Los Angeles, America

Chapter 18 – Los Angeles, America

It was a mild evening in June. Giambone wound his way by foot through the streets of his neighborhood. He was returning from the market. A thick layer of moist fog had settled in for long weeks over the L.A. basin. Air that had blown in from the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean was trapped from above by the warmer currents of the inland deserts. The days were suffused in a dispirited gray pallor. The ocean, the sky and the mountains were invisible. There were no landmarks, no points on the compass. The din and rattle of combustion and sirens, gunshots and helicopters, were the coordinates by which people charted the landscape of their lives. It was as if the dry land was pinned below by the fog, cut off, isolated, and forgotten, with no connection to the continent, shrouded in myth and misunderstanding, the object of contempt, its inhabitants dashing in maddening circles around a metaphorical lagoon severed from the care and consciousness of a larger nation. Their L.A. was the rim of something, a falling off place for the sordid colors of men and women that seeped like a million rivulets into a sluggish but implacable river, curling in and over themselves from all the places that were not America, or from that majestic idea’s more inert regions, blown in and washed up from millions of fractured yesterdays to an inconsonant present. Here was the anti-heartland, searching for definition, having outlived, outgrown, a succession of categories, looking for a new reason to be perfect in itself, without reference to commercial slogans pitched by the ad men and realtors of earlier generations, without reference to older cities more self-assured, dividing itself like a cell, chafing against its parts, devouring itself and growing more legs, turning in circles, an ugly thing, a preying, symbiotic organism, massive and gray and filled with spleen and ire, a dark plasma, lethal to touch.

The night offered electric relief. In the month of June in L.A., people ache for the night. It provides them a simulacrum of life, of light, of the colors that are depleted and bled by the heavy, desiccated air of the atrophied day. All along Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood, poor families of Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans herd themselves in humble earnestness toward the Pentecostal storefronts. These unassuming edifices promise spiritual and communal succor. The facades are washed in a low-tech bath of white electric light. The interiors are little rooms made of Formica and vinyl floor tiles. Sound bounces between its walls like the clang of metal rods beating on a rainspout. The ministers wear ill-fitting suits and enjoin their congregations from atop rickety folding stages. Their exhortations are accompanied by acoustic guitars, or accordions that squeeze out simple chords lamenting the savior’s death in the trotting, Polka-like rhythms of mesa vaqueros.

Others commune in lavanderias. They stare blankly at the spinning monotony of the seccadores, ghost-lit beneath the soot-covered fluorescent lights, whose power, wrung from Sierra mountain waters channeled hundreds of miles away, rinsing the dirt from their sweat-stained clothing and giving life to the telenovelas emoting for them around the clock. The dream boxes are suspended in the corners and compete with their children for their attention, gaggles of new American children racing in the aisles with four-wheeled laundry baskets, twisting the knobs of the change machines, and begging their haggard parents for McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme donuts. They are not afflicted with their parents’ uncertainty and displacement each time they leave the protective circle of Spanish-only speakers and starkly confronted with the great abundance that lies beyond their grasp.

Still others along the old Boulevard, less servile, in rowdy defiance of their new state of indenture, or from lonely nostalgia for the one left behind, cut with attitude for beer halls lit by nothing more than a thin purple neon light over a stuccoed entrance. These humming portals bear no name, no signage. They are present but anonymous. The habitués charge in with swagger, and dollars, the green scrabble earned from scaling fish, driving trucks, packing fruit, cutting lawns, selling drugs and clearing scraps from the plates of meals half-eaten by people with more disposable income. Gradually, through the night, they become ill-shapen creatures, sloppy drunken men, who gamble for phone cards, posture for the attention of the homely barmaid with huge chi chi’s and thick ankles, or they fight poorly and dangerously in awkward, embarrassing displays of male pride over a football team in Guadalajara, or another’s low station in life (he’s a busboy; his adversary, a dishwasher); or this man’s hayseed origins, that one’s Indian blood; insults that no one will remember but the victim’s survivors; fighting words that to a hung-over brain seated in church or on the number 2 bus the next day will seem like the braying of an ass, a child’s self-inflicted rage, another reminder that que tiene nada, esta nada.

Tonight Giambone could afford not to dwell on it. He carried several plastic shopping bags. They were filled with last-minute items Delilah needed for the party they were giving later that evening. Along the way he stopped at the liquor store for a quart of Jack Daniels and some cigars. He always smoked cigars when he was in a festive mood. Tonight he could count on a few of his male friends to join him in a circle in the rear of the house, sipping the whiskey, and letting the sweet smoke of the tobacco fill their mouths before exhaling into an idling cloud above their heads, a shape-shifting, bluish body of gas lit by the gentle yellow light over the rear door of the house. He wanted to hear the garden patio report with the sound of mellow male laughter under a canopy of darkness, to breath the night air’s fragrance, imbued with the scent of the cooling soil, of jasmine and honeysuckle. One of the women will venture out, just to investigate or amuse herself at the strange, primal grouping of males huddled together. Her visitation enlarges the men’s sense of themselves, contributing to the idea of their masculinity as they become more conscious of their sex in her presence. And they are glad to see her. Smart quips will be traded, tart remarks about the ways each sex chooses to commune with its own. In this brief elliptical orbit of bodies, desire is propagated. The men, as they appraise this wife or lover of a male friend, will decide her fate. Judging her sexual potency, each man, quietly in his own brain, catalogues her choicest physical attributes, or dismisses her for the flaws of birth, age, and diet, or the indelible marks of poor choices and hard fate. If she is piquant, her image becomes his estates in tail male. She is endowed by him with impossible skill, and shaped into postures most suited to his lust, before she, having made her mark on all of them, coyly, and with the knowledge of her influence apprehended, slips back into the house to join the other women, and the men let their heads fall back to take in one more gliding swallow of the silken whiskey, and fill their cheeks with the aromatic smoke, exhaling with laughter into the night sky, as if harmonizing together like one large organism of appetite.

Giambone stopped on the sidewalk a block before his house. His eagerness for the night to begin, for the feeling, the best feeling he knew, of being the center of a convivial gathering, was unbearable. He had to take a drink, just one swallow, to placate the giddiness he felt, to satisfy the huge grin that was spreading like a fever through his limbs. He wanted to augment this feeling, to feed it and fan it so that it might grow to dwarf his normal perceptions, to dull the doubts that life was good. There was so much to suck from it when he felt this way. Like standing in the wings before his moment on stage, and he the host, the centerpiece of the night, when the people, his friends, would pay him deference, as the father, the creator, the bringer of life. He felt like a brimming sun when the whiskey glided down his throat.

He screwed back the cap and returned the bottle to the bag. He looked around him on the street. To the west he heard the steady gust of the Hollywood Freeway, as though its great bellowing were muffled by a pleated muslin drape, everything neat and untroubled. The sky had a mottled pattern of grey, purple and orange, like the orange of a hothouse tomato. On either side of the street, children played on the front lawns and driveways of tiny homes; parents and friends talked and laughed on their front porches. Some of the men watered their rose bushes or worked under the hoods of their cars. Dogs barked. Flocks of crows flew into the tall sycamores in raucous clouds, roosting for the night. Giambone liked this neighborhood. He stood out for being white, but no one seemed to care. No one gave him any trouble. He felt good. He felt like Los Angeles was a decent place to live, that America was the best of all possible countries, because there was no strife right now, none that he could see; that his Hispanic neighbors accepted him and he accepted them. That was how it was supposed to be in America when it worked. He was happy. He was going to be a father. He, too, would stand and water his grass while his children played with the Mexican children next door, and he would wave to the neighbor and his wife when they stood on their front porch to feel the light breeze of the cooling desert blow in from the east as the sun set. And he would belong. And the Mexicans would belong. And although they couldn’t speak to one another in a common language, they would communicate through their kids, and their kids would know the value of living amongst others who were different. Giambone knew that this was the promise of America and that he was contributing to it. This made him feel proud, like he had done something, like he was a responsible citizen, and that America was still the promise of the world and that he, Giambone, was part of that promise because he was living with the Mexicans, and they with him, and not in separate enclaves, and that this was all for the common good, for the future of America.