Waiting for the Sun 1969

                    

                              

Los Angeles give you an odd feeling, especially in winter, when you arrive there fresh from one of the colder northern states like Michigan or New York. You suddenly realize that you've left winter behind somewhere and are floating in a limbo that isn't quite summer either, an in between twilight climate, with some rain, but never cold. In 1969, I arrived straight from New York City by bus, managing to see the land change as I came across country, hearing the warnings for snow on the radio for north in Wyoming as I slid through New Mexico, hearing reports that the worst blizzard in New York City history had hit only hours after my bus had departed. And oddly, I missed winter. Not that I enjoyed that particular season when I had to suffer through it, boots always leaking when I walked, leaving my toes frozen and wet. Yet sitting in the back of a bus, knowing that I was managing to escape an experience all my friends back home went through, left me with a slightly empty feeling, the way I felt when I had been told I was still a year too young to join the scouts while all my friends, one year older, had already won merit badges and gone to camp. I came into Los Angeles, too, at night, after being so bored with such a long ride that I began counting mileage markers to pass the time and eat up the distance, four hundred or more of the green numbered markers from the time the bus left Phoenix, each a ghostly eye in the night, illuminated by the bus’s passing lights or those of the countless tracker trailers making their way to Bakersfield. I suppose the lyrics to Arlo Gutherie's song might have come into my head had I even heard his latest album at the time, only instead of taking a bus into Los Angeles, he had taken a plane, and instead of carrying stolen cash in his suit case the way I was, he had carried marijuana. The most disorienting part of arriving by bus was the bus depot and the neighborhood around it. Stepping off a bus at the Trailways station left you in a neighborhood that looked and smelled much like Spring Time midtown Manhattan, as if three days on the bus in a straight line had deposited me back exactly where I had started. L.A.'s skid row not much different than 42nd Street near the Port Authority building. The only oddity was the lack of cold. I could feel it on the back of my neck like a warm, wet handkerchief, and feel it moistening the palm of my hand as I gripped by suitcase to walk outside. Fortunately, the wind was up, stirring the smog that settled over the city daily. In summer, I later learned, it clung to the landscape until a mighty wind from the ocean drove it out, days, weeks, even months of waiting. I suppose I was so shocked I just stood too long in the doorway, one of those supermarket style doors that opened magically before you as you walked, now kept open by my standing on the rubber pad. A cop came over and asked if I was all right. "Is there something wrong, son? Can I help you? I shook my head, yet he guessed from my startled expression that I had expected more of L.A. than what I saw. "Not quite the lap of luxury, eh?" the cop said, laughing. But the cop had missed the mark slightly in reading my mind. L.A. had not lived up to expectations, yet it was not the movie capital of Hollywood I had had in mind, or the grand style of Beverly Hills. It was the sameness, the grimy streets full of grimy people, smelling of alcohol, urine, cigarettes and filth. What as the point of coming west the way everyone in New York kept saying I should if it was going to look exactly the same as the place I had left? "Well, don't worry, son," the cop said, continuing his mistaken reading of me. "It gets better when you get out of downtown." I nodded dumbly, only then realizing who I was talking to and how much that cop would have loved to have known who I was and what I had done and how if my bag was to suddenly fly open how very obvious my crime would have been, cash fluttering down the street like so much confetti, causing even the winos to wake. Somehow, I managed to ask him for directions to "a good hotel," which he gave me obligingly and sent me on my way, a stumble of several blocks through broken glass, broken people and whole chapters of graffiti painted on building walls. Out of the middle of this rose a huge building of glass highlighted with great red lights, with revolving doors through which I managed to drag my bag without getting stuck. Inside, the doors and carpet and large room with shimmering lights seemed to deny that the blocks outside even existed. The air conditioning was set too high and brought goose bumps to my arms. I shook as I signed the register and dug out my only jacket when I got upstairs to my room, managing to pack everything into the drawers, before wandering out into the dark street again, unable to stand the room's lack of reality. Even then, I wasn't sure why I had come so far to stand on a corner with a bunch of drunks and drug addicts. You hear a million reasons why people run away. I heard many of them when I was in the army, when fellow recruits told me how their fathers hated them, or how few opportunities for success existed in the small town from which they came. If I had to define it, I had come to escape the madness of my house, mad mother, my uncles, madness as contagious as chickenpox, and had I not left when I did, I, too, would have been mad as well, stuck in the same miserable unsuccessful life my uncles led, feeling just as frustrated as they did about it. Yet looking around me, I wondered then, if I hadn't simply traded one kind of madness for another. Hours later, minus the cab fare, I found myself standing on a beach. The air was cooler, but not cold, and the sand was strangely empty -- a hard sell for a New Jersey boy for whom the only comparison was the constantly congested beaches he had seen at Seaside Heights. The east coast concessions were strangely missing. In this particular part of the state, the beaches were free and open to the public. A wetness filled the air, and not all of it from the rush of waves. Rain was on its way, dangling its wet fingers higher up in the atmosphere so that only a touch of it made its way down to places of human occupation. Through the thin clouds -- and despite the remarkable glow of the city -- I thought I could see stars. The air smelled clean, and that came from the ocean, as if each wave delivered a special kind of incense, the spirits of some other world beyond the shore. I sat on the jetty and stared out at the distant lights of passing ships. This, at least, was the same as New Jersey, the lights, the winking eyes of the sea, like a further invitation to travel west, making me wonder if I should keep on walking, out into the water, out until I found land again that didn't look like New Jersey or New York. I knew I was waiting for something, just as I had waited on the East Coast. But for what? And then it occurred to me. I was waiting for dawn to break over the ocean the way I had back East, and only then realized it would never happen, that in this land of the sun, dawn rose up over the landside, over the mountains first, rather than the sea, and set in the ocean, exactly opposite to what my senses expected. So, I turned East, and watched the sun rise over the land, and when the show was over, a keen discomfort hit me when I realized that I would later see the sun set into the ocean, watch the sun sink into the water and die, and that seemed odd to me, and wrong, and I hailed a cab back to my hotel, wondering just what to do next.