“She had talent. I always knew that. So she went out. She took a flier and won big. Still, for such a big winner she’s really pathetic.” My father puffed his cigar. “Tell her that for me, too. If I don’t get off that operating table tomorrow, tell her. You got it?”
My father wasn’t pouring bourbon anymore. He was drinking it straight from the bottle. “Look at that,” my father said softly, with something like awe. “First Goodrich, then Alcindor, Walton, and now this.” My father took another puff on his cigar. “This is a dynasty. This is poetry.”
“Daddy,” I began, reaching for something.
I remembered the last night in Philadelphia before the surgery for the first cancer. My father took me to see The Ten Commandments. He would get up every ten minutes to go to the men’s room. Then he would return and hold my hand in the movie theater darkness. Years later I realized he was leaving to cough blood in the lobby. Cancer had pushed its special hard fabric, its whirlpool of black marbles, those wild cells, into a strange, strangling vegetation. Roots and claws planted themselves deep in his throat. Pieces grew in his cheek and tongue. Now it was happening again.
“Listen, kid. Don’t plan on me for the play-offs.”
I stayed with my father until he fell asleep on the sofa. I covered him with a blanket. I touched his hand in the darkness. It felt already bony and thin. The night was horrible. The whole world had started spinning in a fast silvery arc and I was being propelled out in a vast circle, absolutely blind.
4
I cut west and south down side streets, hardly seeing the road, running through stop signs and red lights to the ragged western fringe of Los Angeles called Venice, where I live. Here the city stops its white cement sprawl, its hunger to engulf the whole earth under tons of trucked-in concrete. Here in the lap of the blind blue-eyed Pacific, Los Angeles is stopped dead by the sheer liquid cliffs of the sea. Here the trail ends. After Death Valley and Donner Pass, there is only this last precarious oasis.
You must hang on here, inches from the sea. This is a land of strange personal mutations. There’s a certain pull, an inexplicable force, some as yet uncharted form of gravity. The toes change, growing invisible sharp claws designed to dig in and fight against the slide into pale blue listless waves.
Once Venice was the summer resort of the first Los Angeles affluent, St. Louis and Chicago bankers and developers who pushed across the continent armed with the promise of an ever expanding manifest destiny of the soul. They built wood-slatted houses in a pocket of land facing the Pacific, ground webbed with canals. Perhaps the canals were filled with sea water then and the boulevards did not yet exist and one could simply swim home from the ocean. Perhaps there were families then and homes to return to at dusk.
Now the original houses of the Venice canals sag, paint peeling, reds a faded rust, yellows and blues bleached, a noncolor, not even suggesting pastel. There is a sense of abandonment. Deserted cars sit useless in weeds, looted, their vital organs gone. A shell of a canoe and a shell of a gutted speedboat stretch out like lovers in the field where two canals meet. Broken stuffed chairs rot under the sun. Old screens with the wire mesh ripped lie in random stacks between houses.
These are growing ruins. For decades the dirt has done as it pleases, pushing up what the winds brought, what a hand tossed. Here, where it is always some form of summer, everything grows swollen, enormous, oblivious to proportion. Early roses bloom in front yards on Carroll Canal. Honeysuckle spills over the wire fence of the house next door. Walls of red hibiscus hide windows. Lemon trees are opening up, stiff yellow. The sunflowers are higher than my shoulders, stalks thick as young trees. Soon the canals themselves will disappear, drained and filled to accommodate condominiums. As it is, few of the original dwellers remain. Jason and I are among the last.
Jason has lived on Grand Canal for twelve years. He owns his two-story red house. And he owns the house I live in on Eastern Canal, four city blocks away, four canals away from him.
Jason came to own these houses because he had a vision. He was living on the streets of Venice in the early sixties, living as it was easy to do then, sleeping on the beach and subsisting on peaches and oranges picked from trees. He didn’t need to eat much. He was an amphetamine addict, a character known on the boardwalk, a too thin, small man with a nervous energy, talkative and curious, wandering the beach with a sketchbook, drawing faces and the ornate fronts of old buildings. One summer night on LSD with the sea at his back, Jason listened as a man spilled out enthusiasm for the new society. There would be great changes, a vast movement of people, social upheaval and revolution.
Jason was impressed by the stranger. There were new bodies on the beach now, long-haired men and women with sleeping bags and packs on their backs and a look of odyssey etched across their faces. Jason didn’t know why they were coming to California. They could come to pan gold for all he cared. Still, they were coming. And, with his mind reeling and his eyes jammed wide open, he suddenly realized they would need somewhere to live. In the morning, Jason began looking at property.
He borrowed money. He began wheeling and dealing. By 1969, Jason owned a dozen houses and five apartment buildings on the streets closest to the sea.
My house is called the Woman’s House. And for twelve years, all of Jason’s women have lived here.
My house is set back from Eastern Canal behind twenty-foot-high hedges of pink and white oleander. From the poor rut of broken sidewalk a passer-by could see only a thin sliver of the second story. On the side of my house, two peach trees and a lemon tree sleep near the windows. Bougainvillaea hangs heavy across the front porch with its wood deck and one old rattan chair where I often sit and watch the canals, watch the lime-green algae near the bridge, the black-and-white ducks, the brown-speckled ducks with yellow beaks, push through the palm trees reflected in the water.
I study the canals because they have their own unique life cycle. In the early mornings when the sun is still pale and tentative, still wrapped in night haze, the canals are the color of a mirror, a delicate silver. As the sun anchors itself in the center of the sky for the long yellow noon, the canals thicken. This is the yellow of a mouth of sharp, pronged stained teeth, teeth yellow from grinding something unmentionable, something like bone. The water is coated then, somehow greasy and superimposed, not really like water at all.
In the later afternoons, when the sun is fatigued and indifferent, sensing loss and preparing for surrender, the water is clearly liquid again, but pitted with shadows. This is the season of sunset. The sun suddenly regathers itself for the final battle. It forms one perfect red ball and hangs smack above the ocean, a gouged eye, a beach ball dropped down into the slow stirring night waves of hungry fish mouths and darting crepe-thin fins.
At sunset the canals are streaked as the sky, fierce reds and oranges, thick, the color of lava. The canals assume a new texture then, something like boiling metal. I stand stock still in my garden, watching sunset across the surface of the water. I don’t have to look at the sky at all. I sense the sun sucking in its last breath, preparing for the plunge. I know this sun. It sits above me, a monk in red robes, a suicide serene at the immolation.
Night rises imperceptibly. There is a slow darkening, an abundance of fast-darting shadows. This is the hour when shadows feed beneath the wooden bridges. Plants begin to sway and nod in some perfect agreement. They brush slatted leaves like tongues sucking at one another. They are plotting.