Paraglider wings whipping like a banana peel … I will buy a subscription [percussive clanging resounding through titanium struts, weird twanging like a Nels Cline guitar solo] … It’s really blasting … no control of glider … visibility lim … [hissing of static slashed by sudden silence] … in range … outskirts of Sky City above me, looming towers of wrecked cranes festooned with jagged sheet metal, trailing cables, plastic sheeting … Just a few … to hook the ropes … [loud popping, percussive clanging] Yes! Now if I can secure the glider! [grating metallic shrieks] Cables … swirling like octopus tentacles in the cloud—}
“ELADATL Agnes Smedley descending to three miles. Waiting for your call.”
{[electric crackling, popping] [insistent hiss of static, then silence]}
[Cue: “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido” by Quilapayun]
“This is Ehekatl 99.9 on your dial. Stay tuned.”
CHICKEN MAN
Afternoon light etches a brittle hardness into the corrugated San Gabriel Mountains. They were always there to the north and east, green shoulders hunched protectively over the city, ignored mostly, like we ignored the elders who watched over us because we thought we were in some kind of rush, thought we’d already known everything about them for a long, long time. The San Gabriels are still there, of course, but the city as we knew it is gone. And with it, ourselves. We have become others to ourselves, or ghosts, those selves we thought of as our permanent, private property turned out to be transient as secondhand clothes. Late afternoon orange light cutting across the folds of the mountains, shadows seeping out of the canyons into the lavender dusk like snowmelt stored deep in the heart of cracked granite. Once in a lifetime, the yucca throws up its tall crisp stalk and blooms, creamy white blossoms. Later, the whole plant dies, the stalk drying golden in wind and sun. Later, the seedpods rattling black in the wind.
Ben recommends the Dino’s Chicken and Burgers in Pico Union, but I was closer to the Lincoln Heights location. An order of their famous chicken dripping radioactive orange marinade, french fries drenching a paper basket, trying to eat in the car—you get impatient to eat while driving (can be a disaster), hard to cuss yourself out now because why bother, did you really think you could steer with one hand, stuffing a fistful of greasy bird breast into your face with the skin sliding off your fingers with a fire engine and paramedics coming at you? Sirens, and glare so you can’t hardly see to get over to let the emergency vehicles pass, plus you could once in awhile clean your windshield so it won’t look like a cross between an Oklahoma dust storm and a starry night in the Sierras projected onto the brilliance of mid-afternoon? It’s hard to see anything, while the roofline of a mini-mall in the middle distance polarizes into its own silhouette every time you look directly at it, leaving you seeing spots, groaning because some secret reservoir of orange grease inside the chicken breast is splattering your T-shirt, your pants, and the passenger seat as you thrust it aside.
Traffic moves somehow, people in vehicles crammed together stare at other drivers grimacing, cars bottlenecked behind an 18-wheeler changing gears in the intersection. Too late for this T-shirt now, toss the chicken back into the basket, wipe your hand on your shirt so as not to slime the steering wheel even worse, accelerate past vehicles crowded at the on-ramp, veer into the right lane ahead of the truck, dashing into the shadows of the Golden State Freeway overpass, heading toward the L.A. River.
I punch the radio button, and Warren Olney is reporting on a mass murder in some outlying California town, somebody killed a whole crew of Mexican workers on a chicken ranch. Six, all told, maybe one survivor, Warren Olney said, men who had ventured far from their homes in Michoacán and Jalisco, only to meet terrible deaths—shot, stabbed, and in one case run over repeatedly by a pickup truck—at the hands of an apparently crazed individual. “Is it racism or a sign of deepening economic stress when individuals commit these terrible crimes? As in last week’s murderous attack on a Mexican family in southern Arizona, these crimes seem to be on the rise in the United States. Does it mark a fearful new chapter in the xenophobic history of the American West, as in the days of anti-Chinese pogroms, lynch law and vigilante ‘justice’?” Warren Olney said he was going to devote his program to these issues.
I hadn’t tuned in in time to get the full details. Where was it? Who did it? Was this somehow connected to Mexican cartels and gang wars? Was the chicken ranch actually a secret meth lab? Were the killings a cover-up? What was the poultrymeth connection? I sucked chicken out from behind my incisor and probed the area with my tongue, straining to hear the facts as I drove. I gathered that the violence had taken place in some rural area. I pictured in my mind a chicken ranch I’d seen once as a child outside of Lancaster.
It had impressed me a lot at the time—sterile industrial lines, a facility of sheet-metal hangars sitting under desert heat in utter silence. I had spent the day riding out in a van to see “the ranch,” a piece of real estate the father of one of my friends had purchased as an investment. My friend Raúl said his mom was angry that his dad had spent their savings on this piece of rocky desert. Raúl’s dad told his family it was going to be their getaway from Los Angeles, their “ranchito.” Raúl, his little brother Beto, and I were all curious to see the ranchito. We drove out on branching dirt roads across sun-stricken desolation. The landscape reflected an almost malevolent heat. When the van stopped in a barren patch of bulldozed ground ringed by piles of old construction debris, odd bits of trash and discarded car parts, we saw that the ranch consisted of chalky, alkaline soil, tumbleweeds and creosote brush, and dark volcanic rocks.
The sole structure on the property was a battered mobile home, hot and airless when Raúl’s father opened it up and we pressed in behind him, rank with some bitter plastic stench, reeking like a wet dog. Raúl’s mother stood outside with her arms crossed over her chest in the leaning shade of the trailer, with such a sorrowful expression on her round face that we couldn’t look at her. We thought she was about to burst into tears, and perhaps there’d be a typical big nasty fight and we’d have to ride back to the city in a choking atmosphere, full of recriminations and the chance that we might get slapped across the face if we said anything. So Raúl said, “What’s that over there?” and we three ran off into the bushes to get away as fast as we could.
Instinctively, we made for the highest point on the property, a very low rise—not even a hill—some distance away. We didn’t want to be anywhere near if the adults were going to start screaming at each other. The low rise didn’t look very far, but Raúl and I had to cajole little Alberto to keep up with us, because it must’ve taken us at least half an hour or so of struggling through brush, down into and back out of gullies, struggling up sandy embankments that collapsed and covered us in chalky dust, ducking under dusty branches that coated us in sticky resin. Beto was whining about going back, rubbing his eyes red with some cactus fuzz or something in his hair and eyes, and about to cry, so Raúl and I kept telling him that the low rise was “ruins!”, but he didn’t know what ruins were so we said that there was a treasure there. Alberto really had no idea what treasure was either and kept insisting that we’d better go back, so we told him that people had buried big piles of money and toys and stuff in a secret cave on the hill. We actually found two crushed, decaying beer cans on top of the low rise when we finally got there, and Raúl and I both told Alberto that pirates drank beer here before they buried their treasure. Beto was such a baby, we didn’t have to bother to explain how pirates bury their treasure in the desert. In fact, there were shallow depressions and holes where it looked like someone once dug into the rocky ground. Raúl jumped into one and started kicking at the ground with his foot, telling Alberto that he bet he’d be the first one to find something. I was a little leery of what he might find and didn’t move to help, because it reminded me of old backyard graves of family dogs. I noticed there were white buildings maybe a mile or so in the distance, pale against the volcanic ground. Dozens of windowless, featureless