“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the lost city of Dickens.”
“By painting a white line down the middle of a street that already has two yellow lines down the middle of it?”
“You love the mangy dog that shows up in your backyard as much as the puppy you got for your birthday.”
“Then you should put up a flyer,” she said, handing me a mock-up she’d hurriedly composed on the back of a wanted poster.
MISSING: HOMETOWN
Have you seen my city?
Description: Mostly Black and Brown. Some Samoan.
Friendly. Answers to the name of Dickens.
Reward Earned in Heaven.
If you have any information, please call this number 1-(800) DICKENS.
I appreciated the help and, using a wad of chewed gum, fastened the flyer to the nearest telephone post. For those looking to find the thing that you’ve lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you’ll ever make in life. I chose a space at the bottom of the pole between a circular for an Uncle Jam’s Army concert at the Veterans Center. “Uncle Jam Wants You! To Serve and Funk in Los Afghanistan, California! Allah Ak-Open-Bar from 9–10 p.m.!” and a leaflet promoting a mysterious dream job that paid $1,000 a week, working from home. I hoped whoever posted that flyer had had a talk with human resources, because I seriously doubted they were making even $300 a week, and they definitely weren’t working from home.
It took about six weeks to finish painting the border and the labels, and in the end I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished, but it was fun to see kids spend their Saturdays circumnavigating the city by carefully tracing their steps, walking heel-to-toe on the line, making sure they’d left not even an inch untrod upon. Sometimes I’d chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn’t any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line.
I have to confess that, in the days after I painted it, I, too, was hesitant to cross the line, because the jagged way it surrounded the remnants of the city reminded me of the chalk outline the police had needlessly drawn around my father’s body. But I did like the line’s artifice. The implication of solidarity and community it represented. And while I hadn’t quite reestablished Dickens, I had managed to quarantine it. And community — cum — leper colony wasn’t a bad start.
EXACT CHANGE, OR ZEN AND THE ART OF BUS RIDING AND RELATIONSHIP REPAIR
Nine
Sometimes the smell wakes you up in the middle of the night. Chicago has the Hawk, and Dickens, despite its newly painted barrier, has the Stank, an eye-burning, colorless miasma of sulfur and shit birthed in the Wilmington oil refineries and the Long Beach sewage treatment plant. Carried inland by the prevailing winds, the Stank gathers up a steamy pungency as the fumes combine with the stench of the lounge lizards returning home from partying in Newport Beach, drenched in sweat, tequila shooter runoff, and gallons of overapplied Drakkar Noir cologne. They say the Stank drops the crime rate by 90 percent, but when the smell slaps you awake at three in the morning, the first thing you want to do is kill Guy Laroche.
It was a night about two weeks after I’d painted the border, the stench was especially strong, and I was unable to get back to sleep. I tried cleaning the stables, hoping the smell of fresh horse manure would remove the sting from my nostrils. It didn’t work and I had to resort to covering my face with a dishrag soaked in vinegar to kill the fumes. Hominy walked in with my wet suit draped over one arm and a bowl in the other hand. He was dressed like a British manservant, complete with coat and tails and a vacillating BBC Masterpiece Theatre accent.
“What are you doing here?”
“I saw the lights and thought maybe Master would like the black hash and a little fresh air this evening.”
“Hominy, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Same reason you aren’t. It smells like a bum’s asshole outside.”
“Where’d you get the tux?”
“Back in the fifties every black actor had one. Show up for a casting call for butler or headwaiter and the studio would be like ‘Boy, you just saved us fifty bucks. You’re hired!’”
A little wake ’n’ bake and some surfing wasn’t a bad idea. I’d be too high to drive to the beach, but that would give me an excuse to see my girl for the first time in months. Catching some waves and a whiff of my baby? That’d be like killing two burdens with one stoner, so to speak. Hominy walked me into the living room, spun Daddy’s recliner around, and patted the armrest.
“Sit.”
The gas fireplace roared to life, and I stuck a punk into the flames, sparked the bowl, and took a long, smooth pull and was high before I could exhale. I must’ve left the back door open, because one of the newborn calves, shiny, black, barely a week old, and not yet used to the sounds and smells of Dickens, wandered in and stared me down with his big brown eyes. I blew a puff of hashish into his face, and together we could feel the stress leave our bodies. As the blackness peeled from our hides, the melanin fizzing and dissipating into nothingness like antacids dissolving in tap water.
They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
The distant staccato of gunfire sounded in the air. The last shoot-out of the night followed by the beating rotors of the police helicopter. The calf and I split a double of single malt to take the edge off. Hominy pitched himself by the door. A parade of ambulances sped down the street, and he handed me my surfboard like a butler hands an English gentleman his coat. Feigned or not, sometimes I’m jealous of Hominy’s obliviousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book — that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
“Master, I just thought you should know, my birthday’s next week.”
I knew something was up. He was being too attentive. But what do you get the slave who doesn’t even want his freedom?
“Well, that’s cool. We’ll take a trip or something. In the meantime, could you do me a favor and put the calf out back?”