Peeling LA: Part of an Urban Artichoke Series

I thought about sparing you. I thought about sparing myself and I still might.
It’s a beautiful evening, this one. Will you trust me? I’m at the cafe again and we shall see. As always, we shall see.

If I seem relaxed it’s because I am. The usual pressures up front do not exist. There is a certain freedom in setting out this way, with your hammer and chisel. I can pound on granite all day long, and if it cracks, if I strike a cross vein and lose a few days work what of it? The best part has already rolled off the mountain anyway, before we arrived. There it sits, at the bottom, among the garbage and the flowers. Here, I’ll throw you a rope and you can see for yourself.
I almost forgot how fun it was. It’s like peeling an artichoke. The blank page isn’t blank at all. It’s as dense as stone. Cabrera marble with hints of pink and blue that catch the light just so.
I just have to keep chipping.
But where was I? Right! Rafael. He was in prison. I forgot to ask him last night about ‘the term’. Today I’m helping him move. Boxes he said, no furniture. But does it matter? Is a box that much lighter in the ninety degree heat?
Anyway, he hangs around now. When I’m at the cafe he comes and sits. He doesn’t even wait for a signal, a gesture on my part, maybe an arm, a wave of the hand, a nod. He’s already seated. He’s deaf by choice to my body language. I wonder what my face is doing. He sneaks up on you too. I have the entire street under surveillance and somehow he slips in and gets right under my nose and is pulling the chair out before I even see him. It’s ok but it changes the dynamic too. I mean I like the company and we talk, though usually like a couple of veterans. Word vets, I guess. Veteran street poets, still thumbing our noses at convention, at the established order.
I think he got buggered in prison. He talks fondly of this Aryan guy. Why do I want to say his name is Blockhead? It’s too good to be true but maybe I’m right for once.
Anyway, a Guatemalan and an Aryan are in a jailhouse shower...except it’s no joke. He keeps apologizing for hanging around a guy who tried to blow up a Jewish Temple. But at least he wasn’t talking about the shit stains around the toilet like the Mexicans were. Blockhead had a brain, that’s what he said.
I asked him if he keeps in touch.
“I’m one of those people.”
“Of what?”
“Who keeps their word.”
“Ok.”
He drinks coffee faster than I drink my beer. I’m trying to go down and he’s talking about going to some other coffee shop that stays open all night. Tomorrow I’ll get a poem. Maybe he’ll email Blockhead too. What’s this world coming to? Oh garcon, more coffee please, for him yes, and another beer si’l vous plait.

**********

A few days later I wake up. I’m exhausted already. Shoot three espressos and want to crawl back into bed.
el Sol. The sun blasts through my window like an x-ray and tans my nutsack.
It’s too hot. To begin, you must find a way to cool down.
Some things, like meeting Robbie’s father the other day, are too fresh.
We were setting up the guest room for her parents. They were coming in from the desert to see her dance piece. Her father drives in separately to drop off his truck to her brother. He has a key apparently. We were in the back room, going at it in front of the fan, on the fold out. It creaks like a church pew. We hear the dogs barking upstairs where her brother and his wife live, the metal gate bangs shut, keys in the front door, a deep voice reverberates over the wood floors. Images of the cave cracking first light with nowhere to retreat. Footsteps. Robbie jumps up, pulls down her skirt, and runs out. I straighten the sheet, bury the condom and wrapper under some papers and peek out. Instinctively, I think, he’s standing in a spot where he can see every interior door. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if my shirt wasn’t hanging on the chair in the dining room. I’m mean you’re guilty as hell coming out half-naked and hello, I’m so and so, your daughter may have mentioned me.
But that’s exactly what happened. And to his credit, he wheeled around as I was rushing to the chair for my shirt and stuck out his hand. It was like running into a tree.
I recovered and took the branch he held out but my voice slipped into that higher but not louder register. My first name was all that came. Robbie spelled out the rest while I hid behind the buttons of my shirt.
Not bad for an old bull, I stood there thinking. That move in the passageway - it was a bit like getting off the ropes, getting out of the corner. He had quick feet still and a little fight in him too. I’d have to say he took the first round, winning easily with his ringside manner. After that he toyed with me like a cat. I stood in there and took it. And then he left an opening and I limped out of there.
Later I found out that he had even eaten my lunch, the blue corn tortilla filled with chorizo and cheese from the old woman on the street. I asked Robbie if he liked it. Oh he’s not a big food guy, she said, he barely tasted it.

On the bus ride home I sucked on something my friend JR had said the other day, referring to the Brazilians and their dominating play in the world cup.
“Just enough to win,” he said. That’s what they pulled out of their shorts and that’s how good they were. All you need are a few adherents and then word gets out and everyone thinks you’ve got the biggest dick on the block. It’s an effective tactic in the world of men, in the world of warfare and sports. It’s just like when we were kids. We all knew which one of us had hair first and that status conferred a few perks, like who got to ride in the lead on a long stretch of single-file biking, or who got first dibs on one of our dad’s pornos.
The world was made up of straight shooters and crooked pipes but none was more beautiful than your own when finally one day you discovered that it worked also. Of course that sweet innocence doesn’t last very long. A couple of gym showers into it you start to notice things. These are usually the captains and the guys who date cheerleaders, or at the other end, the guys who were known to smoke weed and own motorcycles or overthrow dictators of small Latin American countries. It seemed like the world was stacked up all backwards, with the biggest cocks on top. Structurally this lopsided distribution didn’t make sense.
Maybe that’s how Fidel sold the revolution after his failed baseball career. He leveled the playing field, so to speak.
I do believe I’m on to something here and maybe I’ll come back to it but my attention is suddenly turned to the legendary Billy Reno as though by heat seeking missile.
First-rate comic, actor, friend since kindergarten, singer, songwriter, poet, maker of animal noises, and packer of a great amount of male heat. Who else could inspire such a line as this:
“Jesus, are you as hung as you look?” This from some cock junkie in the Drug Emporium parking lot in the Valley. Billy was on his rounds back then. The good old days when he could still wear lycra bike shorts and sleeveless sweatshirts, playing hot in the city in his convertible, dropping off actor head shots and going to the beach and then maybe a little self-love at Gold’s Gym before karaoke at the Cutter, an homage to Tom Jones or Englebert perhaps.
Yes, Billy. You gave to the un-giving and she took every bit you reeled out in front of her, this giant red-headed cunt of a city, this bilabial bitch. The very queen of labrose, wouldn’t you say Billy?
And so now what? I know you still think of her, pushing your double-wide baby stroller through the tree-lined streets of your Brooklyn neighborhood. I know you think of her when you look in the mirror and see the young man that you were, now turned gray.
Just enough to win Billy, is what they always said about you, remember? You shot twins. Two birds on a smile and a dribble. Just think what full power would have unleashed, if only you had drawn both guns.
Let’s face it Billy, no one gets away with living. But you made your graceful exit my friend. A show stopper. A beautiful one. Staving off the ruin.
What can I say? I’ve lived indiscriminately at best. In my appetites I’ve been very democratic, to use a dirty word these days. If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t mind living in a 22 year olds bathroom with her dirty underwear and a smelly cat box.
**********

The next day her house is overrun with ants. I can’t sit anywhere without them. They are in the bed, in the sink, on the walls, in the corners, along the floorboards brazenly crossing the open expanse of hallway, in and out of rooms like a camel train across the desert stillness.
Then I find one on her, in the underforest, navigating her lovenest. I pick it off and shake two more loose. I start to get up from down there, to go get the Raid from under the kitchen sink, when I notice something on the floor, next to the bed.
It is the condom I pulled off less than ten minutes ago. These sex-addicted ants have turned it into a popsicle and are preparing to take my seed back to the center of the earth.
I get up and follow them to a knothole in the floor. Outside I find them scaling a retaining wall, entering through a fault in the foundation. They pass over each other in a line, down and up, stretching my seed along their course. I follow their caravan across a section of common sidewalk and over a neighboring wall crisscrossed with dead ivy.
Could it be, I wonder? I give the idea a minute, and then another, standing there in the moonlight watching them carry my seed in the direction of the Count’s house, my ex, two blocks away.
I go back inside to check in on Robbie, padding into the back room. She has pulled the blanket over her and is asleep. I find my shoes in the darkness and let myself out quietly.

What can I do with this quilt we’ve been making? What does the other side look like I wonder? Tonight I am reluctant to turn it over. The stitches are haphazard. This much I already know from what is on view. Is it a bed cover she has pulled over herself, or a funeral shroud, I wonder?
In high school, Carmen Jenson’s mother made me an afghan. It was brown, orange and yellow - the harvest tones of all these - and had those large, open loops that you could poke your fingers through.
Since I didn’t have a couch, I draped it over the back seat of my shit-brown Ford and used it as a sex blanket.
Why do I mention this?
Three reasons.
One, I remember having sweetheart sex with Carmen under the radio station towers overlooking town. Often we did this, and if we were flush we would pick up a pizza and eat it within the steamy confines of the hatchback.
Two. Tori - my young republican friend from german class - vomited in that hatch and changed food and sex forever.
Three. That car always failed me on the coldest day, leaving me stranded on a one lane bridge over an icy creek with no one to help push.
That was the first and last car I ever financed. It was a five year old machine and I have my father to thank really, for getting me into it, for showing me the way. I don’t think I took away the right lesson. I don’t think I was a very good son, even then. Never mind the arrest or the time I buried that car two feet into the mud of someone’s country estate.
Four. I hated that car.
Five Six. I hated what it represented.
I should’ve pushed it off a cliff and would’ve, but then where could I listen to punk rock as loud as I wanted and fuck the girl of my dreams?
Seven. Carmen got pregnant.
Eight. She got pregnant again, after which, sex was changed forever.

We never told anyone, except maybe her best friend who wanted to be a nurse. Back then we had to go to the big city and hang our heads in shame, two bumpkins from the country turning away from our families and god to the welcoming hands of strangers who took your money and vacuumed out your insides. What must that be like to a seventeen year old girl? I have to ask because she would not talk about it.
And always the shame. An in-bred morality masquerading as compassion. Where were the priests and nuns and parents to guide us through safely?
If you really want to punish someone shame them. Take away their membership to club humanity. Shame on you young man. For shame.
For those who have been cast out, for those who have had their member card revoked - what could be worse than living with less credibility than a cat or dog?
Even these very ants I’m following take care of their own, carrying their massacred dead back to the center of the earth in their pincers. And here they are carting me away as well. I’m starting to prefer their company.
*******

Where was I going with that? Lost innocence. Sex. Fertility. Intelligent design. It gets complicated. It’s not just monkey sex anymore. Even they’re having problems. Damned zoo. No privacy. Can’t even drop the kids off anymore without someone taking your picture. Next thing you know you’re on some toilet cam looking down the barrel checking out your stuff being checked out by someone on the other end.
If there’s a glint in your eye, it’s just the handle reflecting off camera. You reach out and flush your own fifteen minutes and it’s the last time we’ll see your happy face. You check your hair, wash your hands thoroughly under the hot tap and go back to your birthday dinner.
Little do you know every one at the table was watching you over the wireless. They’ve closed the laptop and are pretending to enjoy their tapas now. Someone complains that the sausage is too pink and everyone except you gets the joke and suddenly you remember why you hate large group dinners.
This many people can’t possibly be getting along, you think. You begin to pair them up in your mind, swapping wives and boyfriends. There are little orgies, festivals of lavish fruits placed wither on the table. In the corner is a fountain where golden wines flow and in the hallway is a coatroom which doubles as a dungeon where you can book passage to the dark side and hang around with those like-minded in strange suits.
Why not? Have another crippled adventure. You’ve only got a few left. Who cares if no one comes to your wake? If your friends were scandalized that easily then they were not your friends after all.
Don’t you see? The writings on the AutoZone wall. It’s a chicken franchise that comes with a vial of chemotherapy. There’s a lot to be thankful for if you don’t think about it. Most of us will get up and leave before the first act is over anyway. If you hang around it’s your own fault. And why would you want to bring your kids along in the first place? They always get you with that free admission thing don’t they?
But what of the rest of us? Someone’s got to make up the difference, right? While we’re at it, why don’t we create a tax break for the childless? Why is it always the other way? Why are we being rewarded for creating more wards of the state, more recipients of the public good?
I think we need more men like Jesus. More men to take on the suffering for everyone else. Life’s a little unbalanced these days. Way back then the world was small enough for a single guy like him but times have changed.
Yes, another crippled adventure! That always spices things up. Get going! Don’t wait around for the other shoe to drop.
You’re wondering where that saying comes from, aren’t you? Check the internet. Borrow your friends wireless. She’s too busy shoveling that lemon tart to notice. Go on outside with it. Have a ball. Get in your car and get loaded. No one will even notice that you’re gone and when you come back you’ll have it all figured out. That, and a few other things. Never mind if your party leaves the restaurant in the meantime and moves down the street to Salsa night at Los Globos. Some friends. They know full well you don’t like to dance. Forget them. Go back inside and finish your drink and give the waiter a big smile when he brings you a slice of cake.

You pay up and that should be enough for one evening but you’re just getting started. You think, what’s the hurry? Climb back into your car and go for a drive. Sing along with the radio and don’t ask yourself where you’re going. You’re the only one who cares anyway, right? You are like a vine that can’t find it’s trellis.
Poor thing. There are flowers that have suffered more than you have. Yes, what will you do with them? You cannot lean on them anymore. You are on you’re own now, without water, and the soil is bad besides. You are reaching for a wall that is falling down around you.
Why don’t you grab a hold of something else? That tree branch perhaps. Steady yourself a while and get your strength back. In another month or two it will rain. Hang on. Don’t dry up and blow away into the gutter where they will sweep you into neat little piles of broken leaves and sticks along with the used condoms and chicken bones. If you like I will transplant you to a sunny little patch and water you for a while. Somewhere nice. Across the street from the cafe perhaps. There is a bit of life here. People will notice you. The birds too, I think. I see them darting under the eaves of the apartment across the street, looking for somewhere green to land, for a perennial flower perhaps. It’s only a matter of time until you will find each other and begin something new. After all you’ve been through you deserve it.
But if you want to continue your struggle, then by all means, although I can assure you it will end in a bad way.

*******
These sex-addict ants have led me to the sidewalk in front of the Count’s house. I am standing under the trellis night watching them attack a cluster of grapes that is hanging over my head. I framed this arbor out of ninety year old wood from the built-in ice box. Two seasons ago I harvested buckets of this fruit and made wine that rots in secondary fermenters in the garage. Memories of a man’s worthwhile hands in the leaf-quiver seams of moonlight.
I reach up and loose a bunch. They are warm and sticky; sugars raging in the ant maw and we both know.
At the top of the concrete stair my old dog barks at something over the neighbor’s fence. A possum, I think. I can hear the dry crackle of leaves in it’s path. Tight-rope pirates of the night walking the weathered plank.
The old boy doesn’t know I’m down here, has given up on me, has long since stopped waiting for me to come home. It’s been a year and a half now, although I’ve seen him a few times. Watched him for a week once and built him a poem called Come Clown, Let’s Go!
And here we are unable to say hello even. I shouldn’t be this close without a warning. It’s not fair to the Count or her new man if he is over.
I stand there a moment and hear Shaft go back inside through the rubber dog flap. A while later I watch the lights turn off in the kitchen and living room. She is settling in to bed, and Shaft below her with annoyed little huffs while his tired hips crack on the wood floor.
I walk out of the yard and down the second flight of stairs to the sidewalk. This is my neighborhood still. I cannot shake it’s steps and humped streets, it’s ramshackle divisions of yard and nature, of mangy dog and coyote, of prey and prayer. The secret is here somewhere, in a corner iglesia where the church ladies sell papusas on sundays, in a bunch of green bananas propped over the sidewalk with a bed rail, mangos everywhere, on every street corner in the same tilted cardboard easel painting the toucan sun, in chicken coop porches, free-range cocks scratching in the dust, coffee house doodlers, boracho bars, cuchi cuchi clubs.
After all this time apart it is Robbie who has brought these streets to my attention again. No matter how careful you think you’ve been, one day you wake up and all those rootless and scarring one nights add up to a broken life. Then you can lament the loss of streetcars and whores and come out into the open, pushing your walker up the street. Hide and seek is a young man’s game and that is this town. When you quit looking, that is when you become a true Angeleno.
Of course, there are other options. Leering at Thai waitresses through tequila eyes on the Boulevard at 3 am is one of them. Window shopping baclava and sweatsuits. Going to the movies. Jamming spicy noodles into the pit of your stomach. All viable activities, really.
“Go ahead, feel my bumps,” this girl said to me once. She put my hands on her shoulders. I felt the depressions of her skin, scars stretched over holes left by giant fishing hooks. Four of them, each the size of a dime. It was a birthday gift to herself.
She got up and collared me with her stilletto.
“I think you and I get along really well,” she said. “Do you want to keep going?”
I looked up on my swivel neck. “Tell me more about playing the harp.”
I wanted soft notes and even softer underthings. I didn’t want to hear about her being hung from cables.
She put her thumb on my windpipe and when I woke up she was gone. So was my wallet.
No matter how careful you think you are.

But back to the neighborhood. Walking up the hill. High in the thatched power-line night a sliver of bone. Green eyes of coyote bounce across hazy street. A punctured meow crests Scott avenue and ascends concrete stairs. Agave fingers clutching tail fur, pushing on to the jungle and up concrete riverbeds drawn to a trickle over horsetails of algae and one day these concrete ribbons of 5 and 2 and 710 will crumble and blow back into the desert and these pages will print no more.
No more tablets of Olmec stone entreating the four winds. No more vanquished footpaths of Gabrielinos or Chumash. No more tar pit baskets or chinked canoes. The hand of man will truly vanish and thankfully one day.
In my mind I go over the land and over the towns. I let the rivers and mountains answer their call again, tearing off their dental work, throwing wide their zippers, opening their fiery throats and anuses to spawning fish and frogs. Let the grizzly forget what he’s learned about picnic baskets and beer coolers....
And here we go again.
If only the sun would burn the clothes off my back and let the rest of me grow wild. Civility, of course, has never been the answer. Even our heroes are mostly uncivilized men - warriors, Machiavellians, magicians, all of them.
Yes, it would be nice to start over with a hammer and chisel and a fresh piece of marble although I have to wonder - what’s wrong with sitting around in your blue superhero underwear tapping at the keyboard?