My days as a newspaper boy
in Los Angeles County
With an unkempt beard
and long hair,
Lasted about as long as I expected

I looked awfully sketchy at 3 am roaming the streets of Norwalk and Downey,
or maybe,
I fit in well with the late night diner crowd of the area.
There wasn’t much money left to be made, mostly immigrants and parents needing a third job to pay the rising area rent are here.
The only ones left to throw papers to are aging Asian parents who live vicariously through their children.
And they’re dying off fast.

Getting back at 5 am
and waking the house,
back up at nine to take you to work.
Up the 105
to the 605
We pass through Bellflower
and coast to your theater in Cerritos.
No coffee
Yet
Waits on the stereo
The windows are down
no AC
Your feet are on the dash
You’re nursing a Gatorade
to cure this morning’s hangover.
I am at ease.

You don’t remember moments like these until there’s two hours left in your shift and your boss reminds you he needs those reports.
With a clean shaven face and short hair.
This has lasted longer than I expected.

Leave those New York blues behind
Forget the Chelsea Hotel
Living in LA's a lot like Heaven
With all the sins of hell.

brown-outs and in and out from blacking out
this kingdom of cloth, yachts, canvas dogs baring oil and a glass full of scotch, yonder the dogma of breaking out. This is a bank robbery, a fight so let's break it up. Baking club. Two cups of brown sugar, four cups of flour, two packets of apple sauce, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, two sticks of butter, come on now and stir it up. Things are stirring up. Flower petals and Hawaiian Punch, gardenias, orchids, a yellow top, blue jeans, and a green house walk.

California. Top-less, top-down convertible, brief rain on sunny days, and Urth Cafe for lunch. Valet parking on Melrose and window shopping with Snoop Dog at Rick Owens just to stir it up. While some things blur, all the best and brightest with their young supple ******* get together, eat lsd, just to sieve our cells so we can watch as the day is slurring us. Our words and our dance cards are hurting much. The drive to the desert while the beat brings us together and the Santa Ana's blow the pollen from the coast towards the Getty and it seems that our allergies aren't cured enough.

Two homemade lemonades in mason jars seem to me too ****, but to the youth it's the heat that packs the punch. An ounce for three hundred is way too much, on and on like an Indie song goes, Hot Chip and our Captain, we ride the Pacific Ocean while our skins tan under the heavy sun. One woman for me if it's you, is the best, and quite enough. So write your book about sailing a 12' Sunfish through the archipelago when you were four years old, and I'll edit myself into our narrative, use a paddle if the wind won't lift the main sail, and we can try to get home before the water swallows us. Blend the tropics with the fruit, and sneeze while facing the sun, if it's too much we can use Jet Skis and let the current bring us back to the coast one by one. Don't stop or drop the beat, don't worry because we've parked for free, so long as our batteries don't die, our flashlights will lead us home, it's a miracle to you, but just a number and a ticket to me, this is where the fun has just begun. Stirring it upside down, like a glass sailboat in a bottle and a love letter bleeding in salt water, have your romance but keep the sand out of our sheets, it's not like it's our bed, so we can't just have our fun.

I've taken a photograph. Way down in Alabama. Far into the delta where there's no cell signal, and the blues plays through our guitar, if you can do the harmony, I can sing for fun. It's not easy, the sound of our friends dying, drowning, in the despair their disease has overrun. But if we double our dreams, tear our skins and skip the streamers, blow up the balloons and catch the murderers that killed our son.

We can watch from the coast, stand at the top of the plateau, throw rocks into the cove, and free ourselves from a funeral that halves each other thru the mid-life synthesis we've been putting ourselves through, we can count, use the buddy-system and whistle loudly, fuse our genitals and flirt in a party that's just me and you, you might find that there's still fun for us, and this insanity isn't real, it's just a surrealist manifesto that in this earthquake we've just been painting our paths into. We've just begun to believe what isn't really grief but ought to be an afternoon or hunting and traveling at a grueling pace, with meager rations, there's not a snake bite I wouldn't be willing to **** the venom out of you, I'm just hoping you'd be willing to **** the venom out of me in time before I'd have to ask you to.

somewhere in hollywood along route 66
stood a cheap motel—
an asylum
for rockstars and their groupies,
artists and and poets and strangelings alike.
the morning only saw its residents,
drunken and drowsy,
and its black-tiled pools as dark as the night;
yet the nights were its prime
when the artists would gather
in the name of music, dance, recklessness.
the syringes would pierce their skin
and the alcohol like ocean waves
washed out the most of them,
and events too unspeakable were the norm.
the motel never attained 5-star ratings,
but it become the playground
for fleeting moments, wild nights,
brewing grounds for creation.
these nights were so loud and colorful,
but only remembered in hazy visions
and muffled sounds.

and so all those nights end here, today:
at the south of The Strip
where some modern, ordinary hotel now stands
once used to be the mess
that the likes of Jim Morrison
and Tom Waits called home.
its guests would have burnt it down,
but they would've wasted their money,
and who has the time anyway?

ladies and gentlemen, the tropicana motel—
a stop over where
wild minds and wild hearts would meet
and eventually go their way,
the place where these legends
of music and madness
came to play.

The cars hiss by my window
but no one's honking their horns.
We're okay with the traffic,
and we're okay with the distance,
and we know you hate us --
but do you know that we love you?

We got out of the ****** motel early,
while we still could,
before the rental car got stolen
or our room underwent dynamic drive-by refurbishment.
There was supposed to be a
complimentary continental breakfast,
but the coffee machine was broken
and someone had already swiped all the donuts.

My only frame of reference for Inglewood was that it was Sam Jackson's character's home turf in 'Pulp Fiction',
leading me to suspect it
probably wasn't a nice area,
although the fat ****** smoking outside
when we'd checked in at 2am
had seemed very friendly.

You were right about LA, about
how there must be a sun, but you can't
really see it, you just
sort of assume it's up there somewhere
behind the fog huffing in off the Pacific
and the toxic breath rising from the
city's gridlocked mouth.

We made for Venice Beach, because you
don't fly all that way and then not go,
us figuring ourselves early enough
in the grey, jet-lagged damp, to
avoid the junkies, the winos and the crazies,
the symptoms of America driving itself mad with
unrealistic dreams.
But they were already there, muttering and
shivering on sand and cement, some
under rags or cardboard,
just waking up in
spite of themselves.

A woman with the hungriest face I ever saw
threw a cigarette lighter at me, then yelled,
shaking in her filthy clothes, that she wasn't giving it to me, *****, FYI,
FBI, CIA, JFK... then
started screaming about Kennedy and all those lying ***** up on the hill.

The ocean ******* away at the land behind us, like it was
whetting its appetite for the day when San Andreas splinters, and the waves finally get to
devour
California.

The hungry-faced woman was still shouting when
we walked away, through the graffiti and
gangs of *******-huge, hulking seagulls.
If I'd stopped and tried to talk to her, if I'd
gotten anywhere close enough, I was
afraid she'd tear a bite out of my face,
and I didn't know what shots I'd need if that happened, and we didn't have medical.
Which was a shame,
because I'd have liked to hear
what she had to say about Kennedy.

We walked to where you'd street-parked
the car which
still hadn't been stolen.
On the way, some guy, a stranger
coming the other way, called you
'Football Dude' and asked you
to catch his neighbour if she
jumped off her balcony, but
I think he was joking.

Oh, and the car was yellow.