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.

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