Panorama City (4 page)

 

Now, I'm not a small person, I'm six and a half feet tall, and so I was shocked to see how small, despite the size of the bus, how small the seats were. I scanned the rows looking for somewhere to sit, I scanned past all kinds of people, no row was empty. I sought out the littlest person, a teenage girl, and attempted to slide in next to her, but folding myself into that seat without injury would have been impossible. The driver suggested the front row, but a scrawny old man was taking up both seats. He had the look, I don't know how else to put it, his face looked like that of a newly hatched crocodile. His eyes were alive and penetrating at the same time, and his mouth seemed wider and flatter than most, he didn't have much in the way of lips, his mouth was like a straight line across his whole face, and yet you couldn't shake the sense that he was, at the very corners, smiling. Papers were spread all over the seat beside him, a disorganized pile of sketches and notes and diagrams. I had no way of knowing where he had boarded, but judging from the pleasure the bus driver took in asking him to collect his papers and make room for me he had been making a mess of his papers for many miles. He managed to stuff into what he called his briefcase, which was actually a flat cardboard box, he stuffed into that box the whole pile of papers that had been the mess on my seat, somehow that briefcase was bigger on the inside than on the outside, and then he asked the bus driver if he was happy now. The driver stated that he was. We started down the road and the little man looked straight ahead. By way of introduction I told him my name, my age, where I was from, and where I was going. He did not respond, I looked at the landscape. The front windshield was enormous, the bus ate up the road, if I let my vision narrow it felt like riding a very fast bicycle, except without the wind. All I could think about were all the bugs and birds I couldn't see, all of the plants whizzing by in a blur. I missed my bicycle already, bicycle travel was the perfect speed, traveling at this speed was pointless, you missed everything. But then I figured that if I was going to be a man of the world, I should learn to appreciate other modes of transport, I should give the bus a fair shake, and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.

 

The next thing I knew I was watching the Alvarez brothers and Greg Yerkovich driving down a country road like the one that led to our patch of wilderness, and they saw someone riding a bicycle, coming the other direction, it wasn't me, it was someone else riding a bicycle, someone nobody had ever seen before, a stranger. They drove their truck straight at the stranger, he saw them, he saw them coming at him, but he didn't know what to do, he didn't know he was supposed to dive into the ditch.

 

I jerked awake and the man next to me asked if I was okay, I said yes, it was just a dream. He seemed to be in a receptive mood now, so again I told him my name, my age, where I was from, and where I was going. Because we were in the first row, the one with the steps in front of it, if I didn't sit up straight my knees hit the metal bar separating us from the steps. He was small enough that he didn't have to sit up straight, he had room to move, he was short and narrow, he wore a tan sport jacket over a plaid shirt with a dark blue oval at the bottom of the front pocket, there was a pen in the pocket, I couldn't tell if it had exploded there or if another pen had exploded there before and this was a new pen. I was ignorant enough then not to recognize a true man of the world when I saw one. He told me he was heading down to L.A. to pick up a shipment of antioxidant cream, he engaged in a sort of rude commerce, his words, now and then, to support himself, to buy himself time for advanced thinking, his words. He explained that by using this cream several times a day, on your face, in conjunction with a special handheld light, sold separately, you could reverse the effects of aging, you could look five years younger in as little as two weeks, and if you didn't, he said, he would refund your money completely, he was offering a one hundred percent money-back guarantee. He asked me whether I found that impressive. I said that of course I did. Then he asked me if I'd like to order some. I told him I didn't want to look younger, I've never wanted to look younger. He said I was in the minority on that one. I pointed out that when you look younger, people treat you like a child. That's when he said, his words, You're a thinker, I like that. We shook hands, which was awkward, which was difficult in the bus seats, he was seated to my right, he could turn in his seat to face me and bring his right arm around, there was plenty of room for his right arm, but my right arm was trapped, the more I tried to turn toward him, the more trapped my right arm became, trapped between my body and the seat, not to mention that I could barely turn because my knees pressed against the metal bar separating us from the steps. I suppose we could have shaken left hands, but I heard somewhere, source unknown, that it is unlucky. The man introduced himself as a thinker also, his words, named Paul Renfro. At the age of two, at two years old, he told me by way of introduction, he'd seen a butterfly trapped in a cobweb and concluded that life had no intrinsic meaning. I did not know what
intrinsic
meant, he explained it,
intrinsic
was the first word I learned from Paul Renfro. As a result of his advanced development, he told me, he skipped two grades in school, he skipped ahead of those who followed conventional wisdom, which was no wisdom at all. At university, after three semesters of straight A's, he experienced the first of several total and complete breakthroughs and quit to pursue his own projects beyond the academic kabuki, his words. I mentioned earlier that one of the qualities of life is that there are periods when nothing changes for a long time and then suddenly everything changes. Well, another quality is that any event no matter how small could happen a different way and change everything that follows. Meeting Paul Renfro on the bus was one of those events, because in not finding a place to sit farther back in the bus, and in having the bus driver seat me next to Paul, I had, without even arriving in Panorama City yet, made the acquaintance of a true man of the world from whom I would learn powerful methods of thinking and countless facts not to mention hundreds of words.

 

While Paul talked we drove across a flat landscape, we cruised down a very large and long highway, which was almost totally flat, to the sides were foothills, golden grasses, probably a million birds and bugs, but the bus didn't bother with that stuff, that was not the stuff of a bus ride, we were stuck to the gray ribbon, eating it up mile by mile, the only bugs we saw were expired on the windshield, I imagined a bus with no windshield and no back window, the bugs could pass straight through. While he talked Paul shuffled through his briefcase, he showed me many sheets covered with his writings and diagrams, with his patents pending, his words. The bus groaned into a lower gear and started climbing, we were climbing and winding. I had been watching Paul and his papers, I hadn't noticed the hills until we were in them. Paul called it the Grapevine and said that L.A. wasn't far. He said that was the real world down there, which I did not understand until I got there and saw that it meant a place where it is impossible to make friends with everyone, there are too many people, you'd run out of time. He said that we thinkers had to stick together. That's when I got the idea to show Paul Aunt Liz's address, I showed him the card Officer Mary had made for me with Aunt Liz's address on it, I suggested he copy it down, so that when it was convenient for him he could drop by. I hadn't seen Aunt Liz in many years but I had a feeling she would want to buy what he was selling.

 

At the station in North Hollywood I recognized Aunt Liz immediately, she looked the same as when she had visited us in Madera years before, when she had taken over my bedroom, when she had alphabetized all of your grandfather's books, which had made him very angry, they had been sorted according to his own private system. She wore the same animal print shirt, it was a blouse I guess you'd call it, with a cheetah spot pattern on it, every time I'd seen her she was wearing some kind of wild animal print, she had the same reddish hair in the same short no-nonsense style, your grandfather's words, she wore the same shade of lipstick to match her hair. She kissed me on both cheeks, and then she looked at me approvingly, as they say, and I wondered whether it was because I looked like a man of the world. Her car was a Ford Tempo, which was the opposite of Paul Renfro's briefcase, the Tempo was much smaller on the inside than the outside. She asked me to put my leather suitcase in the trunk. Only low-class people carried their bags into the passenger compartment, only low-class people put their bags and laundry and various other things on the backseat, because their trunks were stuffed with coolant and tires and low-class junk, Aunt Liz's words. I hadn't been aware of this. In Madera people always kept things in the backseat, things were easier to reach that way, the trunk was reserved for things that were dirty, but I didn't want the people of North Hollywood to get the wrong impression, so I put my suitcase in the trunk, which was carpeted, which was spotless, which was empty except for an emergency kit and a foil blanket, and I thought, Here I am in the real world, here I am starting a new life. Back in Madera I never stopped and thought like that, I never thought, I am riding my bicycle into town, I am eating a sandwich. Already, being a man of the world was taking effect, I thought, already I am becoming more reflective, like that foil blanket. And then Aunt Liz told me to get in the car, or more accurately she asked what was taking so long.

***

When we got out of the parking lot and onto the streets, I saw that she sat only inches away from the steering wheel, she sat so close to the steering wheel it looked like something attached to her rather than to the car. She kept her hands together very high, both hands high on the wheel, at twelve o'clock, or more accurately at eleven-fifty-five and twelve-oh-five. We pulled onto a larger street and a short look around confirmed for me that she sat closer to the wheel than was the custom in North Hollywood. My body was crammed in the passenger seat of the Tempo, there were controls somewhere for moving the seat back, but out of respect for Aunt Liz and her way of sitting I remained where I was, I didn't want her to have to turn her head completely backward to look at me when she spoke, if she spoke I mean, she seemed very focused on driving. We drove past low-slung buildings lined up one after the other, gas stations, car dealerships, parking lots, and palm trees growing out of the sidewalks. There were signs on everything, there were signs on the trees, there were enormous billboards, shop signs, there was writing everywhere. My gift has always been gab, but even if I was a stronger reader I couldn't imagine reading all of those signs, it was like driving through a crazy book, it would take a hundred years to read it all. I asked Aunt Liz whether we were heading into town or out of town, and she said, Neither, which didn't seem possible. I remarked, I remember remarking, that the weather was pleasantly mild in North Hollywood. Aunt Liz said that we were technically in Sherman Oaks. I asked her when we had left North Hollywood, and she said we'd been out of it for quite a while, we'd left it and gone through Valley Village, and we were, she paused, well, now we were out of Sherman Oaks, too, we'd just entered Van Nuys. I turned this over in my head, I tried to understand how we had entered a new place without ever having left the old one. I watched the city, or the cities, go by. Then Aunt Liz announced that we had arrived in Panorama City. I had been paying attention, I had been looking out the window, and I had noticed no change, from my perspective there was no difference, but apparently we had crossed a whole series of invisible lines.

 

Big full trees ran along Aunt Liz's street, they met above the street and kept the road in shade, they kept the street shady and cool, they leaned away from the houses toward the middle of the street, like they wanted to exclude the houses from their company, which made sense, the houses were made of dead wood, the trees were made of live wood, the living wants to be with the living, the dead with the dead. There were no more signs, there was no more language everywhere to confound the eye, which was a relief. The houses that weren't stucco were peeling, which reminded me of Madera, which reminded me of working construction in Madera, where the sun used to peel paint off all of the houses that weren't stucco. Aunt Liz's house was the only one with a wooden fence in front, the other houses had fences of chain-link or iron and brick, which I could understand from the point of view of maintenance. There were no people, no one was outside, sheets hung in windows and cars sat in front of houses, there were cars all over the place, cars and trucks, and campers, a boat, a panel truck. Many houses had rolling gates and the vehicles were jammed together inside the gates, on the lawns and on the driveways, as if each lot was its own little harbor, everything tied down for a storm, but there were no storms coming, in fact, there was hardly any weather at all. We pulled into Aunt Liz's driveway, she had no gate, there were no cars on her lawn, her lawn was green, the blades had been cut to within an inch of their lives. Two doors down, a house was painted a rich blue, or what would look like a rich blue if it was wet but dried out and peeling looked more like a rich blue under a layer of dried milk, their lawn had grown in a wild state of nature, dozens of grasses and plants fighting it out, a tiny patch of wilderness, I had to respect that, it reminded me of your grandfather, I decided to introduce myself to those people as soon as possible, they would be like-minded, I thought.