Lives at the Periphery

Chapter 11 – Lives at the Periphery

Carson looked at the city and dreaded the meanness of encountering it again. He turned back, lowered his head and pushed toward it, walking west against the oncoming traffic along the 6^th Street bridge. The faces of the passing motorists heading into Boyle Heights and East L.A. were mostly benign and brown. Their hair was deep black and fine. The men wore mustaches. Many drove pickup trucks and had on white cowboy hats. Members of their families, sometimes as many as four or five people, were often crammed in the cab of the truck along with the driver-patriarch. The women rarely drove. They had heavy and long faces, deep copper and mute. He could easily be in Tijuana or El Paso, Carson thought, not six miles from Hollywood. He transported the occupants of the cars to the jungles of Guatemala. Their bone structure was the same as the ancient Mayans from whom they’d descended. Aside from the elemental trappings of American decivilization, like wide-screen TV’s and cell phones, to enter their realm – the tight, guarded, traditional and stifling homes they had set up in the noisy barrios of their adopted country, their way of life was unintelligible to Carson. He knew that they wanted to succeed; that they believed in hard work. Hard work would ultimately bring opportunities for affluence, if not to them then to their children. They believed in the Christian God, to whom they prayed in times of need or distress. This belief was an anodyne to their considerable difficulties. They had occasions to celebrate and some times did so excessively. Like everyone else they had jealousies, or harbored greed, envy, and sorrow. But Carson was at a loss. If the opportunity ever arose – and he couldn’t see how it would – what could he share or discuss with these poor immigrants? He knew that if he were their guest, they would show him kindness in every way possible. The mistrust between them would dissolve quickly once either of them staged even a perfunctory interest in the other’s life. He would see the photographs of the family hanging on the walls. He would smell the rich, pungent cooking. He might inquire about the work the man or woman did, what the children were learning in schools, what kinds of toys they had. But after that, what else could they speak of? Where could they go from there? At some point their common vocabularies would diverge and their profound differences and interests would appear. And then it had to be decided whether to continue, to respect each other based on the few common things they shared, or develop enmities because of the multitude of things they didn’t. It was easier just to make that decision up front, without all the formalities and overwrought introductions to each other’s cultures. What difference did it make, really, whether he got to know one poor, lousy Mexican family? What was at stake? Nothing. Would the world be a better place because one gringo and one wetback broke bread together? Maybe at that precise moment in time there might be a small portion of bonhomie, but what did it really contribute ultimately? Carson thought it amounted to very little. There had to be a reason for the two cultures to come together. There had to be something tangible that they both intensely wanted. The best way of realizing it was to engage with the other in some method for achieving it. It was the business model of human relations. Each culture had to see an outcome that was beneficial to it, an outcome only achieved through an association with the other group. Otherwise, why bother? They were different people. No one, unless they’re freaks or anthropologists, has any desire to mingle with groups unlike their own. They don’t want to live near one another, and they don’t really care to see one another. They are happier with their own kind. It’s easier, simply easier. Life was hard enough. People didn’t care to struggle getting to know another race or culture unless, again, something major was at stake, like their ability to live a peaceful life, or the future of their children, or their jobs or safety. But minus any threat or advantage, the prevailing attitude of all cultures was basically, “you over there, me over here, and just don’t fuck with me.” This suited most people just fine. Carson had no quarrel with it.

            Carson navigated around the support columns, the narrow passageways that made little pockets of cantilever-like flanges off the sides of the bridge, tiny U-shaped byways that were out of view of the motorists, pockets of steel and asphalt where the homeless and crazies found a convenient, cozy recess to dump the contents of their bowels. Even human scum had a sense of modesty, he thought; forced to shit outdoors yet, like fastidious cats, seeking to bury the traces of their excrement. It was a misguided effort. Why didn’t they just hang their asses off the side of the bridge to trim their fetid expulsions, letting them fall on the train tracks below? They didn’t want to be seen shitting, but they sure didn’t mind fouling the bridge for others. Where was the civic decency? Carson held his breath each time he was forced to circumambulate a column, carefully stepping over the turds in various stages of desiccation. He actually feared inhaling airborne diseases rising off the gasses released from the molecular breakdown of homeless feces. He shook his head at the absurd unlikeliness of that, but he held his breath all the same. Since the time of AIDS, anthrax, tainted beef and the West Nile virus, not to mention the preponderance of Jews, white supremacists, Negroes, Chinamen, faggots and the AFL-CIO, unless it was in a package and they could buy it, Americans had become almost Japanese-like in their aversion to anything foreign, to anything that didn’t respond to the usual remedies of antiseptic annihilation.

            Carson reached the foot of the bridge, where it spilled out at Santa Fe Avenue. Even in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, the streets flanking the bridge had about them a ghostly desolation. Traffic was scarce and the few people he saw were homeless phantoms pushing shopping baskets, or the stray and trendy location scout looking for an atmospheric setting for the next big blockbuster TV commercial, one featuring an amazing automobile that could make its future owner as omnipotent and virile as a corporate CEO. The car’s engineers hadn’t quite perfected its capacity to give the driver a supremely mind-altering blowjob (the ejaculate would be sucked and integrated into the car’s hybrid electric/gas fuel system, the protein increasing its overall efficiency), however, better results were expected soon.

Beneath the bridge and running parallel to it was a service road. One side of the road was lined with gaunt and empty brick warehouses built in the 1920’s. They were disheveled relics of another era, when there was a bustling commercial trade, when America made things like screws, and rope, and hangers; cables, motors, rocking chairs and ball bearings. That trade had found other places, other countries to thrive, where profits could remain high, leaving this part of town abandoned, a cavernous mausoleum of obsolete machinery and architecture waiting to be torn down in American fashion, after long battles with preservationists who zealously wished to salvage and mummify the great heritage of the neighborhood as an authentic slice of American history, a brick and mortar testament to the entrepreneurial spirit that had first settled the area, where once thrived the great capitalists (the forefathers of the powerful men with whom the preservationists were now doing battle), the mighty figures who had built the factories and warehouses that made them rich on the broken backs of the men, women and children who slogged in the debilitating heat of their factories for twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, for a dollar or two and no medical benefits, no pension, while these great captains of industry went home to their peculiar, neurasthenic wives, their towering mansions on Bunker Hill, and poured themselves tall glasses of bourbon, and parked their wide, drooping asses in chairs stuffed with wool and horsehair and lined in silk, where they read the stock quotes for the day, or humped the new, young, maid in the dark-paneled library of thick books never to be read.

The preservationists were doing battle with the present incarnation of the industrial scions, the real estate developers who, if they couldn’t tear down and start over, wished instead to repopulate the old buildings for other uses, such as art galleries, pretentious restaurants, chic shopping malls and artists’ lofts, none of which would be inhabited by the majority of artists, who lacked the means to pay the stellar rents unless they happened to be successful painters of dolphins and whales, or brash canvasses of bold squiggly lines that resolutely defied classification or interpretation. But until the developers got their way, after years of haggling with and buying off the bureaucrats, politicians and the nonprofit agitators, Carson imagined this was an area that would make an ideal locale for hidden snipers in an urban guerilla war, ideal for gunning down in droves the faceless, helmeted phalanxes of the LAPD, the mechanistic scourge and perennial shit-kickers of the darker-hued, who in their fortified cars and disciplined formations of misanthropic recruits, would be vengefully set upon from above by a boiling juggernaut of the people’s hate – an angry, berserk volley of fire and garbage and iron-forged architectural details torn by the unfortunate and exploited from the cornices and roofs, raining down thick and heavy and sharp on the state’s jackboots like they were bobble head dolls cornered and about to die in a Mogadishu slum. The blood would run so heavy that squad cars would fish tail and roll out of control as they sped through its moist and sticky tack, and the wobbly feet of charging horses would give out on the slick, coagulant sheen along the bricks of the old Red Line, crashing down hard, the weight of the beasts pounding onto the prone rib cages of the smartly cropped cavalier officers, busting them open and exposing their sinuous and lean punctured hearts, battered organs pumping a fantastic scarlet spray like a snap-jacked fire hydrant, the liquid essence of their lives blending seamlessly into the general flow of blood, into history and forgetfulness and the edifices of new buildings that housed a new generation of useless, vapid commodities.

Carson had to piss. He looked toward the river. Spectral figures scattered under the bridge into its long shadows, like bugs scurrying from beneath an overturned rock, its clammy underside abruptly exposed to a sudden flood of light. It was odd. What business would people have beneath the bridge? Whatever they were doing, and whoever they were, Carson was certain of one thing – they were the hideous afterbirth of mankind. But they would leave him alone, he decided, and he headed into the shadows to find a place under the bridge, away from the sights of patrolling cop cars. He would have his piss, then get the hell out and away from whomever the mole people were, rustling there in the damp and smelly darkness.

Walking beneath the bridge was like walking toward death. The closer he came to the concrete culvert of the L.A. River, the greater was Carson’s apprehension. Under here was everything no one wanted to see. Under here was the place for no one who wished to be seen. It was a geographical divide in the city. Like all divides it accumulated refuse, the place where castoff things washed up, or turned up by choice. It was the periphery, it was the place that was spun off and left to dangle, pushed out by the centrifugal force of the life of the city, where the greater number clung to the center by the laws of social physics. The ones who were not wanted or needed, or couldn’t produce, gravitated to this place naturally, and felt secure in their undesirability, undisturbed by pressures to contribute to a grand social design, free to be despised. They had a permanent place here. For the great majority, for those who never left their cars, if they were to behold this place and encounter one of its denizens, they would have the privilege of seeing the terrible and awful side of nature, something that was magnificently startling, like coming upon a stinking carcass crawling with white maggots while taking a walk in a nice suburban neighborhood of manicured lawns. There is something intensely disturbing about the sight of maggots copulating in the flesh of a dead animal, when one’s expectation is a constant ribbon of fresh asphalt handsomely paved through a well-heeled neighborhood of ultra green lawns. Being under the 6^th Street bridge was like a tight camera shot of the maggots with the nice lawns cropped out. It was like having one’s face shoved into the slippery white tissue of a swarm of maggots. One couldn’t help feel a little nervous. On one level there is a comprehension of the need for maggots, just as there is a need for sewers. But swimming amongst them is not a preferred activity. They are disgusting, if purposeful, creatures. They stink of death, and life is busily forgetting this bit of unpleasantness. Maggots thrive where they can, when the conditions are right. And certain people thrive under bridges, highway overpasses, and the back alleys of deserted warehouse districts. The live on what has been discarded, just like maggots. They provide a service. They are woven into the economy, into the life of the great nation. Eradication is impossible. They provide a measure of humility in the pursuit of happiness. There is in the unmitigated rapacity for acquisition, for the devouring and stockpiling of resources, an inherent and primal understanding of the fear and necessity of our decrepitude. Maggots and maggot people are the system’s built-in component for reminding us of the ultimate morbidity of our desires. We can’t escape them, no more than a corpse can escape decomposition. We require it. We even welcome it, even on a level of pure self-interest. To witness the maggots gives us relief. Their presence reminds us of how much we have accomplished, how many stores we have laid up as a result of our keen minds and crafty strategies for survival, as though those things could never be threatened or lost, as though decay was something that happened to other people.

The sky was blotted out by the heavy arc of the bridge span. Carson passed by an area of city owned trucks and street sweepers fenced off from the rest of the area beneath the bridge. Past these he strode into a stretch of ground that reached to the river. The place was littered with the bodies of old cars, refrigerators with no doors, rusted microwave ovens, empty cable spools made of wood, broken glass, paper waste, and clothing in colors that were bright green, orange and purple. Tires and empty cans of motor oil were strewn about. Old shopping carts filled with cardboard boxes and scrap metal sat unattended, as if their owners had left them there, intending to return, but now gone with no trace, as though their lives had been suddenly interrupted or snuffed out. Pallets of wood were everywhere, their abundance due to the close proximity of the produce district a few blocks away. They did duty either as firewood at night or a nomad’s rudimentary mattress. Paint cans, traffic cones, broken bricks, condoms, headlights, tampons, women’s underwear, old shoes, crates of rotting mangoes and lettuce, briefcases torn apart as if by some savage investigator who had searched the linings for diamonds or gold sewn inside. All of this, the husks of things fabricated, purchased and consumed, covered the compacted, inert and defunct earth over which Carson walked. Several people sat still and upright in the shells of the abandoned cars. A few more, young black men, wandered around with no discernible purpose, keeping a suspicious eye on Carson. Off in the distance, to the south of the bridge was a power utility substation, its monumental high wire towers buzzing with fast-moving electrons, standing like skeleton sentries on a barren mesa, conducting the fires that powered the machines, the vapor producing instruments spewing like steam from a subway grate, belching the incessant promise of wealth, power, happiness and sexual fulfillment that seeped and spilled into the board rooms, family rooms and kitchens of America, fueling collective, national desire with its electrons, the reconstituted and relentless images, the interminable babble and fantasy and manipulation, streaming above and out of reach of this cul de sac of the city’s weak, exhausted, angry and disaffected, the dumping ground of its obsolete artifacts, this bone yard of its voracious appetite, the shitting grounds of commerce and unquenchable desire, where the carcasses of the Republic of Indomitable Compulsion were spit out and shit out like the husks of sunflower seeds or grape seeds from the mouths of fat Roman senators, and then hungrily set upon by the maggots, the human maggots whose hair was matted, who smelled like decaying burros, who spoke in grunts and laughed like solitary eremites, incoherent bodhisattvas giggling and soiling themselves, who clung to the shadows and the cliffs of the outer edges and survived on spite and the detritus of the ones who were fully vested in the dream, the dream, the omnipresent dream. They were crazy with repugnance. They were infected with a menacing fervor for broken syllables and fractured narratives. Locating their centers was to commit oneself to chilling adversity and the unpleasant knowledge of one’s true and ugly false nature.