The only way to get in among the towers is on a guided tour. We bought tickets at the Visitors’ Center — appropriately homey rather than fully corporate. The tickets, pinky purple, were like the ones you used to get at cinemas; the guy handing them over was wearing a large black T-shirt that was just about big enough for him. We showed him the Cherry album cover on Jessica’s phone.
‘Oh man, that’s deep,’ he said. He liked the picture so much he showed it to a colleague, handed the phone back and said again how deep it was. I’d never heard the word ‘deep’ used in this way before. Was it an old expression that had fallen out of use or a new one that I’d not come across, something specifically African American that had not yet crossed over into general usage? I liked it but couldn’t imagine myself ever saying it without sounding sceptical or ironic. Adorno was deep, obviously, but if I said he was deep it would sound like a shallow response or, worse, like I was parodying a shallow response to show the depth of my own understanding.
We had ten minutes to wait before our tour began, so we went next door, to the Mingus Youth Arts Center. I loved the way this place was named after Mingus, the honouring and the legacy. How many times, in London, had I cycled, walked or taken the bus along Brixton Road, past Max Roach Park? How cool that someone had the gumption to name it after the great drummer rather than one of the English poets: Tennyson Place, Keats Street, Shelley Way — reliable signs, always, that you are entering the world of hard-to-lets and potential threat. Not that Roach’s name made crossing the park to visit a friend who lived in the flats behind it appreciably nicer. Nothing ever happened, but it was always a relief to get to his place, to hear the multiple locks being turned, to see the door opening and then being shut securely behind us again so that we could give ourselves entirely to ‘Speak, Brother, Speak’ or ‘Money Jungle.’
Something was happening to me here in L.A., something new or at least something that had been sneaking up on me that I’d only recently become conscious of. Things from my late twenties that had meant a lot to me — films I’d seen, books I’d read or music I’d listened to — kept coming back to me with a force that had been dormant for much of the intervening thirty years. Cherry had been a constant presence — because he had mutated and evolved beyond jazz into other kinds of music that I became interested in — but Ornette, Miles and some Coltrane were re-claiming me in a way that was also touched with loss: the thoroughness of their claim was somehow related to a diminution of feeling of which I had hitherto been largely unaware. There was something deathly about it.
And Mingus had meant so much to me, even though he was dead before I knew anything about him, unlike Cherry, Haden and Pharoah, whom I saw play several times, all of whom I spoke to, albeit only briefly. There were plenty of pictures of Mingus in the center named after him, some album covers and CD cases on display and an exhibition of artworks, but ten minutes was plenty long enough to take everything in. We walked outside again, joined the other people on our tour: ten of us, mainly Europeans, gathered in a semi-circle. Our guide, a smiling African American woman, asked what the most important rule of the visit was going to be.
‘Enjoy yourself,’ said a man in an already-enjoying-himself Hawaiian shirt.
‘Have fun,’ said Jessica, tuning in quickly to the spirit of the place. But no, the main rule was ‘Do not climb on the towers.’ Fair enough — you can’t have people clambering all over the towers as if they’re part of an adventure playground — but it was a bit of a downer in the way that prohibitions always are.
We were admitted to the towers through a locked gate so that the guide became a warder, a turnkey, a screw. In the future an invisible force field might prevent people from entering except at designated times.
In among the tendrils and arches of the towers, we listened to the story of their creator’s life. The story was consistent in broad outline with the versions of Rodia’s life online, though there is considerable variation as to some of the details, including his name. Sabato Rodia — who for much of his life went by the nickname Sam, whose last name is sometimes given as Rodilo — was born in 1879 or 1880 in Rivatoli, Italy, and immigrated to the States in the 1890s. He settled in Pennsylvania, where Sabato and his brother worked in the coal mines. The brother died in an accident in the mine. Sabato moved to the West Coast, married Lucia Ucci in 1902. They had three children, lived in Seattle, Oakland and Martinez before the marriage collapsed in 1912. He then worked as a labourer in rock quarries and as a construction tiler, and lived with another woman, named Benita.
In 1921 he bought a triangular-shaped lot here at 1765 East 107th Street in Watts. The lot measured 151 by 69 by 137 feet, and Rodia, at the age of forty-two, began to transform it into his home and his lasting monument. According to some accounts, he started work on the towers to give him something to do after he quit drinking (though Mingus remembers him ‘drinking that good red wine from a bottle’ as he worked). He lived with a woman named Carmen, who left him in 1927. From then on he lived alone, building the towers until 1954, when he gave the property to a neighbour and moved to Martinez to live near his sister. He was seventy-five. The following year, the neighbour sold the property to a man named Joseph Montoya, who intended to open what would have been the world’s most spectacularly located taco stand. These plans came to nothing, and he in turn sold the property to two film people, Nicholas King (an actor) and William Cartwright (then a student at USC, later an editor), who began the long process of ensuring the survival of the towers.
As the talk about Rodia and his work continued, we shuffled through the site, sometimes on the edges, near the boundary walls, sometimes right by the towers, with the glinting and shining bits of glass and imprints either of the tools he’d used to make them or of anything else that came to hand: cornbread moulds, rug beaters, faucet handles. Rodia salvaged and scavenged what he could — rebar, glass, crockery, bottle bottoms (green for 7UP or Canada Dry, blue for milk of magnesia), junk that might be left over when everything else of apparent value had already been taken and used. That is the essential contrast: the scale of the undertaking and the modest means of its construction and materials. Klara, in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, is struck by exactly this. ‘She didn’t know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality.’
The towers soared overhead, sturdy, intricate, gracefuclass="underline" science-fictiony, daft and Gaudi-esque all at once. They were like a forest of trees, linked by concrete creepers but without any umbrella or canopy of leaves. But they were also like inverted and bejewelled corkscrews. Or like. . The power of the place comes, in part, from how impossible it is to put your finger on quite what the towers are or look like. To Klara in Underworld it seems like ‘an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn’t know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe.’ Whatever we come up with, a crucial part of the experience resides in that ‘what else’: a suggestion of skyrocket, the masts of a triangular ship heading east but becalmed forever in the doldrums of Watts with only wave patterns in the perimeter walls to serve as the sea. Our guide took these nautical references as evidence that Rodia’s heart and course were set on Italy, the land he had come from, but this was greeted with some scepticism by a white-haired member of our group who spoke for us all.
‘How much of this is supposition?’ he wanted to know.
It was all a matter of record, she insisted, could all be verified by things Rodia had said in interviews either while the towers were being built or after he’d finished, when they began to attract the attention of the world at large. By then they had become mythic, and it is the nature of the mythic that it remains true to itself while subtly adapting to the spoken or unspoken needs of those to whom it appeals, whose hopes it embodies. But the towers’ adaptive capacities are also a proven physical fact. They bend away from the sun, our guide told us, like sunflowers in reverse. This was met with a long silence, a breathing scepticism, but then she explained that concrete does this because of thermal expansion. The fence kept people at bay; the towers leaned away from the sun, their non-denominational appeal causing myriad meanings and associations to flow towards them, unimpeded, free. From them too, as if they were not ship but radio masts, transmitting the sound of which they were the visual embodiment, broadcasting their location, drawing us to them.