This is third and final section I'm posting from What's Left of the Sun. Looking at this work after all these years has been very interesting. I now both see flaws in it I couldn't before, but also some strong points I didn't understand back in the day. Overall I now view this piece as an apprentice's prologue to my later work.
Coming out of this fantasy again, consciously noticing my scenes of lush family life drifting away. “Goodbye France! Goodbye Brigitte! Goodbye Ethan and Muriel! You made a wonderful dream family – I promise I’ll love and remember you all forever, …” Laughing at myself again. I’m such a dork sometimes (allot of the time). It’s kind of cool being a dork, though. I mean, “normal” guys don’t get to have these kind of fantasies; they’re stuck dreaming about boinking famous actresses or something, really pedestrian shit like that (not that I don’t have my own mental list of starlets I would do in a second if the opportunity ever arose). Trying to figure out what this particular fantasy means, what I’m trying to tell myself
thru it. Nothing profound is coming to me, though. Just seeing it as a basic kind of counterpoint, an antidote: simple idealized love as the polar opposite of sitting in traffic, of being strapped into a loud metal box, of being forced to drive down roads in whose construction I never had a say …
Feeling a little depressed now. Maybe even a bit pissed off. Southern California is over, I’m thinking. It’s nothing but a mess of freeways, concrete, and pollution – all created by a locust-like population that can’t stop believing in its own propaganda, that’s too stupid to realize that this field has been destroyed and that it’s time to move on. No wonder I transferred my domestic bliss to France. I mean, I’m sure if I actually lived there for any length of time I’d start having to deal with all sorts of stress I
couldn’t know as a traveler, but I felt rhythms there that I’
ve only rarely felt here, human rhythms, rhythms of a daily life based around hearts beating instead of wheels rolling, instead of pistons plunging …
Realizing also that I’m slightly full of shit in regards to this French fantasy, in regards to the way I’
ve been interpreting it. Southern California constantly pisses me off, but I don’t really feel like fleeing the place. For the most part, I like it here. I mean, Southern California is insane, but its also a truly amazing event in human history, an event that I feel lucky to be living
thru, to be living in. And when I say Southern California, I basically mean Los Angeles – cancerous Los Angeles spreading in all directions, its frightening size only slightly disguised by the fact that we’
ve chosen to call parts of it Long Beach, San Pedro, Santa Monica, Thousand Oaks, San Clemente,
Simi Valley, Riverside, San
Bernardino … Feeling being infused into me the raw power that comes as a by product of living in a predator city: a city that swallows up surrounding municipalities, that eats the strawberry fields, orange groves, and dairy farms that once separated here from there, that once helped seal off individual identities and conflicting views of what this place could and should be … Yep, feeling the power within me: the power of the foolish conqueror building empire for the sake of empire, the power that says “San Diego, you’re next. Someday
Pendleton will fall, someday
Pendleton will fall …”
Laughing and smiling inside, suddenly feeling as if the soul of Jack Kerouac has dived into my body and is now swimming around in my brain. Images of my Los Angeles pouring out of me like John Coltrane spewing spark-like notes into some long-ago jazz night that happened long before I was born but still hangs in the American air as a now misty milestone of expression we must somehow strive for even though we know that if we achieve that kind of radiance it will seem like nothing more than smoke running
thru our fingers. Having trouble capturing these images, though. Brief flashes of understandings of this place. Something to do with old stucco houses, pink or very pale green, with palm trees swaying near courtyard entryways and residential streets traveled by huge 1950s Dodges and
Plymouths while Chet Baker’s trumpet offers a perfect pastel soundtrack for it all; something to do with Charley Chaplin coming here to become the perfect artist for his time, even though he’s really an internationalist and we were just lucky to have gotten him at all; something about my grandfather coming here from Michigan because he’d joined the Navy and was stationed in Long Beach, but deep down knowing that he was really coming here to fall in love with my grandmother, a native Long Beach girl (born in a house on 10
th and
Termino), whom he’d never even imagined but whose red hair was calling him in his dreams
thru long Michigan winters he had to bear but was never really built for because he was actually a Southern California boy who happened to be born in very much the wrong place; something about the descriptions of this place in John
Fante’s novels: dewy nights in Bunker Hill, red cars, beautiful young Mexican girls, damaged older women living in sad
interchangable court apartments, sun percolating
thru the wide spaces between the buildings –
thru the sad dreams of Midwesterners who had moved here searching for a new life but who were already far too old to change, who really still belonged in places like Wichita and Iowa city where purse-lipped protestant America still had a chance, was still taken seriously; something about Walt Disney’s squeaky-clean mustache and how it never really belonged here, about how should have been grown in some
facist Florida county from the start; something about 1920s surfers carving their boards out of huge redwood planks, most everybody leaving them alone, thinking them harmless crazies as they drove from break to break; something about tan muscular young men with blond hair and Hawaiian shirts looking out over the vast pacific while standing on wooden decks jutting from houses built on impossibly expensive real estate, frighteningly sure of the rightness of their actions, of their place in the sun …
Realizing that a big chunk of that last thought, the last part of that vision, came right out of Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler, the first story, the one set in San Pedro. Maybe his soul is inside of me. Coming to a new view of Southern California today, digging it in the way Kerouac would dig New York, San Francisco, Mexico City and the Denver of his Neil
Cassady myth: trying desperately to understand eternity
thru an understanding of the eternal moment. Starting with the traffic lights in front of me. No longer seeing them primarily as obstacles, but as flashes of luminous wonder, beautiful jewel colors made even more sweet by the fact that those shades of red, yellow, and green could never really appear in the wild, but are a by-product of our current chemical genius. I mean, thousands of generations of hunter-gatherers could never have seen these colors. Neither could have Genghis Khan. Charlemagne either. But I can. I can love the green and hate the red (and be annoyed by the yellow). I can take them for granted too, If I want. Trying to take this further. What about the roads, the freeways? Not longer viewing them as only as congested time traps designed to destroy clutches and patience, but also as sensual functional sculptures leading me to the places I want to be, both phallic and
vulvic: plowing
thru the city, creating pathways spread out wide and willing before me …
All that Taoist and Buddhist thought I studied in my twenties is roaring back into my head and heart now. Feeling myself a holy Bodhisattva with a reasonably late-model Ford serving as my temple, my meditation chamber. Thought, vision, and physical existence merging, simply becoming different aspects of the same thing. I’m now dreaming Los Angeles as it dreams me. Neither of us could exist without the other. Yes, I could exist as a biological unit somewhere else, but I
wouldn’t be the me that’s existing at this moment; I’d be another Rob Woodard dreaming a different city-universe, fitting into the same legal parameters of that Rob Woodard as defined by his birth certificate, but in reality a different being, not necessarily better or worse, just not this me, this me being this. And this Los Angeles
wouldn’t exist either. Or course a place called Los Angeles would still be found on the map, would still be found expanding along this coast, but it would a Los Angeles devoid of this being’s dreams, or at least this particular dream of this being. Realizing that I’m as important to this place’s existence as the ocean, valleys, buildings, and the point at Malibu on a perfect sunny day, that I’m as good a definition of Los Angeles as any other; realizing that I’m the canyons and hills and the cars and neighborhoods and the new Getty Center perched so arrogantly atop its hillside location; realizing that I’m the ghost of Tom Bradley and the memory of Rodney King; realizing that I’m Steve Garvey standing at first base for the Dodgers in the year 1974; realizing that I’m my grandmother working in an ice cream shop at the Long Beach Pike in the late 1930s, unknowingly (but in a way still knowingly) waiting for my grandfather to arrive to change the universe by creating a new family on this shore; realizing I am the film industry in the years before sound: I’m Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford showing off
Pickfair for the news reel cameramen, I’m Buster Keaton, not as brilliant as Chaplin for sure, but holy, profound, and deeply funny in my own magical way, I’m my great great grandfather George
Humphry Lasley landing a job in Hollywood playing bit parts, one day dressed as a cowboy, another an Indian, another an Arab Sheik …; realizing I’m thousands (millions?) of surfers and beach combers who have stalked this shore looking for peace and thrills and a more profound way of being; realizing I’m Charles
Bukowski still working the shit post office job even though I’m no longer young and by all accounts a great poet who deserves much better; realizing I’m the polluted sky and the rare clear Santa Ana day at the same time; realizing I’m the ancient ever-changing course of the Los Angeles River, of the San Gabriel River, of the Santa Ana river, now thwarted by cement and urban need, but patiently waiting for my time to again arrive … and it will arrive …
* * *
But now it’s just the traffic – me in the traffic, like I always seem to be … So I’m a creature of these rivers of cars? – I just need to accept that, I guess (born in Anaheim, only a few miles down the road literally [just take the 22 to the 405 briefly, then back on the 22 until it turns into 7
th street and my beloved Long Beach lays stretched out wide and familiar before me …]) … Mine is a nervous system that has co-evolved with this predatory flow of traffic that constantly moves
thru this place. Not surprisingly, my personality is often just like this flow: sometimes its smooth and open and capable of dream-driving from here to Seattle at least without a hitch; but it also can be the exact opposite: constricted, angry, and unable to go anywhere at the times I most desperately need to be on the move … existing dangerously close to the breaking point because paradise constantly seems to be only a few car lengths away and I know that there’s nothing I could ever do to help me get there …
Thinking about how weird it is that I’m of this place, that anyone is of this place. I mean, according to the mythology that’s been laid upon us (both by others and ourselves), nobody is actually from here: we’re all just transients moving lightly
thru this sunny Southern California landscape, a place that by definition has no culture of its own, but instead features only an
inefectual watered-down
mélange of those brought with them by the droves of immigrants from more tangible places like Ohio, New York, London, Mexico City … And even the landscape seems unreal in this view. Southern California as a place created entirely out of diaphanous sunlight filtering
thru row after row of palm trees (themselves imported from places like Florida, Hawaii, and Australia) and then reflecting off the HOLLYWOOD sign to illuminate an endlessly growing cast of pretty tanned extras … a place at this point just waiting to be animated by the words of the screen writer … hacks in MGM and Paramount back offices … but also imported “high” culture in the form of
Faulkners,
Fitzgeralds,
Huxelys, and later
Vidals … though it all somehow just ends up being
Gidget in the long run anyway …
Suddenly getting into this vision of Southern California as nothing but Hollywood, enjoying it. I mean,
Gidget really
isn’t all that bad a place to be if you think about it. It was a totally stupid movie and all, but at least Sandra Dee was hot. Plus you could just tell she was way horny – even that chaste-in-the-end persona that the1950s forced on her
couldn’t come close to hiding that fact. Seeing Sandra Dee as a kind of low-rent archetype of the ultimate Southern California girl:
blonde, bubbly, free from any overt ethnicity or underlying sadness left from all the difficult decisions she’s had to make and all the horrible things she’s seen … Understanding also that I’m not on a nostalgia trip with this one either. I mean, Sandra Dee’s still with us – she’s simply evolved. Conceiving of this evolutionary line as going something like this: Sandra Dee into I Dream of Jeannie (Barbara Eden) into Charlie’s Angels into … I don’t know, Traci Lords? Seeing allot of truth in this. Thinking about how guys in Sandra Dee’s era probably jacked off to thoughts of her doing the kinds of things Traci Lords would later do in her films … except that guys back them probably could never have imagined of allot of the things Traci Lords would later do in her films … I mean, it was the late1950s, early sixties …
Realizing that this leaves me in the interesting place of having cast Traci Lords as the perfect flower of Southern California womanhood during the era of my early twenties. Realizing also that I’m completely cool with this situation, that I can’t think of too many other locales where I’d rather have ended up in regards to this subject (I mean, if I’m honest with myself)… Oh to be fucked by Traci Lords in a North Hollywood apartment on a perfect summer night in 1984 while the camera is rolling and a forty-five year old balding director with a pony tail and a shiny open shirt (revealing a hairy chest and at least a couple gold medallions) shouts out orders: “More moaning, more oohs and
aahs,” more saying “Fuck me you stud! Oh God, fuck me you horny bastard! …”; and all the while Traci making those silly-beautiful fake orgasm faces where her nostrils flare while she’s throwing back her slightly-bleached
blonde hair and playing with her own intensely-nippled tits as her hips grind her darker
pubed pussy onto a professionally rigid cock that’s been inside a thousand girls of this general type but never one quite like her … Oh Miss Traci Lords, Oh Miss Traci:
pouty-mouthed open-legged
dreamscape of a young woman … Sandra Dee with a cum-smeared face and glinting eyes that show no repentance at even their greatest depth …