About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
“Trade For Print” is a new short story I wrote concerning an unscrupulous photographer who lures a postal worker into fraud by offering young love for sale.
The piece, entirely fictional, of course, takes place in North Hollywood and moves around on local boulevards and avenues: Chandler, Colfax, Bakman, Lemp and Lankershim. And includes such storied places as The Federal Bar, SGI Buddhist Center and the North Hollywood Post Office.
They had promised rain.
We were going to be drenched, drowned, and flooded.
The clouds would stay overhead for months, and there would be endless days of mudslides, dark clouds and gray skies.
They had promised rain, clearly, and said it in English, many times; the word was rain, but there was so much of it and they had renamed him El Niño.
For maybe one or two days there was rain and it came down and drenched the garden and it seemed that relief was on its way.
But the heat and the sun, and that blinding light, the kind that throws deep shadows on surfaces, came back.
The hot winds, the cloudless skies, the bees and the mosquitos, the dust and the fires, and the furnace of the car parked in the sun with black seats that burn your ass when you sit down.
In Hancock Park, last Saturday, the air smelled like smoke, and lungs labored hard to bring in oxygen.
But on curved streets with swept sidewalks and trimmed hedges, homes glowed, in the inferno.
Movie star beauties, these residences, from the 1920s and 30s, photographed like Garbo and Gable, in black and white.
They retained dignity, reserving in elegance, those rights given to the rich, to remain unaffected by external events, to quietly succeed by dint of elitism, and transcend the hot weather through graceful form.
In honor of my new short story “Somebodies and Nobodies“, which ends on the Fourth of July, I present an excerpt:
“He climbed back over the balcony rail and lowered himself, floor-by-floor, jumping onto each level and then exiting by grabbing, over the rail, swinging down, bending, moving, slithering, twisting, down and down, until his feet finally touched ground.
He was still trapped inside the compound. He held onto the twelve foot high, barbed wire fence and began to climb.
And then his movement triggered the security lights. He pulled himself up over the fence, out of the compound and into the park. Sirens started wailing. The lights shot over the fence, and he could see armed guards coming through and giving chase.
He bolted like a gazelle through the park, his thickly powerful muscled legs no match for the blue-suited, paunchy police.
He cut diagonally across Admirality and into the parking lot of Café Del Rey restaurant along the water, next to the yachts, boats and the docks.
The sky suddenly lit up in pink and orange, a brilliant colossal light show illuminating the harbor, throwing the buildings into daylight under the night sky.
He ran into a crowd of people watching fireworks, and realized as he ran that he was running on the Fourth of July.
He sprinted down the promenade, under the exploding fire show, across to Mother’s Beach, where more revelers and partiers drank and laughed on the blankets and sand.
He ran over to Washington, onto the beach and dove into the ocean. He swam out, past the pier, turning north and swimming the crawl along the shore, parallel to land.
Somewhere in the ocean near Rose Avenue, some 50 yards out, he stopped swimming and began to kick his legs and tread water. He went on his back and floated with the motion of the ocean. His heart slowed down as he rocked in the sea. And, for the first time in days, he felt free in his own capsule of calm and tranquility.
Kicking his legs and treading water, he pulled out the VHS tape from his spandex pants and released it into the ocean. He let the tide pull him in, as he collapsed onto the beach in elated and relieved exhaustion.”
THE END
Adrian/Sepulveda Blvd., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.
Excerpt from “Somebodies and Nobodies”my new short story about a poor athlete, fatherless and street smart, who escapes the California desert and comes to Santa Monica in search of glory and finds himself mixed up between a divorced couple whose failures and successes echo his own life.
“He imagined and wondered, trying to understand his blood-bursting passions. Who was buried deep within his DNA? Who came before him? Whose genes were his?
Sometimes he imagined himself descended from a warrior, other times: a convict, a poet, a dancer; a fighter, a general, a killer, a composer, an explorer, a ship captain, a priest.
He was born poor in the low desert east of Palm Springs, near the saguaro and sagebrush, to Tania Santos, a 19-year-old Mexican housekeeper from Durango, and El Paso born Grayson Waypole, a black man, a 22-year-old cook and expert marksman, dishonorably discharged from the Marines, who was said to be father to 30 children stretching from Indio to 29 Palms.
After Colton’s birth, Waypole went wayward.
Tania was migrant and undocumented. She dragged Colton up and down to all the stifling desert towns where the air is hot and life is hard.
She took a job with the Coachella Valley High School and worked as a cook in the school cafeteria, dumping vats of potato salad, franks and beans into steel trays.
Mother and son lived in a flat, pebble-roofed house on dusty Bagdad Avenue, a place where people parked their pickup trucks in dirt-covered front yards.”
In my car yesterday, looking for a shortcut to avoid traffic on Melrose near Normandie, I turned up Kenmore and drove north.
On the 900 Block, I found a strange and eerie neighborhood of old houses.
There were no cars parked on the street, and hardly any automobile traffic.
Jail bars covered the doors and windows of every home. The street was baked in blistering sun, and without any shade trees.
No people were outside, and at the end of the block, at Santa Monica Boulevard, vagrants sat along the curb outside of a twin-steepled church.
I wanted to know what this neighborhood was, and what it had been, a long time ago.
Was there a time when children played in the front yards, rode bikes on the street, and adults sat on the porch drinking iced tea?
Why did every window sit behind steel bars? And was there a time when people lived in homes without protective glass gates?
And who lives here now? Are they mostly Korean or Armenian?
And why does this sunny place seem so frightened, closed-up, hermetic and cold?
There are some streets in Los Angeles where things just do not seem normal.
The 900 Block of Kenmore in East Hollywood is one of these.
Here in Van Nuys 
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