Because she is from “back east” she says Angeles like Vangelis—pure barbarism. To pair it—say, in a couplet—with dungarees or manganese, the way of Golden Age starlets, is the way of class. To end it with “lace,” too, as the Mexicans do (on-hey-lace), softens the place undeservedly, drizzles too much honey over it. El-ey is sharp as salt.
She feigns offense at the slightest provocation, flaying the innocuous like the lingchi of Fou-Tchou-Le. Piece by piece the world is cut away until it is a cartoon, until strangers are mere string puppets. She giggles and the curtain falls.
She puts the clay bong to her lips and fills her face with sweet hot smoke. Silence, in a panic, fills the rest of her. She evicts both within seconds from a mouth made raw by lies. Changes tickle her skull, begin to crawl out her limbs. But the bodies about her remain autonomic, in stasis—meat.
Her sunglasses are too big—it’s the in look—and smugly reflective. Instead of eyes it seems the middle third of her head now hosts her table mates and blocky avatars of those to her left and right, miniaturized. All semblance of order and proportion is defiled by these plastic discs. Severed from the rest of the face even her smile is perverse, incomplete, like a gift without thanks. And in the dislocation she becomes but an accessory, part and parcel of the paraphernalia. Ashen, inanimate, vulgar.
Los Angeles is the caliphate of the sensuous, and has been ab aeterno, so the peccadilloes of les petits gens—cannabis, for instance—go largely unpoliced by its kings. It is an altered state, a new Enoch, unzipping your fly as it plunders your pockets and pooh-poohs a chorus of “No no no.” It traffics in consciousness, pinching here to patch there. And the young hoydens cheer and accurse their parents, who pay their rent.
She hates their prayers, the teak heirlooms, the slow-cooked Sundays, hates their very dreams. She is the new woman. Liberación! Free to lose her mind, free to seduce death, free to slap the hand of God and remake His house. She becomes a mold, protean, and the city is her substrate. It feeds her loose talk and looser men. Beyond its ramparts, in the noiseless void of the desert, she withers, unstimulated and unadulterated, and fills it with a monologic screed of negativity. Its stoic immensity offends her. It is too clean. The stillness is almost pornographic.
Here comes the bong, again, that phallic totem of escape. She orders a grilled cheese and rolls up a sleeve. Tattoos tumble out like dice. She is a chimney. The smoke, in fine American fashion, goes where it pleases. But our gal, its servant, remains seated. There is no escaping. She can only go deeper into it. Move the furniture around. Pull weeds. Dust His collection of rare books. The epiphanies come on like flies, and her sandwich goes cold. She won’t remember how she got home.
Image: Bujados, Manuel. La Esfera. 1927.
Impolitic 