Issue Nine
FICTION (excerpts): “Los Angeles” by Peter Moore Smith
Downtown, the smog is absolute.
Downtown, the smog is absolute. In the morning a rich graybrown mist settles thickly at the base of the perpendicular cityscape, thinning gradually as the eye rises skyward. Orange light filters through the desert dust, the exhaust fumes of a million engines rising, the diesel and high-octane vapors expanding through an atmosphere that almost never breathes. Toward the airport, the oil derricks pump the liquid earth, their great heads rising and dropping back to the ground like giant mechanical birds. A blazing disk behind them threatens to send the whole city up in The freeways twist, curling one under the other.
Off-ramps, merging lanes, and cloverleafs spiral outward and in, doubling back on themselves like Möbius strips. In an all too apt metaphor for my life, a portion of highway soars over a patch of dry grass and suddenly dead-ends over nothing at all.
I kept driving, creeping my way through the morning traffic, going all the way out to the water, turning down Ocean until I arrived in Venice. I parked the car, then walked down to the beach. I slipped off my sandals, rolled up my trousers, and let the entire Pacific
crash against my legs.
I dreamed, as I have dreamed all my life, of standing on the beach in the full daylight sun. I imagined myself with normal skin and dark, light-absorbing eyes. I stood just far enough away from the Santa Monica Pier to watch the silhouette of the roller coaster reveal itself against the horizon while the disk of the sun ascended over the brown mountains of Malibu.
In the morning the Los Angeles sun rolls over the dusty San Gabriel Mountains and snores through a gray-brown smog that drapes the city like a dirty sheet. When the smog lifts and the sun crawls out, hungover, its eyes swollen, its hair a mess, it takes a few moments for its daily ablutions, then puts on its gaudiest, most
audacious costume—it becomes Louis the XVI, Amen-Ra, and Vegas Elvis all rolled into one. It wears brass buckles, gold rings, and a glittering necklace hung with pendants of BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches.
If you turn your eyes to the Los Angeles sun on the freeway, it flashes a gold-toothed smile and twists its frosted hair with a silvery pink fingernail. Call me later, it mouths. It has to run. It doesn’t have time to talk. Its people are waiting. The commercial directors,television show producers, and studio cinematographers, they’re all out at this early hour, waiting for it to arrive like a white limo at a movie premiere, their eyes squinting, their weather-worn faces crinkly and lined, and the L.A. sun has gotten up just for them. Throughout the afternoon, it rises, glorious, arrogant, demanding its juice, its trailer, its retinue of assistants and grips.
But when the day ends, the Los Angeles sun flashes its satin cape and beams for all the attention it has received throughout the day. Good night, it says like a lounge singer leaving the stage, giving us one last flamboyant bow, its voice velvety and its eyes misty with sentiment. Good night.
Good night, sweet ladies, good night.
Meanwhile, the L.A. dark, sheathed in blue denim and black leather, has been waiting out in the parking lot, smoking a filterless Camel. It leans back against the hood of a convertible and watches the starry sky, seeing but not seeing, like a noir detective. It doesn’t give a shit. It looks straight through you. If you try to approach it, it just shakes its head and looks the other way.
Don’t bother me, it says. In fact, fuck off. It doesn’t want your attention. It doesn’t need you and it never did. Who is it waiting for? Someone else. Someone more interesting than you.
And then it disappears with your girlfriend.
From the book LOS ANGELES by Peter Moore Smith. Copyright © 2005 by Peter Moore Smith. Published by
permission of Little, Brown and Company (Inc.), New York, NY. All rights reserved.
–collage by isabelle Pelissier