The jazzman dropped his saxophone and joined us in the parking lot outside of Compton's Chicken and Waffles. Alvin and I explained that we had just been kayaking the Los Angeles River and were headed up-river, by car.

"Filthy?"

"Not as bad as people think. If you go past Anaheim Boulevard, its free water."
"It'd be a pretty good idea if they could make it so it was used for som'thin like that," the Jazzman said.

Yes, I thought, Los Angeles has San Antonio's Riverwalk, it's just a dusty red carpet waiting to be unrolled. This is not the five burros of New York. Los Angeles neighborhoods are more complex diversities of people - there are Central American neighborhoods (one is called 'The Banana Republic'), Iranian neighborhoods and Armenian neighborhoods. There are places entirely composed of German Americans, where one can purchase hard salamis, and there is a city on a hill, composed of Norwegians and Japanese, a contingency of longshoremen wanting to live in the hills above their harbor.

They overlook Long Beach: the Los Angeles River discharge, which was formally a Samoan enclave, and now the center of South LA's gay community. The Samoans have moved on, to Gardena, near an enclave of Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, not far from Carson, the largest community of Filipinos outside of the Philippines. There are places like the South Bay; a mix of sleepy locals with sun-bleached hair, and ambitious and confused immigrants from the East Coast and Midwest.

Through most of this flows the river; dirty, unnoticed, polluted. Plans have been drawn by some optimistic organizations to make the river completely clean; to purchase the properties along the 53 miles of embankments. Some plans cost ten million. Others are ten or twenty times that.

Angelenos need their river - they want it to be a clean river, with green banks and riparian plants, steelhead trout and terraced restaurants along its edge. Los Angeles wants a unifier for their city. Civic-minded and thoroughly ethnocentric, the Angeleno would at last have a vein of life through his city's gray heart. The Hollywood sign is two-dimensional, the Staples Center looks like an office supply store. The Los Angeles River is LA's Times Square, somebody just needs to plant the seeds.

You should have a garden of palms and grapes in the midst of which you should cause rivers to flow forth, gushing out. (The Children of Israel 17.91)

East, we passed Fry's American Cuisine, Golden Dog and Swirly Freeze Restaurant. I asked Alvin if he thought that rap pervaded black LA. I pointed out that the local paper in Compton had one feature on a musician - a violinist. And the Jazzman and his reggae friend? Where was this pervading rap scene? Maybe rap was an image which television had put in the suburban mind to make Compton and Watts look an evil, uninviting place. Like the rest of LA, the real black LA is clapboarded, friendly, smiley, dirty, and also peculiarly absent of rap.

When Notorious B.I.G. was killed (a rapper from New York who came to LA to mend a coastal division), there was no more gun-talk, there was no more 'I gonna kill me nasty ho', there was only a salty-haired mother crying, which made all the rap-talk look silly; made the rappers message seem provincial, fickle and distant; like two men in Arkansas fighting over the size of a fence.

Notorious was not a small man; the inner city brims with Krispy Cremes and Devil Cakes, chicken livers, Hot Links, Pork Rinds and Sugar Cakes. All this anger; was it inner-city strife, or was it bad food, indigestion, and irregularity? I'd get cranky after a Seven-Eleven Big Gulp of Red Mountain Dew too. Snoop Doggy Dogg? Acne - too many microwaved breakfasts, not enough roughage. I'd pack a gun on the street if I had to spend an hour in the John after breakfast. Maybe rappers need more oranges in their diets, some salads and chickpeas. Maybe the forced image of black LA is just a coincidence of the rapper's poor diet?

From Watts, we drove along the river through Downey, South Gate, and Huntington Park. So-called 'East Los Angeles.'

"Notice how the houses change once you enter Mexican Los Angeles," Alvin said. It was true - the white clapboard gave way to early-twentieth century mission-style homes with irregular red tiled roofs and steep curved palisades. Coastal LA is known for its taco-bell homes; cheaply and quickly slapped with a paste resembling adobe; cheap cements to resemble the red-tiled roofs of the Mexican don era.

Maps and Journals Los Angeles Map

Desert Southwest Anza Borrego The Barren Desert The Channel Islands Windblown zoology off the coast of Los Angeles Colorado Plateau, Navajo Country Mesa to Canyon along the Plateau Death Valley The Saltwater Fish of Death Valley Mojave National Preserve Wandering the Eastern Mojave High Desert Stories from California's High Desert Areas Los Angeles Gray River in the Sun Los Angeles Map Imperial Valley Death and Salvation on the New River Panamint Valley Panamint Valley Roach Motel White Sands and Southern New Mexico Atomic Agriculture on the Rio Grande The Salton Sea Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea Slab City and the New River Death and Salvation on the New River Trona, California Trona and the Unusual Lake Searles Western Mojave Four Seasons of the Mojave Los Angeles Coast Images and captions from the LA coast.