It was Christmas day, which as you know, is a difficult time for me. I had gone for a hike with Chad through the hills of Griffith Park, searching rather casually for the mountain lion said to live there. We saw nothing but our exhausted shadows and the stunning views of Los Angeles, spread out like the whole nation itself. It would be the ideal way to arrive in this city of casual murder, death by surgery and quasi-legal whores: you have driven your 1,000-dollar dreams across the country to arrive in Hollywood. Indeed, the sign itself is there too, shining white with the promise of a slaver-the one who offers salvation in the next life for subhuman bondage in this one. You look out over the city, Los Feliz at your feet, then over East Hollywood and then down, down, plunging down towards the south and the west, the ocean, so near yet impossible to achieve, the booming City of Tomorrow that is downtown LA, the micro-downtown of Century City, and then far and gone are the cranes and machinery of the Port of Los Angeles, and beyond that, deeper under the clean sky of December, you see Long Beach, the final home for the world. A good place to survey what you have in front of you for there is the myth of America seen from Griffith Observatory. The land of the teenager, America. The land of the white hat and the black hat, the land of Shaft, Black Moses and Superfly-TNT. The land that gave us Happy Days and taught us to think backwards. A place too big to hold all of its loneliness.

After the hike, I decided to scatter Pineapple’s ashes. They had sat in that lovely box for almost eight years, a block of memories at the bottom of the bookcase. The only logical place was North Hollywood Park of course, for that is where we spent our best days before he got old and broken down. That was the place where I also almost lost him. I’m sure I told you this before but I’ll tell you again. Since I had raised him off-leash, I could let him wander at will whenever we went to the park. He kept an eye on me and I kept an eye on him. Mostly it was the dance of the squirrel, as Pineapple would race to the oaks and the sycamores, always one snap away from tasting blood. The squirrels would chatter and rotate around the trunks of the trees while Pineapple-his breed trained for circus work-would dance on his hind legs, barking sharp high notes. That day he was about twenty feet to my left. I bent down to tie my shoelace, doubled the knot and stood up. My dog was nowhere. As you know, NOHO Park is not large, not the side we were on, and it tapers to a point like a giant piece of pie. I recalled the trick I had learned about holding your hand up and pointing at everything you see. I did this and saw two children kicking a pink soccer ball, a black man with a knee brace running alone, two middle-aged white women all in black jogging together and chatting, a Korean girl in red silk shorts and a white top walking and talking on her cell phone, a hipster boy tossing a Frisbee to his hipster girl, a pair of round Latinas merrily chatting, a white spitz trotting away from me. My dog. I whistled the characteristic way I did for him but he was 500 yards away and heading for the point where the park ends and the on-ramp to the 170 begins. It was unlikely that he would cross into that death zone but my mind could only conceive of the nightmare of him getting rundown in front of me. That is the fastest I have ever run. The look on his face when he heard my calls, heard his name, and heard my whistle. God. All my life I had been creating that look, on the face of my dogs, my parents, my employers, my lovers, my friends. The look that said, either with disappointment or with relief, that they thought they would never see me again.

Now on Christmas Day, those thoughts were on my mind as I parked the car and crossed Tujunga into the park. It was a winter day like so many in Southern California, the reason all of us millions had fled somewhere else to make our home in this raped and plundered and washed out-land. Scrubbed blue skies, for once not crisscrossed by military contrails and the experiments of Pasadena rocket scientists. There was little automobile traffic on the streets, giving the city the look of a neutron bomb landscape: the humans vanished but all the stuff remains. There was action in the park, of course, for everyday in LA is an opportunity to lose a little more weight, get fit, work off the holiday cheer, and earn the next eggnog, whiskey or beer. Kids riding their new bikes. Seeing that made me wonder if we would ever reconcile, if you would ever give me another chance to get my shit together and be a father to our son. I recalled a midnight Christmas Eve bike ride so many years ago.

1980. Reagan has won the election but the hostages are still in a basement in Tehran. They could have been home for Christmas but Governor Reagan’s boys were wary of an October Surprise. The fools. A Kermit the Frog/Miss Piggy ticket could have beaten Carter that year. The nation is in limbo, like a rocket ship breaking out of one stage into another, the initial thrust successful, but still miles and miles to go. I was 13 and ready for combat. We had our neighbor, Mike, over for dinner and drinks, as he was alone that Christmas Eve. He was a version of my father who had served in Vietnam. He was a version of my father who had to beat his own father bloody to prove he was a real man. He had the mustache, the easy fitness of doing chores, the sad eyes, and the long but not long hair. Drafted the year I was born. There had been no thought of doing anything other than his duty, but there was no enthusiasm for what he had done and why. Artillery. Mike said they could drop a shell into a trashcan from ten miles away. He did not have to mention that he was hardly in Vietnam to eliminate Communist trashcans. Also left unsaid was all the hell he ever sent raining down on pigs and dogs and kids and women and old men. It was only when you got your own kids and your own woman and became an older man that you recalled in detail what all you did and who you did it too and why. Then you saw in your mind’s eye what no newsreel, no Hollywood effort, no Life magazine or Newsweek Special Edition would ever show or ever even know. Someone who had been your best friend was now a piece of an ear and one boot. Men losing their legs, feet, hands, arms, noses, lips and cocks. Men went on leave and everyone at the OP was killed the next day. The landmines. The snipers. The helicopter rides over a beautiful country made into Hell. Those sad sweet days in Vietnam when the beer was cold, the pussy was tight and everyone had a warm place to take a shit. Discussing the draft, my father repeated the oft-told tale-no small amount of guilt there too-how he had escaped induction several times. He had been in college and they were not taking college boys. Then he was married and they were not taking married men. Then he had me and they were not taking men with kids. Then they stopped taking anyone and shut down the whole show. Overall, that angle of the 1960s had done him little harm; however, he had one close shave. Senior year at Southwestern, he acquired a girlfriend who partied all the time. We will call her Suzy-Q. I expect my old man had gotten a little trim before then. Why not? He was drop dead handsome. However, I think Suzy-Q whipped that thing, as he had never known before-or perhaps the feeling was mutual. Probably few things a man enjoys more than being a good lay. So he was diverted, shall we say, from all that was good and wholesome. Gone were the efforts of freshmen year when he went to class all day, studied all night, and rewarded himself at midnight with two small cartons of milk, one regular, one chocolate, and a visit to the roof of his dormitory for a view of his future dwelling amidst the stars. Naw, I believe Suzy-Q fucked all that out of him for a spell. He got behind on his studies. Indeed, he was failing Spanish quite thoroughly when he happened to visit his mother, who passed on the straight dope that his name was next in the draft lottery for an all-expenses paid trip to Southeast Asia. That will make you hit the books, and it did, except it did not. With finals approaching, he devoted a weekend exclusively to catching up. But he was a Beat man with many Beat friends and a Beat girl and so Saturday was absorbed by booze and sex and a ½ ass effort to build somebody a stone wall and then Sunday arrived like a flail, more booze, more sex and a bluesman’s odyssey back to Lafayette and now, now, now he could hear the sergeant’s bugle, the crack of the M-1, the thud of leather boots, the cadence calls, the yes sir, no sir and the call to mess and the call to the latrine and the calls home to mama who had told him so, for sho’. He did what every living college boy has ever done: gotten amped up on some form of speed and pulled an all-nighter. He studied for 25 hours without anything to eat at all and only coffee, water and Coca-Cola to drink. He had probably taken Benzedrine. He walked into that Spanish final with a solid red F and walked out three hours later with a C-. Not that he had the strength to care. Uncle Sam pulls up at that moment with a cot, a pistol and US Army pajamas we might all be living in a different world. However, that was not to be. He slept for about a day and a half, graduated college, married and divorced Suzy-Q, got his Masters, married and divorced my mother, got his PhD, married and stayed married to my brother’s mother. Moreover, for all of that, I wonder that my sweet old pop would have even seen combat. Surely, he would have tested into Intelligence, like his friend Francis. However, it was Francis who left a listening post in Hue in January 1968, to go on leave in Tokyo, and while he was sipping beers and chasing Mama-San, The Tet Offensive was kicking the Americans’ ass. It was Francis who returned to that listening post a month later to find that everyone he had worked with had been killed. Ah, I digress. I am meant to be discussing a bicycle ride, not to mention the whole point of this story is what happened to the Russian Boy. You will excuse me. I am probably still in shock. Anyway, as Mike and my father chatted about the draft, I said that I would have volunteered to serve. That temporarily stopped pop’s clock. Here he had tried to raise a pacifist and he had produced a militarist. One of the adults asked me why.

“Because then you get to choose where you serve,” I said.

“That’s not really true,” said Mike. “They use you like a piece of Army-Green shitter paper. Pardon my French.”

“Oh don’t worry about it,” my stepmother said, waving her cocktail hand.

“But you served,” I said to Mr. Mike, who earlier that evening had given me his Army dress coat, as well as a stern word. (He had pulled me aside, booze on his breath, and said, ‘Your mother says you steal.’ It was true but I denied it. 'Don’t steal,' he said. ‘Nobody ever trusts a thief.’ This was also true, but it would take me many, many years to learn.)

“Yeah, I did my time,” said Mr. Mike. “But knowing what I know now, I would have gone to Sweden and fucked everything that moved. Again, pardon my French.”

“Don’t worry about it,” my stepmother said again. “He needs to hear these things.”

I left the house and went for a bike ride in my warm, woolen Army dress jacket. It was practically new, probably worn once on the plane ride home, then put into a closet, and carried around from house to house, city to city, and state to state. Mr. Mike was from Minnesota, so was his wife, so was my stepmother and my pops had taught English for the Golden Gophers. Minnesota. I might have thought of that place as I rode under a waxing December moon. It was cold for New Orleans, frost on the lawns, smoky breath, and a bracing chill but utterly still so it was a cold you enjoy, not a cold that cut you down. I was wearing my father’s multi-colored scarf, blue, red, and green, warm, scratchy, and I pumped my legs on my crappy bike down streets my stepmother’s real estate company had built a few years ago. The woods had been hacked down, concrete was laid, pipes, sewers, power, streetlights, houses, all arising before our eyes, for we lived one street away from the development. I watched our new house getting built, walking through my room when it was still a slab and a frame. All done now. The economy was dead, the Iranians were crazy, and Reagan was here but not yet, only the promise of the sheriff, not the sheriff himself. I rode, breathed, and felt free, if just for the moment. My parents were both drunk, which was best. Only one drunk was trouble. Mr. Mike was there and my parents were absolutely charming, even grandiose hosts. A few vodka tonics for my stepmother and she would be hugging you, kissing you, confessing to you, writing you a check, handing you her house keys or at least the title to her car. My brother was out with me, riding his Big Wheel down the sidewalk, making the plastic wheels skid and scrape. We raced and of course, I won. It was the end of the 1970’s now, though we did not really know that fact. It was simply a good moment to be a kid-no school, no piano lessons, no coaches or teachers or tutors or therapists or psychiatrists or principals or bullies or girls or grandparents or parents or family at all. If I could have put everything I would ever need for the rest of my life into one small pack, I would have cycled away forever, leaving my brother at the spot where the sidewalk literally ended and proceeded down Bullard Road, still an undeveloped landscape of potholes and garbage and dead dogs and abandoned cars, crossing under the Interstate and then getting on the on-ramp, I-10 West and just ridden that baby all the way to Santa Monica, California, never to return.

I was scattering Pineapple’s ashes under a sycamore tree in the park when I met the Russian boy. He was wearing a long sleeve blue t-shirt, a colorful Nepalese woolen cap with ties on the sides like little pig tails, tan Converse sneakers and Batman pajama bottoms. He looked to be about four years old and he appeared to be alone, just a little fellow taking himself for a walk. His skin was pale and dotted with freckles, and what I could see of his hair was blonde. His eyes were blue. He stood a few yards away and watched as I broadcast what the mortal Pineapple had become. I felt far more grief at that moment than I did when Julien and I scattered my father’s ashes at that lake in Mississippi. That had been an eerie afternoon in December just two years ago.

As you know, I flew back to Louisiana to help Julien and Melody pack up and give away what was left of Pop’s possessions. I spent a day getting high and drunk going through my pop’s books and photos, collecting slivers of me, of my family, of what we had been. Boy, we really know how to celebrate the holidays in the Carriere clan. Seven years ago, my brother was hosing his mother’s brains out of the backyard as we prepared the house for her wake. Now I stood in the living room and went through my newly dead father’s remarkable library. It was not large per se, just a few hundred volumes, and a far smaller amount than he used to have. Back when it was just me, the bookcases were the most important part of our house, occupying the most visible spaces in the living room. Over time and distance from the university days in Minneapolis, the bookcases retreated, first into a second bedroom, then into the garage, finally into boxes and sent off the public library. For a time his collection, some volumes tracing back to his youth, may have consisted of only a few dozen volumes. Then I left school at last, not much wiser, deep into debt and bearing a few hundred books I could not carry wherever an MFA in theatre was going to take me so I parked what I owned at my parents’ house. Later Julien would do a bit of the same, and so at last we had a monstrous birth of my father’s favorites-poetry, history and guns-my brother’s favorites-stuff written for Frenchmen in French- and mine-novels, history and plays. I found a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘A Summing Up’ that had been given to my pop when he was 18. Good tidings and good luck. A copy of Blake given to him by my mother and a copy of Yeats given to him by stepmother. His annotated copy of Hamlet. His ‘Ulysses’, his poets, the Spanish textbook that kept him out of Vietnam. Then the photos.

What are you seeing when you examine pictures of your parents before they created you? A marriage, I guess, or some form of a relationship. The photos of my father and mother are romantic, goofy, my pop naked, covered up by a tree, my mother youthful, soulful, hamming it up, she with her wicked-blonde-librarian look, he with his sleepy-eyed-genius-writer look, they make for a formidable pair, easily the smartest people in a set of very smart friends. Skinny boys wearing heavy black frame eyeglasses and skinny black ties, white shirts, all so stylish yet conservative, the people who elected Kennedy and buried Kennedy and then voted thoughtlessly for LBJ. The people who would have been running the country in the 1980’s if JFK hadn’t been assassinated and all of his followers hadn’t abandoned all of their hopes, careers, ethics, morality and ultimately their children. Kids like most of the people I went to school with, the first great generation of divorce. But with her cat eyeglasses and her whiplash smile, my mother looked like she was just gearing up for what the 1960’s would become: Acid, Acid Rock, hippie seriousness and hippie goofiness, heavy drugs, then the heavier drugs, then the heaviest-the Big H, skag, smack, the Horse With Many Names, and all that it implied-a sleeping pill that lasted all day long. That’s what’s missing from the old photos-the future drop outs, the future depressions, the future long sideburns and long crazy hair, braids and dreads and baldness, the missed opportunities, the failed academic, then literary then governments careers, the future children, the future custody fights, the future foster parents, the future cautionary tale that in some cases both of those people became. Later photos of my father and my stepmother told a different tale.

I sat at the round oak table in the kitchen of my father’s rented house, beer, weed and whiskey nearby, and sifted through the piles of pictures while my brother dug the Star Wars gear out of the basement, the stuff my parents had insisted be kept neat and preserved for future fortune like some rare baseball card, a first edition or a 2 foot high GI-Joe still in the box. A noble notion and totally off base. Star Wars merchandise was stronger and longer lasting that the Force. The Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Lei, Darth, and the one storm trooper we had, all of that stuff worthless, except for the memories, which had long ago been bought and sold.

I studied my father and stepmother’s wedding photos, he in a tweed jacket and cords with a knit tie and a paisley patterned shirt, she in a slim white formfitting knit dress, holding one perfect red rose, her long auburn hair down her breast; each of them was smiling in the best way I had ever seen them, hers one of calm perfection, he one of rascally no-good. His friends told him he was lucky, lucky to get that girl, and of course, they were right. Young, slim, hard working, smart, she read the Russians, thought my father was brilliant and took a shine to me as well when I came back into their lives. A week after the wedding, maybe less, he screwed another woman, an Indian he may have just met. No good reason to do it or not do it, except of course he had stood up in front of God and all his friends-with a guest appearance by a touring national choral group that sang something in Latin- and promised to be good. Here he was, 99 ½ hours later being bad. What to do? Following his Catholic roots back to square zero, he approached his new wife on his knees with terrible terrors and confessed. Expecting a lush welcome, the freedom of forgiveness, perhaps even gratitude for offering her this power to make him clean at last, she instead wept, fell apart, lost her appetite, and lost her ambition, lost her will to live. The beginning of the end.

The Russian boy asked me what I was doing. I said I was scattering my dog’s ashes in the park where we used to play. He spoke with a little accent, and used some odd arrangement of nouns, articles and verbs. ‘Why are you to be doing this?’ ‘Is the dog coming not back when?’ ‘Does you are having a happy Christmas or no?’ Stuff like that. We chatted as I threw grey-white dust onto the Kelly green St. Augustine grass, trying not to think of how much I still missed the old Pineapple. I recalled the day we had him put to sleep in our kitchen, then walked up to the Fox and the Hound to get hammered at 10 a.m. For a while, I forgot what was coming for me, my belly heavy with bitter, my lungs burnt with sativa, but when we got back home, it was there: the empty house where a dog no longer awaited, a feeling I had had for fifteen years. We climbed into bed and as I wept and shook, you held me. ‘He’s running,’ you said so sweetly and lovingly. ‘He’s running now like has not run in years, running, running, chasing squirrels through that big shady park in the sky.’ I always pictured North Hollywood Park as that place, the doggy heaven in the sky.

I asked the Russian boy where his parents were. He said his mama was at home and his papa was at work. I asked him if he was alone and he said yes. He had left home with his mama to go be with his papa. He said his papa took him to the Universal Building, but then he was gone. He said he wanted to go home, and asked me if I would take him there. I asked him where he lived and he said Acama Street. I couldn’t believe it either. The kid lived on our old street. Honey, it got weirder. I asked him if he knew his address. This is what he said: 1143 Acama Street, apartment two. Our old pad. At that moment, I began to wonder if I was dreaming all of this, or if I was in someone else’s dream. I asked him if he knew his mom or dad’s phone number. He did not. There I was in North Hollywood Park on Christmas Day with a Russian boy who was trying to get back home. It seemed perfect for me, a chance to be needed, to be responsible, and to get onto some kind of path back to you and our son.

Of all the terrible feelings I have been privileged to experience, being apart from my son has proven to be the worst, by far. For a long time, I thought the apex of loneliness was being separated from you. Those months you spent in Frankfurt, Germany still echo through the madhouse rooms of my mind. Not having you in the bed was made up by Pineapple’s snorting, dreaming, running-in-his-sleep presence. Not having you all day long was typical of my life anyway, working as a teacher at that school for emotionally disturbed boys and girls. My level of precision had to be so high there that I never showed up unless I was blunted into a new dimension with the strongest indica. Like a GI on point in Vietnam, out there in the vanguard just waiting to get roughed up, but quiet and sure and confident all the same. Yeah, as much as I came to hate what that school turned me into, the good, honest hard work with those poor, damaged kids saved my soul. But when I’d get home, even after I had worked out, gone for a run, gotten drunk, gotten high, I would still face that lonely apartment and I would tremble for what I might do. Not fool around with another chick or kill myself, nothing like that. More like a sensation of knowing that I was riding some kind of crazy animal, a tiger crossed with a jackass, and I dared not let go but knew not if I could hold on. When you want something, or someone, and it is nearly impossible to achieve-but not impossible-it becomes the cinema of your life, a constant state of tension, of storytelling, and the story is by nature the same again and again. The loneliness of he who has no one is not nearly as lonely as the loneliness of he who has someone. The former has the option of an early exit from existence, a monastery on the Sea of Japan, a cabin in the North Woods of Minnesota or a year’s supply of rubbers and the full use of a wind-up uncircumcised hillbilly pecker. But when you want someone, her and only her, you live in a state of perpetual awareness, the hunger, the burn, all of those metaphors, but also something else-like your own mind has been made incomplete, a lobe went missing, a vault of memories hijacked, or perhaps you’ve lost the use of some vestigial organ you never knew you had, like a tail or wings or an extra set of eyes in the palm of your hand. Even trying to describe how it feels to be separated from my son is in itself an exercise in hell and damnation. The night you flew back to Mississippi found me writhing on the floor under the dining room table moaning and groaning his name. Somehow it felt as if we both were missing each other so hard that the feeling met in the middle, somewhere between LA and Hattiesburg, a hamlet in West Texas like Sudan, the land dead, the cotton and oil industry gone back to Africa, the white people inbred and confused, the black people inbred and unconcerned, the Mexicans inbred and festive. My son and I embraced above it all like a prophet sent from the east to smite all of the sinners and all of our sins. He and I, together, his thirty pound body in my strong arms, his gaze over my left shoulder and then in towards me, I his observation point, his listening post, his perch upon the sea of time. Sometimes in my dream he’s wearing those wrap-around army green sunglasses looking every inch like me in my teenage rap phase; sometimes he’s wearing a little white fedora with a blue band, the natural ham, the poser, the taunter, the taker of hearts. My soul wants to burst for so many reasons: for my own alcoholism that has driven you back to your mother with our son, for that little man that knows something is missing and knows what it is too, and for my father-who was evicted from his own marriage when I too was two.

He could never stop apologizing for those years that we were apart, in his cups or sober as a judge, no matter, he would bring it up with the look in his eye of a man who had seen great rivers, lonely horizons, cigarette smoke mixed with frosty air, shoes that fit poorly, walks alone through concrete hard winters, the solitude of books, a candle, no wine. He would try to express the full cocktail of emotions that he was living through-the guilt, the longing, the anger, the self-pity, the paternal pull of a father’s love-a feeling he had known from virtually no man. He had not particularly wanted to be a father-revolutionary spirits like his have no time for family, house and home-they have trains to catch and typewriter ribbon to purchase and novels to argue about and pages and pages to go before they can sleep. Indeed, the failure of my mother’s first pregnancy-the gory bloody, on-the-kitchen-floor dying nature of it-must have convinced him that he would be as childless as he had been fatherless. Thus, on a cold and dreary afternoon in January of 1967, under no moon and no lighting, under nothing perhaps but a heavy blanket and the air of our nation’s capital, I was conceived in a rush and grasp and loving gush-an accident, me. Photos of my father holding me like a spider-monkey, my simian arms above my head, he in white shirt, black pants, belt, shoes and skinny black tie, dark glasses, short dark hair, a bemused smile as he gazes upon this tree ape. You can see it right there in that one shot-he had never thought he would want or enjoy or care for a moment like this, selfless, empathetic, the entire world in his large Cajun hands. Life, the essence of oneself, passed on into the future, your legacy-though imperfect, venial, maybe even criminal already set in the words and deeds of a son-all his unpublished novels and unfinished dissertations, all his ideas and thoughts and gifts and genius and wit and beauty, all of it from Mississippi John Hurt to Bob Dylan to Eleanor Rigby to Lightning Hopkins to high heeled sneakers and get a job blues-all of that made and remade in his hands and he saw what he had done and it was good. No, he had to walk away, forced away, driven away, and then the papers and the court and the early days of absence, sorrow, divorce number two, the parting and sharing with friends, his wife’s new lovers-no matter, he was screwing anything that moved-nothing to him, but the mornings with papa and papa sit and papa read and the words I was just learning before he left now lost to him like a dictionary of fables fallen to the bottom of the sea. Something that never would be again went missing, left the realm of reason and he knew it would not be back. The night he dropped by my mother’s apartment only to find me asleep in my crib and her nowhere to be found. Worried and furious he waited and waited until after midnight or later she came home from a bar. Ah, the righteous anger, ah the wrath of man, ah the doom that he brought down on her. She responded with humility, sorrow, supplication and promises, possibly even of a sexual nature. He left, both assured of his correctness and unconvinced of her words. A week or two later he dropped by again to check up on me and found a dark and empty apartment,  a mailbox stuffed already with unpaid bills, a pile of unread Minneapolis newspapers and a vacancy in his soul like a bottomless pit down to hell. The not-knowing sensation, the uncomfortable agony of unsure, the realization that your kid could be anywhere and therefore ultimately nowhere.  He never forgot that feeling and in some sense never forgave himself for not just taking me out of my crib that night, loading a diaper bag and some bottled milk and driven me home in his VW Bug, to be cared for by himself and Tom the Cat and whatever womenfolk happened to turn up in both of our lives. ‘Yep,’ my pop would say to all I just wrote. ‘It’s all true.’ He would shrug for the 999^th time and say, ‘Well, you can’t unring a bell.’ Then he would fool with one of his guns, readjust himself on his couch, or change the music to one of those wailing Country Women he got into in his final days.

I asked the Russian boy if the walls of his living room were painted. He said. ‘Yes, with golden and green leaves.’ I asked him what was painted on the wall at the far end of the room near the kitchen. He said there was a sun painted on that wall, a mean, angry sun. You remember of course that we painted the walls in that apartment on Acama Street. Goldenrod in the ‘living room’ that became forest green in the ‘dining room’, with that massive welt of an exploding red sun on the farthest wall away from the front door. When you walked into the apartment it was the first thing that caught your eye, this spinning blob of red with tentacles of flames ranging off in all directions, more like the inner workings of a volcano rather than anything glowing in space. I was never really happy about how that came out. I made a mistake in composition, made the sun too lumpy; my fine American hand betrayed by cans of Steel Reserve and chocolate flavored weed. Once I realized that I had lost the original design and was now on the path to excess, I should have painted over and started anew. Patience-not a strong suit of mine, not so far anyway. I made the cardinal error of recognizing that I was making a mistake and continued to make it anyway. It became my Secret Plan to End the War. The sun morphed into a magnificent crab nebula, a cataclysmic answer to the Big Bang Theory-there it was, the heavens ripped asunder with our solar system carried off like so much planetary dust. The great fire, the great conclusion, the end of all things. That is probably what my therapist would say-the destructive dreams of a boy who never had much of a boyhood and so he lives his life like a mowing machine just chopping everybody down. That is all true I suppose. I also spent most of my two years on the road when I was in my early twenties looking for a better sunrise and sunset than the ones I had gotten used to. Those were the powerful moments in a day, especially a land as fetid and dank as South Louisiana. Seeing the sunrise like a burning spear tip over a frosty marsh in St. Tammany was akin to a resurrection. A thermos of coffee and the kindness of the Lord. Moreover, no man on this earth escaped his youth without a drunken wave to the last of that smokeless ball of flame as it sank into Mother Earth with a shout of love on his lips to the girl who never knew anything about him. Sunup, sundown, humanity lived for those moments: greet the day with fire, incense, music and supplication, for you have slept through another black night when the evil one moves; and celebrate the coming of the evil one each night with your hands raised and flattened to the last green flash of the sun, praying that it, your brother, make it safely around the world and back to you and your mother’s home. Those were the images I sought to lay onto that wall, and perhaps in some way I was successful, for it had all the fearsome potential that every day brings to mankind, and it also had something of that bruised, battered and beaten quality to remind the viewer what indeed a day could do to one’s psyche, one’s humility, one’s flesh. Amidst the cool green walls around it, that sun went down, down, or rose up, up, into the unknown tomorrow or into the unforgiving yesterday.

Of course, I was blown away that the Russian boy lived in our old apartment, and at this point in my journey that day, I began to feel that either I was dreaming or I had wandered into someone else’s dream. Standing there, chatting with that darling child, I was conscious of my breath, my belly loose with each inhale, my diaphragm sucking in with each exhale, a steady motion and movement like our son’s noise machine with its ocean sound blowing as endlessly as the ocean itself. My eyes were functioning fine: they saw the child in Batman pajamas pants and a blue long-sleeve t-shirt, blonde hair obscured by a colorful wool Peruvian cap, his tan Converse sneaker with Velcro laces, his pale, pale skin and tiny brown freckles, his big booty and long arms-almost a twin of our own son, really, just darker hair, more Asiatic eyes and of course a Russian accent. My ears were working as well as my rock and roll past would allow them to work-I heard the call of little Mexican boys kicking a new black and green soccer ball under the trees, two brothers, the older one a rough and tumble bully, the younger one all piss and vinegar, battling his brother in their matching red shorts and jerseys, clots of grass kicked up, dirt spraying their shins, like tiny tornadoes dancing in the late morning sun. Their parents stood near, the short brown woman and her slightly taller brown man, a phone in her hand, a bottle of Mexican Fanta orange in his, a safe feeling to watch them: their struggle your own struggle, their faith your own faith, their patience your own patience, their commitment your own commitment. They watched without judgment as the older boy shoved his brother out of the way and raced off with the ball. Stronger, taller, meaner, uglier he was a brutal little lad, but what he lacked was speed. The smaller one jumped to his feet, caught his brother almost immediately, stole the ball with one move and then sprinted back in the other direction. No goals, no boundaries, no cones, no lines, no teammates, no refs, just freedom from school and teachers and coaches and strangers and fools. Nobody would be harder on that little tyke than his brother would and no one would defend him harder. That big bully would swing for the fences on every playground field and street-alley, trash-dump. Nobody bullies my brother but me. Yes, everything was working, all my molecules lined up and correct, all my faculties functioning. I was simply experiencing another of those moments of acute synchronicity. By this I mean a jarring moment in which the alien emerges amidst the familiar, be it a person, a thing, an animal, a feeling, a reaction or a condition.

Here is an example: It is the spring of 1976 and I am riding in the car with my aunt and uncle on the stretch of Interstate 10 between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, heading back to Washington, Louisiana. My uncle is driving, my aunt is in the passenger seat and I am in the backseat with my toy soldiers, my toy pistols, and my books. I am a quiet child of eight who requires little adult interaction. We are tooling along in the right hand lane and I happen to look up. It is a grey overcast day, about ten a.m. A beaten down brown sedan passes us on the left. The man in the passenger seat is my neighbor back in New Orleans. Surprised, I excitedly tell my aunt and uncle, though it takes some repetition to get them to understand. “Well, I’ll be darn,” says my uncle. “Isn’t that something?” says my aunt. I sat back and thought at least two things: the world was smaller than I had ever dreamed; my neighbor was up to something no good. Kids can tell. You cannot hide your truth from them for they have not learned how to delude themselves. They hear the false note in the voice, the look that says ‘No’ when the words are saying ‘Yes,’ the body language and facial characteristics that scream Liar. Our neighbor was leaning forward and staring straight ahead, his glasses perched on his face, his brown hair sloppy, his grey t-shirt wrinkled, his skin pale, his face tense, his entire being perplexed with some great and terrible event that made him a man at risk, a man out of time, a man on the road on a Monday with a buddy behind the wheel and a mission so obscure it could only be a crime. That is probably what it was. A month or so later he was arrested at home for burglarizing houses on our own block.

There have been many other moments such as these, including the one related to us. Some people would say that event itself means that we are supposed to be together forever. I am not so sure. Not because I do not believe in destiny, or finding one person to spend your life with, or even the idea that if one waits patiently for what they truly want, while laboring apparently without any hopes at all, they will finally arrive at that place that they foresaw, that foreign land in the most majestic of clouds, reached both by human effort as well as fortune, circumstance or the fates. I don’t know about any of that stuff, nor do I attach much meaning to it in terms of you and me. I don’t think it meant that we were bound to each other before we even saw one another-too many other incidents intervened before we came face to face that should have kept us apart. Lovers, universities, choices, travel, other cities, other time zones, other states. Through it all, what I found most comforting was the knowing that despite the good and bad drugs I had put in my bloodstream, despite the lagoons of liquor, beer and wine, despite the way my brain shaped its thinking, its configurations, its thoughts, despite it all, I knew that I could trust my own thinking. This can be helpful when a strange child with a Russian accent and Batman pajamas pants approaches you out of the blue, asks you to help him get home and claims he lives at your former address. Moments like these, when I should be howling at the Dog Star with whiskey in one hand and weed in the other, my mind blown and blown again, pass as effortlessly as the nearly empty city bus running its route on Christmas Day.  The basic facts of our synchronicity are not in dispute. What they mean is left to whoever wants to make an effort to decide.

It was a week or two before Christmas in 1992. I was living in Baton Rouge with Marlon and Alice. We threw a big party, got ourselves and our friends-including my much younger brother- drunk and druggy and then watched as people hooked up or fell down or played records or stared at the snow on the TV or danced or screwed in my closet or on the side of the house. It was a merry Sunday afternoon descending into twilight when all the acid I was eating finally went bad. The film projector that was my mind would not stop spinning. I fell to the ground clutching my head, feeling as if I had been cut through the brain, and the party cleared out fast. After some time, Alice and Kent brought me back from the abyss, my freakish descent into madness halted by their parachute voices and their crazy drunken dreams. I found myself in my living room; the house busted and practically deserted, a season’s worth of party goodwill reversed by my shameful inability to handle my high. Marlon was seated on the sofa with my brother stretched out next to him, his head hanging over a plastic bucket. Every few minutes my brother would retch pink puke into it. “He had too much punch,” said Marlon dreamily, stroking my brother’s sweat soaked hair. Marlon had taken as much acid as I had, maybe more, and seemed utterly unconcerned that my brother looked like death. Above them was one of Kent’s paintings, three telephone poles silhouetted against a sunset, a Golgotha for the room, a sentence of doom on us all. Moreover, my brother did greatly resemble the classical ideal of Jesus, with his brown locks, Semitic nose and the willingness to heal the lepers, cure the blind and walk on water if just to get a good seat in class. I imagined at once how this scene was going to go down, all of us wandering off to our separate oasis for a druggy second wind while my brother lay here on the sofa and expired. I stood up, announced I was calling an ambulance and headed for the phone. “Hide the drugs,” said Alice, cursing me for what they all felt was a massive overreaction. I dialed 911 and let them scurry around like kitchen light cockroaches. The ambulance arrived. Two buff black dudes picked up my brother and began strapping him to a pop-up gurney while a tall white dude with a black buzz cut oversaw the operation. Then, two things happened: the black paramedics forgot to strap down my brother’s right arm, and I noticed that the white paramedic had a facial tic. More than that actually, the twitch even affected his shoulders and neck, an involuntary wave of electricity that would shoot through his features causing them to exaggerate cartoonishly, as if an inner man was attempting violently to escape the shell of the outer man. This made me unsure. Could it be real that he had this condition, or was my French-fried brain making it up? Was it authentic or hallucinogenic? Was I in my own living room or was I already in the ambulance racing for the hospital, a psychotic on his way to death by misadventure? If so, then had I seen them fail to strap down my brother’s right arm, or was that also part and parcel of the Trip? The inability to trust my own thinking paralyzed my tongue and I simply watched as they continued to fail to notice their mistake and then took my brother through the front door and down the steps. At this point, he slumped over and because he was not strapped in, nearly fell off the gurney. I lunged at them, my voice high, and my indignation great, my threats more imagined than real. Still, I looked like an utter fruitcake at that moment, skinny, wild eyed, hairy, dopey, torn clothes, runny mascara, mad, bad and dangerous to know. Marlon put his hands on my shoulders and held me back, whispering into my ear, “If you don’t calm down they’re going to put you in that ambulance too.” We both might say that they probably should have just gone ahead and spun me off right then and there. Saved everybody a lot of heartache, trust, money and time. They didn’t of course and my brother was fine of course and my reputation for flaky, druggy behavior was fine of course-all was forgiven. Alice and I broke up and Marlon finally succumbed to the virus he’d been battling for years. Everyone got their degree from LSU and left town or just left town or stayed and had kids and got fired and got hired and rooted for the Tigers and got drunk on Saturday night and Sunday morning and forgot all about that event long, long ago. Except for me. Because no one had ever been able to answer my central question: did the white paramedic have a twitch? “You were the fucking twitch that night,” was the most common reply. Nobody could confirm or deny anything about an involuntary tic, or my brother’ slide off the gurney, the whole surreal scene. They only confirmed the obvious: I was a wastoid who had already gone bonkers once that night. The subtext was equally obvious: nothing I had experienced could be counted on to be factual. This frightened and disturbed me. Growing up around crazies made me painfully aware how the insane suffer. The thought of losing my mind was enough to make me wonder if it had not already happened, or how I would ever know what was real and what I was just making up? Christmas, 2001, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We are seated at the dining room table in your mother’s small house on West 28^th Street. I am at one head of the table; your father is at the other. You are seated to my right, followed by your grandmother and your mother. On my left are your cousin Mickey and his wife. Besides your aunt and one more cousin, this is your entire family. I am here because we fell in love in August over the Internet, made love in Austin, Texas in October and became a couple in Los Angeles at Thanksgiving. We are eating a meal that your mother has prepared. There is only the sound of cutlery, of glasses, of chewing and breathing and a radio in some other room playing Christmas music. Your mother breaks the silence: “Well, I hope everything is all right.” Immediately there is a profusion of praise for it all, the turkey, the dressing, the potatoes, the beans, the salad, the bread, the butter, the wine. We apologize for not saying anything earlier, our mouths were simply too full to speak. At last, I end with a morbid comment that nobody could make a sound because they were choking. At this, Mickey’s wife jabs him in the ribs and says that if anyone is choking then they are on their own because it’s Mickey’s day off. I sit there for a moment wondering what she means by that remark. Mickey is a tall man with a black buzz cut; he’s wearing blue jeans, boots and a purple LSU sweatshirt. I mentioned to him when we met twenty minutes earlier that I was an alumni of that fine school. He replied that he himself was not a fellow alumnus, just a fan of the football team. In addition, he once lived and worked in Baton Rouge. Now, as I ask Mickey what he does for a living, I recall your mother mentioning to me before he arrived that he had a facial tic, and that I need not be concerned. Mickey answers me, saying he currently works as a helicopter pilot, but in an earlier lifetime, he was a paramedic, and hence could save someone’s life if indeed they were choking. The moment is arriving like the lifting of a veil. I ask him what he did when he lived in Baton Rouge. As the twitch flows through his body like he’s just been Tasered, he informs me that he drove an ambulance.

When I had finished scattering the last of Pineapple’s ashes, I walked to my car, put the carved wooden box on the floor of the front seat, took the Russian boy’s hand and walked down Tujunga towards the intersection of Camarillo, Riverside and the 170 Freeway, a crazy confluence of traffic and lights and angles with the Tujunga Wash passing underneath and then alongside Riverside, and the underpass of the freeway used as a storage area for city trucks and piles of tools and gravel-an epic intersection that contains in a microcosm all of the Valley and maybe LA too. From there one can see the Universal Building where you spent ten years of your life and where the Russian boy said his father worked. That glass and steel frame edifice, with its annual ownership changes, reflected the swiftly scattering world of modern west coat entertainment-a theme park, music label, film studio and TV headquarters all housed in a vision from the World of Tomorrow, an elegant slice of modernity, a parallelogram wedged down into the bedrock of America like a hatchet hunted into man’s mind. Whack, and there it will stay, driving images of war and peace and white folks in trouble into the blood stream of American families, American actions, American lives.  For the rest of the world as well. We used to joke about how that office building was a location shot for a dozen cities around the world, from London to Dubai, Shanghai to Hamburg, the Universal Building was the many-traveled edifice, a literal representation of its metaphorical character.

At that intersection, one could see a Starbucks-without which LA cannot function. even the meanest of them has a cluster of writers hacking into the Wi-Fi, typing up tales of wonder and woe, sipping tall cups of something and waiting on their women, their agents, their limousine, their mothers, their children, their rent. Jack’s Classic Hamburgers, with red and white awning and red picnic tables outside and red flags and wholesome written in eight languages and Braille. Why not, for America is the hamburger and California does the hamburger stand like no other so why not have an authentic chunk of the American dream here at the corner of Tujunga and Camarillo and the 170 and Riverside? There’s a 7-11 and where else but America will you find a 7-11, no longer only open from 7-11, now it’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 366 days a year. Rust never sleeps and neither do the poor bastards that run those hideous fluorescent orange and green landscapes of hot dogs, nachos, lotto tickets, doughnuts, energy drinks and beer. We must reveal the worst of our humanity when we lurch into one of those places. I know I do. You’ll find me in there late at night buying something I don’t need or want like Steel Reserve and a blunt wrap; or it is 8 a.m. and I’m buying coffee and a blunt wrap and fuck it a beer too, or I’ve just finished playing hours of football and I’m in there again, buying the usual, saluting the same clerk I see every Saturday, a wizened man from India older than the mountains, a wise old grandfather far from his grandfather’s land, a man who finally asked me after a year of Saturdays what religion was I, to which I only said, ‘God is great.’ He nodded like we understood one another and I escaped before God could see how low and evil I had become.

Pizza, software, a credit union, head-shots, the intersection had it all. Now it had a middle-aged man holding the hand of a quiet Russian boy. Of course we walked. I wanted plenty of witnesses in case this whole adventure went south. I almost felt like I had to speak aloud to the eyes of the world upon us, my conscience perhaps but since it felt external it was almost as if an audience had suddenly appeared, hidden perhaps, but still there, ready to condemn my every action, indeed my every thought. I wanted to say, ‘He just walked up to me a few minutes ago and asked me to walk him home. I said I would because he’s clearly lost and out of sorts, but also because he claims to live in one of my old apartments. It’s too strange to be true.’ I kept those thoughts to myself. Instead, as we waited for three different sets of traffic lights to change, I asked the Russian boy what his name was. “I’m Andrei,” he said. I said that was my name too, but the French version of Andre’. “Two Andrei’s,” he said. “Two Andre’s,” I said. His grip tightened. It was strong, like our son’s grip, strong for the little person who was making it. I asked Andrei if he was cold, though it was a typical California multi-seasonal day, sort of a combination of spring and fall with a dash of summer heat in the bright sun and a touch of winter’s cool in the shade. He said no, but held his hand up to block the sunlight striking us hard from the southeast. I offered him my sunglasses which he accepted, and they rode his face like a Cyborg motorcycle, giving him the look of a trained killer and a leader of men. I tugged my camouflage beanie down lower to block the glare. The light changed to a green welcome with a white ‘Walk’ icon that immediately began flashing orange and counting off the seconds of our lives. Even then, we hesitated to cross, waiting for the inevitable vehicle to come flying through the convergence of so many infrastructures. We weren’t disappointed. A white Mercedes with smoked glass and zero license plates zoomed across two lanes of Tujunga, shot across Camarillo and blasted down Riverside, no horns blowing, no fists waving, just another hot day in this cold, cold town.

The Russian boy took my hand as we crossed the street and headed down the sidewalk along Tujunga, passing under the 170. On our right was a fenced-in area that was used as a warehouse for the city. Stacks of pallets and wooden crates, piles of plastic-wrapped steel coil, plastic tubs of tar and paint, industrial ugliness compounded by dirt and dust and the noise of cars booming overhead. We emerged into sunshine and the typical silence of an LA suburb, with a few cars passing us, some decorated with antlers and wreaths. These symbols of the season seemed at once so perfect and so unreal. Southern California is a deeply religious land filled with children of the cross in all of its forms-Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, Fundamental, Pentecostal, Scientific and Messianic. That anyone bothers to slow down from the search for wealth, health and a lemon tree backyard of one’s own is somewhat astounding. Like our neighbor Mr. Sergio, the Catholic Filipino who leaves two ‘Merry Christmas’ signs in his front windows all year round. That would be the essence of this city of angels, a half-hearted attempt to return home, wherever that is-Cleveland, Boston, London, Moscow, Armenia, Hindustan, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, everyone wants a reunion with their childhood Christmas, when Santa had a plane to catch and a stocking hung with care meant more than just a decorating choice. I asked the Russian boy if he got anything cool for Christmas. He informed me that he did not celebrate Christmas today. “We are Russian church,” he said. Of course. The Orthodox with their Julian calendar. All of their feast days are later than the other Christians. Once upon a time Constantinople was set ablaze over that dispute. Now it was just another opportunity to get drunk in the name of Christ.

Cars passed on our left, while on our right were the backyard fences of Studio City homes, white or beige-painted brick, running in a series of angles like the way trenches were dug in WW I. Bushes of bougainvillea seemed to be growing in every yard, those burning floral leaves of magenta, white, peach and red, those huge balls of perennial color bursting forth with all the muscular exuberance of weeds, uncontrollable, thorny, a tornado of hues and movements and even great whipping sounds when the Santa Ana Winds came blowing in like an army of Moors. Here and there to the west were the towering palm trees, those hardy Mexican imports rooted deep into the rocky floodplain. Such a hopeful sight, that palm against the cobalt sky, or a totem finger when the sun was falling into a purple richness of the invisible Pacific, or a morning friend bathed in streetlight or a late moon, sentient creatures, those palms, survivors of a cruel and reckless Mother Nature, kings among the lowly, even the conqueror of men. Too many TV cartoons of Bugs Bunny in the foreign legion, or Abbott and Costello or Lawrence of Arabia running through my mind each time I laid eyes on those date-bearing fathers, a Hollywood oasis at its foot, cool waters, veiled women, curved swords and horses that out-ran the winds.

On our right now were apartment buildings of three or four units, hard by California bungalows with their low flat rooftops mixed in with the faux French chateaus with their pointed peaks and ski chalet roofs slanting down almost vertically, designed to shed the snow that would never fall on them. A house like that was symbolic of this entire town, perhaps this entire nation. A yearning for something lost and partially forgotten, perhaps seen in a picture book or remembered from someone’s else’s vacation to Switzerland or the Italian Alps or more likely some GI from the European Theatre who jumped into the builder business when he got home from the war. That nameless molder of modern tastes knew that the average American was both contemptuous of education and intimidated by it. Did form follow function in the American mind? Yes, until the American mind had to stop killing Indians and chopping down trees to build rooftop and his walls. Then he allowed himself to live in anything anywhere for any amount of money as long as someone was happy, preferably his wife. So what if the most obvious housing option were the thick low walls of the adobe hacienda with a fountain in the courtyard, heavy shutters against the all-day glare and an outdoor fire pit for the cool and even cold California nights, a house that would require minimum maintenance and minimum heat and minimum cooling, a house without a swimming pool or a lawn to starve the thirsty land of precious water, a house with many rooms and no carpets and no wallpaper and no sliding glass doors and no TV. There were attempts at such places-you could drive down any street in the Valley and spot a fake hacienda with its stucco facade glued to cheap lumber and mounted on a thin slab of concrete, adobe in image only, to allow the American homeowner to pretend he was somewhere that he was not doing something that he was not, not the pretend world of lights and cameras and action but a real world of gauchos and pampas and ranchos and men who carried long knives, smoked long cigars and spoke only when the end had come. Yes, the Valley was filled with all these fantastical phonies, a highly valued land that had all the charm of a pile of human feces.

We walked past a house with a forgotten coy pond in the concrete covered front yard, dry and empty now except for crinkled brown leaves. Something about that unused and useless infrastructure filled me with a strange feeling of joy, like discovering an ancient ruin long concealed from the eyes of man. Sam’s backyard in Hattiesburg had one as well, and sometimes I would walk out there and just gaze upon it as the sun died into the evening light. What was I thinking and what did I want to do? I’m not sure. There was no notion of filling it up again with water or fish, yet I could imagine a time when it was full of water and birds landed to drink, coons and opossum crept to its edge at night, squirrels, mice, and rabbits and rats all partook of the pool. Something about me craves order amidst disorder and disorder amidst order. A concrete lined artificial pond of any size is an attempt to impose man’s will on the land. Evidence of the failure of that will is a reminder of our futility, the truth that nothing lasts. In a few months or a year, the dead and darkened sunken pond in the yard of the house on Tujunga will be filled and paved over, no evidence that it ever was there, a parking space occupied by a parked car where once a person sat in a chair under the dark trees, reading a book, tossing crumbs to the coy who flashed golden white through the murky slimy water. How many vanished coy ponds were beneath our feet, not to mention trails and burrows and graves and hideouts and buried treasure and buried bodies, weapons, animals, children, old women, old men?

We reached the Highway 101 on-ramp, another danger zone. For a pedestrian in LA, as long as one understands and believes the truism that there is never a moment, day or night, when a car is not about to hit you, there is no surprises, no intimidation, no shock, no fear. Taking your dog for a walk at three in the morning? Someone will be pulling out of their driveway the moment that you pass. Jogging down an empty boulevard at noon? Someone will be there to run you down when you cross a cross street. Here at the on-ramp, I took the boy’s hand and we checked traffic together, with him looking behind us and then ahead while I did the same. An expensive silver car making a left turn across traffic made that left turn and squealed up the ramp, only to run into a red light and a line of cars waiting their turn. Another Los Angeles symbol, the speeding vehicle running into the reality of other vehicles, other people with their other destinations and their other needs. All of us who move here on our own do so because we are ready at last for our spotlight. None of us ever understands that one always begins at the bottom of anything worth doing and then spends years and years working their way up. A city of impatience at the edge of an impatient continent of an impatient nation in an impatient age.

The worst lessons we have ever learned from our history is that things that need to get done can get done quickly, easily, thoroughly and painlessly. Only the Southern Man understands military foreign occupation, the disruption of invasion, enemy armies marching unopposed through his hamlets and mansions and towns, the simple and ordinary senselessness of war, the outright murder, the rape, the theft, the orphans, the fire, the dead chickens, dead mules, dead, pigs, dead dogs, only Southern Man ever saw those sights in his own yard and felt those feelings in any great abundance, only Southern Man saw his flag lowered at gunpoint and the flag of his oppressor raised, only Southern Man saw his inferiors made to be his superiors, his land snatched, his revenue wiped out, his currency made useless, his Constitution defiled, his very name made unutterable to his women, his children, his fathers, himself. No, every other place in America was hell for leather on getting their firstest with the mostest. Only Southern Man knew it would never be worth a damn.

As Andrei and I walked under the 101 overpasses, I found myself looking over my shoulder every minute or so, wondering if I was being set-up. You know how my imagination works. What if the Russian Mafia was targeting me? For what, you might ask. Nothing, of course, but cases of mistaken identity do occur, and for that matter, I have taught a Russian kid or two. Maybe I fucked up terribly in one of my classes at one of the many schools where I taught and now someone was after me. Still, what a complicated plot it was already turning out to be. A kid with a Russian accent comes upon me in the park while I’m scattering my dog’s ashes, asks me to help him get home, and that home is our old apartment. Nuts. Gazing to my left I spied a homeless encampment nestled under a few trees between the east and west-bound halves of the highway. What a strangely perfect place to pitch a tent, at once isolated and public, like a hermit perched atop a pole in some medieval town, alone but not, an outcast among the pious, or a sinner among the sins. I myself might choose just such a place were I to lose it completely. There you could listen to the endless passing of cars like an ocean’s ceaseless tides, for the traffic also has its seasons and its daily pattern of heavy surf and becalmed waves. Even the undertow factor existed for people dragged along the rough surface of the road and often to their death because they made the fatal error of stepping too far out into the stream. One would be a witness to it all, a silent testament to the modern age; ordinary citizens carrying on their new century lives while you, an old sage of the streets, sat on a milk crate with a can of cold malt and let it all go on by. You’d hear the occasional car wreck and maybe something like a fender or a laptop or a body might come flying over the side but for the most part it would just be a cool quiet existence with all your basic needs covered, shelter and beer and a modest amount of food. Take your constitutional wherever you could but generally in the bathrooms at the library in North Hollywood Park. Acquire a dog, for life was infinitely less lonely with a dog, and perhaps a few friends like oneself, children of no destiny, and inheritors of no earth. If I ever completely lost you and my son, I could see myself there among the faithful, the true believers in the fellowship of man.

The Russian boy and I now stood at the corner of Tujunga and Moorpark. A gas station, another 7-11, the mini-mall with the Persian seamstress who said ‘you no be curious’ when you tried to give her instructions about your wedding dress, the chain-smoking Armenian cobbler who bought a wife from a magazine, the Laundromat-where the truly have-nots spent hours of their lives, the cute little coffee shop trying its damndest to compete with the larger, cuter coffee shop around the corner. Then across the street where we stood was Henry’s Tacos, the stand-alone hut painted orange and white, the sign in green and red, sombreros and cacti peeking from behind the letters, one of those places built in the 50’s or early 60’s that just makes your heart smile when you see them-the grease, the cheese, the picnic tables, the shredded lettuce, the chewy meat, the paper hats, the bottles of pop, the passing traffic, the sun’s direct light, the menu board in brown with its letters in a white font not seen in this country since 1963. I asked Andrei if he was hungry but he said no, he had had breakfast already and it was too early for lunch. Fine with me; I only eat at midnight after I have drunk and smoked myself into another dimension, so no Henry’s or coffee shop pastries or 7-11 nachos for us. We crossed Moorpark and I steered us left towards Woodbridge Park. 

A curious side effect of remembering a thing is that memory lies upon the surface of objects, on the surface of buildings, on the gravel of a parking lot, on the shadows cast on glass. A restaurant for example, can have so many past scenes played out in its interior and exterior that to stroll past its shuttered door and blind drawn windows is to experience a witch’s brew of emotions. I’m referring to our sushi restaurant of course, where we spent so many wonderful evenings, just the two of us, but also our friends, our nearest and dearest companions, people who stood in our weddings and we in theirs, a place where we were known and known well, for our good cheer and loyalty and generosity and smiles. To walk there from our Acama Street apartment on a fall evening with crispness like an apple in the air through the sweet mellow streets of bungalows and old trees, then cutting through the silent and ominous park, its deep shadows like the depths of an ocean, the twinkling lights of Moorpark Boulevard like a city on the gone horizon, with jungle gyms silhouetted under street lamps and one or two people lounged on benches next to shopping carts filled with their lives, smoking Mary Jane and drinking from a paper cup. Then to cross the boulevard of racing mania and enter that tiny restaurant at the corner of a tiny strip mall of six or seven petite businesses, and pass through the drapery and see a dozen small tables and another dozen stools at the sushi bar, a greeting from the staff, each of them hollering an Oriental ‘Herro!’ even as their hands cut fish, serve dishes, poor sake, pour water, pour beer. We would sit at the bar, tucked at the far right end almost into the decorative fountain and plants. Hot sake and cold beer arrived like the early mail and fresh fish and rice followed thereafter, food that was sexual and raw and sensual, guiltless, drunken, extravagant, justified, and ultimately simply good food, good service at a good price. Yet I had spoiled it all when I picked that fight with Jennifer one night, mocking her dreams of benevolent capitalism, becoming such a raging jackass that I stormed out of the restaurant and waited an hour in the parking lot drinking beer. Or the night that we had a terrible shouting match at home and then you went and had dinner there with Amy, who told you what a loser I was and that we would never make it as a couple. That meal ended well. How long did you go without speaking to her after that? Years. No, walking across the street from that place, holding Andrei’s little hand, I wished I could erase all of the bad that I had pulled off, just shake the mind’s sand and make new pictures, better outcomes, better plans, wiser moments, less drinking, more loving, less talking, more listening, less tipping, bigger tips.

At Elmer Avenue, we turned right and cut through Woodbridge Park. Most of the grass was off-limits, surrounded by a soft wall of dark rubber mesh and yellow caution tape, signs telling us that the soil was planted with new grass. Dozens of birds had flocked to the closed-off areas and were nipping at the ground, devouring the seeds. Crows mostly, but also pigeons, sea gulls, starlings and sparrows, a mad frenzy of thrusting necks and arrogant walks, the furious motion of little heads, eyeball popping consumption. The pigeons were shameless, eating themselves into a full gorged fatness, the sea gulls were the drunken sailors lost among the lowly, the sparrows and starlings were like small alert pupils, always aware of their surroundings, seeming to nibble and keep watch at the same time- they appeared to travel in small teams, three, four, five keeping the others in their range of vision, each grouping something like an experiment in chaos theory. Only the crows had any soul. You could see that they were by far the most intelligent ex-dinosaur out there, somewhat graceless yet elegant, strong yet somehow gentle, canny, even clever, utterly fearless but quickly chased away by smaller more ferocious birds, they moved like gang members without a leader, Japanese warriors with no master to serve. Expatriates of all countries but citizens of every land, only the crows knew how cruel the world was in its searing beauty and only the crows knew how beautiful it could be in its cruelty. Andrei raised his hand and pointed. “Birds,” he said. “Birds fly.” I agreed with him that indeed birds did fly. “I fly,” he said. I asked him what he meant by that and he replied that he flew with the birds and the birds flew with him. “Especially the little ones,” he said, gesturing to a few sparrows tapping their beaks into the dust. “They like me the best and I like them too. The crows, not so much, but the little ones, yes.” He smiled. He was a happy kid, unworried about being lost, a bit shy, not talkative but not at all frightened of his situation or me. Now he was telling me that he flew with the birds. “Of course you do,” I said.

We exited the park onto Klump Street, which runs just that one block and then makes a T with Valley Spring. When we reached the intersection in that mellow neighborhood of million dollar middleclass homes, lawns, trees, shrubbery, flowerbeds, driveways and white picket fences, I showed him the old graffiti on the sidewalk in front of a tidy Swiss-like chalet. You remember, don’t you? You’ll probably say no. I spent so much time walking those sidewalks with Pineapple, staring at the world and often looking at the ground, that inevitably I would spot things or find things. How much money have I found? Over a hundred bucks, I’d say. That woman’s wallet I found on New Year’s Day filled with credit cards and ID but only 5 bucks in cash. That I returned, as with the wallet and the envelope that contained 400 dollars dropped on our lawn at Acama Street by the muscular Israeli commando who lived next door. Weed. I found a dugout filled with weed and a companion lighter, lying in the street, the classic move of a stoner who probably put his gear on the roof of his car, forgot it was there and then drove off into the day, weedless now, leaving it for me. That would make a serio-comic moment later, the doper needing his one-hitter, searching his car like a DEA agent might, his brain running in circles as to where it was and where it went and finally did he even pack his dugout at all? A great mystery and I have the answer on my bookcase an arm’s length away. Then the notes. I find notes all the time. Little letters people have written and delivered and other people have read and discarded. When we lived near North Hollywood High, I would find the most heartbreaking pieces of mail. Once I found two notes from the same girl to the same guy, weeks and blocks apart. The pity with which she articulated her pain, the promises she was making, each one topping the last until you knew he knew that he could make her do anything with anybody at any time and she would. And no man or woman wants that. I have those letters, still. Perhaps when I have cleared all of what happened today from my mind I’ll dig them out again and wonder where that broken-hearted Latina wound up and where her heart-breaking Latino landed.

The Russian boy and I examined the oldest graffiti I have ever seen. Jan and Ken left their mark on these sidewalks in 1916, the etchings into the concrete still quite visible, despite one hundred years of sun and rain. Since southern California got much of the former and little of the latter, it seemed entirely possible that Jan and Ken’s simple statement-in effect, we were alive and passed this way-would be here in another hundred years. What would we tell those two, if we could step back through the planes of history and chat with the past? What would shock them the most, harnessing the atom, walking on the moon or reelecting a black President? What would they think if they saw us in our high priced torn finery? Surely, they would think we were poorer, more desperate, less wealthy, more deprived. They would see the hideously obese cheek by jowl with the anorexic and wonder what strange disease had taken siege upon mankind. However, the means by which we paid for goods and services would be familiar, as if the entire world was our neighborhood grocer, giving us a credit line until things were good again. The technology would not astound them, not rockets, bullet trains, sleek automobiles or jumbo jet planes, none of those feats of transportation would be particularly jaw dropping to Jan and Ken, for they too dreamt of strange adventures 10,000 leagues under the sea, missions to Venus, Mars, Jupiter and beyond. They had sci-fi too. They would merely have assumed that at last the science had caught up with the fiction. No, I think what would shock and frighten them would be the level of disconnectedness between ordinary individual in ordinary places. Teenagers at a bus stop, staring at a small shiny thing in their hand, tapping away at a small keypad with a look on their face that was a cross between the ecstasy of a pornographer and the stupidity of a cow. ‘Ear buds and phones,’ they would say when Ken and Jan returned from their visit to 2016. ‘Everyone uses them as often as possible.’ Out of the outer world and into the inner one. Ken and Jan would tell 1916 that something had happened to mankind that had caused it to concern itself no longer with the world around it, something had changed humanity, made it unrecognizable. Human to human contact had become undesirable, avoidable, and perhaps even loathsome. ‘They use their machines to avoid each other and meet each other,’ Jan and Ken would say. ‘Moreover, they complain that they have no privacy.’ Jan and Ken would not last eleven minutes in 2016, nor would they want to stay. They would gladly and quickly return to a world of front porch politicking and kitchens filled with family and jaunts through the park arm in arm with your best gal and a slow Sunday bicycle ride on the boulevard with the other bikers and walkers and perhaps a carriage or two and a solo horseman or three and a hail thee well fellow and a dip of the hat to the ladies and of course, everyone always in the best clothes they could afford. No, Jan and Ken wouldn’t care about penicillin, the birth control pill,  the liberation of Auschwitz and the rise and fall of the USSR. Jan and Ken could take or leave Louis Armstrong, Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain. Jan and Ken would turn their backs on the liberation of Paris, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of history, the beginning of the last days. Those two young dudes, whom I always prayed had made it through Belleau Wood and the Spanish Flu, went on with their day the day they left their simple poem of themselves and their names to the world, and had a carefree morning, arm in arm, good buddies, pals to the end.

We walked down Valley Spring to Fair, turned right and walked to the intersection with Acama Street. When I caught sight of that space, I had to pause, and I bent down to retie my right sneaker. Andrei was close enough to scamper down the block to his apartment, but he stood next to me and waited, glancing around at his surroundings, but mostly peering into the sky as if he were looking for helicopters and planes, something he had been doing throughout the walk, shading his eyes from the sun, scanning the heavens. What caused me to pause weren’t the two houses at that intersection, the one a classic Valley ranch dwelling with orange trees and California eucalyptus growing in the yard, the other a Brutalist cell block landscaped with stones and bamboo, and it wasn’t the stylish apartment complex of taupe and mint green and pale lemon and white wood, centered around a cool, dim, fountain laden court, no it was the rundown two-story stucco apartment building catty-corner from the Brutalist mansion, that twenty unit hunk of square dull white ugliness dropped into this charming neighborhood of old homes and well crafted condos like a turd in a collection plate. And what made me quake for a moment wasn’t the building itself but rather the glimpse of a side entrance and a set of steps leading up, for it was there in that alcove that I came across a flyer for what turned out to be Allie’s art show. You remember of course that I grabbed said flyer on a walk with Pineapple one day, passed it on to you and forgot all about it. But you didn’t, did you? I remember sitting in our apartment on Acama, probably smoking pot and watching football, when you said that you were walking over to check it out-Allie only lived two doors down. And from there, where did we go? Two weddings, three children, a dozen or more shared friendships, dead animals, dead parents, dead careers, dead lives. But also tremendous love, laughter, generosity and joy. How does one quantify a relationship, put a price on what we missed, and what we received? I don’t know, but that chance encounter with a sheet of mimeographed paper led to a million days that ran differently than if I had not looked in that direction at that moment, not removed the piece of paper, not passed it onto you, and you had not said, 'That looks cool' and then got dressed and walked over to a strange apartment. I stood up, the shoelace secure, and we began walking down Acama Street.

By now, I was almost exhausted with memory. In some ways, I admire the people who forget, people whose minds function differently, people who trained themselves or simply by nature allow themselves just to let things go. Maybe I don’t watch enough television, or listen to the newest new music anymore or follow the local sports teams close enough or get stoned enough, though god knows I have tried the latter to the power of N. No, as Andrei and I strolled that last hundred yards of sidewalk before we reached the old pad, on a street lined with the newer block-style apartment buildings on the right side and the courtyard units on the left, I remembered the tall, older man with white hair who was often out in the yard of one of those quainter apartments, watering the lawn or washing his car. He was a crank, there was no getting around it, and he had that reputation when we moved in there, the old hard-ass who bitched at the neighbors and strangers alike, sharing his unpleasant feelings associated with children, dogs, parking spaces and this trash-dropping world. As far as what I said and did to the old fart, I take complete ownership, for it was my bad parenting as a dog-daddy that brought this on-it was I who let Pineapple stroll himself off-leash around our neighbor’s yards, and I should have realized from somewhere in my stoner’s cave that he was relieving himself of solid waste, probably in plain sight on the old man’s lawn. So what happened was that one morning as I was walking Pineapple down the sidewalk, Mr. Cranky, who was washing his car, saw me, turned off his hose and crossed the street to scold me. Bad move. No sooner had he begun to harangue me for what was a legitimate beef but I let into him, cursing him out. What was he thinking crossing the street like that; did he think he was some kind of hard ass, my parent, my grandpa, the middle school principal giving me a lecture, a military man bossing around some recruit? All of the above, probably. However much he had it coming, because we all have it coming, my finish was particularly ugly: “I hope your prostate explodes, you asshole.” It actually gave him pause and he looked at me, wounded, taken aback, seriously and ominously harmed. He knew I knew what all men fear, the loss of our manhood-that thing we dangle between our legs, source of obvious pride or equally obvious embarrassment, an organ whose best work is done out of sight, itself embedded in another’s flesh, that expectorator of semen and urine and blood and disease, that carved and knobby and skin-sagging monster, half-eggplant, half hope, and here I had plastered a poster on his most private of private parts and the poster read ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’ You can believe he never fucked with me again. The neighbors looked at me differently now, the ones who heard me that morning or the ones he told later on. I had always shown them the Peaceful Dre’, the mellow stoner with the New Orleans voice of blues and jazz and rivers and darkness and old bones and too long of an arrest record and too many firings and only now in my middle years any ghost of a chance at redemption and so I was ordinarily quite kind, quite nice to them and this was mirrored in my gentle dog, the Eskimo Spitz who could walk himself. But like that dog, who was un-sterilized and randy to the end, a hunter and a fighter and a killer of squirrels, I have a mean and cruel and vicious streak, a loner, an iconoclast-the shatterer of images, the breaker of hearts. I changed in their eyes-I was the neighborhood’s new bully.  

The final ghastly memory I confronted before things took a turn for the bizarre was another one related to that sweet dog of ours. As we both used to say, once Pineapple started to age, he aged fast. We had already seen him losing some of his agility-that in itself was difficult to watch. In his younger days, it was not hard at all to believe that the German Spitz was bred for circus work. The way he jumped, ran, bounded, and leapt about, practically walking on those hind legs as he attempted to scale a tree and rain hell down upon some insulting squirrel. He was losing those legs even before we moved to Acama Street, and it was there that I committed one small outrage against the god of dogs. I borrowed one of those twelve passenger vans that I drove for Valley High School and swung by the apartment to walk the dog and smoke some grass. Afterwards, I was inspired to take him back to work with me, so I trotted him out to the van and opened the passenger door. Remember how he would leap into your vehicle when you took him for a ride? Once, when I lived in Austin Texas, he even jumped into a stranger’s car. The boy loved to cruise. Well he tried that move now, but there were at least three problems with the idea: the van sits much higher than either of our cars, his legs were not the coiled steel springs they once were and finally, I had parked the van next to a mud puddle. Of course, the predictable occurred: before I could stop him, he tried to jump into the front seat, missed, twisted awkwardly in the air and then landed hard on his side in the muddy water-the virtual definition of adding insult to injury. And to that, I added something more. Contempt? Is that the right word? I’m not sure. Loathing? Self-loathing? Hatred? Anger? Shame? I can’t quite pin it down. What I didn’t do was try to catch him, or even help him, not right away. It’s as if I saw the whole thing happen through the eyes of another man, the cinematography of me. I knew before I opened the door of the van that he would immediately attempt to jump in-I read his excitement, his joy at the novelty of a strange vehicle-ride at an odd time of the day with his favorite human being on the planet. And when he jumped, I could have moved quickly and plucked him from the air, or at least broke his fall, or at least tried to. I don’t understand that last part-that crucial moment when my instincts to hurt out-punched my instinct to help. Was I burned out by then? Was it the job at Valley that seemed to leave me more depleted every day, week, month and year that I worked there even as my body got swollen up from the daily routines of lifting weights with the kids, like a trusty in jail, with special privileges to sleep at home? I don’t know, to tell you the truth. You and I sure had many an angry fight during that time period-you could point out times that I drove you into a corner so tight that the only way to escape was to hate your way out of it. I know, like every man knows at 4 A.M., how bad he has been in this life to others and to himself. So I continue to hold in the photo book of my mind my sweet and smart and loyal dog, who grew from shivering pup to springing teen to cagy old man under the mostly benevolent despotism of myself, (and to his enormous and priceless benefit, under the loving and attentive eye of you), reduced now to a embarrassed and frightened and confused elderly wretch twisting in the air, his spine one wrench closer to betraying him utterly and finally, and then landing hard, without any means to break the fall, into a putrid shallow pool of black muck and muddy filth. Those were my last thoughts as Andrei and I walked up to our old front door and ran the bell.

Do you recall that the door to our old apartment had a large, speak-easy-style peephole, in this case a little brass door that opened into a tiny brass cage? I had completely forgotten that quaint feature from a better, more trusting era. It isn’t so much that someone could come to any great harm using the peephole, because the brass door itself had a tiny lens through which one could peer, it was the idea that people could openly announce whether they were home or not and whether they were receiving guests or not-a state of semi-privacy if you will. We had rung the bell and were standing there, Andrei next to me, when the peephole door opened and a woman’s eye appeared. She asked me what I wanted. I explained to her that I had her son with me, that we had met in North Hollywood Park and I had walked him home. Her eye got visibly larger. Indeed, more that that, it changed in composition. Fear. It had to be fear, not to mention shock. “What are you talking about?” she said, her voice loud, angry, Russian-accented. Again, I told her that I had Andrei with me and that he wanted his mother. This was met with a kind of shriek that I have never heard before. Not a noise a human could utter unless their will was not their own. Torture, perhaps. That’s where you could hear that sound, or something like it-somewhere where someone is having terrible and terrifying things done to them by other people. Both Andrei and I stepped back from the door. The poor little guy began to whimper and then cry, not a lot and not many tears but he was clearly upset, though he appeared more worried than anything else, a sort of ‘What is happening to mommy?’ look on his face. The eye appeared at the peephole again, and the woman shouted at me, asking me what I was doing, did I think this was some kind of a joke? I looked down at Andrei and asked him if we were at the right apartment. He nodded. “Look,” I said to the eye in the peephole. “Just open the door please and tell me if this is your kid.” The eye stared, blinked, stared, then moved away and the peephole closed. There was the sound of locks turning and a chain being unlatched, and then the door swung open, revealing a woman in a red bathrobe, runny makeup, bottle blonde hair, about my age or so but worn, utterly wasted away with an illness of some kind. She looked at me, then looked at the boy, then looked at me again. What was she thinking? What was she feeling? I don’t know, or didn’t know then, but I suppose it was fear mixed with a plea for pity, compassion and patience. She trembled and waved us away, and when Andrei stepped forward and tried to embrace her she screamed, screamed as if she were on fire, as if she was being consumed from the inside by a ferocious, devouring set of teeth. She bent over at the waist, clutching her lower abdomen, as if contractions were occurring more frequently with each passing moment. I drew Andrei toward me to protect us both from this insane woman, who shrieked in Russian and then English to go, go, go away now! Holding the boy’s hand, I pulled him with me out of the foyer of the apartment building; however, before we left I caught a glimpse over the woman’s shoulders of the interior of our old pad, and the rear wall in particular. That crazy crab sunset was still there-in fact, all of the walls were still painted as we had left them, like green forests blending into fields of wheat-and there at the end of the room was that evil purple bruised tomato of a sun crashing down into the land like a billion deaths of Icarus. There was an altar placed underneath the mural, dozens of little white flames and a few of those tall prayer candles that the Mexican women burn, as well as a brass brazier for incense. The door slammed and we were back outside again, the fury of her reaction following us, echoing behind and around us, a siren of screams and wails.

When I was a senior in high school, my stepmother confessed to me that she was in love with her business partner, Glen-a tall, good-looking black man who ran a local golf course. We were riding in her car on a winter afternoon, an ugly day of rain and cold and wind, the kind of raw New Orleans weather that had no associations with sweat and mosquitoes and ceiling fans and porch swings, no it was the Canadian front coming down from the Arctic to squeeze the blood from your bones, the rain smacking the windshield from about nine different directions, the car shaking as she smashed through rivers of running water, oblivious to damage she might do to the vehicle, to other drivers or ourselves. Playing on the radio was Foreigner’s big hit from that year-'I Want to Know What Love Is'-which seemed to have spawned the conversation. She said that she had always loved my father but Glen had shown her what love truly could be. She wheeled through the suburban streets of New Orleans East, past homes she had built, sold and insured, a minor member of the nobility of business leaders of this god-forsaken duchy of white flight. She spoke vaguely of divorce, separation, custody of my little brother, Glen’s adult children, Glen’s wife. I pictured my father, sitting in the garage, night after night, drinking a beer, fiddling with a gun, or reloading yet another round of .38 caliber ammunition, adding to his stockpile against foreign enemies and the fifth column, waiting and waiting for his wife to come home from yet another ‘meeting.’ She and Glen were always having a meeting or out golfing, or having a beer after they had golfed or having a drink at the Holiday Inn on Highway 90. Where would this all end? My father loved my stepmother in an unholy and utterly unredeemable way. He loved her as he loved his own mother, with loyalty, devotion, great anger and deep regrets. He loved her knowing she would always love other men in other ways and love them more than she would ever be capable of loving him. Whatever he had done to drive the grace, humanity and simple respect from their marriage would never ever be realized again, yet like Macbeth, to go backwards was just as bloody as going forwards. Through the affairs, the pills, the gambling, the suicide attempts, the late night freak-outs, the irrationality, the pettiness, and the plain old ordinary meanness he had stuck by that gal-and now she was ready to throw it all in, at last, for another married man. Good riddance, I thought as the car was pelted with water, wind, hail and god’s vengeance. When she dropped me at her office to answer the phones for the next four hours she warned me against telling my father about our conversation. I kept my mouth shut. I had learned from both of them a long time ago how to cover up a lie. Nevertheless, after that day, she was never the same, never treated me the same. Knowing I knew her ultimate secret made her fear me, and the fear led to hate. Before I had finished high school, I was already living with relatives out in the country. By summer, I was gone from her life, in some ways, for the rest of her life. Walking with Andrei now, I wondered if that was the last the poor lad would ever see of his own mum, and what a terrible thing to have to remember, and remember, and remember.

The Russian boy told me he wanted to go see his dada, that his dada was at work and that his dada would take care of him. “Are you sure your dada is working?” I asked. “It’s Christmas Day for a lot of people, even if it isn’t for you guys.” He said yes, his dada was at work and would I please take him there. He pointed down the street in the direction of Universal City. Why not, you know? By now, I was committed to the weirdness, so to speak. And how could your heart not break for the boy in the Batman pajamas pants? That is the detail that I enjoy the most, now that everything has happened and I know the strange and terrible and wonderful truth-the Batman pajamas pants are like some special gift from the fates. I was obsessed with Batman at an early age due to that fact that he and Robin the Boy Wonder were my babysitters. Day after day I would be plopped down in front of a TV set somewhere in our neighborhood, dazzled by the exploits of the Caped Crusader, frightened by the plot twists that found him tied up in basements or handcuffed to moon rockets or stunned by poison gas, aroused by the appearance of Catwoman, delighted and deranged by the music, both the driving intensity of the opening and closing theme but also the short, sharp horn riffs that spun the viewer from scene to scene. I lived for Batman, lived to be Batman, even called myself Batman and would answer to no other name. With my long blonde hair, pale white skin, freckles and blue eyes, wearing shorts and cowboy boots in the summer and long-pants and cowboys boots in the winter I was a unique version of the guardian of Gotham City, a four-year-old Caucasian fighter against social, political and legal injustice. I recall the pull that the TV characters had on my young mind, how their stories became my stories, their fears and worries were my fears and worries, their deaths would be my death, their abandonment would be my own abandonment. Episodes of Batman that ended with ‘To Be Continued Next Week’ caused me surges of anxiety, nail biting, constipation, fear. With no clear idea of time, and no reliable adults around to teach me time, I lived in a world in which the hero was always in peril, his fate in doubt, his demise practically assured. The Penguin, the Riddler, the Joker, all of those evil doers and their hordes of henchmen would finally overcome Batman and I could not save him, Robin couldn’t save him, Batgirl couldn’t save him, Commissioner Gordon couldn’t save him, only Batman could save Batman, but I would never know if he had been saved or if that was the secret end of it all. Sure, I would see another episode another day, same Battime, same Batchannel, but it was erratic, we often disappeared from public view for a while, lived in hippie crash pads, magic school buses and cabins in the North Woods. I longed for Batman, for Batman to come save me, for Batman to be my father and for my father to be Batman. I longed to be rescued but like everyone else who ever lived, I discovered that the key to my salvation was always with me, like Batman’s utility belt filled with exactly the right tool at exactly the right time, be it a mini-fire extinguisher or a pair of sharp scissors or an exploding canister of paint, what we needed was there for us if we only took the time to think it over, work out a plan and then execute it. Then the music would play, the tide would turn, plots would be foiled and a magical display of cartoon punching and buffoonish shenanigans would ensue, good over evil, badness banished to another episode at another time to be determined later. The only regret might be the arrest and deportation of Catwoman, an untrustworthy creature to be sure but perhaps one who could be converted or at the very least exploited. No matter what actress played that role, she was always about ten million times sexier and hotter and more delicious than Batgirl. I guess it was Catwoman’s music, all striptease and naughty thoughts, sultry voice and wiggly walk. I wanted her to be my mother, lover, soul provider and peace on earth. I wanted Batman and Catwoman to be my parents and I wanted to be safe. I wanted a father who wore a mask, drove fast, threw a mean punch and never smiled, except at me. I wanted the world that TV delivered, predictably unpredictable, conclusive, witty, pretty, clean, and utterly unlike my own life.

The Russian boy told me that his mommy and dada were divorced, and that they yelled at each other a lot. He said his dada would say mean things to his mommy and that his mommy would say bad words to dada, and then later mommy would cry. He said he loved mommy and he loved dada too, that he was going to have a house for mommy and a house for dada and a house for himself. He said that dada’s house belonged to someone else now and mommy didn’t have a house, she lived in the apartment. The Russian boy said that mommy needed money from dada and dada wasn’t made of money and he couldn’t poop money and that money did not arrive with the birds and the wind. The Russian boy said he was going to go find some money and give it to mommy so she wouldn’t have to ask dada for any more money and he said that he would also give some money to dada so he wouldn’t feel sad. The Russian boy said that he was going to the desert when he turned five and that he was going to look for Bobby’s Cave. “What’s Bobby’s Cave?” I asked. The Russian boy said that Bobby had a cave of gold and silver and pearls and rubies and diamonds and sapphires and that he, the Russian boy, was going to dig and dig and dig and dig until he found Bobby’s Cave of jewels and gold, etc. The Russian boy said that to do this he would have to win his enemies, meaning ‘beat’ them, and I asked him how many enemies we were talking about. “Forty,” said the Russian boy. “Bobby has forty These.” Ah yes, the dreaded 'Bobby and his Forty These', a far greater peril, and a far more lucrative reward, than the ones represented by Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves. The Russian boy went on to explain how he knew the password for the magic cave-“Open, says me!”- and he knew to look for the big fat man who guarded the cave. Andrei lifted his arms over his head with his hands together as if he were holding a sword and said, “Hassan chop!” We had paused on the sidewalk along Acama, condos and palms and parked cars all around, tinsel in the trees and shiny Santa’s on a few doors, soft beige antlers attached to the grill of a truck, a shimmering blue Hanukkah star jammed into a front lawn. Andrei did it again, raising and lowering the sword repeatedly and shouting, “Hassan chop! Hassan chop!” You know what he was referring to? A Bugs Bunny cartoon in which the title character’s attempt to tunnel to Pismo Beach leads instead to Arabia in the land of Aladdin’s Lamp and 1,001 Nights. As a child, the great Hassan and the size and curve of his scimitar had impressed me as well, and it was clear to anyone that he was something of a doddering but lethal assassin. Still, charged with guarding the loot of the forty thieves, he was unable to prevent Mr. Bunny from raising hell and high water and eventually dispatching the big galoot with a giant conk on the head with a golden chalice. It ended with the arrival of Daffy Duck, who apparently had taken to tunneling . He too was overwhelmed with wealth-lust, greed, inhumanity, violence, despair, pushing Bugs back down into the hole from which he himself just arrived, cackling, ‘I’m rich! I’m rich!’ My satisfaction of this recall was completed a moment later, for when I muttered those cartoon duck words, acted out years ago on a sound stage in Burbank, “I’m rich, I’m rich”, the Russian boy joined in, doing a little Circassia-type shuffle, joyfully chirping, “I’m rich, I’m wealthy, I’m comfortably well off, I’m rich, I’m wealthy, I’m comfortably well-off.” For a moment we danced together and sang together as the winter sun came down upon the suddenly magical and charming street.

We reached the end of Acama, which gently makes a ninety degree turn and eases into Vineland Avenue, that one short block that parallels the larger, busier lanes of Vineland, almost a street within a street, leaving behind another avenue of strangeness. I had always enjoyed the fact that Acama (Spanish: ‘he, she, you flatten’) was a broken street, in the sense that it runs in three distinct ‘chunks’: from Colfax, it runs one long block to Beck; interrupted, Acama appears again almost three blocks further north at the serpentine convergence of Bakman Avenue and Valley Spring Lane; taking a double-curved route south, southeast, Acama then flattens out onto the relatively long stretch that concludes where we were standing, next to the ferocious sounds of an on-ramp for the 101; then, (as you yourself discovered one afternoon and came home to tell me excitedly), Acama appears one final time slightly south and across the highway, with one dead-end terminus buried behind the North Weddington Recreation Center and the other intersecting and vanishing forever into Lankershim Boulevard. We both like how a street can do that, be chopped into pieces and stretched out over distance and time and if you were to travel on all its interrupted segments you would be able to tell the story of the parts of the street that may have vanished, been replaced, uncompleted, renamed, given away, or never were. The street was like a family and each block was a child and a parent, a sibling and a grandmother, an aunt and an uncle, tio, tia, mama, papa, hermano, hermana, abuelo, abuelita, primos and cousins one and all. Acama had been our family and maybe Andrei’s too, though it was hard to understand how a mother could reject such a painfully beautiful child. Acama was a street of houses we could never afford and rent controlled apartments housing the invalids, the cranks, the warriors, the artists, the gays, and us. It was a street of piled up condos and tucked away small pools where you and I would sneak a dip, me fully swimming, you cooling your feet. I would plunge in and feel the icy darkness of that buried deep California concrete, in the shadow of an old shabby but sexy apartment building-something like a TV damsel who had aged quite well-and then emerge from the chilling green chlorinated water to smooch your sweet lips. Then out, grab the towel and slip on the flip-flops and we would walk around the corner to Aqua Vista Street and plunge into another hidden pool. Yes, Acama Street was our story, and yet incomplete, for we spent almost no time at all on the third and final piece, that leafy lane of single family homes, a strip of America and the San Fernando Valley that terminates at Weddington Park. Had we lived on that high-end arm of the family tree you could have been greeted by a view of the Hollywood Hills and the Universal Building when you walked out the door each morning. The inescapable sight of the job, that reverse obelisk of wasted hours for other people’s dreams, and the destination now for a four-year-old boy named Andrei and his faithful dog’s body, Andre.

We walked south on Vineland Avenue and when we reached the bridge over the Los Angeles River, we stopped and took in the view. To the west, the sky was broad and flat, like a blue wall of infinite height and length, creamed with light cottony clouds that appeared to converge on a vanishing point in the deep center of the frame. One took for granted the daily appearance of the jet engine contrails that normally left hillocks of white smoke in the air for hours, and to not see them today was a reminder that every so often there was a figment of our imagination that resembled peace on earth, if not necessarily good will towards men. Down below us and coming from a curve to the left was the tightly engineered bed of concrete that called itself a river, and I suppose it had the right to be so, for when the winter rains did come once every five years, the torrent that was carried along that freeway of waters was a man-killer. Anything that could move that many cubic feet of water at those speeds and with that volume deserved to be ranked with any river in America in terms of violence, force of will and utter potential for doom. Indeed, that’s why the LA River resembled today a creation from the minds of a fascist government bent on bending nature to the sovereign will of man-because she was a killer of people and machines and real estate values, because she was like all rivers and all water, a keeper of her own rules, a seeker of ever lower surfaces, a true gutter wench always seeking to bring you down to the gutter with her-indeed, to expand the gutters of humanity until we all were in it, truly classless at last, our white and brown and yellow and red bodies all puffed up and putrefying and carried out to the sea to be the food of her worms, her scavengers, her carrion fish of prey. To the east the LA River shot in a straight line to the prominent mountain of Griffith Park like a quest for adventure, a visit with the old man, a promise of treasure or the last barrier to clear before one was finally outside of the law and a fugitive from justice at last. Remember the time that majestic green tit caught fire and burned? You called me from your car as you drove back to work from our apartment on Acama. It was a blazing summer day and the air was dry and dangerous with sun, dust, unrelieved mediocrity, dead ideas, shot down proposals, in a word, failure: failure to rain, failure to write, failure to make it big or die trying, failure to die, failure to truly live, failure to be whatever had compelled so many of us to leave somewhere else to come suffer in the hotbox of this pornographer’s paradise called LA. “Look outside,” you said, and hung up so I could do just that. When I strolled out of our cool cave of air-conditioned nightmares and onto the sidewalk, I immediately saw what you were referring to. Atom bomb. It was my first thought. Like seeing those old black and white films of the first, rather weak A-bombs, the ones that resembled what I was seeing with my own eyes, a forest fire on a mountainside on a balls-hot day in August. The smoke rolled, billowed, and blotted out the sun. For five or ten minutes, the witnesses who cared to pause and contemplate their own insignificance knew the true meaning of ‘awesome.’ You wanted to fall to your knees and welcome the messiah into your sinner’s weed. You wanted to (metaphorically) slay the handmaidens of Christ and ride roughshod over their clothing as it fell to the bedroom floor. You wanted to drink long and deep of whiskey, water and wine or at least the cheapest, strongest, coldest malt liquor that money could buy. You wanted to be in the air above that living, breathing consuming sign of God’s magnificence and mercy and you wanted to be at ground level, up close, feeling its power, hearing its ungodly sounds, watching man, woman, child, animal, vehicles and birds running pell-mell from their own extravagance, corruption, glory and deaths. You wanted it to burn all summer and into the fall, until the land was as ugly and ruined on the outside as it surely was on the inside. But it didn’t, and now that mountain was just an emerald in the distance bathed in beauty, a vision for the pioneers, the sober, the sensible, the keepers of promises, payers of bills and taxes, organizers of rivers, valleys, images and stars, directors and producers of mountains where there was once only a bottomless pit, creators and destroyers of worlds and worlds of wealth.

Becoming a parent elevates you from commoner status to that of nobility. Becoming a parent makes you noble because you now have an inheritor and therefore in theory you have something to be inherited. As newly elevated nobility, you immediately take an assessment of your net worth, your estate, your lands, your carriages, your men in livery, your coat of arms, your chivalric devices, the health of your sexual organs, your tendencies to go mad. You meditate upon what you will bequeath in terms of manners, morals, obligations, common sense. You recall with renewed anguish the many small insults and assaults to your own character, the tiny lessons that molded you, the ways that you were made. Inevitably, you consider your own upbringing and naturally, you find your parents to be guilty of heinous crimes. The list is so long and detailed that it lends itself to tedium and boredom rather than to newly discovered incidents that would only confirm what our biases already believe, that our parents were unrepentant fuckups from ass to Christmas who appeared more interested in cataloging a rogues’ inquiry of destructive behaviors before they sadly and badly sank to the bottom of their personal inland sea. Yet once you become a parent, you tend to forgive even if forgetting is an ideal unobtainable. One is so wracked with their own emotional Dien Bien Phu that they have little time to coddle long past grievances with the not so long dead. I can’t look at our son’s face without seeing that pink patch across his nose acquired when he fell face-first onto the frame of his high-chair while I stood there, four feet away, knowing he was going to stumble eventually, knowing that his fourteen-month-old-coordination would be unable to prevent him from toppling onto the bone-hard plastic and metal crossbars an inch or two above the floor, knowing that the basic ability to throw out one’s hands and prevent a major blow to the chops was nonexistent and yet I left the high-chair in his play space, stood at the door ‘supervising’ his amble, scramble and eventual plummet to the smack down surface of Life. He cried, and not so much with pain as with surprise, shock, his face frozen in a glowing red and white frieze of anguish, sorrow and abandonment, followed by three or four great piercing wails. Me, I just stood there for a microsecond, as we have been taught to do, before quickly stepping over the plastic walls of his kingdom to soothe and amuse. I’ll carry that day until my last breath on this planet, begging forgiveness for the forgiven, the forgotten, the never was and the never will, for the scar to heal and the coordination to improve, for the chance to not do it again and the knowledge that it will happen again, and probably with more dire consequences, no matter what you choose. We know our families live and die with the guilt of what they have done. How many days and nights did Audrey waste in utter despair recalling the time she shut the car door on my leg? A dozen? Two dozen? A hundred? Two hundred? Of course, she never forgot it, for it was one of the first things we spoke about after not seeing each other for years. She was frantic back then, she explained, she didn’t know her own mind. That Buick, she said, it was a poor design. However, she knew it was all a cover. She knew we were in a rush and she had my brother jump in the front seat with her and I climbed into the backseat behind her. She leaned her seat forward, cigarette burning, Top 40 playing, engine running, her strawberry red hair curled and soft, her surgically altered face grim, her mouth a cauldron of bad mojo, her scowl that could stop rocks. “Hurry up!” she said. Maybe I was hurrying or maybe not, but I certainly wasn’t fast enough. As I climbed in behind her, she slammed the door shut on my left leg. Pain, yes, but more than that, shock, I guess. Perhaps I hadn’t experienced such a direct example of her cruelty before, though that is unlikely. Perhaps it was having my young brother as a witness. Or perhaps it was my age-about 13-when you feel too old for all that. Or perhaps it was the ruthlessness of her actions and her utter lack of sympathy afterwards. No, now that I am noble, with an inheritor in my house as well as a candidate to be the king, I must remember that she did not get to that strange crossroads of inhumanity and motherhood on her own, she was brought there. I too have someone to bring somewhere, the only journey that will ever matter again.

We crossed Vineland and turned down Bluffside Drive, the side street that runs alongside the shopping center where Ralphs and Starbucks are located, as well as the place where we used to get our nails done together. What a weird lost good time that was, no? You sitting next to me in one of those heavy chairs that assault your body, a massage chair with a whirlpool for the feet, a pad of numbers on the armrest that allows you to program the machine in which you sit to send a metal and plastic fist into your lower back, middle back, upper back and nut sack. The machine will do your hips, ass, legs and shoulders, your spine will be bent, your ribs will creak, and your feet will grow soft in the soft water. A woman from an ancient Oriental kingdom like Khmer or the Saigon Citadel or the realm of the Khan will apply great pressure and force to your feet and toes, plying them with the wisdom of the ancients, rubbing into them the old ways and the old days, the bones of our ancestors, the truly deep land of sleep. You sit in your chair while this child of the rising sun does her tricks, scrubbing and pruning the skin and the nails, making layers of dead skin disappear, making the wrong right and the right righteous, making you feel for five fucking minutes like a human being and not an automaton, a robot in the service of other robots and the machines that build the robots themselves. We would reach out and touch fingers, and you would smile that way at me that told me that you truly loved me, that I was the only one you would ever love, that I was the keeper of kings and the reason for living, that I and I alone was the reason that you came home each night, more happy, less afraid, your arm so long, your hand so graceful, your kindness so prevalent, your eyes so professionally blue. Yes, to sit there surrounded by white women-with the occasional sister getting her feet on-was to be the only frat boy at a sorority party, the object of much curiosity, some interest and not a little disdain. You are invading a woman’s world when you get your nails done, almost as if you were taking a shit in the girl’s bathroom while smoking a blunt and playing Mingus too loud. Gals don’t really like gays either, except in a non-threatening way like being in a play with one or going to their parties. Other than that, straight women fear that gay men will steal their baloney and so I have felt their cutting edge glance when they think I am a pony boy and not your boy toy. No matter, I have been accused of worse. And so what I wouldn’t give to have you there with me, choosing a color for yourself while I went with basic shiny black, all the better to conceal my ugly, fungus stained nails, and you getting something like burgundy leaves or autumn wine country or whatever crazy name they find for their colors. Then, bill paid and I handle the tip in cash, we walk out in thin rubber flip-flops with toilet paper between our toes and we saunter to the sushi restaurant next door, have some sake', have a bottle of Asahi, order just a roll or two, maybe some Miso and some edamame. Yes, my darling, those were my thoughts as Andrei and I walked down Bluffside Drive, a wall of condo city on our left and smaller individual apartments on the right, green grassy lawns, a dog and his master walking, the dog stopping to do its business, the master standing at attention, the whole picture a comic opera without words, and the street heading directly at the Universal Building like a driveway, that slate colored stone and smoked glass fortress rising alone against the sky of dreams, the San Gabriel Mountains behind it, their crests topped with snow, the sky as magic as it ever is when you are in love with me. I held his hand and let him be as quiet as he wanted and as I wanted to be too. I didn’t know anything then about love, loss, evil, hurt, disappointment, and betrayal. I thought only of myself, us, and our own little boy, asleep perhaps in his smaller crib in your mother’s house, watched over with a black and white movie camera that catches the sound of his ocean making noise machine. I knew not where you were at that moment, and that was the painful part, not knowing where you were or what you were doing or with whom or why. I just took in the Christmas sun, thought of how ugly my feet were looking these days and got us to the end of that bright and suddenly lonely street.

The Russian boy and I climbed the embankment to the sidewalk that ran alongside Campo de Cahuenga, the street that crosses over the 101, leading to Lankershim Boulevard and the Universal Building, which now stood as the only significant object in our view, besides the freeway itself. It is the Hollywood Freeway at this point, but just a ¼ mile back where it splits with the 134, it’s the Ventura Freeway, and of course, that reminds me of that song by America. ‘Ventura Highway’ came out two days after my fifth birthday and went to #3 on the easy listening stations in the US, which was Audrey’s favorite kind of music. Once upon a time, she’d been down with Hendrix, Dylan, and the Stones. Once upon a time she’d rocked out to The Airplane, The Who, Big Brother and the Holding Company. But the 60’s were killed by the 60’s themselves and people just stopped caring anymore after Jimi died, Janis died, the Beatles broke up, Nixon widened the war and then won reelection in a landslide. People just wanted a good fucking time and that’s what that song is, good time music. I sang what little of it I knew as the Russian boy and I crossed over eight lanes of freeway, strangely thin with cars, looking like the old photos of LA in the 50’s when there was plenty of roads and not enough cars, when many days looked like this, with only a few dozen or so cars passing under you every minute as opposed to hundreds or even thousands. I’ve never liked bridges over noisy highways-they always make me feel as if I’ll be sucked over the side and land on the road, only to be chased across lane after lane as I scramble on my hands and knees, finally smashed by an unlicensed driver driving an unregistered car, a mad and drunken migrant worker who flees into the trees. Humming ‘Ventura Highway’ while holding Andrei’s hand, with that rising Universal shaft of glass and stone in front of us like a citadel arrived at from many miles and weeks of walking, the freeway slow and steady underneath us, I felt as good as I have felt since you left-almost as if you had not left at all. I felt important and needed and okay with who I was now as well as who I would and would never be. I felt the call of California as I had when I was a child in the Midwest, a student in kindergarten, the cold wet Minnesota winters around us and making Thanksgiving turkey hands and turtle necked sweaters and the sound of America’s sweet voices telling me it was all going to be okay anyway. And I had sung that song with Audrey, at least the parts I could understand, the ‘you’re gonna go Joe’ and ‘alligator lizards in the air’ parts, the parts that made me want to runaway already from everyone and everything, or at least with just my father. I wanted to travel with papa in his VW Bug, having fun, going to the park, climbing trees, playing games. I remembered how special it had felt for a few precious months in which I was the only child, and my father had custody of me, he was unmarried but living with Audrey, and I was the boy king, Flapjack, Pancake, the kid who slept in his father’s black t-shirt and got up in the night to drink water and pee, the cutie with the roan tooth from bonking it on a windowsill, the lad who wore a one of his father’s old belts cut down to fit, with a real brass buckle, worn religiously even if it was too big for any of my pants. The independent son, the one who walked himself home and to school, the one who you didn’t needed to be concerned about, the one who liked to read, the one who could be alone. I gripped little Andrei’s hand tightly, the traffic noise crushing my music and I sang louder, prouder, happier, a bit of an edge now, a bit of feeling too, for I had made it to the Ventura Highway of my mind and that song and yet you weren’t with me, and my son was sleeping in a faraway room or playing with his faraway toys. This little boy, with me right now, became my own salvation at that moment, my only hope for forgiveness and reunification. I became utterly convinced as we strode the bridge, waited at the light at its crest and then descended towards the Metro subway station, that getting this boy back to his father was my ticket to some higher power, a transcendence, a freeing of the soul from the terrible wanting of the flesh-and a way to get you to change your mind and come home, come home, come home.

The entrance to the Universal Building always feels needlessly intimidating, as if one is entering a fortress built for defense. It starts with those wide black steps that lead from the street up to the mezzanine. One could imagine a row of archers standing at the top, bows drawn, ready to send hell downstream at the surging barbarian horde. There is another, smaller tighter stairwell along the Lankershim face of the building, and it appears to be designed to be guarded by a small squad of men armed only with swords. I used to bring Pineapple with me when I would come visit you at work and he’d sprint to the top of those wide flat 100 steps and then race around the pond nestled in the court of the mezzanine. Surely, the fattest dumbest least-wild squirrels must have lived in that copse of mixed hardwoods and pines nestled around an artificial body of water populated with imported white ducks. He had himself a rodent chasing romp to be sure but security quickly shut that down. That’s another element of the place: all those hard dudes at the door checking ID, making sure you’re on the list to enter the facility or are wearing your special badge around your neck, flash, you’re in. What a job, standing around all day trying to be suspicious of the people you see constantly, to be more a part of the building that the workers themselves, for companies come and go, change, downsize, upsize, morph, re-morph, disappear utterly from the face of the earth or simply send their employees to cheaper offices at the edge of former horse pastures and methane gas fields. No, security is a part of the infrastructure and those big round boys with their cafe-au-lait skin and their pimples and their linebacker physiques and the blue blazers and walkie-talkies are always the types of dudes I try to steer clear of, wanna-be-cops who like nothing better than to give a slick bullshitter like me a hard day. I get it, they’re trying to protect America from itself, especially its stalker side, and I really wouldn’t change anything at all since it gives me something to look forward to, mindless petty bureaucracy carried out to its fullest possibilities, As Andrei and I took the broad staircase to the brightly lit mezzanine with the December sky pieced among the architecture like a slice of blue infinity and sparrows flitting in the cavernous arches and the wind whipped down the stairs and drove dust and newspaper shards before it, I imagined the difficulties that awaited us-a kid who claimed his father worked here being escorted by a stranger he met ninety minutes ago in North Hollywood Park. No ID on the kid and mine would be useless, I did not work here and for that matter, neither did you. Though I imagined that they would have remembered you, with that sweet hourglass ass how could they not, or that you knew the secret entrances or the passageways that led to the underground chamber where all dreams go to die. No, it didn’t figure to be an easy time, perhaps even the end of the line would occur right here where the world begins, the security desk of the Universal Building on Christmas Day with the cops being called and a pair of fuzz showing up, one Asian male, one Hispanic female, and they’d take down all the statements and of course treat me from the beginning as a suspect in a kidnapping and my day would be shot at least for the next two hours, maybe longer, and would the kid even find his dad, who knew, and god forbid if they should return him to the rampaging lunatic who answered the door at his mother’s house. Yeah, my confidence level was at an all time low as we emerged hand in hand at level with the pond, with the smoked glass doors to the building on our right and the row of shops and restaurants on our left, all closed and ghostly of course, no business to be done on Jesus’ birthday even if most of the people who passed this way didn’t celebrate the arrival of Emmanuel. No people on benches in the sun gazing dopily at their phones while ducks quaked about just as stupidly, conning the odds of a bite of sandwich or a taste of potato chips. Nobody in the park, nobody at the tables outside the coffee shop, and nobody to be seen in the foyer of the Universal Building. Great. Nobody home. We walked toward the sliding doors together, Andrei and I, expecting them to remain solidly shut. However, they opened with a crisp whisk, and we were walking over rubber-backed black rugs past the cordons that ordinarily would be coiled with people but were empty now. No one sat at the desk before the velvet tropes watching employees scan their ID. Across the lobby, where the larger security desk stood in front of a bank of closed circuit televisions, there was only an empty rolling chair, and the TV's themselves were blank. There wasn’t any sign of life at all, an air of desolation, as if no one ever had been there, a state of permanent Saturday, unoccupied, unmanned, the circuits unplugged, the scanners downgraded, the ropes undusted, the carpets un-vacuumed, the security unsecured. But no worries. Andrei took it all in stride and led me to the elevator banks, the ones on the left that skip the first fifteen floors. He pressed a button on the wall and it turned pink. A second later, the brass doors of an elevator opened like the eyes of a lover after an afternoon nap. We stepped aboard, and Andrei pressed the button for floor 35. The elevator doors came together, folded hands of prayers and that box of lights and metal and carpet and wood rose quickly, dizzyingly into the upper heights of the tallest building in the San Fernando Valley.

I had forgotten that you worked on the 25^th floor, but I recalled that fact as soon as the elevator doors opened and I saw the posters on the wall for artists under the Universal label: Steely Dan and Joe Cocker, Elton John and Donna Summer, Herbie Hancock and George Benson, Vangelis, The Carpenters, Tangerine Dream. All of those successful people and their miles of work displayed in a simple image of the band name, or a smiling face, glistening eyes of the youthful artist in their skinny 1970’s primes, when their hair was thick and the drugs were clean and nobody knew nothing, nor did they pretend to. I thought of all the great music you had brought home during those days when you managed the office at Universal Digital Initiative. Some of it I could practically reach out and touch from where I am sitting now: Etta James, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, The Rolling Stones and enough Eryka Badu for all our cars, all our record players, all our CD systems. Andrei led me down the hall past empty offices, their lights off but illuminated nonetheless by the holiday sun streaking in through the smoked glass, views of the unimportant work stations where white collar employees sweated out all the troubles of the day, staring at alphanumeries, trying to divine the future from the past and the present from the future, blonde wood desks and dark carpet and succulents in small clay red pots, little Christmas trees and candies, the walls of the halls hung with tinsel, blue and silver cheer but not a soul to be seen. Andrei took us to the double doors that led into your old office suites. “This is where your father works?” I said. Andrei said yes. “My wife worked here,” I said. Andrei nodded as if this were common knowledge. I had told him that you once worked in this building but not for what division of Universal nor had I told him the floor. At that moment if I had fur, it would had risen, like that of our dogs. I wonder why that happens. Is it to make the animal look larger, eerier, scarier? Yet the animal does it unconsciously, as if the body were protecting itself by conjuring some supernatural sensation of warning, especially from behind-a defense system for the most vulnerable aspect of our existence, the physical rear and the unknown reality that borders on the horrible, even the godly. When this happens to me, I become acutely aware of sight, of sound, of motion, of surprise. I was utterly ‘on point’ now as Andrei tried the entrance to the suite, the words Universal Digital Initiative attached to the wall in modern bronze. The heavy door on the right opened. Darling, if you had been sitting there, waiting for us both, minding the phones and the emails before noon on Christmas Day, it would not have affected me at all. I now understood that I was on a journey, possibly real, possibly fantastic, possibly imagined, possibly dreamed. I felt as out-of-body as I did the night I met your cousin Billie-I was not sure if what was happening was truly happening or whether I was being whisked by ambulance to the emergency room, or even worse, spacing out on a gurney in some dark hospital while the morphine claimed my life. No, you weren’t there at the large desk that sits just inside the door to the suite, nor was there any evidence that you had worked there before, except that little sign you had attached to the mini-refrigerator: ‘Gone crazy! Back soon!’ I loved the sentiment in that orange shiny square of hominess, not so much because it is typical for people to have such things in their office space along with pictures of their lovers, kids, animals-or little cards, little calendars, little snow-scenes, little magnets from Hawaii, anything to help the individual escape the reality of their prison-but also I liked that you had that sign because it’s true: you do go crazy, but you always come back soon. Remember that please. Anyway, the lights were on in the suite, though no one else was around, and there was no one in his father’s office-though the sign on the door said Nikolai Stavrogin, a Russian enough sounding name, and one that seemed vaguely familiar. On the desk was a blue sticky note. Andrei let go my hand, walked over and picked it up. He read it, and then handed it to me. It said, ‘Andrei, meet me on the observation deck. Love, papa.’ Without a word, the Russian boy took my hand and led me out of his father’s office, past your former work station and out of the suite, down the hall past a poster of Bob Marley, stoned and happy in the Caribbean sun, back to the elevators. Andrei punched the ‘up’ button. Our story continued to be told.

We exited the elevator onto the 35^th, and highest, floor of the building. A bank of doors to our left informed us of the location of the Clark Ellis Real Estate Company, but Andrei immediately walked to our right, past the elevator doors and down a long hall of closed wooden doors. I followed, watching him from the back, his booty high and bouncing, his balance on the toes of his sneakers, his arms by his side swinging like an exaggerated nutcracker dance, his blondish red hair rising in a cowlick, his total sense of purpose at this moment in time. Up until now he had been my mostly silent but observant companion, a bit unsure of each next move, but ultimately willing to take it, as if I had been coaching him to jump off ever higher diving boards and now, with the end of the line before us, he was racing ahead to show me that he wasn’t afraid to hazard the highest dive of all. We reached a black steel door at the end of the hall with a red ‘Exit’ sign encased in a steel frame above the doorframe. Andrei opened the door into a stairwell, one of those passages through a building that looks like a mine shaft, with that dim fluorescent lighting and the grey grime of the concrete, the exposed pipes and foam insulation, a hard steel stairwell going down and going up, a fire extinguisher in a glass case on the wall, far from anything that could possibly burn and likely to be forgotten when something in some office down the hall did go up in flames. Andrei took the stairwell up, holding the rail with his left hand and watching where he placed his feet. We reached a landing about ten or fifteen steps up, and took another set of steps to a silver door with a pane of glass embedded in the middle, head-high. We reached the door together, me slowing down so that Andrei could keep up, knowing how much it would mean to him to be the first to see his father. As Andrei turned the knob to open the door, I looked through the window out onto the rooftop of the building. Have you ever been up there? I remember you told me that when you worked for Universal Music you were the floor warden, and how you got the insider’s tour of the building. You mentioned the dedicated water supply and special generators, and the long hidden hall that exited into the lobby like something out of Batman’s mansion. Still, I don’t recall you describing the roof, nor would you have gone up there on your own, heights being something that you’re no great fan of. Nor would I have gone up there either unless I was leading and being led by a four-year-old boy with the sweetest face and a Russian accent. Glancing through the safety glass I saw the gravel and asphalt roof itself, anchored with enormous smoking condensers, huge fans inside huge boxes keeping the hermetically sealed building at a steady sixty-five degrees. There were maintenance ladders and catwalks, complicated machinery and alleys between each giant brick of roaring spinning infrastructure. The noise was incredible. We walked into it, the whir of fan blades and smoking, chugging locomotives of air cooling pistons. Hardly an observation deck, but Andrei seemed to know exactly where to go and now he began to run in a funny stiff-legged way, sort of bouncing on his toes, then his heels, as much of a dance as a walk, and with his arms pinned now at his sides he looked just like a little acrobat bouncing across the circus floor in his colorful getup and fresh white skin and I wondered if he had a ballet dancing future. He got ahead of me by about ten or fifteen feet, then suddenly turned left and cut between two roaring AC units, moving faster and faster and finally breaking into a run, almost as if he were trying to escape me. Ahead of us was a chest high wall and beyond that, the open blue sky of Southern California on Christmas Day. Above us were the soaring blue heavens with a shifting trail of white islands of water vapor, clouds of paradise above a land that had long since ceased to be one. As Andrei sprinted towards the wall, I had a terrible thought that he might fly headlong over it, but a blonde man in a black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, boots and blue jeans stepped from behind the end of the huge AC unit and caught the boy in his arms. They spun around together two or three times, laughing and howling ‘oo-rah’ over and over. The Russian boy was laughing, laughing, laughing with joy and relief and love and trust. He hugged his father tightly, grabbing fistfuls of the leather jacket while his father stroked his hair and kissed his cheeks. I paused, not wanting to intrude upon their reunion, which seemed utterly genuine, almost magical, as if they hadn’t seen each other in many years. I waited for the father to notice me, or for the Russian boy to turn to me and say something, not so much a thank you as an acknowledgement that I, an utter stranger, had done what he asked me to do without much questioning or doubt. Just a smile or a wave and perhaps I would have shook his father’s hand and accepted his gratitude and then gotten out of there and back to my day. Already I could taste hops and barley and cold malt liquor, the hot burn of a blunt, the relaxed stare into oblivion, the chance to truly relax for five fucking minutes and actually have something good to think about in terms of myself. However, there was nothing at all from either of them. It was as if I didn’t exist and never had. I watched as the father turned and walked toward the wall that rimmed the roof’s edge, talking into his son’s ear in Russian. The boy held his father around the neck, and one of his hands was lovingly stroking his father’s blonde hair as he gazed away from me and out over the landscape of the valley, with its shiny little houses and glittering silver boulevards and greenery and palms trees and shiny silver cars and the mountains in the long distance, far beyond a day’s walk, capped with snow which also shone silver under a nearly noon yellow sun. The father was saying something deliberate to his son-you could tell by the way he leaned into the boy’s ear to emphasize a point-and the boy nodded his head a few times to show that he understood. When they reached the protective wall, the father stopped, but only for a moment. Then he threw Andrei over the side of the building, and without a glance back at me, stepped up onto the wall, brought his feet together and his hands in a point over his head and dove off the building, disappearing without a sound from my sight.     

The shock of what I saw was like a physical blow. My chest and head snapped back as if I was in a moving car that reached a sudden violent halt. My legs shivered and shook, then propelled me forward in a series of awkward jelly-steps, my feet finding their way but unsurely, as if I were badly drunk but also massively surprised. I stumbled and then ran to the retaining wall at the edge of the roof. I could still picture the father throwing Andrei so deliberately, almost practiced, as if he was pitching him into a warm swimming pool or a sun-dappled lake. And then his own violent and lovely end, standing on the wall like he was climbing a stool to change a light bulb in his kitchen, then the hands together above his head, the king of summer ruling over us all with the world’s last, best swan dive. Now I looked down at the ground, the little duck pond at the mezzanine level.  Andrei’s body was down there, a splayed lump of clothing. The impact had knocked off both his sneakers but otherwise he could have been sleeping on his side. Twenty feet or so to his right was his father’s body, a blood splattered mess of pulp and leather and hair-covered pieces of bone. His arms were outstretched, as if he had managed to go face-first into the concrete, leaving behind a Christian symbol of martyrdom, the man flayed and betrayed to the cross of his own decisions. I began panting, and a strange sound emerged from my lungs, a horrible moan, as if I had just seen my own son murdered and then been party to my own suicide. What had I just witnessed, and why? I looked down at the bodies again, no one else around down there, no security, no building maintenance people, no 'type-A’s' working on Christmas Day with their mega cup of coffee and their ears filled with phone. Even they would have heard the impact of those two falls, or at least seen what was there now, the remains of the sweetest little boy and his father, a man I never knew, and based on his final two acts, a man I could never ever know. Oh, I howled. Oh, I howled to the gods that made me, to the star in the sky from which I came and to which I would someday be reunited. I howled at the baby blue sky, unblemished now, utterly scrubbed of water vapor of any kind, no clouds, no airplanes, just a wide-open and glistening emptiness. You could see 10,000 miles straight up and still not see anything. You could look to the east and there would be mountains and mankind, and beyond to the horizon, a distance so far and purifying that to reach it would be to betray everything you ever wanted for yourself, then to look north and see the wasteland of the San Fernando Valley, a despicable place, a place of homies and hotties and friends that loved you until you were friendless, and then to the west, the dear dark west with its shine of the Pacific and her riptides and her money-laundering future and her grape-growing past, all of it at once filled and empty under that early winter sky. Then I saw him. Just a speck in the wide open blue yonder, but there he was in those Batman pants, with the little jacket flapping behind him, the Russian boy, flying through the Christmas sky, soaring over Ventura Boulevard, getting closer and closer to me, cruising through the air with his hands out and his feet tucked behind him, his hoodie around his face. As he passed the Universal Building, he descended to my height, gave me a small quick wave, and then shot off to the south, following the path of the Hollywood Freeway and disappearing at last through the Cahuenga Pass.

When I got back down to the lobby, there was a security guard sitting at the large desk in front of the bank of TVs-a stocky Latino with silver braces on his teeth wearing a black suit and tie. His hair was shiny black with pomade, spiked up, and he had a friendly twinkle to his eye. He was about my age. I must have looked a sight when I approached his desk, hungover, in shock, sleepless for days, an unshaven haggard street urchin all grown up and gone from bad to worse. The guard’s name was Eddie-he remembered you, said your eyes were gorgeous, which is true. I explained to Eddie what had just happened, and asked him to call 911, that there were two dead bodies next to the duck pond outside. Eddie nodded while I spoke, his eyelids half closed, calmly taking in my half-coherent rant. He stood, and as I continued to speak, moved from around the desk to my side, until eventually he was standing right next to me. He was about my height; maybe shorter, built like the high school linebacker I’m sure he once was thirty years ago. I found him escorting me towards the doors and soon we were out on the mezzanine, standing next to the duck ponds. He gestured towards the landscape, to the pretty emptiness of it all, the white ducks jostling each other in a corner of the pond, a few mallards and their mates swimming, the sway of the trees at water’s edge, the neatly mown grass with patches of wild flowers clustered on hillocks and under the trees, a squirrel chattering to another squirrel, the sun-caressed water itself.  The sidewalk, where I had seen the smashed body of the father and the strangely undestroyed body of the child, was only cobbled stones, a few wooden benches, a smattering of lampposts, and the great roaring freeway beyond. No death, no destruction, no horror of horrors, no terror of terrors, no sin of all sins, no denial of god and man in one fell swoop and no utter contempt for oneself and one’s immortal soul in another. All of that a was just a great and fantastic unreality lived and dreamed by another man on another day, perhaps not even on this world but in some far off solar system where the rules are all reversed, where fathers murder sons and where heroes live to celebrate those fathers and their tremendous, unholy deeds. At last, Eddie got me to calm down, stop talking and get seated on one of those wooden slatted benches that face the water. He asked me if I believed in god. I said yes. He said that he did as well. He said that he had no clear understanding of what god was or how god operated, however; only that god was as real as you or me or any other people anywhere on earth, that god was us and that we were god, not some dude in the sky with a beard and a throne or a halo or a chariot or any of that. Then he told me a story. It went like this. In 1984, not too long after the building opened, a man who worked here was going through a terrible divorce and custody battle with his wife, so on Christmas Day he brought their four-year-old son to the roof, threw the child from the top and then jumped to his death. “The thing was,” said Eddie. “The kid lived.” He touched me lightly in the arm. “He lived. The kid survived for something like an hour and a half. They got him to a hospital and hooked him up to all those machines or whatever. Can you believe that, man? A four-year-old surviving a fall from that high.” He turned and pointed to the top of the building. I looked too and for a moment it was peaceful, quiet. How did it feel when daddy threw you from the roof? Were you scared? Of course. Were you shocked? How could you not have been. That feeling must be unimaginable to a living person-the ultimate betrayal that leads to an almost immediate death-yet there are a few seconds to contemplate what has just happened, the impossible made possible, chaos unleashed, all rules torn asunder, the death of your old god almost simultaneous with your reunification with your new one.  Dear boy, dear boy, I shall never stop weeping for that moment, that dreaded and horrid moment when he launched you from his loving and protective arms into the horrible mouth of death, the moment you realized what he had just done. Did I help you? Did I help set you free from that moment, even in death, of realizing that daddy had let you go on purpose?  Eddie was quiet for a while, and then he said, “There’s never been anyone else who came here on Christmas Day and said what you said. About coming here with him. He brought you here. That little boy brought you here to be with his dad again. That’s gotta mean something, man. That’s gotta mean something.” I asked him what he thought it meant. He shrugged his shoulders and gazed out over the pond, but his eyes were seeing something else, hard days, worse nights, ugliness, pain, suffering, shame, anger, jailhouses, prison bars, gang activity, the works. It was in his craggy handsome features and his barely concealed neck tattoos, the scars where there shouldn’t be scars, the big meaty hands that crushed bones, broke faces, windows, doors. He was on the right side of security these days but it had not always been that way. “I never knew my father,” he said. So I was a knucklehead. One hundred per cent knucklehead. I got my shit straightened out, though. Good thing, ‘cause now I got kids of my own. Two of them, a boy and a girl. My son looks just like me. Acts just like me too. That’s what scares me. But my little girl, she’s my angel. She’s definitely daddy’s little girl. My wife, she can be a handful, man, I ain’t gonna lie. We fight. We say things we don’t mean. But you know, man, at the end of the day, you gotta think about your kids. You know? Fuck all that bullshit. Fuck it all, man. You gotta stick with your kids. Ain’t nothing better than your kids. It means that you mean something. It means you finally fucking count for something besides your own bullshit.” Then he smiled and said what the hell, what did he know. His radio squawked, he spoke Spanish into it, we stood up and he gave me a man-hug, one of those kind I haven’t had since I worked at Valley High with all those crazy people. It was nice, I really needed some humanity at that moment, and maybe Eddie did too. We hit a final fist bump and then I headed back down those cavernous stairs, a little lighter, a little tighter, ready to face my problems without the barriers, without the solitude, ready at last to ask for help.