Westside Rhapsody

"What's the point of view? Can't track the point view."

Editor taps your pages with his molar-marred pen.

You exhale through your teeth. "Listen, Jack, I'm only here for a minute, and ain't that just life. God help us if one POV goes on forever."

"Alright alright, settle down," he says. "At least explain to me the girl."

"Jasmine."

"Yeah, explain to me Jasmine."

"Okay okay, but for the last time," you say, "Even though you got no right to ask."

Editor smiles sardonic, oblivious that the adverbial abandonment was intentional. He sits back, all patient like, and pops that goddamn pen in his mouth.

It goes like this:

Slow morning as you wish. The sky is robin's egg and the clouds are daubs of chalky gray. A cool, damp breeze pushes through the screen. Tiny cairns on the windowsill, a relic from Alaska. The dishwasher whirs in the background as you sit there being slow as you wish.

Yesterday, day before even, riding in with Benny, the Nigerian driver / film producer. Only in LA, always in LA. His film with Tom Sizemore, still looking for a distribution deal. They gave him shit, something about quality control. Talking about pay-per-view, gotta have pay-per-view and does he even know Tom Sizemore is dead. He gives you his card. You email him for the hell of it, says he has a documentary concept. Something about how the current generation's war is always the conflict of their forbearers. Benny ain’t wrong. He writes you back that he’ll reach out in six months. Patient man. Master of the long con. Perfect for Hollywood.

Later, a walk for dinner. The beautiful shaded pathways. The filthy sidewalks. The pop-up Mexican joint. Folding tables and El Pastor with all the trimmings.

So much confusion. Such beautiful rebellion. So punk rock. I'm this. I'm that. How can I be this, not that? Look down. There it is. Deep down you know and all you want is to be that other thing.

Deep down you know, you remember.
Deep down that adolescent desire still lingers.
But maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
How long can the maybe live?
Maybe grows up eventually.
It has to.

Usually not where you thought it would. Not how, in your quiet moments, you were teenage-certain that it positively, absolutely would.

Had to.
But no.
What then?
Get hung up in the breach and slowly sink.
Yeah, all kinds of buildup.

Sleep. Semi-warm. Lying under the open window. The night breathes in just enough. Cool air comes in off the warming ocean. Sign of the times. The air hangs heavy with sea. Can't smell it but it lands on the surface of your skin and you know it's there. Up in the night. Cutting into someone else's silence and you move through it like a prowler. All to just avoid notice but you know that's impossible.

No flush and the nerves settle. Peek out at the morning sky. Is that the dawn rays glancing off thin clouds or just a sickly city glow? Looks like the latter. Better try to sleep some more but it will never happen. Then again it does.

Wake,
wonder,
long for solitude.

And then you hear the jangling tin slide of the garage door and you've got it for a hot minute. How long? Get up and slip into the day. Make the bed.

Ease into the guesthouse like this is your routine. See how it suits you. Imagine this life, this place, these bindings. All yours. A cup of tepid coffee awaits. Kind gesture and the kindness warms the coffee back up. No nukes. Just enough.

Wade through your thoughts like swamp water. Nothing much down there but a mild edge of fear. Just the same. Find a comfortable place and wait to see what the coffee can do.

More breeze and the neighbor starts the shower.
Runs for a beat. Warm it up.
Then he flushes.
Talk radio and he clunks around with plastic bottles.
He chuckles and the sounds are so crisp you could dredge them through a plate of guacamole.

Read a little bit. Soon the garage door will lift and lower and that other part of your day will begin. Then it does.

The heat settles in and watches us all slow down. The crows and the parakeets object. Walking down Lincoln, see a junkie who nods out using a bike rack for support. The splay of his legs, one bent knee so his chest lies flat on the lock bar. He was settled in, balanced. A true innovator, and just then the heat was nothing at all.

Those stains on the sidewalk. Don't read too much into them, even though here one could root a dissertation, a rhapsody, a eulogy. But just keep moving.

After all, sidewalk.

Just down the way at the fancy supermarket, a playground for the beautiful people, wellness shots and skin-tight leggings donned for everything but the looking. You don't have to be an urchin every goddamn day of this bitter life, Bukowski. Could have just as easily been a press operator at the Ford Automotive Company, a corporal or a steamship steward. Instead you made dog treats and eddied out here in LA and studied the underside of bike racks.

Sparks of activity,
jaywalking in a beach town,
teenage girls with iced coffee,
a couple of Swedes walking and wondering, vad tusan.

Later, stalled in the parlor, the breath of Hades settles in. Sit still, the sheen forms. Nextdoor neighbors have no air conditioning either. Windows open wide and you can hear them clear as day, moaning and groaning, maybe making the most of a sweltering afternoon, but afterward you can hear fake surety in his voice. Unsteady, fishing for affirmation, and she talks to him with all of the warmth of a late-shift diner waitress who just wants a cigarette. Groans were mostly his besides. The trill of shower curtain rings, a rush of water, and the tinny talk radio. Somewhere else, she texts a friend.

Sit still, pull them apart like steamed crabs. They have no idea. Just like blue crabs, whole lot of work for such tiny morsels, but what else are you gonna do? Too hot to lie down, too hot to stand. Just sit and listen and pray for a breeze.

Morning again, still time for promise. Lost in the blocks. Wrong turn and suddenly a requiem. Cafe where you once lunched with Paul. Gap-toothed, dreaded, yellow toenails.

All around you, vegan dandies,
and Paul was a tin can gong,
jangling, bright,
the gaps in his teeth let them dance.

People lean in to talk,
no NDA,
revealing pin-back scars.
Sparkling or still, passion fruit.

And Paul leans back as if he might roar and only you notice. Last time at that cafe was the last time with Paul. Rest in peace, weird lion.

Up a hill, down a hill, everybody is out. Dog park and the dogs are wild with impulses that will never play out. No memory, just energy that bottles up and they don't care.

Later, on leash, tug, tug, sniff.
That's it baby, do your thing.
Out of bags, oh well.
Engrossed by the phone, oops didn't notice.
Good girl, let's go. Mama's hungry.

The freeways are great wide-open spaces, concrete prairies where nothing grows. The traffic lays still, humming, thundering. Hot breath, tailpipe to lungs, lungs to tailpipe. Crest a hill and herds of buffalo dot the landscape as far as the eye can see. Humming, thundering, moving the weary from mile marker to marker.

Clover fields and serpentine,
a death march.
The warriors and tricksters travel by night.

Just across the way, teenagers sit anxious on the sandy sand, studying forms, dreaming through the mysteries where everything is perfect, everything is harmony. The last vestiges of Elysian childhood, swirling plastic bags, swirling in an ebbing tide, like a portal to grown-up delights.

But it's all a ruse, tripping through norepinephrine mirage, and the sea evaporates and the last waves dissolve into the sand, leaving the fancy dancers naked and alone on a salt flat that melts into an orange sky. Two ostraca in one hand and a colorful ribbon in the other.

Start walking, kid, this is just the beginning. See that dark smear on the horizon? Those are the happy masses, and if you don't double your pace you just might not catch up. Or is it just another mirage? Or are they all just the same, cutting a swath of footprints into the desert floor that slowly gets deeper like the channel cut by a meandering river?

I'll tell you the secret just before I vanish, as well. They're all locked in a class system, from clique to caste, and they all think they're one grade up because they eat fancy bread and drink water labeled with all the right promise. At night, in numbers unimaginable, they huddle around a pyre with flames that lick the sky and they make offerings of thanks and they feign compassion for everyone else, everyone stuck back there in the middle, or god forbid, in the refugee enclaves of the perpetually downtrodden.

On command of the gods, the lords of consternation, they pass a few artisanal loaves back through the crowd. Here, get these to those without. And so the bread travels, hand by filthy hand, just like currency, the crusts growing crustier all the while, and this goes on and on seemingly forever until Donor Zero, who first got the command from god himself, turns and accepts a cobble of dark matter, barely in the shape of a seeded sourdough boule, fetid from the countless caresses of a million dirty hands and someone deep in the crowd whispers that's all that's left as the nodule dissolves to sand.

But before the dream ends you move past a wall of jasmine, tiny tiny blossoms call you back like sirens up from the horizon. You turn and see the sands percolate a benevolent sea. Minute puffs of steam pronounce the cooling of this wretched scape. A seabird rises from a smear of feathers and glides low across the rippling water, an easy celebration of being alive. Wings push the air and waves swell and move toward the land and they push the air too and the breeze carries the smell of saltwater and it mixes with the jasmine and a rush of calm joy curls through you like a standing dream.

Ravens circle and soar, claiming the land as the gulls gather and cackle over the bounty of their new sea. Far overhead, atop slender tines, starbursts of palm fronds bob hither and yon, sweeping mirth among the splotch-daub clouds in a shade of blue that seems unlike any shade of sky you've ever seen. It's the blue of magazine ads and bomb pops.

In this fragile, eternal moment the dream returns: safe, enveloping, true.
And this towering wall of jasmine, was it always here?
We've walked this block a million times.
It’s as if it dropped overnight from the heavens like a bed sheet hung to dry in the pacific breeze.

The sun hangs back, diffused by layers of sugar glass and ocean mist and she is there in quarter view looking somewhere else, showing you the arc of her cheek where it rolls away from her brown eyes and falls toward a ready smile, skin the color of crème brulée, the center part that your spoon sweeps through. She is waiting and she doesn't know she is waiting but she is waiting and you ask her:

“What's your name?”

And she turns and smiles the ready smile and her cheeks seem to lift, ever so slightly pinching her eyes.

"Jasmine," she says.

And for all you know those are the last words to ever register in the long and troubled annals of our history.