Waterworld

   It's a feeling I love.

I like to let it happen.

Sometimes I do it on purpose.

I go to a pool, walk into the surf, swim out into a river, flip myself upside down and ....breathe. 

I long for it. I miss it.

The burn. The stuff ripping up into your sinus and out your ears and back into your mouth. Death searching for life, or is it life searching out death?
When water challenges the air for the same space in your body, tugging at it, wrestling it, the combustion is almost erotic.  The body remembers -and I almost feel anger at the memory- that at one time I could breathe both. 

I've tried. How I've tried. 

It's the strangest thing. To know this in your bones. In your blood. 

The High Schools I swam at, the clubs, the parks, the camps, walking past people's pools I breathe in the beautiful poisons. Chlorine. Soda ash. Both should kill you, both can. Both send me into a reverie. I whipsnap into a different time a different age. Suddenly I'm ten again, I'm 14, I'm 20 and this water is my ticket, my pathway, my canvas, my proving ground. The ring wherein the damage done never shows. Eternal water. Eternal movement. The feline element. The only one you can throw yourself into that will bouy you up.
I'm a fire sign and I've been told by acupuncturists and doctors and seers and astrologists and girls Ive dated that I should get the fuck in the water every day and cool the fuck off.
I shrug. And then when I do get in the water, the ocean especially, I feel transformed, like a mole who's been activated by his handlers to admit his true purpose, to shake off the act and be that which one was meant to be. I feel like a weapon that's been disarmed at the last second in a Bond film or a villain who's happy he got caught and now wants to do his time.
Somewhere in the salt water is my covalent bond. The element that takes me from reactive to inert.
My point break. Go easy bro. Who knew?
I think it comes from this: one day I realized that most of the world doesn't, most of what we call the living, don't breathe air. Something stuck in my mind- that there's what we think, and there's what is. There are the theories of the few and the thinking of the mass, and I thought to myself I am not in that mass. That mass breathes water, it swims and breeds and swarms about the rim and expanse of the globe and we sit up on our odd rocky outposts and theorize about intelligence and fate and destiny.
We on the surface are an abstraction. And our beliefs, our reasons to be: God, transcendence, art, work, labor, gender, race, war..they're all bumper stickers on the ass of the music of the water world.  Prosaically we're a bacteria on the skin of the earth.
I had no philosophy to support my thoughts but I began to think my thoughts must be incomplete, must be crippled somehow, or stunted because I lived in the air and not below it.
If the earth is an organism, if it is a unified ecology then that ecology is fed by water, it's oxygen is liquid.
The land is an exception and the land dwellers but workers on the surface, trained to keep the canopy clean.
I have a theory.
And it's this.....one day we will realize as best we can, or maybe we will only catch a glimmer of this truth as we denude the seas of their creatures, or we will, just before incinerating ourselves in a holy war, hear spoken the concept that everything we do and want and build and fight for is motivated and mediated by our need for tools. To use our hands and language as transmitting poles for what goes on in our minds and body. To embody the nature of tools. To diefy them.
So imagine if we didn't need to. Use tools. If we didn't need hands or the extensions thereof. If we didn't need that most amazing of human constructions; If we didn't need language.
What if whatever we were, or needed, or were thinking, or felt could be felt in kind by our siblings our loved ones and our neighbors thru the medium in which we lived? If we and the medium were one?
What would fall away?
Clothing. Speech. Tools. Architecture. Science.....Deception....?
Imagine, you live in the same fluid that makes up the majority of your body. Your "self" extends, after a brief epidermal pause, into the immensity of the world about you. You and the nerve endings of creation are one. When your heart skips a beat, your brother knows it. When you are sick, your sister feels it. When you want a thing, they know you do, or want it too at the same instant. Communication becomes a kind of sung common truth. History is what you need to preserve in song to stay alive. Imagine something, anything, any of your deepest darkest secrets, and 3 thousand miles away, a day or two later, your distant cousins conceive the same.
Whales. Dolphins. Cetaceans.
Carl Sagan describes what must happen when a creature in a two dimensional world comes into contact with a three dimensional creature. The two D being sees a two dimensional line. It's the world he/she knows. It's how their eyes work.
That line may be, to the two dimensional being's apprehension, fairly simple or even rudimentary because to the three dimensional creature the particular aesthetics and needs of the two dimensional mind must seem primitive.
Now imagine you had no need for clothing. For a wrench or a fire or a backhoe or housing or the telegraph or the internet. All of it. The whole built terranean world was extraneous to you. Go beyond that. Imagine that the fundamental conundrum of individual consciousness, of being, of existential human conflict, of incomprehension or translation or even distance and the nature of the "self" was not only unimaginable to you, it was irrelevant, unnecessary.
You are a whale.
You are a dolphin.
You're brain is larger than a humans.
These odd small boney beings make sounds at you and then throw you fish if you imitate them, surely the snack is worth the amusement.
The three dimensional dolphin gazes at the ridiculous two dimensional human as the human laments that the dolphin doesn't know subject from object.
Only because in the dolphin's world the two were never separate. There was never a language in the water that needed them.
If for nothing else we should incline our genius to theirs.
But here's the kicker.
We've slaughtered them for hundreds of years. Exercised a virtual holocaust on their population and still instinctively....they do not run from us. They surface and look us in the eye. They lift their children up out of their living element to see these strange calling apparitions in the sky.
If for no other reason, if say we decide they do not communicate in a simpler and superior manner that one day millennia from now we may share, than if only for the fact that they forgive us our sins, we should step into their world and cherish both them and it, and suffer the consequences.

Sandcastles

   The summer I turned 13 my friend Peter asked me to come to the shore with him and his parents for a week. Or his parents asked. He was an only child. We swam together. For different teams so I suppose we swam against each other but it never felt that way. He won, I won, we were happy for the other's success. And it was the only time we ever saw each other, at swim meets. He lived in the suburbs I lived nearer the city, but back then, in Pittsburgh, especially Pittsburgh with its Balkan hills and Balkan ways, a few miles of separation could mean as much as a time zone.
   Peter was blonde. We were both breaststrokers, equivalent in speed, teetering into adolescence. What a silly word. Such a meager word, a soft word for what in a boy's life can make or break him, or both. To leave boyhood and realize you have to be a man. Your manhood overtaking you and running you into the ground. The muscle, the heat, the sweat, the stink of being male. It grabs and doesn't let go. One day you're pretty, you play with dolls as often as balls, you lean against your mother and your friends, you help her sift flour and sweep the rooms, your bones are fine, you could be called aquiline, the trim of you is neither hard nor soft and then you wake up and you're a plow. A block. A threat. Happy Birthday.
   We stayed in an A frame his parents rented in Cape Hatteras. Among a few houses in a field of sea grass, a mile from the only store in town, the Red Drum I think it was called, and the grand lighthouse to the East with its twirled stonework, a short walk to see. When the tide came in the light was surrounded and Peter's father said it was bound to collapse if they didn't move it. Which one summer 20 years later they did.
     I would stare at it from the back porch  reading Robert Ludlum novels and Clive Cussler and Leon Uris, the moldered paper backs left year after year on the vacation shelves, as his parents smoked and drank and told themselves stories about a family I didn't belong to. Peter's parents were as old as mine which was a rarity in working Pgh. Mine remembered the Depression. My father could have served in the War if he'd wanted to lie well enough. When they'd met they smiled at each other knowing they didn't have to explain, didn't have to bridge the baby boomer gap. Peter and me, the last sons of last son's last son. My mom told me once of her grandmother recalling in her presence that as a young girl she lead the young men down into the basement to hide and be fed. Antietam.
   Peter and I went to a water park one afternoon and I remember the perfection of the girl who let me ride behind her on the plunging raft. Unable to let myself put my arms and hands around her breasts I held her by the shoulders. Something unforgivable to me to this day. Nearly throttling her. The maddening firmness and strength of her body and the simple clear fact that she wanted me to touch her. That she offered it. The astonishment that she would. Dawning on a boy in the same way being paid for a job, or rewarded for kindness, or forgiven completely would continue to stun him till he was in his thirties.
   I hid myself. I read for hours when I should have roamed the shore with Peter, I was afraid of the solitude I chose but I chose it. We must have gone to the beach occasionally because I remember Peter's hirsute father covering himself in sand and running toward his wife the sharp dust cascading off the dust of him as she emerged smiling from the water. Half naked grown ups. My friend's mother's tits. Her smile. Knowing she still loved her husband. Watching them and feeling like a language was being spoken to me I could not translate in a land I couldn't leave.
  I think that week was the end of our friendship, Peter and me. I was too tortured even then, too dark, too inclined already to leave, to walk away, and abandon anyone when the demands and shortcomings of friendship got too dear, the necessary exchange of forgiveness for kindness, got too complicated. We swam a few more times against each other that Fall. I quit swimming, became an anorexic shut-in for a year, reading everything in the house, every book, diary, magazine and paper, my father's Defense Industry monthlies, years of stacked New Yorkers and Smithsonians, two decades of the National Geo and when it came down to it catalogues that my mother paged through for fun, and when that ran dry whatever I could grab from the town library. And then I went to boarding school where at least for awhile the men there dragged me to the surface of a life some could call normal and I excelled.
    4 years after that summer Peter and I swam in a race, an exhibition between his HS and my private school and we nearly tied in adjacent lanes. I remember how big his smile was and that he reached across the lane rope and hugged me in his father's gruff way. He shook me. We never saw each other again. I think we spoke once on the phone later when we were adults and I'd been on tv. I seem to remember his voice, deep, older, generous but withheld by what we used to share.
   At Hatteras, his parents were friends with a pair of married couples who shared  the house next door. The only other house for blocks, if one could call the dunes with lanes dug thru them streets - today I'm sure they're cheek by jowl with development and rented, the wild grass torn away for the pebbled yards owners lay out to save money on gardening in the off season - but then it was acres of tall blue green hay and the tower of the lighthouse rising out of God's nothing and the surf.
  The couples were young. One husband had a ragged beard. His wife's name was Gail. "Perfect name for her as she's a wild woman." They seemed weathered, experienced, I found them faded. They were probably in their early thirties. It was Gail's husband who took us to the water park. I remember him telling us that the girls we'd met were hard for him to look at, and then he hooted to the sky and stroked back his beard and made way for the imagined descent of their thighs onto his face. As he told us, and acted out the act I had no idea this was even possible. I remember being ashamed, put off by his candor, by what I didn't even know in me was desire. The facts of life it didn't seem possible were what beauty got boiled down to. The unutterable vision and the perishable flesh I couldn't yet combine.
   They smoked a lot, they listened to the Dead who I didn't know were the Dead yet, and they sat behind their screens at sunset, filtered as if on film, and talked and laughed while Peter and I waited for dinner to end. Mr Cochran grilling the fish he'd caught outside under the eave of the house. We'd walk to the beach afterwards every night. It was my only peace, answering the huge tug of the surf. The heave of Hatteras with its monstrous opposing currents, hot and cold, the Gulf and the Labrador crashing into each other and creating a tide that didn't care a rats ass for human life or comfort.
  I'd made a sandcastle one afternoon, one rare day in the sun, and I wanted to go back and see how it was doing in the wind, whether the tide had been able to reach it thru my moats and walling. I do remember it was a gorgeous sunset, the glow on our faces almost a force, the waving blue of the land set off like rich fabric against the sky. When I got to the beach a handful of kids who lived nearby and I'd met -I think we'd even body surfed that day, I can still see Peter's expert angling- were hovering around the sandcastle, a few of them smoking, a few of them dressed in finer clothes like the teenagers they were about to become.
   I joined them, it got darker, and there was a girl there, with long blonde hair and a light cotton sweater, a useless thing in the evening wind that snapped off the ocean, but which looked like spun ambergris in my eyes against her. A boy, I don't know if he liked her and didn't like that she and I were standing near, or whether he had any idea I'd made the sandcastle at all, then waded into my castle and destroyed it with a few quick sweeps of his leg.
  I remember thinking this should hurt my hand as I hit him with my fist, again and again on the mouth as he lay in the sand where I held him. And I remember thinking this is so easy, why doesn't he push back. I could feel his sadness and his fear in my fingers and on my face. I remember thinking even then that it was odd something inanimate, a sandcastle, a stuffed toy, a book with the cover torn off, could mean so much to me, or be the source of so much sorrow. When I bite the knuckles on my right hand, if I need to pull out a splinter, or chew off some stuck residue, I feel his teeth to this day against my fingers as if they were my own.
  And I wonder, does he remember going one summer to North Carolina. A trip with a friend or a regular summer spent by the shore with his family. Did he know the girl's name, does he know it still as he approaches 50 and where did he go to school and then graduate and where did he finally settle down to work and make of life a go? Where does he live now? With a family, or divorced and on his own, balding, children, how old and when he sits of an evening by the water does he remember this boy forcing a fist into his mouth time after time because of a little sand. Has he ever told anyone who wasn't there that night what happened?
  I dont remember him bleeding. No one tried to stop or pull me away. I do remember crying, heaving cries, sobs with a voice in them, when I let him go and wondered at 13 why am I crying, when I'm not the one who's being hurt.

Rhinebeck NY

    I was shooting a film no one's ever seen in a mansion half a mile above the Hudson. A view one literally would kill for.
    The house belonged to a man named Sam. He'd made a fortune writing soap operas. He was tall, strong, well- fed. He looked like Rodin's Balzac. Not a handsome man but striking: one people gathered round, with the forehead of a Russian chess player, eyes that either undressed you or kept your secrets. Or both.
    Sam took me to a party. We parked by the gate of a place you couldn't see from the gate. Halfway across the lawn we met another man, wearing the most beautiful shirt I'd ever seen, untucked, flowing around him, blue grey like a canvas.
    "Hello Sam".
     The man's face didn't change when he glanced at me.
    "David, I want you to meet Jasper."
    Later that afternoon at the party in Jasper John's house I listened to a thin, cigarette sodden man talk about the Christ child's cock. When, in the portraits of the baby diety did you see it, Jesus's penis, or not. And what that told us about the times in which the painters lived.
   Women I would have killed for sat around him, listening in poses out of a seraglio.
   I asked him, is it true oil paintings take a century to dry?

    He said of course, isn't it erotic? The scent, the stench of what you make, of what you love most, isn't that what we all want in life, all around us, smeared on us?
   The women smiled. Yes.
   As in Ulysses yes? when Bloom takes a shit in chapter four and reads the paper and thinks about his wife fucking another man and his daughter also come to maturity, the ink of the paper and his own stink rising, the meal he'd just made the Kippers fried come to their natural end, and then he takes the "paper" yes, like the language we've been listening to and wipes his ass. Genius, no?
    I nodded. Sam laughed till he coughed. You're so full of shit Victor. Victor inhaled- Exactly!
    Johns asked me to hand out some snacks. His cocktail napkins were a bright Caribbean blue, I remember. Half the guests thought I was the help. Or one of his Johns. The art historian turned out to be one of the world's foremost art critics. The women, his students for the summer.
   Sam told me later, on his wide porch, the Hudson laying out below us, that he was thinking about marrying the woman who lived in the mansion behind him, which one couldn't see from his yard. I said I didn't know 80 year olds got married again, or had affairs, or sex.
   Of course David, what the fuck else is there? This ? and he pointed to the house and the grounds that I would have killed for ..."but I'm afraid our rigidities don't match. A shame. She's lovely. Paints all the time down in her place by the water. Doesn't chatter."
   She has another house?
   Yes, a boat house. Says the light's better there than in the manse.
   Sam, aren't you gay?
   Have been. Mostly. After awhile it doesn't matter as much, where, you know, how. Just who. I do have a son, remember, so I ....remember.
    Ha.
    Doesn't speak to me much, but there you are. Strangest thing - they don't tell you-  your children stop being your children and become anyone else. It's as much their fault as yours, eventually. Odd.  But a relief.
    The film never came out. The Director and the Producer refused to use a two page version of the final 10 page scene that we had to shoot and had no time for, because the actors, not they, had cobbled it together. Half way thru the 10 page sprawl the other Producer shut down the set and sent everyone home. We were blamed.
    The Director came back months later and tried to film a patch work scene- some Hail Mary, Frankenstein piece of writing to make saleble sense out of his mess-  on Sam's property, and Sam met him at the gate with a shotgun.
   I have rarely loved a man more. I keep that image of him in my head to this day. Grand Colonial estate, grass flowing down to the trees along the great river, the abandoned docks, the rail line, the Adirondacks grey in the distance, a tall man in impeccable dress. A shotgun.
   He died a few years later. I came back to see him just once. I was doing a play at a workshop in Poughkeepsie -which sounds like the opening of a stand up routine but there you are- I came by and we had a drink on his porch. He hadn't married his neighbor. The house was in decent shape and though his son was writing more often he didn't want to leave it to him.
    For some reason, I can't remember the segue, he started talking about WWII.
    For some reason it hadn't clicked in my head. Of course, he was the right age, he must have, and he did, serve.
    Combat, somewhere in Europe. I don't remember the facts, the name, the places which would give this story some non fiction gravitas. But he landed close to D Day and saw terrible shit. Boys died next to him. He wasn't a clerk.
    I said oh you should read Paul Fussell's book on his..."I know Paul, he's an ass." And Private Ryan had just come out so I said "They say the sound effects in the beginning are exactly like- " And why would I want to hear that again David?
    He had a stillness about him, I remember. He didn't move more than he needed to, and even less. His eyes didn't give much away. He smiled rarely. When he did laugh it was usually at someone's expense and he could stop a conversation completely with it. He had you, more often than not. He was the one you watched in a group. If he'd had a favorite hat, if it had blown off he would have stood there and watched it tumble down the street. What do they say, with a bemused air.

  If I've ever been in a bemused air, it was with him.
  Letters. That was the segue. It was something about letters, the texture of them, the feel of an actual letter, not the new fangled emails his son was trying to get him to open.
   He said the stationery the army gave you was completely singular, he'd never felt anything like it since: light but raspy to the touch, a militant onion skin, a material one couldn't imagine could give any pleasure at all but that nothing in his life had ever been so important as opening a letter from home at the front. The stench and the brutality surrounding him, sitting in a killing zone, and then his mother's voice or a close friend's coming up off the page.
  I think that's why I became a writer, yes, that's what I was trying to do, he told me.
  The light was just right, it was near sunset -he probably knew that- and he knew exactly which way to lean to catch the glow, but his eyes when he spoke about the war changed completely. Like my best friend's, getting out of the car he'd just driven into the side of a truck and lived, staring at me. My brother's when he told me his remission wasn't gonna last. My mother's when my brother stopped breathing. Even these are weak approximations. War. The deepest crime. And the one we send all our sons to commit.
  Sam. My war hero. Was 20 years ago this week I met you. Godspeed. And a shotgun.
 
 

I, Los Angeleno

  From the Mexican border to Los Angeles County, 80-90 percent of the original shoreline wetlands have been dug up, wiped out, built on.

  The amount of suburban and exurban and neo-tripleX- unurban development that's happened in Southern California -and that's an idiotic phrase because it didn't "happen", it was made, bought, built and sold- since the Second World War, is truly mind blowing. 

    Housing - the phenomenon of unchecked unending single home sprawl along the California coast- is one of the great unwonders of the world. 

   I never get used to it. It's like watching a fire. Or like watching something you hope will catch fire and never stop burning till the scrub fields, and the salt marsh, and the pine gatherings return. 

   But it's a hopeless hope. California's great undying myth is homeownership. Like capitalism, like cancer it HAS to grow. My door, my garage(s), my yard. Ad infinitum. 

   And the other undying aspect of Cali life is the story of what was. Or more accurately what wasn't. You get it first, you notice it, or seek it out, from the old guard, the third and fourth and that rarest of the rare, the fifth generation Californian - Cheryl Camp you red headed genius where are you now - they look up slightly from their Vans and their Dickies shorts, over the top of their rebuilt Broncos and the sun glazed eyes focus somewhere toward when they were 15 or 16 and they start to tell you about the open fields that were the Marina, hunting for foxes with rifles over their shoulders where the condos spread now, the old Irvine ranch lands above Orange County which into the early 60s stretched for 20 thousand acres. Santa Clarita when it was an empty desert camp. The back lot of Fox spreading across Olympic and Pico to lean up against Beverly Hills like a fantastic theme park for the celluloid visionaries in their Canyon manses. 

   The story of California is always what's been lost. The virgin territory of Old California. But what's actually been lost is the urge not to do something. Not to build or sell or develop. It's almost unimaginable to them. But somewhere in the depths of their psyche the Californian feels the urge- Don't Rent It- they just can't bring themselves to say the words.
    For a place constantly trumpeting its growth and richness and adaptability, the deeper narrative of the local is a false lost innocence, his or her lost lebensraum, how the promised land broke its promise to them, its Covenant. (Why are my taxes so high!!) Californians are hard but dreamy Protestants -Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Hindu no matter, the dream's the same- who can't figure out how they get even less now that they all decided to stop paying taxes for what they had. Saint Ronald, in the long run, let them down. And what's left to represent their American Dream? Nothingness. What's left simmering in their minds behind the wheel as they resent waiting for you to cross the street? The lust for open space, unused territory. Because it's the clearest expression of wealth; Land you didn't sell. 

    They say once you've made it thru six years in "The City" you can call yourself a New Yorker . I think you become a New Yorker like you fall in love or you can throw a spiral - it just happens for some people and not for others. 

    You can call yourself a Los Angeleno I think when you love a part of the town that no longer exists. You suddenly feel a ghost landscape in your heart. And you don't have to do anything about it.

   It's happened to me finally. 
  To get to Venice Beach from the airport you have to drive north on Lincoln Blvd. It's a simple and an easy drive, a god send if you travel a lot. I could get home or back to LAX in 15 minutes. 

  Lincoln drops down from Westchester Heights and into the giant Santa Monica basin. 7 miles of flatland, the great plain of Los Angeles, held in by the Mts to the north. When I first moved here to work in 1996 that descent out of the crowded and condo'd and mini malled Heights used to take you down into a long dark field. The Balloona wetlands. The delta of the northern flood plain of the LA river, which had never been built on. From the docks of Marina Del Rey it held out for two miles inland. A salt sea, scrub desert. Heavy succulents and dark bushes with spritzings of wildflower. Glimpses of calm water. Acres of what LA once was. The thing the Spanish said they saw when they landed in a bay with no harbor. Swampland and fields of seagrass as high as the saddle, one Captain wrote, his legs soaked to the skin by dew long before he reached the Mission 11 miles inland. 
    And here it still was, minutes after leaving the hectic airport. Primordial California. A beautiful nothingness in the epicenter of west LA wealth, no houses, no shops, no light. The drive home like passing thru the blacks at the edge of a stage - an intake of breath, a place to clear the mind before I dove back into the narrative of the city and my place in it. 
   And of course the point is it's no longer there. 
   Well half of it is. 
   The County sold it to Spielberg and Katzenberg and David Geffen, men with the power of Conquistadors, a power of Chinatown scariness, Stanford, Huntingdon, Chandler type strength. They were going to build their Dreamworks studio and leave half the wetlands alone. Which is half of what happened. The titans fought, the studio went elsewhere, half the wetlands closer to the water can still be seen and the other half East of Lincoln blvd is now the ultimate expression of that dreaded big box reality, Live/Work.  
  Is there a better moniker for the New America? LiveWork. The two now fused. You MUST work. It will follow you home. It IS you. Work IS home. Here are the keys. 
  So my lost LA is a hemmed-in triangle of weeds just south of Marina del Rey. Fitzgerald talked about My Lost City. I suppose this is My Lost County. (Los Angelenos being a little more expansive in their dreams). Strange the difference. NYers live in a compressed landscape of particulars but dream of the grand city. Los Angelenos live in a colossal city state but dream of a deli they used to go to when they were kids.