Lithium for Medea

4

I cut west and south down side streets, hardly seeing the road, running through stop signs and red lights to the ragged western fringe of Los Angeles called Venice, where I live. Here the city stops its white cement sprawl, its hunger to engulf the whole earth under tons of trucked-in concrete. Here in the lap of the blind blue-eyed Pacific, Los Angeles is stopped dead by the sheer liquid cliffs of the sea. Here the trail ends. After Death Valley and Donner Pass, there is only this last precarious oasis.

You must hang on here, inches from the sea. This is a land of strange personal mutations. There’s a certain pull, an inexplicable force, some as yet uncharted form of gravity. The toes change, growing invisible sharp claws designed to dig in and fight against the slide into pale blue listless waves.

Once Venice was the summer resort of the first Los Angeles affluent, St. Louis and Chicago bankers and developers who pushed across the continent armed with the promise of an ever expanding manifest destiny of the soul. They built wood-slatted houses in a pocket of land facing the Pacific, ground webbed with canals. Perhaps the canals were filled with sea water then and the boulevards did not yet exist and one could simply swim home from the ocean. Perhaps there were families then and homes to return to at dusk.

Now the original houses of the Venice canals sag, paint peeling, reds a faded rust, yellows and blues bleached, a noncolor, not even suggesting pastel. There is a sense of abandonment. Deserted cars sit useless in weeds, looted, their vital organs gone. A shell of a canoe and a shell of a gutted speedboat stretch out like lovers in the field where two canals meet. Broken stuffed chairs rot under the sun. Old screens with the wire mesh ripped lie in random stacks between houses.

These are growing ruins. For decades the dirt has done as it pleases, pushing up what the winds brought, what a hand tossed. Here, where it is always some form of summer, everything grows swollen, enormous, oblivious to proportion. Early roses bloom in front yards on Carroll Canal. Honeysuckle spills over the wire fence of the house next door. Walls of red hibiscus hide windows. Lemon trees are opening up, stiff yellow. The sunflowers are higher than my shoulders, stalks thick as young trees. Soon the canals themselves will disappear, drained and filled to accommodate condominiums. As it is, few of the original dwellers remain. Jason and I are among the last.

Jason has lived on Grand Canal for twelve years. He owns his two-story red house. And he owns the house I live in on Eastern Canal, four city blocks away, four canals away from him.

Jason came to own these houses because he had a vision. He was living on the streets of Venice in the early sixties, living as it was easy to do then, sleeping on the beach and subsisting on peaches and oranges picked from trees. He didn’t need to eat much. He was an amphetamine addict, a character known on the boardwalk, a too thin, small man with a nervous energy, talkative and curious, wandering the beach with a sketchbook, drawing faces and the ornate fronts of old buildings. One summer night on LSD with the sea at his back, Jason listened as a man spilled out enthusiasm for the new society. There would be great changes, a vast movement of people, social upheaval and revolution.

Jason was impressed by the stranger. There were new bodies on the beach now, long-haired men and women with sleeping bags and packs on their backs and a look of odyssey etched across their faces. Jason didn’t know why they were coming to California. They could come to pan gold for all he cared. Still, they were coming. And, with his mind reeling and his eyes jammed wide open, he suddenly realized they would need somewhere to live. In the morning, Jason began looking at property.

He borrowed money. He began wheeling and dealing. By 1969, Jason owned a dozen houses and five apartment buildings on the streets closest to the sea.

My house is called the Woman’s House. And for twelve years, all of Jason’s women have lived here.

My house is set back from Eastern Canal behind twenty-foot-high hedges of pink and white oleander. From the poor rut of broken sidewalk a passer-by could see only a thin sliver of the second story. On the side of my house, two peach trees and a lemon tree sleep near the windows. Bougainvillaea hangs heavy across the front porch with its wood deck and one old rattan chair where I often sit and watch the canals, watch the lime-green algae near the bridge, the black-and-white ducks, the brown-speckled ducks with yellow beaks, push through the palm trees reflected in the water.

I study the canals because they have their own unique life cycle. In the early mornings when the sun is still pale and tentative, still wrapped in night haze, the canals are the color of a mirror, a delicate silver. As the sun anchors itself in the center of the sky for the long yellow noon, the canals thicken. This is the yellow of a mouth of sharp, pronged stained teeth, teeth yellow from grinding something unmentionable, something like bone. The water is coated then, somehow greasy and superimposed, not really like water at all.

In the later afternoons, when the sun is fatigued and indifferent, sensing loss and preparing for surrender, the water is clearly liquid again, but pitted with shadows. This is the season of sunset. The sun suddenly regathers itself for the final battle. It forms one perfect red ball and hangs smack above the ocean, a gouged eye, a beach ball dropped down into the slow stirring night waves of hungry fish mouths and darting crepe-thin fins.

At sunset the canals are streaked as the sky, fierce reds and oranges, thick, the color of lava. The canals assume a new texture then, something like boiling metal. I stand stock still in my garden, watching sunset across the surface of the water. I don’t have to look at the sky at all. I sense the sun sucking in its last breath, preparing for the plunge. I know this sun. It sits above me, a monk in red robes, a suicide serene at the immolation.

Night rises imperceptibly. There is a slow darkening, an abundance of fast-darting shadows. This is the hour when shadows feed beneath the wooden bridges. Plants begin to sway and nod in some perfect agreement. They brush slatted leaves like tongues sucking at one another. They are plotting.

Someday they will find the sun’s secret sleeping place. Vines will reach out and branches lock in an intricate embrace. The sun will be caught and bound to the ground. In time, a great new mountain will form. And only the trees and plants silently rustling and nodding their shadowy mongoloid heads will be able to see in the forever darkness to come.

There is night, the final season of the canals. The night is laced with sea salts. The air stings. The night is a terrible season, even when it is wrapped in a luminous grayish fog thick as the breath of condemned men.

Night is a kind of metal. Nothing stirs, not even shadows. The ducks grow quiet. One can’t see the bottles that float in the water, the tossed-away pieces of old tires, the gray clutter of newspapers and plastic wrappers that stay on the surface for days like a species of mutant flower. Dogs begin to bark. It is time to wait for Jason.

Sometimes Jason will cross the Grand Canal bridge and then the bridge over Carroll Canal and Linnie Canal and Howland Canal and finally, the bridge near my house on Eastern Canal. Sometimes I watch Jason zigzagging toward me, kicking beer cans from the eroded sidewalks into the blackening water. Sometimes Jason will come to me in his yellow paddle boat. I can hear him humming as he ties the boat to the wooden spoke he drove into the side of the canal in front of my house, the pillar he insists on calling a dock. Sometimes I will weave my way across the bridges to Jason’s house. And sometimes we don’t see each other at all.

I might wake up with Jason, at my house or his house. Sometimes I wake alone or with another man. The men are interchangeable and mean nothing. In Los Angeles no one is who he appears to be. Everyone will claim to be really something or someone else, aspiring, in transition, headed toward some all-encompassing vision. And they pass through my life like water, not even leaving an impression.

When I wake up it is the first or second season of the canals then, the pale mirrory unsubstantial silver of early morning or the thick yellow of noon.

My job consists of keeping Jason’s books for him and collecting the rents from his various properties. Jason is too pure to do this himself. He must keep himself free from the tedium of ordinary reality, of calling plumbers and electricians, of keeping numbers in neat rows and making trivial decisions. Jason is too busy creating, planning his new canvases, sawing and nailing the boards together, sketching the canvases, arranging painting sessions with his models and sitting alone in dark rooms, thinking of women and their pink and yellow and peach-colored flesh.

Jason is also afraid to collect his rents. The pensioners with their gray streaked windows and canes, their cataracts and coughing, terrify him. The hippies call him a capitalist pig. The bikers threaten to beat him up and burn the house down if he bothers them again.

Oddly, no one threatens me. I step out of a fog bank, wave gray, a piece of the beach inching up to doors, peripheral. Ebb and flow and I am gone, shadow.

I lay down in my bedroom, the bedroom in the Woman’s House, and waited for Jason to call me. Jason, making his eyes dazzle, dance and sparkle. Jason, making his eyes black tunnels, black torpedoes hurtling across rooms. Jason, making his voice a sea filled with small harbor waves. Jason, making his words promise, hard as spines. Jason making his words snap manic and red. Jason, my sorcerer.

I had enough cocaine for one more shot. I took it.