Mangy-ass Angelinos roll in downhill after dark, to do their own thing while no one’s looking, a rendezvous of the senses to hang no ponga from rafters, wield lost boy skateboards in the shadows, cover up motives with backpacks and vapes, congruent with the incandescents but even more so with the dark, where all falling apart occurs.
No one, when the smoke clears, even remembers them. Invisibility has been a coherent strategy until very recently, and it’s been easy to confuse extreme isolation with deep belonging feelings. But a lot has transpired on the way to the future. The Blue Lounge closed when they shut down the world and has never returned. And in this reflective December in uptown LA, the hill decides who gets sold down the river, and when things go real.
The lights have turned on in every emptied building, a kind of magnificence that can be seen from the stars. The cool people are on the late train, where the flow of graffiti keeps up with the river, and the inner mounting light reveals itself: the scrapyard after dark, the floods on concrete mixers, cars washed with light as well as lather, a chemical plant cerulean swathed, the warehouse where the tree mushrooms grow have only a loading dock bulb over the door, then a lobby for once full – with light and truckers, every intermodal port occupied, every pot and cup of coffee filled, its lot of semis idling, soft in their red lights – then the coaster rail rises, over the Slauson salmon lamps not even flinching upstream …
And the train, as if empathically, stops, rolls backward now to Commerce, to pick up perhaps one wayward lunchpail stiff, who would theoretically be grateful for an open door, hence our beacon in reverse through the dark graffiti, the pallets under glass, the weeds under lights more full of life than in the sun, the shipping and receiving under kliegs along with trailer hitch lubrication authorized personnel only. We arrive back-ass-ward to a glow of cell phones on the platform, like candles for choralers exhaling hallelujah – then we’re back Jack on the backtrack rack, past the mausoleums of tool and die, the luminous offices emptied of clerks. The lawyers on the train fall at this time into their historical fiction. The Burlington line still rumbles beside us as it always has, still fucking with everyone’s life.
The pack who walk off at Norwalk hobble swiftly, everyone carrying something, ears occupied with what listening might override in sight of their situation. But they are swimming now in the blue pools nearby, arms throwing spray up like dolphins do when jumping. At every station the loudspeakers are lit up like bows. A single office gleams in the train window glare a patina of pathos: the old computer, that particular calendar, the unmistakable bend to the chair. Then the open lumberyard in Fullerton and its saws officious as morticians, positioned in night-searching florescent for inspection in desolation, Ma’s House Restaurant the only sign of light for a long stretch, then the Satin Topless arrow, the green claw machine in The Paramount Platinum Triangle, then Angel Stadium just waiting with its big A to be filled, a thousand identical dry rigs in the lot for the off-season, while the Modelo flag still waves illuminated, as if it can exist beyond the game. The parking structures are dotted with eyes to see.
Then the Christmas lights begin. The strings between the houses are frayed but they do eventually connect, amid the high palms and the green doors of storage garages, the warehouse with its Christmas tree. We ride above the houses now, above the snowmen. The train speeds up as the decorative flair thickens. But time has become like a rubber band that doesn’t bend anymore. The downtown water tower's on the right, radiant as an alien spacecraft, and the last McDonald's. The cupola over Santa Ana station has left its light on, high above.
