A Los Angeles Story

(2024)

When I left my apartment thirteen months ago, I willingly stepped off the waterwheel of my life. I left my wife sleeping in our bed, towels dripping on the laundry rack and a resignation letter inching out of my outbox. I walked five miles east to where I curled up under a bridge and cried sweet tears of freedom. Do you know, I don’t think I’d truly cried since 9/11.

The beginning of my homelessness was ecstasy. My little white pill was a clear vista at the top of a caul-de-sac on the edge of development where the city bound with land, where sprinklers water dirt and the smell is healthy and herbal. All plants could be sage in the world where the actress can be seen in her kitchen at night, peeling back her bangs at the reflection of herself in the glass.

I was fleshy clean, still possessing that vigorous healthiness, as if rubbed raw by a damp washcloth. I was a little pink bud, all I needed to bloom was the feel of night, complete in its reach, and not just through the square of a window. You wouldn’t have guessed how close these creatures live. Do you know who creeps up to your door to sniff the scent of your children, of your pets? A bobcat can cross five lanes of a highway in less than a second, snakes sleep on the threshold of the steakhouse, and coyotes shake open paper boxes in the flashing lights of the Fat Burger Disco. I count myself privileged to know beyond a doubt this city was built on a desert.

Nothing could abate my addiction to the fresh air and voyeurism those early days living on the streets afforded. It wasn’t until I awoke for the first time with a stranger’s mouth to my ear, saying something like where’s the fuckin stash, hand clamped around my neck tight enough to suppress my it’s not me you’re after, pinned to the blacktop where I’d slept innocent, awaiting the intruders realization of error and the subsequent unclasp, horror, and flight of my violator, that I understood I was outside.

After the attack, the charm of a life without a home was gone, I had entered the business of trying to forget the open air. I slept half awake, snapping up at the slightest sound so that it was more like intentional inactivity than the oblivion I needed, so when I found a tent, run over three, four times by station wagons in the Big Lots parking lot, it seized me like a blessing.

Although the tent only afforded a thin sheet of protection from the outside world, I reckoned it gave me the time it takes to rip tarping apart for me to wake up and prepare for the assailant should they come again. But because of its condition, it was difficult to break down and set up camp, so I would remain for several days at a time in one spot until I ran out of food, wherein I would scrunch the tent down and drag it behind me in a shopping cart to the next location. Every movement revolved around keeping the tent safe.

The thing is, not long after I began this routine, it started to fail. The tent’s rigging wasn’t coming together with the same efficiency anymore. Not that it had originally been a charmer, but the poles were starting to really chafe. One half of it drooped severely and I worried it would one day fail to stand itself up entirely. When one of the poles dissolved into a pile of metal filaments and had to be replaced with a long branch, I knew I was going to have to finally leave the tent standing under 101 freeway before beginning what should have been a short walk to the shelter for my next meal. If I hadn’t taken such a wrong turn, I wouldn’t have missed the lunch meal, and would have had to wait around outside for the dinner meal.

I’d only heard about sweeps as this general city council aesthetic proposition. What did it matter? People collecting trash, living in trash, no trash would be better for everybody, right? Wrong. I returned that evening to a blank stretch of sidewalk illuminated by the blue flash of a police car. I passed the desecrated landscape as if I were just a pedestrian with a mild interest, moving along on my way to where I parked my car or to the bar where I was a regular. I walked all night with this kind of intentionality, afraid if I stopped, I would remember I didn’t have a car or a bar where I was regular and I would unravel.

After the tent, I tried refrigerator boxes. There were two of them. Like girls I loved. Donatella was the first. Followed by Ariana. Beautiful boxes. They lived too fast, pulped at the mere introduction of a mist. I restarted again with a tarp I threw over some bushes. And when that blew away onto the highway, I tried living behind stacked crates in doorway. But nothing compared to Donatella and Ariana and Donatella and Ariana didn’t compare to the tent, and nothing was quite like the shelter of my apartment off Havenhurst in the Valley with the bone dry WIFI plan and my wife’s sweaty back.

I lived this way, without a single moment of stability and the unrelenting concern for the exposure of my neck or my back, and the constant battle against the urge to go back to my wife for nearly 6 months.

Have you ever heard of the Social Disorganization and Strain Theory of criminal cognition? Because I want to highlight how much this was on my mind then. I was starting to fear for my cognitive health. Without what they call “mechanisms for social control,” which is just another way of saying supervision from my wife, who’s determination in maintaining healthy social bonds kept us in unsatisfying but otherwise harmless community circles, I began to display “erratic behavior.” Not real violence but I would throw things hard against walls or run at gawking teenagers to scare them off. I had not accounted for the reactions to my social deprivations to manifest in aggression unprecedented in my prior, indoor life. I was desperate for a solution to my isolation. This is how I ended up loitering around the Social Security building next to the Army Surplus in Hollywood.

It was hot. Every day I would refill my plastic water bottle in the bathroom of the Yoshinoya on Vine and then go sit with my back against the yellow wall of the Army Surplus and watch the line grow shorter around the Social Security building where sometimes, sweaty, polluted fights broke out.

Every so often, in between altercations, I would a walk through the neighborhood to relieve myself behind a dusty mimosa tree before returning to my station. I was approaching a mimosa when a man came out of the Social Security building with a burning face, tears spilling out of his eyes, shouting to the people standing in line about how the interpreter only spoke European Spanish, how she’d treated him like a dog. In his anger he’d knocked over the fruit sellers umbrella stand. The fruit seller who took this as an act of aggression began shouting at the angry man and pretty soon, they were at each other’s throats, wrestling on the sidewalk. The spectators had to intervene. I stood there with my hand down my pants watching.

Hey man watch where you point that shooter, somebody said.

Below me, sitting against the very tree I was about to aim for was a man in an army jacket, no shirt. He’d also been watching the fights.

I apologized. He said it was okay, told me there was a cop circling anyways and to piss down the alley. The man introduced himself as Caesar, but that’s not my given name, he’d said. I’d said my name was Paul. But that’s not you’re given name, right? Caesar’d said. I laughed but Caesar’s face remained still, so I told him no, that’s not my given name.

Suddenly the warring men were embracing. Somehow, they had come to the realization they were related, cousins maybe. The fruit seller was going to help the angry man find some security, socially. They were going to have dinner together that very evening. Caesar stood up and suggested he and I did the same.

Caesar took me back to his encampment, a group of six or seven people who lived like spartan warriors on an embankment off the 110 freeway. I was given my own plot.

Back when I was living with my wife and working at my career, I say this like it was years ago but at that point it was only months behind me, we were always gathering stuff. She would go on these runs down the hill to Ventura Boulevard in her drooping sweatpants and sports bra. She liked the attention she got dressed like that; I just know it. Sometimes I saw her on my drive home from work, flapping down the main strip, and it was like we were strangers. I had permission to be repulsed by her, and to hate her like you hate strangers with a bad accent or an unwashed smell. She would always come home from those runs with a plastic bag of stuff. Charger plugs, batteries, a five pack of briefs, a little box of decorative soaps. All of it would get stuffed into the back of drawer to expire and grow its invisible fungus, infecting us with clutter. Even after all this, we were always missing something vital. I was always being sent to the store for something. It came to feel like all my waking hours were in the store, never fully awake unless blasted by the overhead lighting, driving that red plastic cart up and down the aisles waiting to find the last card to complete the deck.

But Caesar’s world on the meridian was a complete deck, the social efficacy I needed. There were rules. No theft, no violence, watch your hygiene, and most of all, the encampment must resemble a house. The bathroom, the kitchen, the bedrooms. You would walk twenty feet, even in the pouring rain, to have a midnight-leak. Stick to your principals and know at all times if you are on an off or onramp, because no one would phone your next of kin if you forgot which way the traffic drove.

I relaxed into life on the meridian. I had friends, I had chores, I took regular bowel movements, I slept well. I was so absorbed I almost forgot why I’d started this lifestyle to begin with.

It rained for the first time since I left my apartment while I was living in Caesar’s encampment. A group of five of us sat under a tarp. I was seated with Caesar on the edge of the group while he smoked a joint . We were staring out at the mudslide beginning across the highway in the foothills. It was the first rain after a long stretch of drought and the soil, being so compact, didn’t understand it was being watered.

 Maybe I was experiencing a second hand high, I don’t know, but whatever it was, something made me ask him about the housing development project off Kanon Dume.

You think I know anything about houses? He’d said. I felt embarrassed for asking. But then he said. You know I might have read about it on the shitter.

What do you mean? I’d asked.

You never read the papers out back when you’re taking a dump?

I try and not look down. I’d said.

Well, I do. He said. Constipation. It takes me almost an hour to lay a brick. Probably from all this. He held up a cracker in one hand and his joint in the other. You know what a gut micro-biome is?

I said I didn’t.

Well, you should look it up. That’s knowledge you need to know.

I waited to see if he’d say anything more. He was squinting out towards the mudslide again. Then he said yeah aright, maybe I do know about it. Is that the project where BLM just sold some like crazy amount of land to developers.

 I said it was.

The world is fucked, he’d said.

 The shitter was a pile of newspapers appropriately twenty feet from where we slept. I stood over it, looking down into the valley of wet newsprint. The ink on the papers in the pit bled into each other so that I couldn’t read anything properly. Whatever article Caesar’d read about the project was soup. But I did take Caesar’s advice. I began reading the papers I dropped my ass towards each day. That’s when I read about the deaths of Six-Stream Lee and José Cuarez.

I didn’t believe it at first. The papers were calling it a mutual suicide. But those men were too cool headed to do something as brash as kill each other. As it turned out, Caesar, had gone to high school with both Cuarez and Lee. They’d run in different circles, he’d said. As far as he was concerned, the two men never crossed paths. Cuarez? Nah, he wasn’t smart enough to do the things they said he did. Caesar had said tapping his skull. A bit uh, slow, you know what I mean? He’d be a perfect scapegoat for some big boss. He’s so stupid he probably fessed up. Six-Stream though. That was one scary motherfucker.

I liked Caesar, but he could be simple. Why did he think he knew them so well as to judge what kind of people they were based on impressions from afar?

I hadn’t said it then, but I’d known both Cuarez and Six-Stream Lee all too well. I had been their psychologist at Tujunga Penitentiary for nearly four years. I hadn’t said how when I heard of their death, I felt a pang of that ugly grief, so strong it was as if a lead rope I hadn’t known was holding me still, had been cut, setting me loose on the plains. And even after all that time, I couldn’t say I knew who they were. I knew this though. They weren’t killer types. They lacked heat. You know what I mean?

My supervisor wanted me to explore their social stresses and particular strains. Did their mothers beat them? Did their fathers molest their sisters? Things like that. The most I could ever get out of Six-Stream was he was an only child of a single young mother; she’d never married or dated as far as he knew. The darkest strain in Cuarez’s life was his brother’s leukemia. His parents were active members of their local community center, they ran a landscaping business, they were still in love.

What my supervisor didn’t’ understand was that they weren’t driven by a lust or redemption, or sociological anger as general strain theory would suggest. We couldn’t just solve them by tacking on a cover sheet: Oppressed and Abused... Next! They did what they did because the world is getting uglier. People are getting greedier. These men had never seen the wilderness without a trail or a billboard somewhere in the distance. These men had vision when they committed their crimes, they could see beyond the skirtboards of civility with a cool clear eye.

Spend enough time with someone and you start to compare yourself. You’ll do that with me. You’ll see. You think, oh I wouldn’t end up like him. He’s just obsessive, or what do we call it? Disordered grandiosity? Go on, laugh, I’m laughing too, because if you’d told me, I dunno, four years ago, that I would long to be like a man who shot up Westfield malls to protest consumerism, the very same one my wife and I frequented every Sunday afternoon, I would laugh too.

I can remember the first day I realized I no longer saw them as criminals. I’d had a group morning session with a rapist and two child molesters. The rapist had explained to me how his vision for the ideal future world was one where desire did not exist. He was a victim, he said, of his sexual heteronomy. He sobbed in his irons and jumped up and down in his seat as if to punish his loins for their determination to ruin his heart. This was the behavior of a criminal. A wildness driven by a white-hot, blinding appetite. Even the sociopaths, submerged as they are in their cool baths, burn with this unruly pathological determination to destroy.

But Cuarez and Six-Stream distinctly this kind of fire. In fact, it often surprised me to hear the rattle of their chains.

I believe they trusted me because unlike the other psychologists, I let them run loose. I liked to think of myself as the sounding board for their theories on the return of the Dust Bowl or the withering of collective intelligence bolstered by American consumerism. Everything they said was new and terrifying. Like martyrs in a Roman arena who would not complain of their shackles chaffing who, when faced with the beast who would maul them, opened their arms as if to embrace their fate. Their tolerance towards an uncomfortable life for the sake of a good cause was the heavy muscle I longed for. But no matter how much I displayed respect, puffing myself up like a mating pigeon, they never truly accepted me as an equal. They were intellectuals in the finest of mental conditions and I was just a brick in the walls of their prison.

It was my carelessness that got me removed from their cases. The warden referred to my report on Cuarez which stated he possessed no psychological defects; Need I remind you how many human casualties there were when this man poisoned a viable water source with arsenic? He'd said.

I told him I hadn’t forgotten.

If you’re telling me this man is perfectly sane, do you know how that bodes for him? You’ve done assessments with these guys for years now, and you’ve gone backwards on yourself. I have to put somebody else on the case. Even if it’s just to corroborate. You understand?

I wanted to say no, its you who doesn’t understand, but instead I said I did, and went home early, furious and certain then I had to do something to continue their work.

In early summer a woman named Kaula planted a wall of sunflowers between Caesars encampment and the onramp. She, like Cuarez and Six-Stream, yearned for beauty and would do anything for it. But Kaula suffered from pill dependency an often forgot to attend to her garden. On the morning of the fire, Kaula’s sunflowers were wilting. After the storm the roots had become over saturated, some of the healthy soil had melted down towards the freeway and hadn’t yet been replaced.

It was a blue early morning. I was squatting over the shitter trying to read the papers there. Don’t ask why I didn’t just go and steal a full paper from one of those paper boxes. I felt like I had to do it this way. Like I said, I wasn’t a criminal back then. I happened to look up at the sunflowers and isn’t that the strangest thing, I thought, because they were glowing red. For a moment I thought, this is the real state of things. Do you know what I mean? I thought that’s what a sunflower is supposed to look like when it isn’t heavy with dust and maybe Kaula had been doing things right by them all this time.

But then I saw the flames explode out of the dusty California freeway brush, urged on by the inflammatory booze stash and intimate fluid-soaked boxes. Before I could fully pull my pants up from where they’d dropped at my ankles, I was running down the road.

I watched from behind a white van as the cops circled the scene. They grabbed Caesar and threw him to the ground. I watched as the people who lived under his careful eye, flung themselves into the street like beetles. Which direction they went hinged entirely on their relationship with a holster. I knew they were fucked either way. It didn’t matter what happened to them because if not now, it’d be later. The play was always being recast.

The beginning of the end was a wet dark field. Steaming like the new shit of a buck-horned deer, blue before the sun, flashing in the headlights of an early morning commuter. The asparagus plant charred on the stalk long after the fire engines rolled away.

Did I love my wife?

My wife was afraid of Six-Stream Lee. She said he could have killed us on a Sunday. Sure. But that’s not what happened. Instead, he came to me like a burning candle when I was at my darkest. It was for this purpose, this cosmic leaning towards Six-Stream and Cuarez and my future that herded my wife and I to visit her aunt at a retirement community on Ventura Blvd where we spent the very Sunday, breathing in the scent of antibiotics, unwashed bodies, and expired perfume, when Six-Stream terrorized the Westfield mall in Encino with a semi-automatic. When he killed fifteen people and got away with it, we were eating jello cups in an un-air-conditioned room in the valley with an old woman who lamented never having married. So, sure, I loved my wife, but not because I found her beautiful and special, but because I wanted to go to the mall on a Sunday and she said no.

I took the fire as a sign. It was a preface to my cause. A smaller version of the greater act I was to partake in. That I was barefoot and shirtless was of no consequence because if I played my cards right, I would be a hero to the yearners. If I played my cards wrong, my wife would welcome me home, and I would lay my head down on her pillow and die.

It took me 13 hours to walk from the embankment in Toluca Lake to the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains. I’ll never forget what Cuarez said about the valley in our last meeting before I resigned. He said, we seek to forget how ugly the land has become by making ourselves beautiful. Before long the only real beauty will be beheld in our mirrors and reflections in the glass. And when we finally reach into the well for the water to wash the surface clean, our knuckles will graze the bottom and come up blackened and dry. I thought about this as I walked through the city into hills and suburbs, deeper into the valley. I walked all the way down Ventura boulevard with its stench of vape pens, porn shops, Italian bistros, dental offices, pool halls and laser hair removal centers, the longest outdoor shopping strip in history, the greasiest teenagers alive. I walked into the suburbs of Calabasas where the women held their tits when they ran. I walked under the freeway where boys on skateboards sprayed nonsense shapes on the cement pretending in their wildest dreams to be leavened by the hard world before their home cooked dinners around the kitchen island. I burnt the balls of my feet. I walked all through the day. And then that long deserted stretch between Calabasas and Agora where the highway bends over the yellow hills, pocked by low hanging coastal oaks, to within sight of the mountains in a third degree sunset burn where the clouds blister and blood boils at the edges.

You know it was in one of our sessions I learned about the new development in the Santa Monica Mountains. The planes were being razed to make way for track homes. It just takes one man’s wife to set him over the edge, Six-Stream had said.

How’s that?

Say he’s out in the yard smoking, and she comes out and says she found out he’d been cheatin or some shit, what’s a man gonna do?

I don’t know, deny it?

Of course. And he’s gonna throw that cigarette down in the bush and that’s the Santa Monica Mountains alight right there. All the way up to Point Dume. You know how many birds die in a fire like that?

No.

50,000. The condors are endangered, you know?

I didn’t.

Well, they are. A fire like that could be the end for a species. He’d said. His hands were crossed in this lap, he looked down at them as if he held a charred animal there. All I could see of his face was the top of his bald head.

Beautiful, beautiful, was all he said.

The development project was one mile south of the Malibu Creek Rec center. It still is, probably, one mile south. Somebody should probably tell me if it is, or at least I should have access to the papers. If that could be arranged. You see, I never saw it. I only imagined the razed field and a thousand dusty frameworks. I fell asleep that night in the grasses dreaming of the morning. I dreamed of standing on a precipice above the scene and having a spiritual moment. I was a Zeusian figure, I had exercised the right muscles, and the heavy muscle.

Forest fires happen all the time you know. I imagined a witness to my act of acting natural disaster, burning them before they burned the condor, in a controlled blaze. One might see me, shirtless against the dawn and love me for my perfect, mythic shape. From far away it would look like the aftermath of a violent natural disaster only to come up close would one see the destruction was from within, that we had destroyed, for ourselves, the natural and the disaster was the replacement of beauty with dusty stucco box houses for more greasy teenagers and sweaty women to emerge from like larvae from a blackened ham.

You want beautiful, beautiful? I’d show you beautiful, beautiful. From the ashes would rise the perfect bud, followed by thousands of dormant sister seeds, all cracked open in my fire.

Falling was my only regret. As I rose from my inadvisable slumber, it was a sweaty woman in a jogging suit who witnessed my rise, and it wasn’t against the dawn, it was after dawn and behind me was only a dirty pressed patch of dead grass. The woman screamed and fumbled in her jogging suit for her phone, to call the police I assumed. I knew the construction crew would already be filtering in between the skeletons of the development project. Even if I were to run as fast as I could across the two fields separating myself from the site, it was too late to hope the cops wouldn’t get me before I got there.

I groaned and tried to stand up. I had to go, I had to get there. The woman screamed again and dropped her phone. I couldn’t help but move like a beast, with all angles of my limbs, a likely terror for her, I have since come to sympathize. But I still can’t forgive her for trying to call the police, for trying to stop me, or for screaming the way she did when I grabbed her wrist. Did they tell you that? That I just grabbed her wrist and the rest followed? She crashed down onto the rocks and dust. I saw red and the burning in my throat choked out my language. I explained with my hands, no no no, and pressed her throat, which I thought was her wrist. I’d forgotten the anatomy of a woman.

The police came, as expected. I wanted them to come, but not then. It was the wrong time; couldn’t they see that? Of course they couldn’t. I was a mad man who compelled by desire for disobedience, had gone so far as to disobey even that. I am sure I kicked and screamed at my captors. I am sure on that drive to the station behind the ambulance wheeling my victim to sanctuary, I was a boiling pot. I can only guess. Whoever shook in that back seat was a stranger even to me.

You know, I used to do what you do now. I sat in that very chair with that clipboard and your notepad, are you even writing anything down on that? I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, this man lacks self-control, this man needs has psychosis, why else would someone like me with a good job and a wife voluntarily destitute himself? His time living outside taxed his mental state, oh it weakened his self-regulatory capacities. You’re going to ask me about my relationship to my sense of worth. You’re going to say my aggressive compulsions stem from my unsatisfactory relationship with women or a delusion of grandiosity. And I won’t stop you from doing your job. But If I were to say one thing in advance of your diagnosis, I would say there are two men before you in chains, one is a criminal, and the other is a wretch but both will never fully recover from seeing himself so blatantly an animal.