And they didn’t seem to need water, just some trimming from time to time, but the wind did that. Blew down the giant fronds making a mess on the street. Sometimes a city crew came by with a man in a basket on a crane and buzzed the old stuff off. Buzzed everything till there was nothing but a little green mop at the top. Looked ridiculous. One time made a mistake and buzzed the whole thing off the top, nothing left but a damn pole. Bald thing for pigeons to sit on from time to time.
Other kids said, “What you drawin’ them ugly palm trees for? If anybody had some sense, they’d hack these poles down and plant some real trees with real shade.”
“Poor people don’t get to have no shade. That’s what porches are for.”
“These palm trees are a mistake. Somebody thought they would grow short; turned out they giants.”
“That’s cause they gotta see over the freeway, over the hood to the other side.”
“Eventually, they gonna cut the tops off. Turn them into telephone poles.”
One day, Buzzworm got taken for a ride on the freeway. Got to pass over the Harbor Freeway, speed over the hood like the freeway was a giant bridge. He realized you could just skip out over his house, his streets, his part of town. You never had to see it ever. Only thing you could see that anybody might take notice of were the palm trees. That was what the palm trees were for. To make out the place where he lived. To make sure that people noticed. And the palm trees were like the eyes of his neighborhood, watching the rest of the city, watching it sleep and eat and play and die. There was a beauty about those palm trees, a beauty neither he nor anybody down there next to them could appreciate, a beauty you could only notice if you were far away. Everything going on down under those palm trees might be poor and crazy, ugly or beautiful, honest or shameful—all sorts of life that could only be imagined from far away. This was probably why the palm trees didn’t need any water to speak of. They were fed by something else, something only the streets of his hood could offer. It was a great fertilizer—the dankest but richest of waters. It produced the tallest trees in the city, looking out over everything, symbols of the landscape, a beauty that could only be appreciated from afar.
CHAPTER 5:
Traffic WindowHarbor Freeway
The third movement was excruciatingly beautiful. But that was his rule about third movements. One should hang breathlessly on every note, a great feeling of anguish nearly spilling from one’s heart. It was mostly strings, violins accompanied by violas and cellos, exchanging melodies with the plaintive voice of the oboes. When it was really good, it brought tears. He let them run down his face and onto the pavement, concentrating mightily on the delicate work at hand. One slip of the baton, one false gesture, and he might lose the building intensity, might fail to caress each note with its tender due. In some deep place in his being, he wanted desperately to lose his way through these passages, but he would not give up his control. He must hear every measure, cue every instrument at its proper moment, until the final note. This was the work of a great conductor and the right of the composer.
Manzanar Murakami sensed the time of day through his feet, through the vibration rumbling through the cement and steel, and by the intervals of vehicles passing beneath him. At that moment, cars swooped at steady intervals, trucks trundled but trundled quickly. Traffic was thick but moving. It was manageable traffic. People in this traffic could count themselves lucky. They might reach their destinations ten to fifteen minutes early. Manzanar calculated that it would probably be twenty past the hour or ten ’til. It was prior to or after the amount of time it took for workers to normally leave their offices, pack their belongings, descend in elevators, retrieve cars from parking lots, plod through city streets, wait on ramps for traffic meters, then to finally merge onto the great freeway system. They had not yet all arrived, or a great wave of them had already plowed through in a slow grumpy mass. Those who cruised by at this reasonable speed, considering the hour, were the early birds or riffraff of the great mass. They took advantage unknowingly of what Manzanar knew to be a traffic window—a window of opportunity where a traveler might cruise between the congested clumps of aggravated rush-hour traffic.
Such a traffic window was essential for the third movement. There was just enough tension and yet the possibility of reverie. Not the stoned reverie of night traffic at seventy miles an hour, but a controlled reverie of rhythmic cadence and repeated melody. An incredible yearning went forth, perhaps of love and desire. Even if it were only the simple hunger for dinner, it was a hunger Manzanar sensed in a brutal and yet beautiful way. There was an inexplicable clarity about the third movement, a sweetness tinged with pain. It was as if his very heart tilted forward, his arms offering and yet containing this heart, opening and closing as the wings of a great bird, coaxing the notes tenderly to brief life, conducting sound into symphony.
Those in vehicles who hurried past under Manzanar’s concrete podium most likely never noticed him. Perhaps there were those who happened to see the arching movements of a man’s arms, the lion’s head of white hair flailing this way and that, the silver glint of the baton or a figure of strange command outlined starkly between skyscrapers in the afternoon sunlight. And perhaps they thought themselves disconnected from a sooty homeless man on an overpass. Perhaps and perhaps not. And yet, standing there, he bore and raised each note, joined them, united families, created a community, a great society, an entire civilization of sound. The great flow of humanity ran below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city.
From the beginning of daylight saving in April, the city watched its days lengthen until the solstice, when daylight lingered across the skies as long as possible. It was the end of the school year, and children had or had not graduated from one class to the next, eager to wake to listless days at the beach, on cool porches, under sprinklers, or before the interminable TV. Never mind that they had been signed up for summer camps, Y camp, work camp, athletic camp, leadership camp, swim school, remedial reading, remedial math, college for kids, year-round school, summer school, summer jobs, a job at McDonald’s, a job a Disneyland, jobs for youth, the family business, keep kids off the street, the family vacation, vacation with grandma, vacation with dad who lives in Florida or mom who lives in Dallas, a trip to Epcot, a tagging crew, gangs, or detention. Never mind. Today none of that had started. It was Monday. It was hot and listless and expectant. All the TVs in L.A. were turned on. Maybe no one was watching, but they were turned on, turned on to cartoons—Warner Brothers, Disney, Hanna-Barbera. It was summer, the first day of freedom.
All this Manzanar knew. Gone were the yellow school buses, the sporty Nissans and Mazdas favored by the college-bound, the Tercels, Corollas, Accords, and Tauruses favored by educators, the mothers and their early-morning Chrysler and Previa vanpools. When education left the freeways, a certain unclogging was achieved. Manzanar likened it to lowered cholesterol in the blood stream. It was the same when bureaucrats were given holidays. And it was the reason for the unusually good window in traffic. The first day of freedom might mean many things. For Manzanar, it was this extra elbow room on the usually densely occupied freeway. It called for more expansive gestures, a greater elasticity in the musical measure.
Manzanar Murakami had become a fixture on the freeway overpass much like a mural or a traffic information sign or a tagger’s mark. He was there every day, sometimes even when it rained, but it rarely rained. After all, this was L.A. There was a schedule of sorts, a program, an appropriate series of concerts and symphonies in accordance with the seasons and the climate of the city. As noted by many others, climatic change in L.A. was different from other places. It had less perhaps to do with weather and more to do with disaster. For example, when the city rioted or when the city was on fire or when the city shook, the program was particularly apt, controversial, hair-raising, horrific, intense—apocalyptic, if you will. There was an incredibly vast repertory, heralding e
very sort of L.A. scenario. Particularly eloquent was the Overture to the Santa Anas. Few contemporary composers rivaled the breadth and quantity of his compositions, and no one had yet dedicated their entire repertoire to one city, not to mention L.A. Few composers of his category were so unknown, so unheard, so without recompense for their art, so maligned, and so invisible.
To say that Manzanar Murakami was homeless was as absurd as the work he chose to do. No one was more at home in L.A. than this man. The Japanese American community had apologized profusely for this blight on their image as the Model Minority. They had attempted time after time to remove him from his overpass, from his eccentric activities, to no avail. They had even tried to placate him with a small lacquer bridge in the Japanese gardens in Little Tokyo. But Manzanar was destined for greater vistas. He could not confine his musical talents to the silky flow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai. It was true that he had introduced the shakuhachi and koto to a number of his pieces, but he was the sort who imagined a hundred shakuhachis and a hundred kotos. Indeed, he had written a piece for a hundred shamisen—the sound of their triangular bones beating on strings echoing through the stretched skins of a hundred cats was deafening and thrilling. No. Only the freeway overpass, the towering downtown horizon rising around it, would do.
It was suggested that he could be taken by helicopter and left on a mountain top—certainly a grand enough vista for a hundred shamisen or a thousand cellos. But those who knew Manzanar knew that he would find his way back, track the sounds back to the city, to the din of traffic and the commerce of dense humanity and the freeway. The freeway was a great root system, an organic living entity. It was nothing more than a great writhing concrete dinosaur and nothing less than the greatest orchestra on Earth.
CHAPTER 6:
Coffee BreakDowntown
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour before the five o’clock deadline, mid-June, summer solstice, and it had rained. Out there, steam rose from the hot streets, the pungent odor of wet concrete wafting over the downtown landscape. At eighty degrees, in an hour it would be dry again, but for the moment, everything out there had a wet reflective murky glow, the clouds parting into what I typically call pewter skies.
As usual, Emi called. “Hey, Gabe! Break time!” she announced over the phone. “Get away from that monitor before you catch cancer!”
I put her on hold. “Listen,” I said to Terry on the other line, “You’re right about the pewter skies. I got carried away. Strike it.” Actually I never get carried away. Well, rarely. It’s just a joke around the office. It’s how I test out new editors. See how they handle an edit. When a new editor like Terry comes on board, I always find a way to plant a pewter skies line into the body of my story. About a week later, someone will say to the newcomer, “Pass the pewter test yet?” The smart editor may simply strike it without a word. The shy editor may wander through previous articles nervously trying to find a precedent or whether I’ll bite. One editor changed it to putrid skies. Another suggested buffed tin or tarnished silver, or was it stainless steel? Someone left the pewter in and added something about how it darkened the Southern California landscape like heavy metal. Most editors are polite or politely sarcastic, but one editor said haughtily, “I’ve only been here one week, and it’s already obvious you guys can’t write to save your behinds. Major L.A. newspaper my ass.” Clearly, this editor was God’s gift to the business.
I didn’t feel like giving Terry a hard time. I had met him in the elevator. He complimented me on my mothers of gangbangers story. He seemed wise and bookish, a true editor type. He didn’t seem like the sort who would become a problem; he wasn’t a wannabe reporter. Wannabes could be trouble. Years of turning sloppy, albeit perhaps creative, writing into terse cogent prose could make an unsung talent pretty damn frustrated. But Terry was probably one of those editors whose finely tuned sense of grammar was a source of modest pride. Knowing how one word should follow another, one sentence follow the last, and one paragraph unfold upon the next, and applying those rules to sometimes unruly text seemed to be, for Terry, the whole of his fulfillment. Oh yes, and he was a precision speller. I could write a book about the pewter test, but that’s beside the point. All this to distinguish myself as a reporter who understands the worth of a good editor. In this oftentimes cutthroat business, I might even be considered sensitive in this regard.
Perhaps you’ve seen my by: Gabriel Balboa. I do the local news and sometimes the East L.A. metro beat. I’m one of a handful of Chicano reporters on editorial staff. I did a rare thing: worked my way up from messenger. Did this all through college. To be honest, I did it for completely idealistic reasons at the time, not necessarily because I could write or even liked to. It was because of Ruben Salazar, the Mexican American reporter who was killed at the Silver Dollar during the so-called “East L.A. uprising” in the early seventies. Of course I never knew him personally but had read about and been inspired by the man. By the time I got my first story, he was long dead, but I was there to continue a tradition he had started. That’s the way I felt. This was going to be my contribution to La Raza, to follow in his footsteps. Now I’m not so pretentious as to think I’m some kind of modern-day Salazar, but remembering my roots can keep me on track, steer me away from the petty jealousies that seem to pervade this office. So I might be considered idealistic in that regard. On the other hand, I must say I keep a handle on the nitty-gritty. It’s the detective side of this business that gives me a real charge, getting into the grimy crevices of the street and pulling out the real stories.
“Gabe! So what are you working on now?” Emi nearly yelled into the phone. She knows this is the most loaded question she can ask a reporter in a crowd of other reporters. You only need to lose one scoop on a story to learn evasiveness on the phone.
“Rained you out today, eh Angel?” I answered.
“Can you believe it? I wasn’t gonna lose the commercial. No way. We played the tape. Bob whatshisname-the-weatherman is talking like a fool about sunshine in the afternoon, and it’s pouring out there.”
“The paper predicted rain. And that was yesterday as of five.”
“Who reads the paper for godssake?”
“We know you don’t read, but who tunes in for the weather at two-thirty in the afternoon?”
“Surfers? Who knows. Hey,” she interrupted herself, “Hot tip. Invest in rubbish. At one point four billion, it’s our tenth biggest export item.”
“I believe it.”
“Did you wrap up the linguini?”
“It’s in the back of the car.”
“It’s going to rot in this heat.”
“It’s part of the plan, although I doubt salmonella can kill you. Besides, you owe me. You left me with the bill.”
“Did we have great sex last night or what?” This was another one of Emi’s tricks. “Come on, Gabriel. Say it out loud. Repeat after me: We . . . had . . . great . . . sex. God,” she whined, “it’s so stuffy over there. Okay, then. Say it in Spanish.”
“I only speak Spanish with my family, with my mother and her priest. I can’t talk dirty with you,” I joked.
“And I thought you were bilingual.” She said bye-lingualll, like she was licking her lips.
“Gotta go. Gotta interview.”
“What time tonight?”
“That’s what I meant to tell you. It’s gonna be a long haul tonight. I haven’t even started.”
“Then I’m going to the gym.”
“Do me a favor? That video store next door to the gym. See if they’ve got Angel Beach.”
“No way. This is disaster movie week, remember? I’m taping the series. We’re gonna watch real TV, color TV, commercials and everything.”
“Angel Beach is a disaster. An artful disaster.”
“See you lay-ter.” She hung up.
Knowing Emi, she would find Angel Beach for me. That’s the way she was. The complaining and the bitching were
the surface of a very big heart, the most generous I had ever known. The character of our relationship only seemed stormy. It had started out that way, with the smart talk and mouthing off, the snide repartee of two people who hate each other’s guts and then fall into bed together. I admit Emi had it all over me; she never lost her cool, but I could really get mad. And she knew it. “I thought you had some hot blood,” she crooned. She could be wicked, but I admit I loved that side of her. I loved her fast tongue, her spontaneity. She had said so herself. “Gabe, you’re then. I’m now. For a reporter, you oughta be more now. Let’s do it now.” She kept dragging me into now. Most of the time, I felt grateful. But I had one thing over her. She acted like she didn’t care. I knew better.
I snuck into Beth’s office, one of those glass enclosures earned by seniority. Beth was always good about letting me have a private conversation when necessary. She wasn’t around at that hour, but she wouldn’t mind me using her phone. I paged my contact and waited. Usually it was a five minute wait, but never more than ten. I looked at my watch. Three minutes. Buzzworm was in form that day.
“Balboa? You? You paged me on my coffee break.”
“It’s the other way around, Buzz. I paged you on my coffee break.”
Buzzworm laughed.
“So what’s up, buddy?”
“Strange day, dude. Strange day. Rain over your way?”
“Yeah, sure did. Hey, turn that thing down. Sounds like a bad connection.” I could hear Buzzworm fiddling with his Walkman. He was never without his radio. Asking him to turn it off might make him hang up the phone, but I had learned he wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
Tropic of Orange Page 5
