Home is Someone Else's

My walking/running route takes me up Vermont into Griffith Park, up the sandy slope towards the Observatory, trespassing around property Gage believed for many years belonged to Alex Trebek, then down through the hills along Glendower and Bonvue, cutting down to Berendo and Los Feliz. I walk when I know I'd be running against myself, and yesterday I walked. I'd been cooped up with sun poisoning, and when I stepped out of my building the neighborhood boomed around me, the traffic, the jasmine, the wet warmth gathering between my new and old skin, a taste of stale death/boredom/bacteria, I knew I'd been putting myself through some kind of purification.

The video I made is rendering as I am writing this. It runs methodically through each frame and each transition, and I wait to be amazed if it goes through.

I wasn't expecting the commotion at Griffith Park, which was being flooded by hipsters in cars and on foot, as if on some pilgrimage to the Greek Theater, where, I found out at the top, Rilo Kiley was playing. I was wearing one of my new Goodwill finds, a cream colored t-shirt that says "ROCK ON" in a script meant to look like rocks; I was carrying electrolyte-enhanced water. The young woman climbing the sidewalk in front of me had the whitest, longest legs I'd ever seen, and I video taped her striding ostrich gait for a few minutes until I lost her among the other concert-goers. For a while I toyed with the idea of melting into the crowd, slipping through the gaps in the fence, bounding over the ticket-collectors, flying down from the nose-bleeder aisles to the front row and listening to the well-meaning suggestion written on my t-shirt. I settled in the parking lot behind the stands, next to a motorcycle that said "EAT SHIT" on the back. The sound was good and free and all mine.

I sat on the curb listening to a couple of songs by Benji Hughes before getting on with my walk. Already I'd be getting home after sunset. A couple of weeks ago, I was there skimming over the surface of the vast galaxy of bulbs below; for every one of them there was a word to which I no longer had access, because that is the way things are when you are sitting in the dark next to someone you've partly invented, but love, nevertheless -- or therefore. There were coyotes of course and it sounded like a real fiesta at Alex Trebek's house 'til a voice came on the loudspeaker and said "Attention: The Griffith Observatory is now closed," and I knew the park service would neither be held responsible nor rescue us were we to be attacked by mountain lions. The gate next to the billionaire's house on Glendower said "NO PARKING ANYTIME," and "NO TRESPASSING" and "CONTINUE TO DREAM AT YOUR OWN RISK." I did, and since then, something has been falling down that hill hitting every cactus on the way down, tumbling noiselessly into private swimming pools.

But I like to walk there. I like to say "This house is great," to friends when they come with me for the first time, and we are passing the house that is all stilts and wire and the lightest-looking concrete you have ever imagined, or the house that is all windows, or the "Mayan Temple" (Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House). I like less to say, but do, "These houses make me sick," when passing by one of those other horrors. It isn't size that bothers me, although grand scale and poor taste seem to be inextricably linked in these parts. But... spoil the reader, spare the moralizing. I walk through this neighborhood like a street urchin in a free national museum, allowed to enter but kept at a remove, and that ever-imminent alienation may be one of the reasons I love Los Angles. At least, why it suits me right now: I can't get lost.

And sometimes I can even feel at home. Take for example the little house I passed at twilight as I was climbing up Glendower. Jared once pointed it out because it belonged to family friends. I noticed in the following order: the pink flamingo, the ubiquitous floodlights, the heavy-handed landscaping, the pleasant window above the garage (I imagined it to be pleasant, from the inside), light spilling onto the street from the garage, in which there were paintings on the far wall, and a man with silver hair (presumably the family friend) was working at a table saw-- and then, in perfect sequence, I HEARD Beethoven's 7th coming from somewhere inside the garage.

The video is writing to the disk now, and I worry that the whole first half is missing, and it's much too late to start all over.

It's so quiet in the hills that I could hear the Beethoven for a long time. I was already too far down the hill, and it was really getting dark, before I realized that in the stupor of reactions triggered by that scene -- a slow, expanding joy; the distinct pleasure that comes from feeding but not over-sating the senses; the bloom of a narrative thread, a beautiful and purely cinematic shot -- I had failed to extend a neighborly greeting to the silver-headed man who had unknowingly stirred up such a fuss in my imagination. After all, I had a vague entry, I could have mentioned Jared, or not at all, I could have just stopped, as people do, and said, "Hello." Next thing I knew I was running down the secret steps from Bonvue. I don't know why not talking to the man in the garage blasting Beethoven's 7th was causing me pain, but I wanted to put as much physical distance between him and me so that it really would be too far to turn back in such a late hour. I distinctly felt that I had failed to rise to some small, but secretly grand occasion. Perhaps because that scene had been conceived deliberately to make me feel at home.