Lost in Los Angeles
Back in the day, when cellphones made bricks feel small and insecure about their size, my girlfriend and I drove across the country from New York to San Francisco. We weren’t in any hurry. We were young nobodies with time on our hands. Our plan was to drive, more or less, through the Northish center of the country. Highways had signs and gas stations sold maps.
Everything went fine until we got to Nebraska. Just across the border we were made to feel like aliens for expecting milk for our coffee. It was whitener or the highway. We waited too long to get gas as we plowed a straight line across the flattest place we’d ever seen. As darkness was coming on we started looking for another tank of gas and drove by one darkened gas station after another. Lightening blasted off in the distance to the north and south as the needle hit E and the engine sputtered out. If not for a UPS driver taking mercy on us, whose appearance along the road was about as expected as a parade of elephants, we would have been stuck on that road into the night. He dropped us off with a state trooper who brought us back to the car with can of gas and a warning. We were sitting inside a triangle of tornadoes that could break in any direction without notice. We slept in the car under a bridge when we finally found one.
In the morning we crossed the border into the perfect calm of Wyoming. There was a view of mountains from nearly the precise moment we crossed the borderline. In the small town, we came to the streets where quiet residential streets were as wide as superhighways and the houses looked familiar from black and white photos taken in the 1930s or 40s. We turned south and headed towards Colorado where we sought out the parents of some friends who practically tossed us out on the street before even speaking to us. We tried to climb across the Rockies, but the car slowed as the incline grew steeper and finally stopped. We managed to turn ourselves around. It seemed like the only way forward was to sneak around below the biggest mountain range in North America.
Outside of Taos, up in the hills in a park of some kind, we found a place to camp beside a stream and stayed for a week. In the day we made trips down into the town and met some locals. I’m not sure why we ever left. At Bryce Canyon we got the car fixed. It took a mechanic no more than five minutes to figure out the problem and fix it. He had to slip a thin piece of metal between two other pieces of metal in the engine somewhere and we were good to go. No charge.
Las Vegas was a nightmare. It was over 100 degrees after midnight. The only pool we could find had a plexiglass cover over it, and people were dancing on it as if it wasn’t even there. We arrived in Bakersfield too late in the day for the Saturday night honky tonk scene and awoke in the middle of the biggest truck-stop parking lot I’d ever seen. Buck Owens was out there somewhere. Probably in church. That was about the end of it. We headed for Big Sur. My girlfriend had worked there a couple of years and it was close enough to home. Enough was enough.
I didn’t make another long haul trip across America until many years later. My brother got a job teaching at Tulane and my sister and I drove a truck of his belongings south from New York. I’d never been south of Washington, D.C. before. I didn’t have a single interaction that didn’t freak me out past that point except when I was talking to a Black person. As we drove through the remnants of a nearly clear-cut pine forest through Alabama, I was looking over my shoulder for trouble all the way. The only safe space along the way was the Jewish Federation building in Atlanta where I met up with a childhood friend. I admit that it makes me seem racist, but the feeling that my presence in the South was appreciated more by some than by others was reinforced during my next trip to the South. I exhibited at the American Library Association’s national conference in New Orleans which was the first big convention that was held at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. I shipped a palette of books down to the show. Speaking with a woman on the phone about the truckers, I expressed some frustration with their lousy service. I got a call back from an angry Cajun who told me that I had insulted Southern Womanhood and that he was on the way over to beat me into the pavement. That didn’t happen, but I felt that I had a pretty clear sense of where I stood.
I can pass for white if I feel like I need to, but nowadays I have gotten accustomed not to. I pass for Muslim sometimes, but that's another story. I never needed anything like “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” that guided Black motorists to safety through the latter part of the Jim Crow era, and I don’t assume that any traffic stop might be the death of me. I spent some time last year with some Muslim seminary students in Texas. One of them grew up in Southern California. He told me that he drove back and forth between Texas and his family who remained in California. I asked him what the experience is like for him. He told me that always he drove as fast as he could and made as few stops as possible. There are a lot of Sikhs driving long-haul trucks nowadays, so it may be safer on the highway for my young friend than he imagined, but I understand.
America is a land of beauty and promise, but that beauty and promise isn’t shared equally. The voices against sharing that beauty and promise have mobbed together to promise us all four years of ugliness, and for some of us, harassment and violence. It is hard for us to recognize the country that we thought that we knew. As much as I have felt like an unwelcome stranger in parts of this country – the South not standing alone in this – I always felt that there was some grudging place made for me and my kind. The joyous yawp of Walt Whitman, the supple drawl behind Woody Guthrie’s songs, and the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King were enough to intoxicate me with an optimism about America. It was always the angel on my shoulder that kept the devil of racial fear from dominating my thoughts. It feels like that angel is sitting on the curb with a black eye swelling, a cut lip and a torn collar.
To be lost in America is a bit like being lost in Los Angeles, a feeling that I still have after five years here. Unlike America, I’ve never really gotten a handle on the place. As you can tell from my invocation of Whitman, Guthrie and King, I draw my understanding from the written word as much as the situation on the ground. I have been trying to make my way in understanding Los Angeles through its poetry with very little luck for some time. I found the poetry section at the Central Library and I have redoubled my efforts. Recently I finished “Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City,” by Laurence Goldstein. I am still struggling with it and the, “is that all there is,” that won’t go away. Below is a poem by Wanda Coleman that nearly gets me there:
LOS ANGELES NOCTURNE
Eternity ends where Hollywood begins
to be THERE is to scarf and strangle
on those thick lids and hot brown eyes
is to possess the unpossessible/ fever and cure
is to ignite those cold stars over Avalon
(like stumblers through long-unpaved hearts
looking for the back entrance of love)
is to be them in a dreamscape of asphalt & desire
a sea of tight ambition & loose thighs
southerly off Graham, streetlamps wave like raffia
when earth quakes, nightprowlers
cruise jungle to jungle, anxious to score light
no reservations tonight. It’s a dress-down affair
stilettos like high-pitches hopes heard
stabbing down sidewalks while
behind slammed doors the Molochs tally
ill-gotten dreams and lo-hung coupes take
stops doin’ the South Central Roll
the unreachable unbreachable unteachables
hands shoved deep into pockets
they can feel the next world
remember the Parisian Room
remember the California Club
remember Memory Lane
Normandie zigs where Jefferson zags
(you too can touch it. as much
as you want
you too can taste it. as much
as you want
there is everything to feel. there. throbbings
in your palms like my heart)
Eternity ends where Hollywood begins
So here we are and what is to be done? We get our angel’s lip sewn up. We get our angel a new shirt and a bag of frozen peas for the eye. It is going to be a long night and there’s work to get back to.
