La Cienaga Boulevard by Harrison Kim

“It’s hard to believe I exist in this place,” I tell my wife Rita.

On this trip to her hometown L. A. I’ve felt increasingly unreal.  My eyes scan the ground, try to see this city at a basic level.  There’s too much to take in if I raise my sight, the sheet white mist, streets lined with tents, people staggering and shouting.

“Onto the bus, Cody,” says Rita.

I perceive the steps and escape up into a corridor.

“Go to the back,” Rita tells me. 

The back is the best place. Nothing’s behind you but a steel wall. Passenger heads rise from the seats as I pull my way down the aisle gutter to the end of the bus.  I think of the heads as bowling pins, and sit across from one, it doesn’t turn or wobble.

“This is more like it,” Rita says, sitting in the back seat. 

I’m against a window.  I peer forth through the glass. 

The bus travels alongside palms and streets full of debris, towards the brown hills which I know often burn in yellow fire or flow with black mud, today they disappear and reappear in the white and grey fog.    

We pass a strip mall and outside under an awning stands a man in a yellow cowboy hat wearing a long coat, he turns and his coat flaps open revealing a sawed off shotgun, then he turns again and the gap closes. 

“Did you see that?” I ask Rita, but she’s staring out the window on the other side.  “He’s guarding the present moment,” I tell her.

I lean forward and point back, and Rita nods and smiles and checks her telephone.

“She’s pulled me into her dream,” I say to myself.  “It seems to be about 2:45 p.m.”

We’re in this intimate world together, two tourists staring through windowpanes.  We’ve jetted in and walked East L. A. all through the morning.  Now it’s time to voyage back to the motel.  The motel is the same as every other motel.  I like the certainty of the bed.

I imagine watching T. V. at the motel and imagine that what I see on the bus I see on that T. V.

Rita wanted me to travel with her, to the neighbourhood where she grew up.  She left the original L. A. twenty-five years before.   I’ve been pulled into her wistful comeback.

“I need to see the past once more,” she says.

“There is no way to return exactly,” I tell her. “No time machines.”

Rita wears short shorts and when we walk her neighbourhood to admire the Spanish style architecture a car stops in front of us, and two guys step out and stand there in sharp suits and watch as we pass.

I wonder should I say “Buenos Dias?” but I only nod, and they nod too and watch us walk away and do not follow further.  As soon as I turn my back, I forget they are there, until now when the bus stops and four tall boys jump on, with short hair and long arms, baggy pants and fast movements. People ahead of me swivel their heads away.  I watch the boys barge up the aisle in careless strides.   They sit alongside my wife and I, moving and twisting their legs, scanning around.

“I think I see,” I hear one say.  “A dirty long-haired Jew.”

I turn my head and strain my gaze out the window.  I notice a woman, a runner perhaps exercising in black tights.  Is her hair long enough to qualify?   A man’s pulling a cart down the other side of the street, he’s dirty but he’s bald.

The shaven headed lad to my right takes out his lighter and flicks it.  He holds the flame high.  The bus stops and an older well-dressed black woman with a jumpy gap-toothed kid appears.  The kid twists and turns down the bus bowling alley gutter aisle.  The two take a seat directly in front of me and the kid swivels and looks straight to my eyes “you’re from a different place,” he says.

“Indeed, I am,” I tell him and examine the bus up and down for any sign of the Jew spoken of earlier.  The eyes of the lanky late teen boys move, they watch beyond my nose and lips to the space between myself and the kid and the kid says “Yeah, man, yeah,” and he kicks out in front of him with brand new runners.

“Just got those shoes?” I ask and his grandma tells the kid “Keep your face forward.”

I look above her head and see through the bus window a wide graveyard all in tallish trees, more green and shade than I’ve observed anywhere today, there’s a high concrete wall between the street and the yard and on top of the wall there’s barbed wire.

“People are dying to get in there,” I call across to Rita and she nods.  I continue. “It seems very calm.”

One of the lanky lads says, “There’s a lot of dead Jews in that graveyard.”

I don’t look at him because the green cemetery space commands all my attention, focus on the tombstone view.  I don’t want to look into anyone’s eyes now, because they’ll pull me out of this bus gaze dream and into theirs, and I’ve told Rita I’ll be with her today.  I glance over.  She leans forward, her face close to her phone.

The bus sits at a red light.  I half-stand in the seat to peer over the graveyard wall.  I search for signs of Jews, a star of David on a tombstone, mourners wearing kippahs.

It looks cool under those leafy branches.

I notice brown leaves blowing in the cemetery breeze.  Where I sit inside the bus, the air is still.

 I turn and shrug.  “I’ve never seen barbed wire on a graveyard wall before,” I tell Rita “Looks like they’re trying to keep us out.”

“That’s the past on the other side,” she says.

Her voice quavers.

The dancing child in front of me folds up one pant leg, bends his elbow, his head bowed but twisted to one side, grinning.   I nod my head towards him.

“We used to play in there then they put up the wire,” says one of the restless boys.

“Yeah,” says another boy. “You liked it inside, eh?  When you were still a kid?”

All four boys chuckle.

“The fence is no problem, man, no problem,” says the first one.

Rita pulls the bell cord.

“This is our stop,” she says.

“I didn’t think our destination was this close,” I tell her.

Yet indeed, it’s Fairfax and La Cienega, at the border of Culver City.

I say “Goodbye,” to the gap-toothed kid, he sits legs straight with his brand new runners, twirling his feet round and round.

His grandma turns and then looks away.  The boys watch us get off, then turn away also.  I forget about them the moment my eyes look somewhere else. 

The bus drives off, Rita says “You were very cool, very cool.”  She’s breathing a bit hard, leaning against the bus pole. 

“How was I cool?”  I ask. 

“You didn’t react at all when that boy talked about the dirty long-haired Jew.”

“I couldn’t see any Jew.  I looked but I couldn’t find anyone that fit that description.”

“He was talking about you.”

“I’m not Jewish.”

“I know that” she says.

I look at her and she laughs out loud.

“They didn’t see me,” I say.  “They saw someone else.”

“Did you think you were in a Hollywood movie?” Rita asks.  “Those boys were looking for a showdown.”

“I imagined I was in your dream” I tell her. 

 “My dreams are way out of control,” says Rita.  “You kept low key, Cody.  You’re running a tight script.”

The hills are clearer now, through the mist.

“That graveyard was real,” I continue, then stretch, to wake myself up to this new scene at the bus stop.  “That was the biggest patch of green space I’ve discovered in this city.”

“It was well protected,” Rita says. “I used to play there too, just like those boys.”

 We walk up the street arm in arm, to Jonny’s Restaurant.

A twitchy woman stands on the road in front of us, holding a blue backpack in front of her, she asks “can you give me a few dollars so I can get to the other side?” 

Rita pulls a ten dollar bill out of her purse.  “Here you are,” she says.

“Thank You!”  The woman glances at the money.  She looks up.  “Can you give me another five? I can make it all the way to the next street with another five.”

Rita gives her five more, and the woman crosses.   She breaks into a run as she reaches the opposite sidewalk.

We walk into Jonny’s. 

“This is an expensive city,” Rita says.

Her face is very clear to me now, as she gazes down while holding the menu, I notice her halo of thick black hair, her mascara highlighting the curled up ends of her lashes.  She sits in her short khakis, sets down the menu and tips her buff bowler hat.

“I wish to order a salmon and lox bagel,” she says.

Our food arrives.  My hand shakes as I hold my hamburger.  I put the burger down and study the waitress and the restaurant patrons.  Beneath their clothes and skin and organs, they’re all bare, white ribbed skeletons.  I imagine these skeletons all around me, then fill the spaces back in with meat and clothes.  Then I close the gap between myself and them with the invisible substance I call “reality.”

“This is happening, this is truth,” I say inside my head, and after a while I feel calm.  I try eating my burger again.

“You seem lost somewhere,” Rita says.

“You’re the one who matters,” I tell her.  “Scenes stick to you and I from everywhere, but we’re the only ones together through them all.  You and I.”

“Just us two,” she says.

I know if this perception ever changes, I will indeed disappear.  I must keep myself convinced, and existing.

After the lunch, we walk back across the street.  The woman with the blue backpack asks us for more money to walk over to her original side.

“She knows where she’s going,” says Rita. “Which route should we take?”

Nothing is within my control except being with Rita.  Today I looked out the window of a bus and let the words and scenes fall around me.  I can operate here. I can make this work.  Time to get down to specifics.

“Let’s hike to the Hollywood sign,” I suggest.  “We’ll ask someone to take a photo of us arm in arm by the sagebrush, right below the H, so we can look at it tomorrow and remember what was real.”

Harrison Kim

Image: La Cienaga Boulevard from Wikicommons share alike. A panoramic view of the boulevard at dusk showing shops with lights flooding across pavements