The
women did not talk, except to Freddy. "It's like, so chillin'"
one said. They would roll off their beach chairs, and beg Freddy for cocaine,
which he held in a bathroom in his father's cascading villa. They even
ignored the Arabs, who sat on the fourth terrace and smoked cigarettes,
talking about home. The Arabs were students at Pepperdine University,
whose fathers sent them to Malibu because it was 'religious' and 'nestled
in the hills' - safe, and American.
Because
the Arabs came from wealthy families, and had been surrounded by luxury,
they held little in common with the Church of Christ students at Pepperdine.
The middle-class white faces from places like Texas and Arizona who read
books about God and who called Mormons and Scientologists 'cults', who
went about Malibu, doing good deeds by bagging sand for flood control
and spreading the good word.
Freddy
was different, because he had good hash, and liked to sit in the sun and
eat cheese. The Arabs liked him because he reminded them of their relatives
back home, unconcerned with other people's little worries. Like their
state-subsidized fathers, Freddy was subsidized by his parent's wealth,
and like so many Malibu locals, had no particular skill. One local, they
called him Benjo, was on welfare. The son of a producer and screenwriter,
Benjo did it 'to prove that it could be done.'
The Ventura County boatman, Dave, lived in the cabin of his twenty-six
foot sailer, and I remember him well because he seemed to be one of those
last Angeleno's who still clung to this idea of the water. Dave had constructed
his sailer from scratch. He crafted the interior for twenty-eight years
in thirty-two brands of wood - koa, teak, and cherrywood. Delicious carvings
of seagulls and waves, dolphins and islands. I asked Dave when he was
going to finish his boat and set her in the water.
Dave
had trouble answering this question. He gave up everything to build his
boat, including his wife, procuring a hundred dollars here and there to
do some woodwork on the docks. He had designed the hull himself, but he
was getting old, and woodwork in the sun hadn't treated him well. I asked
him what he wanted to do once the boat was in the water. "Sail all
over the place. Go to Mexico. Retire there."
Malibu
had become isolated; however loud was the surf, the drone of bored millionaires
was always louder, making us outsiders. One morning, I escaped, and found
myself leaving Malibu for a place deeper in LA. One day, it was Culver
City, walking along Ballona Creek, a Los Angeles River subsidiary, which
smelled foul and was green from stagnation, rust and algae. From its birth
in the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles River once flowed gracefully,
ending its trek in the Santa Monica Bay, and sometimes diverting, as floodplains
do, around Palos Verdes and into Long Beach. For thousands of years, it
was the center of Indian life - lush, wild and green.
We
were invited to join a group of Japanese filmmakers for karaoke in a Korean
neighborhood on the edge of the river. This group of immensely polite
suburbanites specialized in editing out the obnoxious moans of western
porn models and replacing them with the more subdued Japanese voiceovers.
A Japanese karaoke box, unlike Middle America's alcoholic karaoke bars,
is a small room with enough space for six to eight people to sit. In the
middle of the box is a television-set, which loops dreamy pictures of
bridges, cherry trees and urban parks, while a sing-a-long script in Japanese
runs along the bottom. The clerk had told Jeswar that alcohol was not
permitted in the box, but when the Japanese filmmakers broke into Frank
Sinatra, Jeswar said, "there is a Seven-Eleven across the street."
Jeswar
and I stuffed Modelo Negro's into our coat pockets as the Seven-Eleven
cashier was ringing them up. "You an Indian?" Jeswar said.
"No,
I'm Boongladeshee," the clerk said.
"No, brother, you are no Bangladeshi, you are an Indian. We are all
Indian."
"No, I Boongladeshee," the clerk repeated.
"Listen brother, we are the same. We are brothers. We are both Indian."
"No, I am from Boongladesh. You cannot tell me what I am. I am Boongladeshi!"
Back
at the Box, where in the confusion of Japanese sing-a-longs we drank Mexican
beer, I asked Jeswar why he made such a stir. "They don't understand,"
he whispered. "They are so nationalistic. Those Bangladeshis."
Yes,
I thought, those damn Bangladeshis, here in LA. Did I need to understand?
LA's maturity as a city is apparent from its concrete underbelly. Even
though LA went through puberty after the invention of the automobile,
and has become an unorganized sprawl for all that, it has a feeling of
being elderly, like it has always been here.
