Off the Road - 21

a jazz novel on a typewriter

Four

1

I was adventuring on this florid American day. Well away from downtown where the noir version of LA still held on in buckets there were scraps of dirty Vegas holding on the distant memories of the country that was the city of the Angels. My mouth was dry because I was still thinking of the woman who cheated us and was left in the show of shows having expired the meter on her Camino Royale. It was a dry bitter feeling when there was me to who pointed out a taco joint and said:

“We are going to take a lot of time to find a joint in Los Angeles, so why don’t we stop here for lunch and a drink?”

 Dean was not as depressed as I was or at least he didn’t seem so from the outside and nodded yes which was actually a first because he usually protested on the street if I suggested something so low class in its taste of food. But there you go even clocks and Dean’s would often strike twice per day. I just did not expect it to be cheap o’clock in Los Angeles. But I knew not to ask which current was favorable and pulled the car over to get an angry fix of delicious ensuciar to go. But then even Miles and Bird would build a line on a standard and go on to make the inspiring design of improvisation in their wake.

 I don’t think I have mentioned that Dean was often solving a Rubik’s cube as often as not. I had never gone the cube anywhere close to being solved and yet Dean could do it in a few minutes with a desirous urge as he clicked the last sides in place and left solved a squirreled air. It was a mighty fine quarry for a taco joint in its prime with a choice of sauce and a menace of hysteria in the fixings that it offered.

But finally, I had to ask: “How do you do that? I have never met anyone who could solve a scrambled mess and make a round egg on the fly.”

Dean managed to make a strange kind of laughter: “I am a duffer and only know the most trivial kind of way. Someone who is el fino can solve this thing in a few beats of the heart and then go on to the next.”

I turned and looked at him as if he had two heads but his face was placid and calm in that way which I knew him to be serious. And the car stopped on the pavement, and we got out with the cube in hand which was already being solved again by Dean.

Ordered for tacos each mixing the ground chuck and the chicken then I ordered two more with fish and we collected a full two liters of Coke with a twist of cherry and got back inside the heated oven.

But then we were back on the road with no shade except for the buildings in view and stop signs that had a curve in them.

We spattered down I-10 having left I-15 back in Ontario Mills. But now we were in Alhambra and ready to cross into the sacred heart of sacred hearts: I spoke in low tones of Dodger Stadium which was only a few miles away as the Bird flies. Of course, it takes a good deal longer if one takes a bird who has to walk and roll a flat tire in the baking of the day. Even though it was 1 September only in a different year than one where a short mustache took a drive around Poland, I remembered some lines from a dive, the ones where he chants what every school child knows: those who evil is done unto due evil in return.

Dean had had two tacos and several swigs of Coke, and he then looked at me and said:

“Why don’t we go to the Griffith Observatory and look out at the country that we have come here to despoil.”

So, we entered into the aorta of Los Angeles with five and 10 crisscrossing their way through the ribs. And then we took a tributary on US 101 through Chinatown and Koreatown by way of Angeleno Flats and Thai Town until the exit which led us to the Western Gateway and Fern Dell Dr. And here we parked the car and got out on hooved beats amid the Pine and Sycamore trees loping are way up the corridor. We did not say that we wanted to walk so far it was just intuition and extuition at play. We got up on the dented sidewalk beneath the old-style city walking lamps and Myrtle through the trees that were placed tight on either side. We did not know how long it was to walk and perhaps we would have made a different decision but that is the price of fame and fortune.

“So, Dean, why would you go to this place given that I can refuse anyone at any time for service?”

He chuckled at that and said: “There was a man called Dean and he was starring in a picture about a rebel that did not have a cause but so desperately wanted one that it dominated his life in the extreme way that any obsession would. This is one of the pilgrimages in the same way that Ulysses in Dublin has a communion of steps on the cross.”

And so we trekked on to the sacred ground and looked up at the black dome supported by white relief which aspired up to the heavens with a celestial grace taking one and a side the lights and green grass that soured in the hills of sand.

Somehow I knew that this was his first time upon the rock that another Dean had tread and that he was now more holy because of the connection to another past which was only visible in video.