Alan Hanson

Carlos sat in his Langer’s Deli adjacent studio apartment staring blankly out his open window. Those hard silent Angeles nights. Those people dodging floating tumbleweed trash on the street below. He could hear the stoplights click through their stages. He could hear the heels clicking along the grimy, dry sidewalk. He made clicks with his tongue and stood, he soft-shoed to the window with his hands in his deep khaki pockets, he removed them and clapped them powerfully together in front of his chest. It was July and every cell in every body on his block was a balloon testing the limits of its expansion. It was that hard heat, that rabbit-punch nothingness, that pulled them all upward and outward. Not floating. Not rising. Just hooks in the skins; tethered nebulously.

He placed an arm out the window, straight, like an archer. The outside air draped his arm like a shadow, like a quiet dish towel of the city hanging from a tired waiter’s folded appendage. He pulled his arm back in and let the night’s grip fall lazily back down to the street. He chewed off a fingernail and ate it. He returned to his seat, with a heavy head full of pills, at the only chair at the only table which was centered directly in the middle of his barren apartment. A mattress cowered in the corner, a Magnavox held pounds upon pounds of unopened mail on its shoulders by the mattress’ feet, and then the small wooden table with only one chair and the electric device he had purchased in Chinatown earlier that morning.

Carlos gripped the hand-piece, cold and metallic, shaped like a potato peeler, and shoved the sharp end into his gut one inch below his bottom right rib. A shy trickle of blood escaped and poured itself over his tight fingers. Thank god for the pain pills. Thank god for the cellar-man in Chinatown. It was working. The first memory popped upon the screen that the metal hand-piece was connected to. The screen was no larger than a telephone, the glass scratched and dusty, but the resolution below its surface rang clear and vivid. The cellar-man told him the first memory would undoubtedly be one of pain. The body would be unable to separate the insertion of the device from starting there, starting with the first hurt, the first draw. And there he was, Carlos, age nine, watching Madeline in the hot sun, sprawled in the grass. Heat stroke, maybe, dehydration, he forgot to fill her bowl, and when he checked to see if, please Lord, she was only sleeping, when he fingered at her hanging tongue to wake her, the trickle of blood that slid out her mouth and onto his tight fingers, the family dog, now a hot lump of fur in burnt grass.

Of course, the machine had an option to delete this. Carlos didn’t buy it to delete memories. Tempting, sure, the little prompt that appeared as Carlos wept uncontrollably. But that wasn’t his game. He wanted to carve out spaces. He wanted to rid himself of intangible occupants. The real memories, ones of happiness and love and pain and death, he knew he needed those. He knew their worth. It was the tiny cities made of stagnant half-thoughts and fear-wonder he wanted taken away. He needed more space. That’s what was killing him, not enough space.

There were the faces, first. Faces he would never need to see again and never would be able to contextualize. Faces pressed against bus windows, gawking at him in wet fog, faces in crowds that struck him for a millisecond, all kinds of blank faces just taking up space. Click. Click. Click. He felt them go and tangle themselves into nothing, little hooks pulling them out of nowhere and into nowhere- but at least a nowhere not within himself. Then there were the carpet moments. Those little imprints of patterns. As a child, so many times, he ran his hand through the rugs below him as the adults spoke in hushes and looks from the kitchen. Those he wiped clean, too. He was already feeling refreshed. The bleeding had stopped. He felt lighter. The pills put him on a wave.

This went on for hours. And the stoplights clicked themselves into thirds and the street men hustled with their dragging feet and the 4 line farted its hydraulic cat-calls until it was late enough for the busses to stop running. Carlos removed the machine from his body and clapped his hands together once again. He was free of the hangers-on, the little nothings that kept bumping around in his skull without meaning. These little cities of the extras we keep with us, now eradicated. Now empty lots. Now ample space for new cities to fill with which he saw ultimately fit. The cities built on a new love that didn’t have to balance itself upon the trash-piles of his past. The cities ready to expand on their own with endless possibility. A whole county inside him, freshly paved and lit, waiting to be filled with everything new. There were roads where his veins once were. His rib-cage dissolved and let the organs travel to whichever part of the body they pleased. His heart in his head, his lungs in his fists, his testicles in his throat. All this space! All these open acres to love you with and love the world with and love the dirty men on the bus whom now he understood, no longer afraid of, no longer looking away. 

He walked back to the window and stuck his head out and felt the thick, hot air comb his face. He smiled and could not wait to be filled. Could not wait, that Carlos. And he wouldn’t have to.

This is how the night ached: You hovered grass-length above your discount mattress. You gawked wide eyed and frightened with a quivering face; sweating out a howl in you,  a windswept fear of emptiness. You were the Salton Sea and you felt too tangibly the unlikeliness of quenching your barren thirst. An excavation crew scraped, unsatisfied, at the floor of your chest. This is a loneliness of removal. This is a length of rope pulled steadily, hand over hand, from your gut, dangling the remnants of your best. Oh, you tyranny of distance.

Then the dogs. Six, seven maybe, all erupting in pitch black barks. The neighborhood is suddenly ablaze with fear. It pulses through the clouds like the northern lights. Your hovering halts and you clutch your post. The dogs don’t stop. Something wicked is stalking around down there and your little boy body is too shaken to creep to the window and search it out. If it’s even there, you wonder, and your wonder is worried, frightened like you, that your mind is beginning to make these things up. And how.

This is how the night took shelter: Your cognizance released its clutch and let you sleep and the dogs put their heads back on their paws and only the night palms whispered until it became light again. 

It had passed, like it always will and does, and this is how the new day took hold: You cleaned your face and refreshed yourself with comforting habits. You laid your layered memories neatly before you and were thankful. You cut corners with cloth shoes through your crisp, sun-dipped patch of Los Angeles. You could breathe and be breathed and knew that every time it comes back for you it will also again go. Every night easier than the last. Every morning an eon long thank you note.

He paces the kitchen tiles which are marble and in them blurry reflections of Christmas lights can be seen. It is the eve of destruction, he is told, by the newsmen and the nuts and the endless, clever quips in the Sisyphus-scroll of his Twitter feed. Though, it has been tomorrow in other parts of the world, Perth for example, for over ten hours and no city-swallowing earthquakes have come to his attention (though, to be fair, it would take some time to report if the entirety of Australia blipped under the blue). 
-What’s so bad about the end of the world? he thinks silently. -It would be no different than if I were to choke on this Nathan’s hot dog here in this kitchen, at least for me. All or none- he thinks, -What’s it matter, all or none?

He paces the kitchen with ketchup at the corners of his dumb, nearly always open, mouth and flicks the light switch up and down, up, down, up, down, and enters the living room. In the dark of the tiles the blurry reflection of the Christmas lights now seems brighter, sharper. He sits on the floor before his entertainment center and scans the hundreds of DVDs he has proudly collected over the years. This time, however, not one title seems to breathe. Not one film on the shelves speaks to him and suddenly he feels so goddamn ridiculous attaching himself to these discs. They are nothing and will be the least missed.

For a second he thinks he’s fainting. He becomes unbalanced and wobbles as he tries to stand. It isn’t until three picture frames jump off the wall behind him and land in a vibrating clutter that he realizes that it’s an earthquake. A small one that is over before most people in his sleepy neighborhood could even be stirred awake. He wonders how many others on his street are pacing their empty homes this late at night.

He retrieves a broom and sweeps the shattered frames’ glass into a garbage bin. -What if that was the one? he thinks. -Not the end of the world, not apocalypse, no, but what if that was the ‘big one’ we keep talking about? What if a volcano erupted above a village with no electricity? They would be convinced it was here. What are the chances a large earthquake could hit tonight? And we, those who choose to live so carelessly near the San Andreas fault, well, wouldn’t we all be convinced that this surely is it? If I walked out into the street and my neighbors’ houses were caved in and the city behind them was burning into the night what else could I believe? This is it! But it wouldn’t be. And I again a fool who believes in the magic of catastrophe.

He chooses I Heart Huckabees and lies down on the couch. It is already midnight and the city sleeps well. Before falling asleep to the menu version of Jon Brion’s score, he decides that tomorrow he will write more letters. 

I had driven, very carefully, my father’s black Ford Ranger, which was given to him by my mother’s father in passing, across an icy and dead Main Street to your mother’s house. I loved driving that truck. I felt one with that truck; more so than any bicycle I ever owned. And I owned four.

Your mother was gone, always, and we scraped enough cash together to buy a twelve pack of Pabst. It was still snowing, as if the tundra of Leavenworth needed any more blanketing, in that white-wash, foggy, floating way— where it seemed to not be falling at all but hanging delicately, fixed in every space. The air itself seemed to be ninety percent snow. The horizon line, nearly nonexistent, smeared perfectly from the frozen ground to the blinding and barely-blue sky. It was barely two o’clock and the sun had given up hours ago. We had two plastic discs and a sorry excuse for a hill, behind your mother’s house.

The key is layering. I wore a shirt with the Krylon Olympic rings, a green thermal, a heavy sweater, a thin windbreaker, and an overcoat. The second key is to put your gloves on your hands before donning the last coat. This eliminates snowy wrists.

We placed the PBRs snugly into the snow and kept a screwdriver nearby to lift the cans’ tabs to avoid the removal of our sleeve-fit gloves. We should have purchased whisky. The beer was flavorless on our frozen tongues but we drank it quickly in between lazy slides down the barely-sloped backside of the hill. The whitewashed spectrum of visibility erased property lines and obscured the moaning and sad city behind the tree line.

Our faces were dried and raw; prickly with a cold-induced blush. We were two bundled ghosts half-drunk and freezing, staring at the squiggly sled marks we abandoned after the second or third descent. It felt, down in the sad of our guts, that we could ghost in this town forever and one day, with loose, unfinished possibilities dangling at our feet like untied shoelaces of maybes, we would watch our children angrily force those sleds to slide. We would be older and not new and the slippery cans of beer would still sit in a patch of snow by the drainage ditch.

Afterwards we stripped down fifty percent of our layers and warmed ourselves by the space heater. There were still beers left and we talked sloppily about whether or not people actually watched bukkake, if Mac Lethal was serious or not, and if our loves would last through the New Year. They didn’t.

Our jackets and gloves were scattered like debris over the Sega Genesis cords snaking their way to the crackling television where someone just became “on fire”. Someone else came through the door, bringing in a dark chill from the driveway, toting a fresh twelver and an eager grin. That was the last time I visited your mother’s house.

On the way home I stopped at the middle school. The parking lot was packed thick with weeks of snow and I did slow donuts underneath the fading, desaturated yellow lights. I kept pushing the limit of my donut speed. I would scare myself each time I reached a new level of carelessness. I would whip a 360 mere inches from a dividing curb or wink my brake lights at a lamppost and then let the vehicle slide to a safe stop. I would catch my breath and see how close I could get again. How pissed my father would be if he knew what I did in that Ford Ranger. Donuts, joints, handjobs, broken speeding limits, seatbeltless passengers. It was Leavenworth, Kansas and the dead waitresses at Applebees and the dead soldiers in the graveyard behind my house suffocated me. I sped down the frontage road leading to our cul de sac and turned the headlights off and on. Thank god the deer were sleeping.

There is bluish light cavorting with the dust on the kitchen tiles; pushing it around fluidly, casually. They are middle schoolers doing the snowball at Skate City. They live in back and forth.

Assembling the percolator is quiet metal and calming. I scoop two piles of ground coffee from the tin that says “Yuban, Dark Roast”. It is a lie. The tin is old and the amber grounds contained inside are actually a “blonde willow blend”. I dump the bags into the tin. I enjoy the scraping sound made when the plastic scooper drags the brown granules against the wall of the can. I screw the top half onto the base and turn the burner on low.

The act of making the coffee is a progress that holds inevitable completion and reward. I pace on tip-toe from the west window to the corner of cupboards and back. I wait for the water to warm and I collect the stiff and empty beer cans from the night before to place them in the recycling bin. I crunch each one in half with my thumb and forefinger. In the bin, each can doubled over in pain, they fall into each other Tetris style and form a foundation of aluminum. The smell of stale beer is comforting. I woke up again.

I read the time on my wrist and remind myself that the watch needs a link or two taken out. It has been a lean year and the gold and silver watch my father gave to me slides down my forearm when I brush my freshly showered hair out of my face. I took a long shower again and stared into the neighbor’s yard. He loves his sleeping cats.

The water begins to whisper gurgles under its breath. I am reminded of ghosts and drifting friendships. I worry that people I once knew, now dead, in some wholly unscientifc and completely supernatural way, ever miss these moments. Is there a satisfaction in unending silent instances like these? Some mornings I think I could live here. Small space, small time. I pull the choke-chain back on the restless dog who says, “now, this year, even more of us will disappear.” I cut the silence because I have to. I let a tiny “fuck” jump into the air and exist. 

I walk to the west window once more and watch the smog gently cap the hills. A path of soft sunlight is cutting its way through the neighborhood politely. The yard has been brown and disgusting for months. The recent rain has turned the entire rectangle into a mud pit. Although now tiny, eager patches of bright green grass begin to emerge; little spots of reaching blades thankful for the moist and breathing soil.

The percolator begins to babble and a thin line of steam rises steadily from the spout. It is confident and perfectly straight.

When I was in elementary school I lived in a new suburb that was constantly being developed. The street that ran perpendicular to mine and cornered my house was the cut off for an added development. My house and the houses to the west were completed. Freshly sodded lawns. Paved driveways. Fenced backyards. The houses east of mine were empty lots or skeletal frames. Three blocks into the ‘badlands’ of the new development was a deep runoff trench that we would play in when it was dry. Halfway down the wall of this trench was a large exposed pipe. The opening had a radius of about one foot and some genius bastard hid a Penthouse in there. We were definitely not allowed to play in this trench after school when our parents knew where we were. But for twenty minutes each morning, while waiting for the bus, and our parents occupied with morning papers and coffee and getting our younger siblings to school, we could chance missing the bus (oh how this pissed my parents off, missing that bus) and run over to the ditch to squeeze in five minutes of staring at a soggy, outdated, Penthouse. I particularly remember preferring to read the last pages. The last pages were full of hotline ads, about 30 per page, that had a different naked woman featured in each one. This is where the variety was. Sure, they were tiny pictures. But tiny NAKED pictures. And at age 10 naked anything was paralyzingly enthralling.

One snowy Colorado morning it seemed that the bus would be much later than usual. I hadn’t been to the porno pipe in quite some time so I decided to see if it was still there. I ran through the sludge of the neighborhood, the rough material of my Dallas Cowboys’ Starter jacket chaffing the underside of my chin, to the run-off trench. The pipe was full of mud and the floor of the trench was half frozen dirt and half melting snow. In a heap of grey, wet, mush I saw a soggy page corner peek out. I thrust my hand into the mess and pulled out shreds of wet, torn, fading naked women and ads for dildos. It was destroyed. As I stared at the remains of this once magical document I heard in the distance a loud hydraulic brake. It was the bus. And I was definitely too far away to run back in time. 

Boy, did I sure get my ass chewed out on that car ride to school. If only my seething father knew it was because I was staring at a soggy Penthouse in a ditch somewhere, not even jerking off, just ruby-cheeked, huffing and puffing, staring at rapidly decaying tits. 

So now you know that. 

Rodney clips a side mirror and parks against the railing of an extremely narrow road. Mulholland at night always puts a particular fear in me. The only time it hasn’t was in a parked Trans Am necking with a perfumist. On the way home she came down with caution. Someone else did not.

The party is nice but there are Networkers here. The birthday boy and his set are boozily comfortable but everyone else seems to be searching. The only people I know here are the ones I came with and the neon-red haired amateur porn actress I once tried to take out. The house has a brilliant view of the city, the moon, and the valley. It cranes its house-neck and peers downward. The house will one day fall off of the mountain. Maybe it will roll.

By the pool my sister makes jokes that I am proud of. I am staring at underwater lights and drinking my Red Hook and I am amazed. I am amazed at the new adult casually talking about moving in with her boyfriend and his business partner’s assault rifles. She was once my baby sister. My baby sister who dragged her security blanket, Nanny, through a colony of fire ants and then wrapped it around herself. My baby sister is now in the semi-legitimate California drug business. She tells me about James Bond poker games in Newport Coast and prostitutes and extortion schemes. She assures me she’s safe. “No one’s out to get Mike, just his partner”, she yawns.

In the bathroom line one of many bald men in attendance tells me about his feature and later he will hand me a business card that I will only use to make crutches for joints. The woman next to him asks me where I got my sweater and she is the third person tonight to be disappointed by the answer “Goodwill”.

We are getting high in the driveway and the calm air is warm and comforting and still crisp. There are no coyotes and my Mulholland fears dissipate. The city unfurls itself below us and shimmers. The rest of the party sings “Happy Birthday” in unison. We can hear them in the backyard.

We drive to El Chavo and I want to sing, too:

There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret’rite one…
Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,
All through our crippl’d Zone,
With a face on ev’ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev’ry stone…

Now everybody— 

It’s Saturday night and I have already gone swimming. I have chugged beers. I have eaten a pier hamburger. I have shot LED lights with a fake gun and I have skeeballed. But it’s Saturday night and even though I have also fallen asleep half-drunk in a car already I still want to go out. I’m having anxiety and FOMO and thinking a lot about death for some reason so I feel like I should go out. A friend is visiting and she invites us to the birthday party of a mild celebrity. We drink on our stoop and exhaust every possible driving vs. taking a cab scenario possible.

Emma brought two of her friends from school. They’re pretty art chicks and they don’t seem like they care to talk to us very much. I try to figure out if they’re on drugs. They go to the bathroom two at a time which suggests cocaine but they’re not rapid-fire pitching business ideas at me. They’re not even very political. One touches her face a lot and says she’s very tired so I decide if anything it’s pain pills. Then I decide that they’re probably just tired and I’m projecting because I am the one on drugs. I drink my beer quietly. I tap my hand on my thigh. The art chicks all dress like Grimes. They yawn at their palms and exhale wisps like “when are we going to the party?” and “oh no Sal is calling me again”. We go to the party.

The problem with anxiety forcing you out of the house is that it likes to flip itself on the car ride over. We’re standing outside the building and now I dread security guards and strangers and conversations screamed over dubstep. But we’re here and we found a good parking spot. The party is half hip and half Hollywood and half-lit in purple neon. It’s on the top floor of a very tall building and I remind myself to stay away from the floor to ceiling windows. It’s an open bar which means a very long line so I drink them two at a time. I keep losing everyone I came with and finding myself in strange groups with very well-dressed people. I am wearing a hockey jersey. It was three dollars at Goodwill. I feel very silly in my hockey jersey. I don’t even play hockey.

There are people here I like and some people that don’t remember my name. I talk to the people I like and then two of those people go with me downstairs to shotgun Miller High Life on the sidewalk. This is a stupid thing that a sober person wouldn’t do but we’re not sober and sometimes we feel invincible. Luckily, the cops are busy elsewhere. We reenter the party and it’s on its last breath. The music is really bad and I can’t remember if it’s been bad the entire night or if maybe I’m sobering up. We decide to go home. As we drop Rodney off at his house I think “what a weird, good time we had tonight. LA, you are a twisted and wild woman but boy do I love you.” I eat ten chicken nuggets and am very glad to have wonderful friends.

It is 10 AM and my head is made of lead when Erika calls me to see if I want to go to the Observatory to watch the shuttle fly by. I protest with my hangover but ultimately decide it’s worth it and shower quickly. We stop to get coffee and then drive north on Commonwealth to take the side trail to Cedar Grove and avoid the vehicular vomit that is pooling around the actual Observatory. We are ill prepared for the terrain but it’s a fast hike and the view is great. We catch our breath and complain about the flies and complain about the heat. Then, from the trees behind us, a great roaring emerges and wraps itself around us. When the shuttle finally comes into view I am shocked; childlike and proud. I want to reach out and place my palm against its side. I want to be so close to this machine, to feel the aftershocks of its pulse which once hummed in space, a hum that traveled over one hundred million miles. I miss the version of me, age six in a small house baking in the Mojave sun, who would spend hours on hot blue carpet manipulating the cool, metal parts of my die-cast Endeavour model. We reposition to see it fly back around on the southeast ridge of the grove. It is just as thrilling the second time around. After the last pass a couple to the right kisses! They are grinning and fulfilled. A man in uncomfortable sandals runs like a Jesus Lizard through thick leaves to try to snap one last photograph. We fill our shoes with sand as we hike back down to the car. We get lunch and the television above the bar is broadcasting the arrival of the shuttle at LAX. One of the newscasters gets choked on air and I am glad that this is meaningful to him and others. The news shows a feed of instagrammed shuttle photos and I don’t roll my eyes. Connections are good. Connections are great. It’s always warming, for whatever reason, when a bunch of disconnected humans can all stare up at the same thing in the sky and feel joy. I ate a California roll and a Philadelphia roll and drank a Coke. We left the restaurant and the air was much cooler than before.

It is an insanely gorgeous, yes, gorgeous morning in Los Angeles and I am going to move from my bed to my desk. The bed is comfortable but I have been here too long. The sheets are crisp like spring and that means fall in Los Angeles and the smell of hot grass, a good smell, has crept in and interwoven itself with the comforter. The comforter is rolled to the wall; too hot to be used the night before. The comforter waits with support. The comforter is a wall. A wall that smells like good, warm grass. But I am leaving the bed for the desk. I stand up and decide that the bright breeze falling in the through the window necessitates a shirt. I open my drawer and find every single t-shirt I own crisply folded and organized neatly. This is rare. Yesterday was laundry day. I put on a thin cotton shirt from the 1980 Olympics and am amazed at the softness on my skin. This is remarkable! I whisper. Then, beckoning from the arm of a chair, a royal blue hockey jersey. The jersey is for Yonov, number 43, who went to Phillips Exeter Hockey School. The jersey is mesh as jerseys usually are and very cool to the touch. It smells like high school and I replace the Olympic shirt, with its cartoon raccoon coincidentally clutching a hockey stick, with the Phillips Exeter Hockey School jersey. This too, remarkable! Cool, smart plastic fabric resting on my shoulders and me, standing barefoot on chilled hardwood floors, face flush with a palm-lined view, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven palm trees on that hill! One for each person that I truly love in my life. Which is usually seven. I decide cotton is the best as the sun rises quickly and switch back to the Olympic raccoon and finally make my way to my desk. As I sit in the rolling chair I see a folded map of the United States on the nightstand, compliments of the Sierra Club (founded 1892). I decide to finally put this on my wall, no matter how juvenile or tacky it may feel. I want to run my hands over mountain ranges like I used to run my hands over the photograph of my father I would clutch nights when he was in the war, that photograph of him smiling and tanned on some Honduran tarmac, vibrating enough to exit its puny two dimensions, smiling happy past-less young and in love with the world. Like me.