I love the sunshine. I love the fact that it doesn’t get cold - “It dips to the low 60s sometimes. Y’know, long t-shirt weather. You might take a jacket”.
I hail each rising day with sandwiches and sunshine. I like the way he says my name and the fact it will take me half an hour to walk home with a hot coffee in my hand. If feels like the beach is just a block away and there is nothing more urgent than getting home before my coffee gets cold, before it all spills through the lip hole and squeezes up to pool on the biodegradable lid instead of in my stomach. Pumpkin spice feels right on a Friday. Sheep dogs piss on the streets. I could spend winters here, drying myself out like wet jeans in the sun.
Regular fare is a dollar seventy-five. (I loaded on 25 dollars and can’t get it back). I am sitting on the bus - they call it the metro - 134 to Malibu.
Truffle fries and oysters, with tahini braised dates to finish. Add a martini to that. Thanks.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror and, smirking slightly because I don’t know what I’d do otherwise, tell her “I’m really glad we’re alive”. The Uber Eats icon flashes up on my phone – “Your order is in the kitchen“– my stomach growling slightly for food from my favourite deli, way across town, somewhere below a Hollywood sign above a lake. I swing in my chair, touch my palm to my temples, and repeat, “Thank God I’m still alive”. There had been a moment there, a brief, fleeting windrush, like the seconds before you fall off a bicycle or step out into the road on when the traffic light flashes amber, when I had doubted it slightly, watched life float away, a bubble on the water, fishes on choppy seas. I was standing on the edge of the highway, my trainers scuffing on builder’s rubble, my arms prickling in the wash of speeding vehicles, my heart plummeting at the bus driver’s shaking head, shaking finger, honking horn. He could not stop there, he meant. The stop was suspended, closed because of the workers who were sitting eating their lunch, legs waving in a hole with their hard hats in the dust and their truck ignition still turned on. I had waited 28 minutes for the delayed service anyway. I was not waiting anymore. I double clicked on the $60 Uber, sighed my frustration to the ground and bit back my tears. A two hour hike for a waterfall I never saw (too dry) and now it is 12:45pm and I want a chicken caesar wrap; I am on the edge of a highway in Malibu. The air tastes of dust.
She offers me a banana which she keeps in the glove box, and a stick of red beef jerky which she keeps in the cupholder. I decline both with a shake of my head, and attempt to climb into her car from the driver’s side. She has already offered me a lift, which I have accepted, cancelling my Uber – wait time was too long – before giving my body any time to think. I sit back into the black leather, mentally crossing my fingers while noting the chemical smell and the piles of laundry which take up the back seats. Three men’s shirts hang bodiless in the window, and Jesus hangs bodily from the rear-view mirror, suspended by a rosary like a spider on a thread. In stilted sentences, she tells me she is a housekeeper for an English family up the coast, that she is on her way home for the day – “two and a half hours’ drive, so I leave at 4:30 before sunrise to beat the traffic” – that God is her only purpose and that she feels her father close to her when she walks in the dark from Malibu to Santa Monica, along the beach without a light. She moved here from a ranch in Venezuela 24 years ago. (When I finally put my lips around my chicken caesar wrap my hunger has gone. It is 2:20, and I am not usually one to go so long without eating. When I drag my fingers through the empty pot of caesar sauce, it is thirty-five minutes later: I feel wholly satisfied, and want to dance a jig. I say an (audible) prayer of thanks to the sales assistant in American Vintage on Abbott Kinney Boulevard told me that caesar dressing was the only thing I had to do in LA, pick up the crumbs on the counter with the sticky bits of my palm, and drag my mind back to the car, the heat by the window on the passenger side coming in from the afternoon sun). She said it was God who has brought us together, sent me to her or sent her to me, just following the bus and seeing it ignore my waving arm (do you even hail the bus in America?), battling with her – “how you say it?“– conscience, which would have plagued her “for months” had she not turned back. She aims to camp in every National Park in America. She attends mass daily, and on days when the church is closed because she’s too early, or too late, she sinks to her knees on the church steps and submits herself to God (both hands off the steering wheel, pressed tightly together, begging, pleading). She does it alone – “me, myself, I“– emphatically holding her hand to her heart. “Loyal“. (She looks up the word, unable to find it in the translations in her mind, speaking Venezuelan into Google instead because I cannot, I must not leave without knowing this definition of her character, this adjective plastered on her soul). It is her name label (I cannot remember her name) taped to every in-seam of every item of clothing. This belongs to: Loyal. Property of: Loyal. If found, please return to: Loyal.
We drive down the ramp to the Malibu Pier parking lot. We overtook the bus on the way. “I took a wrong turn” she lies to the ticketing lady, so we save our $20 and she pulls up by the side of the road.
“Can I give you a hug?”
“Sure,” I say, pushing open the door – she’s letting me go. My heart skips a little.
She walks around the back and I walk around the front, so I go to her and she presses a piece of card, no larger than a bookmark, into my hand.
“I wrote it,” she explains. “It is a poem – a prayer – to our Venezuelan Saint, the first man who came to this country”, she points at the ground. I can hear tinny jingle music from the ferris wheel and people’s shouts as the red rollercoaster hurtles above the Pier. I look down at her earnest face and up to the Californian breeze which is blowing back my hair. “Welcome to America”, she says. And she does. She really does.
Our Days Begin and End as Stories. The graffiti is stark, clear, red, white and blue. The only evidence of my smoothie is an empty Erewhon carton, lodged between my bruised knees on the air-conditioned metro home. It was worth every sip of its $21. I get a bag of Skittles thrown at me on the bus. “Ten dollars, baby. I don’t need them, I got four of them. Look, look I got four of them! They sour, though, they sour”. The man’s hands are in his rucksack, rootling inside, pulling out dark-looking packets and baseball caps and mismatched pairs of black socks. He opens pack after pack, tearing off the tops and leaving them patchworked on the bus’s floor, tossing handfuls into his mouth with a balled fist. He has kicked off his shoes, and now sits hunched over the rucksack, folded at the middle, with his bare feet planted on top of his blue slippers and “GOD” tattooed up his arm. (The ink bleeds green into his brown flesh). The bus smells sweet, sickly, permeated by his sugar-high the way cinemas get saturated by popcorn. The air con is cool but gives the impression of heat, swirling around our moving cavern and making the stench of pick’n’mix worse like we are churning in a spiral of candy floss. He opens the front of his T-shirt and coughs, making it a chute of dry spittle and Skittles which fester at the corners of his mouth. Eventually, he gives up, throwing the sweets one by one in a falling rainbow onto the seat in front of him, chasing them with the empty packet which he pushes deftly onto the floor. He shouts “Can I have back door please? Back door”, and gets off. I look down at the unopened fourth packet of Skittles on the seat beside me, paid for with money he didn’t have. I feel a sense of sadness, a long windpipe of loss reaching into my stomach. The colours on the packet are too bright for reality, squishy cloudz, crazy sour, airy soft.
The pretentiousness of the line “Is that my coffee?” from a white haired middle aged American catches my attention. J P reaches out his hand, grasps his enormous take-out mug, and turns without a thank you. They have a photograph of every dish pinned up in the kitchen, so they can see what it should look like before it exits on a black plastic tray through the steel swing doors. I realise I may be waiting for my coffee all morning. I reconcile myself with this fact, and position myself against the door frame in the slant of morning light which catches between the half-closed blinds and the bar which is sticky with pumpkin spice syrup.
I love the way they say Halloween like a cross between hallelujah and a mouse (hull-o-een).
I begin where I end and end where I begin. He gives me a sweet potato for free and my bag grows heavy on my shoulder as I tuck it in beside my ten dollar cream cheese. Another person says “Cute dress” and I steal stickers from the Nut Butter guy, pushing them deep into my bag while biting down on the plastic taster spoon in my mouth. I try on a vintage plastic flower necklace and decide to keep my $85. It is green and pale in the sunlight, reflecting like a daisy in the centre of my dress, the chain so long the pendant hangs over my belly button. “It’s designer, honey. This lil’ol’lady made them in New York”. It could have been made by a child; I love it.
We are unfinished items in a parking lot, golf buggies speeding over sand pits, graffiti paint dropping down a wall. We stock the shelves and we buy the wine and I realise that travelling makes me feel like I am in love, the early days, the complete sense of living that nothing comes close to replicating except the saturation of a fridge or the soft smores feeling of friendship. Compliments fall like rain dust and my feet feel far from the sky. I am rooted to reality by the uselessness of the LA bus system and the American guy calling at me from across the street, asking if the bus runs on Sundays, like I’d know when it will arrive.
The cheese in my nylon bag grows warm and putrid, just the way I like it.