My Los Angeles (800)

Mar 01, 2008 - 18:01 PM PST

My Los Angeles is not that Los Angeles, with the clubs and stuff, mine is the one you encounter all alone from a dark turnout off Mulholland awaiting the sound of your dealer's car.

Awaiting the sound of a midnight rendezvous in the cold sage smelling canyons when the coyotes are all asleep, a midnight rendezvous that could bring death or it could bring new life.

when the eagles are all asleep, the snakes are on the prowl. there's a certain species of night-blooming reptile in the foothills of Los Angeles who is able to function and hunt at night. A nocturnal reptile writhes in the foothills of the Garden.

In a rattling old pinto I climb the surface streets that parallel the freeway invisibly, hidden in the trees and the close-packed houses. It takes all day -- I pass bus stops thronged with mexican domestics and men with blowers. Halfway up as the mexicans lounge on the lawns they just mowed and eat large and complicated lunches, the mail trucks and the UPS trucks start circulating. Internet-ordered luxury items are arriving; soon the kids start to arrive, and finally long after dark, the parents. Then the rodents arrive, then the nocturnal reptiles. then the pilots arrive, and the shaitans arrive, and the jeebis and skinwalkers arrive. then the doppelgangers arrive, the gangbängers and the doppelgängers.

In our ships we silently prowl over these canyons and watch that nobody gets out of control and nobody gets hurt. Oops, porn starlet in a garage with a shotgun -- one little adjustment, a button, a ray, and the thing won't fire. Uhoh, the dealer's got a gun -- zap, and his steering went out and he goes flying off the road out over the canyon, trailing bindles and packets and a cloud of white cocaine smoke. The white powder settles like an albino aurora over albion and all the mice and coyotes get high.

We have the highest coyotes of all. Even the snakes smoke cocaine. Even the nocturnal tour guides snort coke. the coke coyotes. there is a certain sort of humanoid, the "stem cell" for all drug dealers and users. It may develop into any one of a series of drug users or dealers or just a person addicted to caffeine, like myself. You've known people who just never get into drugs...they came from a different humanoid line. These stem humanoids come walking out of the desert on certain nights when there is no moon, and they walk silently, walk noiseless and white into the hillside communities and are not seen nor heard from again.

In my Los Angeles, wet eucalyptus leaves stick to the car, for it is El Nino and everything here smells like a cough drop. When you pass under the 405 in a kind of tunnel leading to Van Nuys on Victory Blvd., you find yourself suddenly in a new world. There is a commerce on these dirty sidewalks which defies description. Coyotes and assassins rub shoulders with the poor, the infirm, the insane, huge women with clouds of blue hair, and Lupita, newly arrived from Guatemala, and Ted, long, skinny, blond kid with red-rimmed eyes and constellations of tweaking scars, and everybody hunched against the miserable rain and sneaking between the awnings.

Out back of the Korean Market, there's the bang of huge dumpsters. This alley smells of urine and automobiles. Now and then a naked woman goes walking down it. Overhead are the huge, shaggy coifs of palm trees. In the palm tree streets, things are not what they seem.

Far across the nighttime rooves, a girl is taking her clothes off. She is not slim, but neither is she particularly fat. She has a neatly trimmed bush. The eucalyptus blows in the winds and droplets splatter on the window. Out in the living wall the heater comes to life with a bump and hot dry air wafts in the bedroom door.

Night after night after night in that bed, and the specifics have all gone by the wayside. Could I not have conserved the specifics? I didn't think I would want to remember them. When the lights have all gone home and there's only the tree and the sky.

Once my roommate was dead, I was alone again. I am alone, I like to be alone, I am friend to the dead. Buddy to the dead. The crowd around, whisper and writhe. Imperfectly I transcribe the things they say. I like it when it's strange and out of left field. Completely spontaneous, not "generated". When it pops in whole. When the memetic stem cells differentiate.

Ideas have stem cells too, you know. Nöoietic cells turn into noöblasts and noöcytes. circulate exclusively in the rain. There's a single naked brain in the rain, floating silently through the busy streets. Everybody turns to look. The cars stop, the cops stop, the bums look up from their rummaging. The brain trails a cloud of healthy noöcytes. All go home with new ideas and no memory of cars.