AIG and every war that bankrupted the whole world system to show up in our driveway with a suitcase of cash and papers to sign? You think they’d overlook our lack of friends in government, no investors, no credit, no permits, insurance, licensing? Don’t you even read your own newspaper?”
“Okay, okay—”
“No, no, follow me on this now. When it made it here, Western Civilization brought the equivalent of the Black Death to the Tongva. But from this angle, we’re watching the whole show in decline. Industry came to Los Angeles like Steve McQueen heading to the Tijuana cancer clinic, like Janice Joplin in room 105, fixing in the Landmark Hotel, like Sam Cooke shot with his pants down at the Hacienda Motel, like JFK in the Ambassador Hotel—”
“RFK. Ambassador Hotel Wilshire Boulevard was Robert Kennedy—”
“You know what I’m getting at. Look down, two o’clock, south by southeast.”
“At the cops? That looks like one of those, what do they call it? Pursuits where they go slow?”
“But look at the streets—what I’m saying is that they got streets and buildings named after those ‘people,’ but it’s all just like black-and-white shadows, soundless flickering in the collective memory of some windy abandoned hangar—”
“Did your ears pop just now, too? Mine just did.”
“Tupac and Biggie Smalls, heroes of the crack wars, where are they now? Che T-shirts, brown berets, and the grape boycott, where are they now? Purple Hearts, field jackets, the Doors at the Troubadour on Sunset, all those rock stars living in Laurel Canyon, Topanga and Malibu, where are they now? Sam Yorty calling Tom Bradley a communist? Freeway Ricky Ross’s conduit for CIA crack cocaine, the prison post-industrial system! The San Fernando Valley porn industry boom and bust? All those unemployed porn stars trying to find work as strippers? The Desert Acres real estate bubble? L.A. riots of ’65 and ’92 and 2021, etc? Crystal meth, Earth Day, public education, rap music, U.S. Steel, the Merchant Marine? What happened to all of it? It didn’t just blow away on a Santa Ana …”
“That was then.”
“This is now! Hey, you can see water in the arroyo! It’s gone now, but I swear I saw it shining.”
“So what if there’s no aerospace industry? Fifty thousand gangbangers and 100,000 cops, they’re still there. Maybe if you sift out suicidal Christian cults, the movie business, the real estate shuck-and-jive, $1.37-per-gallon gasoline, ‘physical culture’ and food fads—that was what was real, finally …”
“Cops?”
“Or gangbangers. Did you see? The cops had ’em lined up on the sidewalk back there. In the spotlight.”
“Well, we aim to love it anyhow, as is. So what if the twentieth century was a wash? We aim to love it by floating our boat. We aim to change the whole look of this landscape. This solar-powered dirigible will rise from the El Sereno hills, ferried across the San Andreas Fault at night, in the early hours before dawn, to some secret mooring location. An underground movement to develop pollution-free air transport, to revolutionize and revitalize the Southern California grid. Job creation for the masses, turning around the bankrupt culture of despair, the Cults of Eating Shit and Liking It. We will use the current state of total neglect, disrepair, and the entropy of urban centers to launch an inversion. An electro-titanium dirigible on the scale of the Graf Zeppelin will appear like the rising sun over the San Gabriel Valley, and, when the people see what can be done, they will rise up, across the nation, in every dead city and wasteland suburb, the will to live and the desire to prevail, the prevailing of desire—”
“What do I get if I invest my life savings in this imaginary scheme? A pound of queso fresco, a clay statue Colima dog?”
“Such a deal! Where else can you find an offer like that?”
“So why wait? What better time for them to rise up than right now?”
“What, why—If it weren’t for the lack of a handful of investors—”
“What, you’re gonna pretend cash is all that’s holding you back?”
“We can’t operate forever out of abandoned buildings, always moving storage and assembly sites one step ahead of the bulldozers. We don’t have outlay for lithium batteries, critical materiel; everything is borrowed against up to our eyeballs. Every time I need a new part, I find Vice President of Sales Swirling Wheelnuts out back sitting on a woodpile in the weeds drinking up the profits, clinking beers with passersby—”
“I think you’re holding back the real reason.”
“I assure you, it’s all a house of cards improvised on the head of a pin, balancing on tiptoe, walking through fire—”
“You got the look of motion sickness on you. But I don’t think it’s from vertigo, from any fear of actual heights.”
“You think it’s not daunting, piloting pirate dirigibles across the night skies of Southern California, conversing in code on the radio so as to fool air traffic controllers into thinking that you’re either some aircraft heading away from them on a standard corridor at lawful altitude, or an emergency craft making an unscheduled rescue? To give at least a radio appearance of being legit while avoiding all visual recognition, collisions, and charted air corridors?”
“I know you can spin it for the customers—huge, hovering airships droning across the south-facing slopes of the San Gabriels in the dark, hiding behind black clouds, pretending to be the slowest helicopter that never was, maneuvering through air pockets, isotherms, and cold fronts, carrying forth into the New Era forgotten alternative technologies, salvaged through derring-do. But a while ago you had something like this same green look on your face when you told me you were waiting in your car in the alley outside The Smell to pick someone up—”
“No, Isaura had to drop off something for the band—”
“Whatever—you saw her come out of the club, smashed. The guy she was with had to carry her out. They fall against the side of your car (I see you sitting stone cold in the dark and not even twitching at this point) and slide off the hood (very slowly off the wheel well, as you described it) and stumble down the alley.”
“Yeah, I told you about that. That was the guy she married.”
“Her enabler, I know.”
“You said that.”
“Not true?”
“I wouldn’t begin to know.”
“No?”
“I don’t pretend—”
“No? Come on—she was calling you. I know you were taking her calls.”
“Once or twice a year. Yeah, I might get a call.”
“Maybe more than that. She’s drunk or wasted and always starts crying. She’s gone from L.A. to El Paso, Austin to San Jose, San Jose to Chicago, Albuquerque to San Diego, burning her bridges everywhere. The constellation of mutual friends is winking out one by one. Even you stopped lending her money when she told you it was for her mom, and then you found out it wasn’t. Her mom has one in jail, one out on parole at home, and this one—”
“I knew her when she was better than that. Everybody just sees the latest mess. She used to be somebody else. Some other person entirely.”
“You got that color in your face again.”
“I heard she broke up with that guy, anyway.”
“Of course! Within six months of the wedding she and the guy are fighting all the time. Eventually she calls the cops, apparently there’s visible bruising and redness, so they arrest the dude. She changes the locks and gets a court order barring the guy from getting back inside his own house for three months! When he does, he finds she backed up a moving van to the place and cleaned him out. She was off to Texas or Chicago or wherever when the guy walks in and finds it clean