the streets

The streets of Los Angeles are utterly my entrails. Its countless gutters are juicy registries that merge with my intestines. I only truly know things when I feel them here, the way you know a kiss or smell, my innards tell me so, with whispers of joy and nausea. Los Angeles, my exo-skeleton, my outer spleen. Its pavements risen up, shattered here and there, with spots repaired, sloping like kelloid scars, caterpillars of tar on asphalt and gravel, pushed up from underground by the madcap feet and elbows of a subterranean life, a Pentecostal light. For strangers, the appeal is cosmetic. To them, the surface is something like a beauty mask gone dry, crumbling and cracked, the wake of bygone, fabulous years, but I'm too familiar to notice it. It is the face of a whore I've long forgiven. Her pink tongue emerges from a manhole and whips around full circle, lapping up the spirit gum. They're disappointed, they look away, they feel serious regret about the real terrain, but her tongue smooths it over like a calm evening tide. She can taste it, all of it, their expectations, the naysaying, the actual grime, it's tasty! When I take a deep breath of downtown air, my diaphragm expands with minty freshness, a brand new song is leaven, and dozens of crannies bulge forth with roots and greeny undergrowth, suddenly alive with butterflies, inside and outside. Some California sun urges them upward with promises obscure and widespread. A long line of skinny palm trees wags fiercely in the wind, thrashing high and low, like savage catapults, nearly snapping at the neck, and if you look closely, I am always in the crowd of it, swinging, suspended, now spinning, a hammock between them!

Drafts course the Chinese tunnels beneath Olvera Street like far-flung gasps, and here below the walls are painted burgundy, but none of these lead to the Reptile Kingdom. A bronze Beethoven, preoccupied in Pershing Square, peers at pigeons with his thunderstorm eyebrows and in his metal skull reverberates the sound of anvils. Further south, on Figueroa Street, the prostitutes in furs and little else slip inside of cars, and some are police officers, but all wear masks this evening. There are armies of middle-aged widows who search and pillage the Flower District mornings and every Thursday a cemetery groundsman disposes of their efforts, renewing their assignments. And children cannot fathom the hobos that tremble on stone benches or their raving monologues in cardboard shelters, so they laugh and guess each others' futures. But there's a lone priest giving out single dollars like a man who would chisel Everest with a breviary. Galactic jazz and fried chicken at Leimert Park, what used to be on Main Street, what used to blow in the East, now poltergeists. At La Brea, for your benefit, the woolly mammoths are forever drowning in a tar pit and every few minutes one of them struggles for survival. At the wind-swept Green Line station, in the middle of opposing freeways, two lovers kiss in a nook between directories, a mirage encased in steel, eliciting sighs and flying horns. A new Catholic church, St. Patrick's, on Central Avenue, dwarfs the new Islamic Center across the street, not to mention the size of its fence. There are Black activists, wearing white camouflage and berets on a corner in Crenshaw, with posters of men hanging from trees, and one of these bears the title Mexicans were lynched, too! Ex-Alpha Beta, ex-Ralphs, ex-Vons, post-1993-riots-Jons Market now lies in ruins, ruins, a dirt lot for traveling carnivals! Streets filled with upheaval, graffiti, lies, music, murder, all qualities cradled in my inner most self, sprinkled with bones, peels, seeds, wax cups, straw, blown in from the Farmer's Market downtown--my childhood bazaar. How can I explain?

I feel very strongly that there is something in Los Angeles that I like. I like it so much that I don't like it when other people like it. It is a love like that, jealous. A large part of me is headquartered here. I understand how ghosts can get stuck to a place, even though it's very dreadful, even if it changes beyond recognition over time. If I leave this place, I will start to eat less and less, the longer I'm away, and perhaps I'll eventually starve. I've never stuck around anywhere long enough to find out. It's not that other cities aren't lovely, and it has nothing to do with the quality of food, nor any leeriness versus unfamiliar dishes. I'll try anything new and odds are I'll like it. I have learned to negate my eyes, my nose, several of my senses, actually, so that unfamiliar and outlandish-looking food won't revile me at all, as long as others are eating it with confidence. My stomach is no stranger to hunger, having survived a few childish fasts and vegetarianism. It's more than happy to identify new sustenance. For lunch today, I had some raw oysters and pomegranate, dousing both with Tapatío, lemon, and salt. I washed that down with mango Snapple and a vitamin supplement. My co-workers watched me with disgust bordering on horror and only one showed a hint of curiosity. So, in the worst case, the food will come delicious and well-prepared, as far as I can tell, and I will be nicely accommodated in a new surrounding; nonetheless I will feel discomfort in the moments before I gorge myself. I can only describe this feeling as imminentness, the feeling before a calamity, when you augur that wrong place/time falling piano. You tingle with subtle warnings, but disaster never strikes, more so it phases in and out, behind the scenes. There is a changing of the guard, but there is no perceptible harm, only the obvious change that took place. In a sense, the food has the quality of being stale, it tastes stale while being very fresh, and it's forgettable the moment it's arrived, like you've already half-eaten it and lost interest. The timing of the food is wrong. The Frenchman Marcel Proust once wrote that when we miss a certain place we are really missing the moments we have spent in it and not the place itself. The place merely serves as a receptacle. The people, objects, and events of bygone times, the things that inspire the sensation of longing, cease to be qualities of the place, for it is constantly changing, in structure and attitude, but we are comforted by a souvenir environment, which evokes the most familiarity. The Los Angeles that courses inside me is long gone, already expired, but I'm perpetually linked to its old ghostly framework. The city has become an ectoplasmic condiment for my senses. In essence, I'm like a Cajun that prefers his meals to be dripping with hot sauce. Anything else would be too bland. My life requires a dose of Angelean ghost.

Ironically, if someone were to mention plans of visiting California, I would deny Los Angeles to the point of treason. I'll make an urgent case against it, in favor of San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Napa Valley--cities I might have been to only once and that are not even worth the fuss--anywhere but here. I will drum up doubts and dismiss any kind expectations on grounds of naiveté. I will even have the audacity to complain about the weather, such as The heat is unbearable! Scoff at this, think about the severity of other summers, but keep in mind that Los Angeles is spoiled year round with pleasant weather, so we are not apt to suffer sustained climactic annoyances. We have this luxury called a marine layer. Winds off the coast are cool and continuous. Oppressive weather comes and goes in a flash. When it lingers on, there's no justice to it. One hundred degrees in the winter is a joke between the deities. And so we smolder and torture ourselves with the foolish hope that the insolent weather will move along as quickly as it came, whereas residents from cities like Las Vegas are already resigned to the daily inferno. When it's not scorching, it's London skies with smoggy brown halos, and the streets stay empty, except for the steady movements of tourists and transients. When it's crowded with Angelenos, it's usually in protest or a ruse of some sort. Angelenos are always driving around and are therefore invisible. I suppose people drive as much so they won't have to come to grips with the flat expanse of the city itself. Popular locations are set dreadfully apart and its citizens are anxious to arrive at specified times, to make grand entrances. They hate it here. They would prefer a city built upward, where the action is centralized and not on the fringes. I have a car, a fast one, but I prefer not to drive. I take what Argentines call el colectivo, the bus. The soles of my shoes go bald long before I ever scuff the tops of them. I walk the streets, I trample about them. I am more than acquainted. The streets wind in and out of me in ways no map can ascertain.

Of course, I will only resort to negative remarks because I feel that others don't have a right to like Los Angeles. Even so, what appeals to visitors is never what appeals to me. The idea of someone staring in wonderment at the Hollywood sign or a likewise attraction is altogether depressing. I remember the smattering of buildings replaced by the Staples Center and how the new arena stood in skeletal form. Just past it, there's the orchestra murals, with violinist Ralph Morrison peering into every northbound car. I remember the halls of a library that burned down, which I wandered as a toddler, clutching a Ninja Turtle comic. I subsist on these sights and memories. These are the freedoms granted me with every step. I stand in the middle of downtown and I realize that I'm thirty to forty minutes away--thinking of time as space and proceeding to fork it--from the susurrant Pacific coast, the sometimes purple mountains, and the horizontal desert.