The sun was going down, the service calls slowed up and
finally stopped coming in altogether. I stopped in at the little Carniceria on
the corner of Stone and Prince, and got two Tilapia and some veggies, chopped
them up at my truck and handed them to the barbeque man outside, by the fading
murals by taggers and Mexican artists. The Norteno music on the speakers inside
and out was sweet as a lethal dose of the brown Mexican candy by the cash
register. Once done, I took the barbeque
over to my friend Eric’s, and we sat and ate in the fading light outside the
crumbing adobe he’s trying to rebuild, on a building schedule, while the City
can bulldoze it at any time on a demolition schedule. Because years ago an inspector persuaded him
under duress and misinformation, that if he signed a contract to give the City
demolition rights, he wouldn’t be charged if his house had to be bulldozed
sometime in the future. It didn’t seem
like much of a possibility at the time.
But time is nothing and suddenly there he was. And there we were.
Mourning doves were hooting and a hawk was slowly sailing
out over the dry bed of the Rillito, over the spot where Eric had seen the
remnants of a pipeline the Mormons had run, up to their mine over a hundred
years ago, when the rivers ran year round and the cottonwoods hadn’t stopped
dying off one by one, as the water table dropped along the road to Mt. Lemon. We talked mostly about mechanical stuff, and
his little dogs. I told him the Coyotes
must thank him nightly for raising such juicy little furballs that are dumb
enough to run out to the fence when the Coyotes make noises like a little dog
in trouble. We talk about tools and trucks and the weather. We don’t talk much about women. Because sooner or later we realize we sound
like idiots.
And we talked about the city’s dirty deals and its dirty
little wars against the poor and the aging and working class communities, and politicians
wrapping themselves in the farmworkers’ flag while they screw the workers in
their districts, and our problems with building codes, all of which is just a
bunch of words that mean gentrification, waves of it, with no beginning and no
end of settlers coming across the prairie, when the grass was so tall it rubbed
the bellies of their oxen and mules raw, the land so rough the natives so
hostile they had to make new rules by the month for where they could and could
not be, and where they belonged, they who used to belong anywhere and now
belonged nowhere, they who had no culture and no laws, no civilization, no
rights more than animals, and if animals and trees had rights….but let’s not go
down that road.
We talk about inspectors who MAKE law instead of enforcing
law, and bulldoze (especially) adobe houses, because the new settlers consider
them uncivilized.
The new settlers have more guns
They make the rules and they break the rules.
We were here first but now they get to tell us how to live
and whether we stay or go.
Those of us who choose the path of accommodation and
adaptation are called cowards and traitors.
They have neither strength nor skill with horses.
Their houses make us sick but we have to build and live in them
anyway.
They hate the original people and the original dwellings.
They will win
We have to figure out how to let them win and keep what is
most essential, get us a Casino, a resort, a reservation, lots of land that
other people consider useless, relocation expenses, and lots of money for not
talking about all the broken treaties.
And while we talk I watch his white hairs flickering in the
soft night wind, and I see the roadkill
beside all the highways and dirt roads of life, the broken precision of misshapen
people in bureaucracies, that results (by words that blur their reference) in forced relocations, concentration camps,
torture, genocide and government sanctioned murder. What can you believe
in? To what god can you pray? Wrong question. The question is what values do these idiocies
and atrocities teach us?
It is intellectual property I speak of here , on the edge of
death and the death of the all too human world, the spirit water flowing in the
dry river bed beneath our feet, and the
clouds and stars just out of reach.
Something has to happen beyond protest, because rules change to fit the
money, and there will always be spiteful little bureaucrats trying to build
themselves up by finding fault and bringing others down. We hear stories about slab city, home
invasions by thugs in uniform, and organic gardens violated in the name of
sanitation and safety, the retired telephone lineman who built a house so
strong, it made the others look bad, and so, the inspectors wrote him out of LA
County.
So that ice cream trucks with posters of superheroes on
their sides can roll through those neighborhoods where the streets curve just
so, and all the architecture is dislocated visual muzak to match the blatantly
banal Christmas carols in July that the trucks play, where the children never
cry, and Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell’s America will never die, because it
never was alive.
So I said why not make mud huts about a quarter inch less
than 200 square feet so they escape the code, make them of branches, cob, mud
and wattles with dugout floors, an engineer’s stamp for the hell of it,
aquaponics, plants and flowers growing out of them, and through skulls,
machinery, busts of clowns, the sanction of churches for it as an interfaith
meditation center, the part of the property it sits on deeded over to public
use.
So that if the City bulldozes his house ,it has to take the
hut with it, and has to do it in public, and take away its use, not just from
the owner, but from the public and the wildlife that’s been accommodated there,
and with a squad of clowns bearing silent witness.
Just to be as absurd and sensationalist newsworthy as I can
make this thing, which is not a thing, because it is intellectual property,
designed to trick the mind into seeing from up close and afar, seeing our
seeing of the dirt and weeds rushing past the wheels, and simultaneously the
distant mountains, where all time and trouble and pain and joy end, in one huge
moment, that’s neither here nor there.
But also seeing the whole sad old movie tragi-farce directed by an
insane god…for what it is. Because the holiest of mantras is: It is what it is. Because cruelty and kindness are ineffably,
inexorably mixed, in all of us, and all that seems real is only virtual, and so,
the ultimate virtue
of clowns.
