lonely, obsessed man with a vision and thirty years spent on an impossible quest, and I can't help but look at him when he does and think of how we're all on that mission, all of us who've ever touched the sky, and it's only sad if the pursuit of the impossible is sad, only sad in the way that life is always sad, because everything that is glorious and magical is destined to be ground into dust before we even know how beautiful it was. It is the essential dilemma of being alive, the unanswerable question, the engine of the doubt that drives us to ask "why?" when we already know the answers, and the endings, too.
In the rear view mirror, I watch the towers dwindle and dip below the roofs of the houses in this place, and I smile a winsome, complicated smile, happy for having had the chances I've had.
We head downtown, back into the fray, and the trip is lovely, though only to me. I watch the industrial landscape unfolding, and it is wondrous, expansive, and lush with details, and I realize, even as I reach for my little scraps of paper to make notes, that I can never explain it all, that there's just too much. When I think that maybe I'm a writer first, instead of third or fourth or elsewhere on the list of things I do well, I think of how much goes undocumented, how many stories go untold, and I feel like I'm not doing this right, that I'm just missing too many things.
Other times, it's clear how impossible a task it is, to make sense of all this.
We stop and visit the splendid Spanish wonderland of Union Station, where a million movie-star dreams began and lived and died, and it's a vibrant place, even as LAX has stolen its thunder, a cathedral of being in between, a warm, well-worn place from which to start a life.
From there, we wander to Olivera Street, and make a quick circuit, just long enough for Mickey to be swallowed up in the t-shirt shops, and it's fine and lovely and shabby in a pleasant enough way, but there's so much more to Los Angeles than what everyone knows.
There is so much more to everything.
Near the end, we stop at the Bradbury Building, one more of my Blade Runner stops, and it is completely enchanting—far smaller and far more detailed than I expected, and oddly true to the spirit of this trip, in that way.
Before we leave downtown, Terry stops at a tiny hole in the wall store and buys a little set of wind chimes with three chimes and five clear plastic angels. I take it and put it aside, but I will remove from its package and carefully assemble it the next time and find that it is unusually harmonious for such a last-minute purchase.
The day winds on, full of love and light and good company, and I am happy.
I realize how the days have slipped by, and I start to feel sad, to miss this place already.
I retreat to the tub in the wee hours, and this time I take my iPod along, holding it out of the water as I listen to an old favorite song that's become more meaningful on this trip, a song that starts to sing to me in a new voice, and the words ring out over the noise of the churning water and make me cry.
Why did we ever come so far?
I knew I'd seen it all before
Tall building reach up in vain
Tinseltown is in the rain
I know now love was so exciting
Tinseltown in the rain
Oh men and women
Here we are, caught up in this big rhythm
One day this love will all blow over
Time for leaving the parade
Is there a place in this city
A place to always feel this way?
And hey, there's a red car in the fountain
Tinseltown in the rain
Oh men and women
Here we are, caught up in this big rhythm
Do I love you? Yes I love you
Will we always be happy go lucky?
Do I love you? Yes I love you
But it's easy come, and it's easy go
All this talking is only bravado
Oh, Tinseltown
Tinseltown in the rain
Oh men and women
Here we are, caught up in this big rhythm
Tinseltown in the rain
Oh men and women
Here we are, caught up in this big rhythm
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Do I love you? Yes I love you
Will we always be happy go lucky?
Do I love you? Yes I love you
But it's easy come, and it's easy go
All this talking, talking is only bravado
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
Tinseltown is in the rain
And it sure is, it sure is.
I finish the work I've done on the artwork for Terry's tattoo, and I spend a long time trying to figure out how to get my iBook to print on Ricky's horrid little Dell printer, but in the end, I just email the image to his computer so I can spend more time trying to figure out how to simply print an image using a computer running Windows XP.
It is a pain in the neck, a pain that's a nice distraction from other things.
As we head to the tattoo parlor on the boardwalk in Venice, I can't mask the fact that I'm floundering, that it's all just finally become too much for me, and I curse the way my brain's wired, the way I see it all like I'm looking over everything from the sky, all the paths and intersections that criss-cross the worlds of meaning, and Terry wants me to watch over the process and tell him if I'm not comfortable with the artist, to let him know if it doesn't seem right, and I stand there, holding the carefully-transcribed handwritten poem that Billy wrote to Terry that I've been editing and formatting to make it easier for the artist, that I've been working on to make sure that it'll always be beautiful on his skin, and I answer every question through clenched teeth.
"Are you mad that I'm getting the tattoo today?" asks Terry, and I shake my head. There's more to it all, something insanely complex and full of layers and gradations and cruel ironies, and all I can do is just do the best I can, because it's all too much to explain, too much to put together in an even remotely clear way.
Terry makes big design decisions in the last minute, enlarging and cropping the text and changing the look of the design a bit, and the changes are fine, perfect, really, but I just feel the ground starting to fall out from under my feet, and after a while, I just have to leave, to get the hell out of there as the needles buzz, and I practically stagger out into the sunshine, heading for the ocean and the golden setting sun.
There are crowds gathered around peculiar entertainments there, around men balancing snakes and banjos as they stand on shaky wooden ladders, and aimless, awful Reggae players scratching for melody seemingly at random, and dancers and more and more and more, all competing for the prize of attention in this circus of the miniature spectacle. A well-dressed older black woman stands at the edge of the boardwalk, singing for her supper, and I wander over her way, hand her my last cash, and listen as she sings "Summertime" at my request.
When she reaches the lyric that always gets to me, I know I've overdone it, so I smile, wipe my eyes, and stumble out to the sea. The sun sets the sky on fire, lighting up the neverending stream of jets departing LAX like golden seeds, and I stand on a jumbled pile of black rocks where the waves rise up in fans of spray, tickling my face with each cascade, and it is a moment when I can feel the earth turning underneath me, the clockwork of heaven running at full speed.
After a while, I am ready to head back to the tattoo shop, where Terry is bandaged and getting ready to go, and from there, he and Ricky and I all get on the road again, and my stomach is tight, wound up in knots that I just take as more proof of how fucked up and confusing life can be. Maybe everyone thinks that's true. Maybe it is true.
I ponder asking them to wait for me, so I can watch the sun set over the Pacific, but it's not important.
I don't need to see it to know it will be simply perfect, like so many things here.
I had to rent the movie as soon as I got back, though I didn't watch it until this past weekend, and though I was afraid that it may have been one more of those things that doesn't stand up after so very long, like the original version of Pippi Longstocking, I could see it all, all the meaning wrapped up in that monochromatic world.
When I was a kid, I watched It Should Happen to You, a lightish comedy starring Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, and Peter Lawford, at every chance I could, and every time it was aired, because there was just something about it, something to its message that sang to me in the simplest, sweetest voice, something that told me a truth I desperately needed to believe in. Its plot is a simple one, in which Holliday's character, Gladys Glover, makes a name for herself by renting a billboard in New York and pasting her name up there in million-point type for everyone to see, and then explores what it all means as the world discovers her.
I think it always meant something to me because I always knew I was meant to be special, somehow, but never could figure out what that meant. I was never good at things that people commonly recognize as valuable or worthwhile, and I never achieved much, whether in school or elsewhere, and though everyone always told me how smart I was, I couldn't, for the life of me, work out what earthly use that was.
I knew I was special, though, and it was something I held close to my heart like a secret, something that kept me warm when all there was in my life was pain and fear and the constant abuse I suffered almost from the very first day I stepped into school. The world did its best to beat me down, to grind the sharp edges of wildness off my soul, but there was always that little spark inside, the little glowing coal of the knowledge that I was meant for something special, to keep me going, and when times were at their worst, I could hide somewhere dark and quiet and open my hands and see it there.
It Should Happen to You spoke to me, and it was one of the first movies to touch me on that level, to show me the power in storytelling, and there were times when I almost lost that message, when the little spark dimmed until it almost went out.
In the middle of the eighties, it was getting pretty dark for me, and I'd done my best to prove my father and all the cynics in the world wrong by jumping into the so-called "real" world and making a go of it, and in due time, I ended up homeless, living in an abandoned chicken coop on the edge of the sprawling government agriculture research center, salvaging bags of burnt bagels from the dumpster of the nearby industrial bakery so I'd have something to eat. When my job narrowed from thirty hours a week to ten, and then faded away altogether, I filled my days by sneaking into the multiplex at the mall and watching movies from noon till midnight, and the cheesy, prefabricated magic I found there sustained me.
The movies weren't much to see or remember, just endless trashy comedies, invariably set in Los Angeles, invariably set in a candy-colored world, where moral gradations and the subtle distinctions of reality just kind of got mashed down until everything seemed plausible and justice seemed inevitable, and I'd watch them over and over, staying in my seat until my ass was completely numb, just watching Bette Midler being kidnapped in an endless loop, or Ally Sheedy getting her comeuppance as a maid, or whatever insane thing passed for comedy back then, and in time, I started to develop something like the Stockholm Syndrome, a sort of irresistible urge to heed Horace Greeley and go west, where things just seemed so much better, somehow.
In the movies, there were always cameos, either in life or in sign, by the inexplicably famous Angelyne, who'd ripped off Gladys Glover's idea and run with it, becoming famous in LA just by being there and by believing strongly enough that she was special. Whether or not she was special was immaterial to me. In the end, the key point was that faith was currency there, that you could tap into all that buried energy and rise to the level of what made you special, or at least that's what I started to believe.
By the time my first and only relationship with cohabitation was coming apart, I knew that I wanted to run for LA, to just pack up my whole life, flee for the perfect climate in the perfect land, and start all over again, somewhere where people recognize special people.
I knew what my life would look like—I'd seen it in the movies, over and over, drilled into my head by repetition as I hid out in the movie theater, and I thought maybe I'd be the one person who'd live it out for real, because I was special, just like my mother always told me, and my mother was not someone who told lies. I found another job and started to try to save up, and tried to be as LA as I could, buying crinkly white pants and white suspenders and little checkerboard ties to go with my checkerboard Vans, and I wore the right kind of sunglasses and bleached a little streak in my hair with Clorox (which immediately faded to green) and got brochures for VW convertibles from the local dealer, imagining that I'd need a white Cabriolet with a white top and a white interior to blend in. I thought myself to be completely cool, maybe for the first time ever in an entirely uncool life, and was utterly blind to the fact that I was, in fact, just an idiot, special only in the short schoolbus sense of the word.
For a time, though, I let myself believe in magic again, in the kind of magic where you believe the world into being, taking the dull realities that we're all dealt and turning everything into something rare and wondrous.
In the end, I could never save up enough money to go west, and my sad Datsun station wagon with one black fender wouldn't have gotten me there, anyway, which is probably for the best. In those days, as wide-eyed and naive as I was, I'd have been eaten alive, winding up on the street like so many other special boys in the world, who dreamed their way straight into hell.
Soon enough, I managed to get into college, and beat my way out of the dark years by turning colder and harder and becoming a grim pragmatist, and I felt less special every year. In time, I decided I hated the very idea of Los Angeles and all the stupid, ridiculous things it represented to a smalltown boy from Maryland, and I was content to think that for a long, long time.
In time, I found that little spark again, and fanned it and fed it until it was starting to burn bright, even after my life went horrifically wrong over and over again, even after I had to abandon one big dream after another. I found a middle ground where I could be mercenary and a dreamer at the same time, and things started to turn around.
Still, I had a doubt, a little inversion of the old saw that "I wish I knew then what I know now."
In my mind, it was always "I wish I could know now what I knew then."
I just wished I could remember what it felt like to have that kind of pain and uncertainty that could be wiped out in a few hours by nothing more than a dumb movie, to just dream the simplest kind of dreams instead of these complex, confusing dreams I'm having, where I can't forget some things about the world and about myself, where I can't forget the things I wish I'd never seen, the things that I wish I'd never done.
I readied myself for my trip to LA, my first trip west of the Mississippi in twenty-six years, and I thought I'd find repudiation for all that regret, validation that my faith had always been foolish in that long-gone winter I spent dreaming the golden dream of life in a hyperreal place, and that the "what might have been" might have been as bad as I've since imagined it to be.
I expected to hate it, albeit in a smug, sardonic kind of way, the kind that drives snotty hipsters to visit Dollywood and Disneyworld and Branson and Shaker Village solely so they can make brilliantly snide observations about how much fun they had being better and cooler and more edgy than all those glitzy fools, all those ignorant fucktards from the land where everyone thinks they're special.
It would have solved a problem, in a way, too, but I was destined for disappointment.
In time, my rallying cry becomes "hey look—there's a Datsun!"
There are no Datsuns left on the East Coast and haven't been for a decade. Rust ate them all, nibbling away at a million economy sedans until they just evaporated, and I am not impressed by perfect Mustangs and Jaguars and other such things, which are all as well tended in Maryland as they are anywhere. Even the occasional Citroën fails to thrill me, but perfect Datsun 210SL station wagons, even nicer than mine was when it was just five years old, catch my eye.
I look for things to make me angry, but I do not find them.
I am getting very, very frustrated.
I will not see a single Hummer on this trip, not one, not like back home.
Desperation finally overtakes me.
On the afternoon of my last day in LA, we leave the tattoo shop with Terry's arm in a fresh bandage, stop briefly at Ricky's, and head to Rose Hills, where Billy is buried. There have been many things to make me anxious on this trip, but this is the main one, the one that's most difficult to explain, and most likely to make me angry, because I try to put the strange relationship I have with a man I never met face to face into some kind of perspective and people invariably start to spout the cheapest, most pathetic kind of amateur psychology at me, as if they're telling me something new, something I'd have totally missed. It is all well-intentioned, so I refrain from shouting "shut the fuck up," but I still think it, each and every time someone with only the sketchiest of information chimes in with the big truth I'm supposed to be too dumb to figure out. They've not seen my dreams, they've not seen what I've seen.
It has been a year of impossibilities.
The drive to Rose Hills is endless, and less interesting than most, and I have to be rude to Terry and Ricky and retreat to the enclosed world of my iPod, because I'm just feeling too many things all at once, too many things. I have watched Terry suffer for two years, almost, and have loved him for half of that time, in spite of every good reason to the contrary, and I've found a kind of equilibrium of denial and bravado I can almost live with, almost all of the time, but we are heading to a place where it will all be put into perspective, where Terry's sorrow and disbelief becomes absolute. At first, I am frustrated by Ricky's presence with us, but it becomes a comfort, and will be even more so as the day goes on.
I have made two playlists on my iPod just for this day, and I sit and listen and find myself crying quietly more than once, and I am glad it is hidden behind my sunglasses, which just reflect a distorted view of the world back into itself. It's all so hard sometimes, so hard to be of so little use. I lean against the door and watch the uninspiring landscape rushing by, too overwhelmed to even think "stick tree, stick tree, stick tree, Datsun, stick tree," as I see these things.
Rose Hills is a commercial cemetery, something that bothers me on a lot of levels, and passing the showrooms and sales office and such just rouses a kind of refreshingly ignorant anger in me, a nice break from the more complex things I'm thinking, and Terry's feelings come in waves that I can feel almost like the hot rays of the sun. He cannot believe he is here, even after almost three years, and I know the feeling well and yet still can do nothing to make it better for him. Every time I open my mouth, I say the wrong thing, or something meaningless, and it's all just background noise, just sound and fury, signifying even less than nothing.
We make our way up the hillside until we find Billy's tree and Billy's bench, and I climb out of the car, stiff from the ride, and walk a stumpy walk over to the bench, holding the bouquet of daisies I brought like a kid being forced to pick up a blind date for the prom. On some level, I want this moment to be magical, to be soothing and perfect and sorrowful in a completely linear way, but the thoughts in my head just start to spin and swirl and crash in ever more confusing conglomerations of meaning. Terry stands over the grave, a lost little boy, and I just sit there, just watching as inconspicuously as I can, just wishing that belief was enough, that love was enough, but it never is, not in the face of the hard truths that just can't be rewritten or analyzed or otherwise put into context.
He is a lost little boy, no matter how hard he seems sometimes, and I cannot comfort him.
It is not from lack of desire to do so, though.
Damn.
He tends to the grave, wiping the stone clean and tending to the site, cleaning up the area around the stone and the bench and the tree, and he and Ricky talk quietly and discuss the wind chimes, which they agree will probably be removed from the tree by the staff of Rose Hills, because of complaints from the families of those buried nearby. Ricky solves the problem by using his pruning shears to snip off the three chimes, discarding them in a nearby trash can, and Terry hangs the silenced mobile of five sparkling angels in the tree, seeming pleased at how it looks there. I think of the people who would complain at the sound of wind chimes tinkling on that lonesome hillside, and I want to stomp on their loved ones' graves, as if to say, "take that, you prim and loveless formalists—fuck the lot of you!"
If there's ever to be a place where people go to remember me, I want it to be filled with music.
I slip my daisies into the holder by the bench and Terry slips a double bouquet of all-yellow daisies into the recessed holder at the headstone, and it strikes me that I knew I wanted to bring daisies long before I even came here, because daisies are the flower I love best, because they're humble and simple and pretty without being showy or drawing too much attention to themselves. From all I know of Billy from what I've heard and read, I think they're perfect for him, and like him in the very best way, the perfect flower for another little boy from nowhere in particular.
Even in my sunglasses, Ricky can tell I'm having a rough moment, just watching Terry in his grief, and he sits down beside me on the bench, slings his arm around my shoulder, and leans over to give me a kiss on the head. It is a beautiful thing, and I am grateful for it.
Why should I be so sad here? Billy wasn't my lover, wasn't my friend. Why should I feel like I do?
I've given up trying to answer such questions.
When the time seems right, I get up, walk over, and stand in front of Billy's headstone with my iPod in my hand, ready to fulfill a promise I made in a dream, slowly clicking through the playlists until I find the one titled "Billy." Maybe it's a rude gesture to stand over someone's grave in headphones, but Billy knew something I know, too—the exact layout of the dance floor at the Blue Star Lounge, in that imaginary place in everyone's head where we can go when we need to connect with something higher than ourselves, and it's a place made of rhythm and harmony and the joyous abandon of dance, of real dance, the kind you do when you're called to move by music that is full of magic and you know that no one's watching.
I will not dance on his grave, because it's a symbolic gesture that all but a few of us in this world can't help but take in the wrong way, but I have brought the two pieces of music that I need to hear there, as if to finally share them in person after so much has happened, after I've come to know him in so many impossible ways in the time I've known and loved Terry. I don't believe this is where Billy is now, but it is a place where so many things come together, where one thread in his short history came to a conclusion, and so it is a place to find commune, to ask unanswerable questions and hope for one more miniature miracle.
The first song is easy and obvious, a song that I took refuge in at the end of 2003, when my life just just getting complicated, and I dial it up and listen with my head cast down, just letting it wash over me, just letting it flow through all the nerve endings in my body until I become a one-man radio tower, broadcasting everything I love and dream of in the world in a crackling thunderstorm of emotional energy, and I have to stop myself from putting out my hands, as if I could cast lightning bolts into the blue.
The second piece is much harder to listen to, and it is a song that means something for a reason that is so intensely jarring and incomprehensible that I will never, ever tell the story of how it came to mean what it means, as if I even could. I let it play, my skin turns to pure gooseflesh for five minutes, and I can barely even breathe until the last rumbling notes fade from my ears. When I return from LA, I locate the CD it came from, hold it up in the light to see the little mark that explains everything, then use a paring knife to cut diagonals into the disc until I am certain it will never play again.
Before I leave Billy's grave, I pause to lay my iPod on his headstone, just for a second, just long enough to stare at it there, looking glossy and perfect beside Billy's picture and the loving words Terry had carved into the granite, and as I reach down to retrieve it, I press it down slightly, and slide it a fraction of an inch before I pick it up. I've kept my iPod unscratched and factory fresh for a long time now, and I turn it over to see that there is a new pattern of faint scratches that come from this place, from this moment, and that is a good thing, in fact, a very, very good thing. Terry says I'm prone to grand gestures, and it's totally true, every bit of it. What else is this world worth?
I remove my earphones, roll up the cord neatly, and slip everything into my jacket.
Ricky and I start to retreat to the car to leave Terry alone with Billy for a last moment before we go, but I take a side trip to the trash can, where I pick through dead flowers and leaves until I find the glittering rods of the discarded wind chimes. I pocket them and head back to the car.
In the valley below Rose Hills, a locomotive is pushing boxcars down a rail siding. In all of Los Angeles, I never once heard the voice of a train, never heard that lonesome cry of a faraway engine making itself known, not until now, not until here, and I take it as one more glorious coincidence among far, far too many in the year that changed everything for me, and it's a sound that makes me smile a wistful smile in spite of everything.
Thank you, Billy.
On my last morning in LA, I wake up right on schedule at 3:40, strip to my birthday suit, and run through the cool breeze in the yard to the tiki hut and the hot tub, where I slip into the hot, still water with just the light switched on, just that marine blue light lighting up the darkness, and I just float there, dead center in the tub, until the water no longer ripples.
The breeze sets the wind chimes over the tub tinkling and I feel like the subject of a painting, something from Hockney's fat-guy-in-a-pool period, and I am not sure how I feel, or how this place has really affected me, or even what I've seen in the eight days I've been here. I've seen a microscopic slice of the life here, just a tiny fragment of something so large that it hurts my head to think of the scale of it all, and yet I've reveled in it all, even when it was anything but fun, anything but joyous, when I could not help but channel Terry's sorrow and anxiety by proximity, because I am here because I wanted to be here, and I don't regret a bit of it.
I float for a while longer, then reach over and turn on all the jets, feeling almost like I could just dissolve in the churning maelstrom, evaporating and coming back as rain to fall over this dry landscape.
It's time to go.
I climb out of the tub, dry myself off, switch off the light and the jets, fold the insulating cover back into place, and head back into the house.
I can't help but think of the ocean as being on the wrong side in California, misplaced according to the natural way of things, and it is a trace of my well-cultivated smugness that I want to say that we've got it right where I come from, where the sun springs from the sea, each and every morning, ready to bring new and magical things into our lives, and that the sun goes to California to die, to fizzle out in that unbearably deep sea in a repetitive suicide, but I tell myself this as one more of the lies I rely upon to get through the days.
The sun comes to us as a baby back east, full of joy and promise and the dreams of how far we can go, but it fades into the Pacific full of wisdom and stories, loaded with everything it's seen in its day-long trip over this rambling country we live in, and the people here know this only too well, so well that they've packed the shores to meet the sunset each and every evening, to mine the setting sun for all the tales it has to tell, and that energy just fuels the fires of creativity and chaotic, explosive magic, and there is such magic here, such crazy, magnetic life spinning into being under these mostly-perfect skies, that I can barely tell myself otherwise, even if I want to so badly that I can barely contain myself.
I wanted to hate this place, to find it as dull and shallow as I imagined it might be, but I've failed.
"You hate everything about LA, don't you?" asks Terry in a continuing refrain, and I shake my head.
"No, I don't," I say, but I honestly almost wish I did hate it.
He's asked the same question about his house and the guesthouse and Venice throughout the trip, and I don't want to answer any of these questions, because they just lead into futures that just aren't there, and I'm sick and tired of the future. Sometimes even the present's a bit dodgy for my tastes.
I wanted to hate this place so badly, because it'd have just been easier that way, but I lost that bet.
It seems I became one more dreamer of the golden dream, even if I don't know what it means.
The rain carries on and washes us away as we board our plane and head east.
I start to miss the hot tub before we're even airborne.
But it's easy come, and it's easy go
All this talking is only bravado
Yeah, I know.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2005-01-18 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 02:04 pm (UTC)Next time I'm there, I'll work out the hours for the tour.
Beautiful place, beautiful dreams.
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Date: 2005-01-18 01:52 pm (UTC)The images of you standing over the grave, with music, are so powerfull.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:05 pm (UTC)I wonder, sometimes, if I'm just hopeless overdramatic, or if it's the world that's at fault.
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Date: 2005-01-18 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-18 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-18 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-18 05:26 pm (UTC)I'm so glad you loved Los Angeles, Joe. You certainly did it proud.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:09 pm (UTC)Thank you, hon. You get it, and you make it worth beating my way through this tangled lexicon, even when it's almost enough to do me in.
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Date: 2005-01-18 06:14 pm (UTC)with your daddy and mammy
standin' by
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Date: 2005-01-18 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-18 06:47 pm (UTC)When she sings here that "nothin' can harm you," it's as though she knows that's just not true ...
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Date: 2005-01-18 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-19 12:49 am (UTC)This is phenomenal, but all your stuff is. If Augustin Burroughs is making shitloads of money, it makes no sense that you aren't either. Yeah, it's that good.
Does Terry read your journal? Sometimes I write pieces that are just so personal involving other people that I don't feel like I can share them, because people are going to take them the wrong way, or there will be some sort of other disconnect. Curious if you let your BF tune in.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:14 pm (UTC)I wish I was making shitloads of money, too, but I'd be happy with peeloads. Literary watersports all 'round, please!
Terry reads my journal, and I read his (
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Date: 2005-01-19 01:22 am (UTC)I still see Datsuns here and there, though they're all late 70's - early 80's Z's. I like those, though, especially the ones that say only Datsun and don't have the dual Datsun/Nissan logo. It's kind of like the little happy feeling I get from seeing an AMC Gremlin with original green paint puttering down the highway.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:15 pm (UTC)Wave at the next Datsun you see, just for me, okay?
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Date: 2005-01-19 01:34 am (UTC)I knew I was special, though, and it was something I held close to my heart like a secret, something that kept me warm when all there was in my life was pain and fear and the constant abuse I suffered almost from the very first day I stepped into school. The world did its best to beat me down, to grind the sharp edges of wildness off my soul, but there was always that little spark inside, the little glowing coal of the knowledge that I was meant for something special, to keep me going, and when times were at their worst, I could hide somewhere dark and quiet and open my hands and see it there.
Thank you for this. All of it, but especially, this.
I used to dig vegetables out of the dumpster in Haymarket in Boston. To this day, raw cabbage is hard for me to eat.
---
Question for you. Do you read my LJ? I know you have a lot of people that write comments in yours - I was just wondering, as I have been writing bits and not posting them, but have thought of it - and would like your comments when I do.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:20 pm (UTC)I've been reading your LJ, and especially liked Part 2, which was poetic and evocative in sweetly straightforward way, but I've been woefully behind on getting caught up with my LJ comments, so I'll have to beg forgiveness for my taciturnity while I get up to speed.
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Date: 2005-01-19 03:04 am (UTC)I don't even really know where to begin.... I'll just say I have a friend who "returned" after a long absence who now lives in LA. He invited me to visit and I honestly thought it would be a terrible idea...for many of the reasons you dispense so well. I will now give the idea fair consideration.
I applaud you for trying to get it all down. I get so caught up in some blockage I have I instead get nothing down.
Thanks for continually posting such wondrous, human windows into your soul.
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Date: 2005-01-24 02:21 pm (UTC)I understand the blockage well, and sometimes it gets so bad that my head just starts to pound, and it's write or die, almost.
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Date: 2005-01-19 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-24 02:21 pm (UTC)I do get a bit verbose, don't I? ;)
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Date: 2005-01-25 05:04 am (UTC)