Chapter 41: Greyhound bus depot—Los Angeles
When they dump him off the Ride—for this is how he feels, like a piece of trash flicked out onto the highway—the last exit is Los Angeles.
He awakens, slowly focusing—A motel?— and is immediately distracted by a salty smell and a low humming roar that sounds like ocean surf. How? A memory is nudged—San Francisco?—he wonders but the breeze flapping the sun-stained window shade exposes a giant palm tree. It doesn’t disturb him at the moment that he doesn’t know how he’s gotten here. Am I still inside the Bright Cloud? He leans over to turn on a lamp and a matchbook cover whispers, “Welcome to LA.” A wry smile—ain’t Louisiana!
Jared lies there for several minutes, then rises, not to dress because he’s already wearing his clothes, rumpled from sleeping in them. He doesn’t bother to wash his face or straighten his hair. Looking like a morning monster he opens the door and steps out onto a sand-blown walkway. He ventures forth.
Of the few other strollers he passes on the beach-walk, he doesn’t ask touristy questions, although he’s never been here and doesn’t know where he’s walking to—he’s just walking.
“Venice” says the sign and he asks it, “Venus, great goddess, where art thine gondolas?” Haughtily, she snubs him. Undeterred, he continues walking through the bits and pieces of early morning trash that cuddle at the walkway’s edge. The soft muted sunshine, the snappy kissing breeze, the crisp brightness of it all, such as he’s never known—bliss!—he is on mindless lockdown. Not thinking, not plotting, not wondering who paid his bill, if it is paid, he slips his hands into his pockets and finds unexpected treasure—two one-hundred dollar bills. “Jesus! Wow! Fuck.”
Jared hasn’t held money for how long? No matter. Wow! Fuck. Unaware, he’s attracting attention from two vagrants who sleep out under the palms most nights. They shadow him. Hungry, he stops for a doughnut and coffee only to have his C-notes rejected. The vendor says, eying his rumple-haired, wild appearance, “Go on! I’m no jerk, buddy. Pass that fake shit off on somebody else.”
“C’mon, man, it’s real!”
“Sure, buddy, sure. Go on, take a hike!”
Not quite amused, I’m rich but starving!
He catches the date on a newspaper: May 18, 1973. Fucking-A, calendar time again! He’s got to find change to buy the paper.
The soothing beauty of sky-blue waves cresting and crashing in small chalk curls snags his attention, as it does most tourists, so before he goes looking for a bank to cash in for smaller bills he wanders over to the ocean’s edge. He slips off his shoes and wiggles into the damp sand. Brrr! It’s colder than he thought but he’s hooked on the sunrise surfing on breaking waves and so he just stands there awhile. He jiggles in up to his trouser cuffs, rolled as they are up to his knees, and then suddenly—drawing a surprised laugh out of the two stalking him—he flops into the big wet.
The coldness breath-gasping shocks him, thump! throws his heart like a heavy stone at his chest, and the spray, salty and distasteful, makes him choke and laugh. But whack! Whack! Before he can right himself he feels the blows: one, then two, a kick and he’s reeling. “What the fuck!” spurts like whale spume and he rolls sideways several times. Four hands are on him, two pushing roughly into his pants. Rape! images of prison swarm up—but there’s no “Fuck the bitch!” so it’s not rape, just robbery.
With an agility they hadn’t anticipated—two as one, one as big as him, “Easy money!” they had calculated—Jared rises and confronts them. He hops sideways out of the water and crouches like a defender trying to stop a two-on-one fast break. The muggers quickly lunge. Two against one they pull him apart, one on each side, yanking, but he holds. Marion. Quinn. Attica. The fury of his scar explodes and he crushes one nose and knees one stomach. Shocked by his strength and sudden rage, they read the taut line of his scar to mean, Ain’t some ass-fuck with early sunshine money. Faster than they came, they’re gone, doing what they do best—surviving.
Heaving and sweating and riddled with an uneasy anxiety, Jared turns this way and that, eying up and down the beach to glean signs of other attackers, but none come. As such he is facing LA, facing east, an updated version of the conquistador Balboa but backing into the Pacific, hardly pacified. All we are saying is give Peace a chance!
Angrily, he spits, “Fuck you, LA!” as if that is what the conquistador should have said, fuck finger rigid and pumping. But just as quickly, he’s snickering, giggling, then laughing loudly at his miserable self. “Jesus fucking ass-wipe Jared, this ain’t prison... It’s fucking-A dangerous out here, man!”
A few moments pass and he’s calming down, breathing regularly. With rueful laughter he wipes the sand from his trouser legs, rips open his shirt and plunges back into the water. Dig it! He swims a bit but tires easily. Splashing himself in the face, he licks the salt, then lies back and floats, lounging like a big whale . . . . sinks meditatively for a moment, seeking the deep embrace of Mother Ocean from which he knows all has come. Dropping into a sense of himself as slime emerging from the great primordial Ooze, he crawls out of the water, half-stoops, clumsily rises erect and walks—totally blitzed!—back to his motel room.
Three hours later, he wakes again. Lying there he wants to call, to say to someone, “I’m out!” He realizes he himself wouldn’t believe the message. Still hardly believes it.
Outside. The free world. On the streets. Wherever he is, he knows he can never again be in just one place at one time. Inside has irrevocably screwed up the flow between dreaming and reality. Every day from now on, his mind is like a wall stacked with TVs, each tuned to a different channel.
He rolls over, tugs on an ear, squeezes his eyes shut. Am I still in the Bright Cloud? Am I just dreaming?
He opens his eyes and there are no bars. “Shit! Fucking-A shit! I’m out!”
What am I to say?
He senses enough about the weirdness of the Ride to anticipate that Steve—and the Boss reaching out from the grave!—have created a fictional world for his family and friends, as they had for him on the Ride. Postcards. Pictures. Secret FBI meetings with my Mom. Geezus fucking-A K-rist, I can smell it! He’s a bit paralyzed by the dawning awareness that he’s been out of touch for quite some time—can it really be a year?—and he has no doubt that his story’s been “managed” by misinformation experts. God only know what people think happened to me!
If I call, how will they have changed? What does he know about them now after, what?—he counts the months—man, almost two and a half years? Fuck! Man, thirty months—about a hundred twenty-blah-blah weeks, Jesus! And a god-zillion hours.
What were they doing during my time Inside?
He does know some of the Outside chronology. “Fucking-A, it be May of seventy and three,” he falsetto pitches as he slaps his head. He’s up and slowly pacing, trudging around the room. He’s recalling a headline, “Ceasefire Signed in Paris” back in January. Out loud, “Ha, the war’s ending!” He paid attention to some of it. Of course not even he could miss hearing about Watergate. Just how fucking mixed up will everyone and everything be?
He doesn’t call—anyone. Why try to explain it all over the phone? Not even Mom. On vacation—that’s how he sees himself. Lolling in bed he daydreams about San Francisco, how much he likes it, would relish walking right now through Golden Gate Park. Hitchhike up the coast highway? Naw! He knows he won’t delay leaving this place too long. Snap out of this! He’s aware that he’s caught in between, more than a bit overwhelmed by the dual facts of being not-Inside and of carrying the Inside with him. “Aaren,” he sighs. I need closure, he admits to himself. He has to get back to Minnesota, sometime soon. But not yet—not today.
In less than a day Jared sees all of LA that he wants to just by hanging out in Venice. He talks to the ocean. “It’s just like LA to promise gondolas and give you taco vendors! What a trippy scene! But it just ain’t my speed, man!”
Truly not on a vacation jaunt, he doesn’t ho
p on the Gray Line to see the “Homes of the Stars.” But wanting to see something of the much heralded Southern California beach, he does take a short hike, barely two hours up and back, on the newly opened boardwalk. Lots of renovation, some dumps, up into Santa Monica, truly a funky jewel, scads of scantily clad women—at least through Jared’s Midwestern eyes. Hip people, loads of money, hippies on the street—he wearies. A hand-lettered sign puzzles him, “People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” Maoists? Are there Weathermen about? Aaren would love this! Ha. Mutters to himself, “Just a fucking ignorant hick from the Minnesota sticks, what can I tell ya?”
Gotta go!
The Greyhound bus depot feels like a visiting room on the Outside. Many are folks who carry their world in small parcels—like hermit crabs. They scuttle, moving feverishly along, glancing neither this way nor that, afraid to engage an other. Bemused, Jared realizes that he now knows what only few know, that they—the gods of cruelty—use such places as their observatories. No fucking doubt about it! They sit behind the walls whose opaqueness is only created by those who do not want to be seen.
As Jared sits and observes, he sees with Inside eyes. Who takes the bus and why? He sees the very poor who litter the landscape around the depot, not riders or passengers, but just hanging out at their day spot, begging at times, picking up a discarded fag. Stains and spots of human flesh. He notes the near-poor who labor and sweat for bare existence, always on the border of poverty with suitcases and duffel bags crammed with their life’s belongings, their kids running around, comfortable here in a place not unlike their homes. Then a segment of the niggardly middle class who are pinching pennies by taking the bus, and whose eyes show fear that they might be touched, whose noses squinch from odors real and imagined. Damn, this depot is its own fringe area of Inside.
Enough! He slaps his cheeks lightly, fingertip-thumps his forehead and upbraids himself out loud, easily overheard, “Jesus, didn’t you learn nothing? Fucking-A, ex-con!”
He wants to shout, “You are beautiful!” Say that to all his comrades in public transportation, but he knows they’d laugh. Beauty—ah, ever the philosopher’s quest. It’s a residue of his Earthfolk insight. “Truly, Mister, you are beautiful. Do you know that all creation has occurred so that you are now? So that you can feel and breathe and touch and fuck and eat and sleep and laugh . . . and just be!” Why not? Because he knows he’d get locked up. Public nuisance. Ambulatory schizoid. He’s no dumb con, so he locks it up within. Just runs his script on a solo reel. God, people are beautiful!
He watches a child work hard at tying her shoe. She gets so frustrated, several times looping this way and that, only to have it all fall down like overcooked spaghetti. And the brother, the one who chases her and sits on her and causes her no end of annoyance, reaches over and says, “Let me do it!” Yet, although he’s talking with a tone of superiority, his stooping to help is actually an act of affection, and as he kneels before her she hugs his head and kisses him. “Stop that!” he roughhouses and pushes her away, but not before the bond is strengthened, a memory encased for cherishing later.
An elderly lady of proper dress and careful makeup is asking for change from a ticket handler who’s clearly tired and trapped within a moment of exasperation. Admirably, before dismissing her, he takes the twenty-note and walks behind the counter to make change. Her sincere “Thank you” heals this moment of ancient pain.
So it goes during this morning while waiting two hours for his bus, eating limp pastries with thick crusts of addictive sugar and an ever-filled cup of joe. Jared sits and digests and burps and holds on to his spot, ticket in his pocket, ready to go home.