L.A., or a demon's claw to clutch
Wandering alone around the desert at dawn hiss-whispering, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Standing among the small whitewashed adobe bungalows, the sun, still hidden, climbing behind the Morongo Canyons at the other side of the Sonoran Desert and starting to stain the sky ochre, rose, the juice of a ripe to bursting peach running over your fingers, brick and lilac, staring up at the tiers of colours as they stretched, deepened, spread into one another.
Turning to Mt. Jacinto behind me, lit up orange against a sky like sea glass, talc-washed blue and framed by fuchsia bougainvillea overtaking a low stone wall, I said the same thing, louder this time. Across the sand courtyard I saw a white curtain pull open and yank back shut, and remembered I was in pool slides, sleep shorts and GAP’s version of an appropriate pyjama top, before it shrunk. Still, the colours came on stronger as the sun clambered up behind the hills and I stood there getting shots off on my phone, groaning weird things like “Woo boy” and my initial incredulous sun salutation until I saw a couple other curtains flutter and went back to the room to make coffee.
The desert looks lifeless, looks unchanging, but shifts with every increment of the sun. Shadows thrown, oils let off heating plants, fits and bursts from the small animals that scuffle and settle here. A hummingbird smacking its body against the white blooms on a desert willow, sun-bleached sparrows chasing down armoured cicadas midair and wrestling them to the ground, the taupe mourning doves that gather on the power lines to puff in the heat. A place that will pull you under, that continually shifts the granules underfoot, that will leave you to howl, dry out, slam your shin twice into the solid wood bed frame in the dark looking for an outlet for the kettle but you will still thank, profusely, for having you.
At Pearson, even at 6am, there is so much Raptors gear on every kind of body from baby to baba. Like emissaries going out in the world. And they’re—we’re—still proud. It’s very early, but seeing it chokes me up.
You have to understand that to be prideful of something this long after is not really Canadian. I don’t mean that in some nationalistic, we’re so humble way, only that bragging here is just usually chased by guilt or perspective, or knowing that the next little bit could be shit. With sports, probably it is a legacy of losing that informs that attitude too, which is why the resulting, sustaining pride around the Raptors is so earnest, because you have to go against your better judgement, your own experience, to keep it going.
Reaching up to pull a huge green lime down from a branch bending over a small sand path beside the pool Shanon stops me, “That’s an orange.” I am so amazed by citrus out in the wild, on its own, more or less juicing.
We’re up earlier than the staff, than the guy who is going to come and skim away all the little black and red beetles that succumbed in the pool overnight.
Everywhere we go we are the only ones: At the pool, talking about Porzingis, where that accusation went, about letting Boogie go and if the league will follow suit. On the daybed in a shared courtyard where Shanon queues up the Democratic debate and I come around the corner, arms full of watermelon spears and corn chips, still dripping from the pool, hovering over Bernie Sander’s bare head on screen and doing some kind of dance that comes to me naturally and you’d be embarrassed by. At the Ace Hotel’s restaurant down the highway, asking the waiter to put aside a slice of key lime pie "before anyone else can get it” and he gamely plays along, though we are not joking. Crossing two-lane flattop to the resort lobby for our 3rd cups of coffee at 8am when the room’s supply runs out. Trying to drive up the foothills and running instead into a sign asking us to stop, and we do, though no one would be the wise.
L.A. for me is a place where I’m taken, at speed, along curved roads that could at any time plunge off the side of a cliff, a bluff, into a bucolic spin of piñon pine, agave, prickly pear and palm but lead instead to my friend’s faces hovering over food or under neons, grinning to see me, smiles pushing their sunglasses up on their faces, smiling from pools, smiling from places all vetted for me by someone who has already thought about me being there, alone or with them, and that it would suit. Coupled with wind from the windows down funnelling in from the freeway, from never having to navigate the way, from the sun always at a beautiful slant even when it is baking, from laughing, most likely, very hard, or else talking over miles all the things that have happened since the last visit. The place isn’t real for that, shouldn’t be, almost isn’t, but in the citrus smells that drift in the morning when the air’s still cool, the chattering green parrots huddling in the trees, the helicopters that hover out at the edges like heat-logged wasps, in the way the people I care about here navigate their way around the place, it is. My reality is shaped by them giving theirs up for a time to treat me to one not true.
“The mountain looks fake,” I said to Shanon. Meaning superimposed, like a cutout fixed to the sky. But it wasn’t the mountain—hulking, permanent, solid—it was the sky that was unreal. An unshifting, vivid to the point of coming down on you, blue.
I thought about, how often am I trying to talk about the thing behind something. The bigger, quieter, glowing thing, and instead focusing on what’s pushed up in front of it. The thing that’s easier to explain.
His body as he turns to you: intent, an arm coming up to rest over the back of the booth, a gaze levelled easily though he has been sitting, arms crossed, rocking imperceptibly back and forth but now, gone completely still. He takes a breath, considers your questions, gives slow answers, the sometimes barbed ends of his stories, the chips from brickbat bursts, gone. It’s like your energies, side by side, bounce off the other but head-on, soften, make room. In the desert, months ago, you didn’t realize he had a field of dense freckles on his arms, or that they seemed so casually solid. How is it we shrink people when we furlough our friendships?
The things that stayed exactly accurate in my head to real life: his laugh, his teeth, his hands, clasped or moving, mostly, to help me.
I tell her the Clippers could win it, that they remind me of last season’s Raptors. The same overlooked depth, the same supplemental pieces that all together made one very extraordinary team. Plus Kawhi. Plus how boring Paul George. Flashy stars never really worked with that franchise, let alone all together.
The best game I ever saw Patrick Beverly play was against the Clippers when he still was in Houston and almost fought the entire team for no real reason other than it was mid-March and he was annoyed. He was half having fun, half serious, and they didn’t know what to do with him. I was with with Shanon then too, joined her friends two rows back from courtside so I could see the grin up close on Bev’s face whenever he rattled Blake Griffin, Chris Paul (not hard), even unflappable DeAndre Jordan, who still lived in Venice Beach then, for who the ball may as well have been covered in tanning oil the way Beverly snaked it, again and again. J.J. Reddick led with 25 points and even with Harden’s solo 33 Houston still handed it over. Beverly was incensed, and now he has the kind of quiet help that can’t be pushed around he always wanted.
She screams. We are in a desolate carpool lane headed out to the desert but I swear I see the only car within squinting distance swerve.
Coming out of Shanon’s house I can see Sean in the driver’s seat, head bent, studying something so closely he doesn’t see me closing the twenty feet from porch to passenger door. The car is on a pocketknife slant. Later, he would remind me how he grew up driving in San Francisco and hardly registers any hills as an impasse, let alone one he intends to idle on.
I throw the door open and burst a big HIIII. He immediately responds with, “Shit!” There is a Raffi song absolutely blaring. Sean motions furtively to his phone. He’s trying to cue something up. I fall into the front seat, the door slamming shut behind me.
“Here!” He says, finding whatever he was looking for and slapping the phone into a dashboard cradle. ‘Life Is A Highway’ comes on. First only through the phone’s speakers, making Tom sound so faraway. I told Sean once that ‘Life Is A Highway’ makes me cry every time I hear it. It finally comes through the car speakers and this time’s no exception, but I was already teared up from laughing, violently slanted backward like we were on a rollercoaster climbing up, up, up, with Raffi—Sean says it like Raf-fay, “Is he French Canadian?”—for courage.
There are people whose mutual orbits you come into and so comfortably, intrinsically, affect your own that from the minute you get close you’re vibrating, your blood going in friendly spirals, the distance closing in real time. The things you say to each other come in an uncontrolled spill that brings to mind someone leaning too hard against the edge of an above ground pool, all that broiling water spilling out in a rush.
He turns the car on its axis and we are going, speeding downhill, a stop sign entrenched in prickly pear cacti rushing to meet us. We get to the restaurant and sit outside on a bench under the diner’s eve, sweating, watching people clutching the spatula the place keeps its outdoor restroom key attached to pass us by. Out in front, the parking lot, out in front of that a wide, four lane road, beyond that the San Gabriels, Strawberry Peak, swathed in haze like a fall layer.
We take up two chairs a piece. One in full sun, for drying off after slipping into a pool so quiet I can only bring myself to jump in once, and the other full shade, for beating a retreat when the sun starts to sink us, when the heat goes past our skin, past that pleasant burn, and instead begins to stew.
She finishes: Beloved, a book on Evangelicals in the United States, and a book on the benefits of paying everyone a comfortable wage. I loll around in: Book 2 of the Neapolitan Novels, stopping more than occasionally to stare through the silver leaves of an olive tree at Jacinto bearing down on us. I tease Shanon about her knack for poolside reads, like I am so lively, but that night I will fall asleep with the sun barely sunk behind the big mountain, the quiet of the desert crashing hard around us.
I do this trip often, I’m realizing, for the way the light throws itself against anything it can stick to, and in a city like this, everything low-rise and spread out in one long, lazy smear of honey, undulating across hills and valleys, eventually up the San Gabriels, Verdugos, Santa Susanas, that’s everything. I do this trip, I already know, for the way Shanon will leave me to sit on her back deck in the mornings and stare down the hills around her house, or lie on the couch, the floor, watching the light go across the walls and listen to myself slow down breathing in it. I do this trip because it feels like a big distance to go for a breather but not so far that the coming back defeats it. I do this trip because there are some things you come to do for yourself, again and again, that reproduce the same feeling and that is in itself a little bit rare.
After a quarter of an edible at Magic Mountain, for Out on the Mountain night, I’m at a 90° angle to the earth below, just about upside-down, on a ride called CraZanity that clocks out at 75mph, murmuring, “It’s a harvest moon, y’all,” through bloodcurdling screams of the people seated around me on this purgatory pendulum.
I would do the same thing on the 3rd of 4 loops in a row on the next roller coaster, tilting my head against the neck and head braces strapping me in to look for the moon adrift in a sky too brightly lit for stars, even in Burbank. Finding it and whispering, “Moon’s going strong”, while everyone else on the ride gamely hollered for their lives, forced their arms up through gravity shoving them down.
On the way out I stopped to stand under the extended claws of a demon. The park had already put out some of its Halloween decorations and right at the gates were two twenty foot tall stoked looking devils.
“Take my picture with this demon,” I shouted. The edible had of course fully kicked in as we were leaving.
I reached up and wrapped my hand around one black lacquered claw. In the photo I’m grinning like you’ve just told me I’ve received the Nobel Prize and am proud of wearing basketball shorts to accept. The demon is sincere and horny and menacing and like this throbbing red amongst well-manicured ficus trees. It’s the first time in a night spent being thrown upside-down and slammed backward, cold sweats, pulse pitched way up, that I feel some kind of anchor. Up through a fibreglass claw. There are more things in heaven and earth.
The plane’s display feature had us going backwards on the way to Toronto. Flying west to east, outside darkening by the minute as we left the sun sinking behind us, but the screen on the back of the headrest in front of me was ticking down the distance to Los Angeles. You and me both, buddy, I thought.
You pay for the window, you get cloud cover for the natural wonders—the Grand Canyon, the exploding part of the sunset. You pay for the trip, how you frame it in your head ahead of time, and you get instead yourself at the end and the lurch of your heart as you leave, the plane climbing, realizing Oh, I’m crying.
It was the 5th play of ‘Sunflower’ that evening, at volume, and we were stopped at a set of lights in Silverlake on our way to meet OJ. We had the windows down, the sky was muddled lemon in the bottom of a blue plastic diner cup of watered down iced tea. A classic Mercedes convertible, gold-bronze, pulled up beside us. The guy driving—tall, narrow, silver white hair—started to nod as the beat kicked in. Slow, easy. We got good looks. He inched the car gradually up. He took the corner.
“David Lynch,” Shanon and I both said at the same time.
Like I would hours later, when we said goodbye to OJ in nondescript strip mall parking lot with the moon hanging over his head and waving hands, him letting out a HAAAA—cause we had told him the story—when the ay ay AY ay first line burst from the little VW’s windows, cranked, I started the song again.