Twenty Four Hours in Los Angeles
A familiar drive with the same, but different company happened while certains songs played along the bends of the road that led to a place on a hill. A place that I had been to before, but this was the first time in a long while. The Hollywood Sign stood its hillside ground next to the Griffith Observatory, while women in matching hats spoke different languages hanging out under jacarandas drenched in the late spring full bloom.
The Los Angeles air was perfectly dry and holding a lazy breeze. The sky hung over it all, cloudless. The conversation from a pair of park goers to my left landed in my orbit. The man said to the woman,
“Well, she also works with insects so I asked her to help me mount this beetle. Turns out her mother is also dead.”
Soon after that, a foursome to my right caught my attention. One woman with a blonde pixie cut was speaking what I assume to be Portuguese to a salt and pepper haired man in a polo. She wore a slouchy newsboy cap and so did the other woman of this foursome, but the other woman was talking to another man who was also wearing a polo. This other man had a voice that sounded like it previously belonged to the United Kingdom. He said things like,
“War is the greatest economy in the whole world. War is always about money. The Kennedys’...”
I was sharing a Mexican blanket with a blonde who knows how to play guitar. I took off my boots and pressed my bare feet into the well watered crabgrass. The need for a jacket was a ridiculous suggestion. I stretched myself long on the lawn that faced the Capitol Records building and the West LA skyscrapers. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House had my back when the book bound words I held in my hands told me something I already knew: Harrison Ford was Michelle Philip’s pot dealer and she did not know he was in Star Wars until her cousin took her (hungover) to see this new groundbreaking movie (Star Wars) at ten am on a Saturday. The words in my hands attempted to explain to me that a traditional book is boring and Slouching Towards Bethlehem is nothing more than a Gothic story wearing New Journalism clothing. I rolled my eyes and sat up to stare at the view in front of me. Nothing seemed homogenous and that was familiar and traditional. The neverland of everlong variety made me remember what it felt like to think of things in a hopeful subconscious. Anything could happen because everything is already happening.
Later a dinner happened in a Koreatown stripmall and then the Dodger game came on the home television. The announcers kept saying the words “Baseball Gods” and I wondered how to join that church of bobbleheads and beer cans. Everything about this particular afternoon had been done before in the way that certain songs become classics and others don’t. In some ways I forgot some of the lyrics to this theme song because this was a different rendition.
In a matter of twenty four hours, clouds landed on Los Angeles. I found myself on the west side because I was going to Malibu. Pacific Coast Highway is now open at a twenty five mile per hour pace. Burnt out Porsches faced the ocean with nothing standing in their way.
My cousin parked her car and we walked to the beach. She paddled out and I sat on the sand. Soon I became bookended by Ronnie and Randy. I looked to my left at Malibu pier and then to my right where a set started to roll in. Ronnie, tan, elegant, and somehow seventy years old said to me, “There is no place like Malibu.” Randy, the other bookend, opened his yellow playmate cooler and asked me, “Would you like an oyster? It’s picnic day.” Soon after we cheersed our oysters, he broke me off a piece of baguette and poured me a glass of wine. Ronnie and I talked about Two Years Before the Mast.
“Some people will just never understand it” she said to me. It being California.
Randy explained to me about the concept of Paradise and how it is never meant to last, because if it did, it would never be Paradise. He told me,
“I am working on a home up the road some clients are rebuilding. They are going to need 32 pilings to support the structure… That’s why you never live right here.” He pointed down at the Malibu sand and his gaze found the horizon.
It seemed to be that maybe if you find yourself trying to create a permanent paradise the well will run dry or worse, paradise is not lost only ruined.
Ronnie stood up and asked me, “How long are you here for?”
“About two weeks.” I told her.
“I hope to see you again, this weekend is going to be a good one.” A good one as in 80 degree sunny weather.
I kept thinking about Paradise and how it seems to always be lost and found. You get to it and have to leave it behind or you catch glimpses that are only of that moment. It is tempermental and so is California. Maybe everything that is known is good as gold and everything unknown is eventually just part of the whole thing, whatever that thing maybe. Rugged and manicured. Wet and dry. North and South. East and West. A place that is forever lost and found.
