by Ken O'Steen
Sky and ocean formed one continuous black wallpaper of my bedroom for the night. The former looked, and the latter sounded riled. I felt blessed however suddenly to possess peace and privacy for as long as they could last. Both easily were worth the cold and bluster that would be their price. Besides, it was a cool Pacific breeze, not a frigid wind.
I scooped myself out a little bed in the sand. I wrapped the blanket around me and lounged back with my beer: night-tripper by the sea. I captured the nub of a joint floating around in my pack, and utilizing the paraphernalia of antiquity, the cave man’s roach clip, a pair of tweezers, I smoked the joint down to a wispy coal. My world was all silence and relief and remove. The incessancy of wave and wind erased any acoustic manifestation of mankind still extant in the night. Only birds, whatever ornithological nightlife cruised the beachhead in that wee hour of night, or dewy hour of newest day made an audible representation of earth’s creatures capable of surviving a cacophony of baying wind, and banging surf.
Eventually, I surrendered my attention entirely to heaven above. The tarpaper dome had become a pornographic planetarium for an audience of one. A show of constellations twinkling in female forms, disrobing, misbehaving lubriciously and coupling acrobatically provided a majestic sidereal peep show that kept me awake a while. Sleep overtook me only after I burrowed myself into the sand, snuggled there with other crustaceans.
I felt heat warming my back before I even raised my head. Soon as I’d blinked the Santa Monica stardust out of my eyes, I saw first a parapet of palms braced against the concave shoulder of a turquoise hill. I imagined, I hoped actually, I had been stowed away unconscious and brought to Tangiers. Then I saw the billboard with a picture of Mickey Mouse inviting one and all to Anaheim to frolic in the ubiquitous corporation’s shareholder adored playground. Of course Morocco might well have had its share of the identical billboard. The one within my range of vision I now could see, had a scaffold clinging to it on which a group of men were engaged peeling Mickey’s face, scraping him into curlicues of paper that twisted out stiff as whiskers. As I watched, rays of sunlight broken through a swaddling of morning fog toasted me to a happy and contented crisp. It occurred to me that I felt extremely well. Joggers and dog-walkers had begun to trespass on my isolation, yet I was especially cheerful. Taking stock while I luxuriated in the natural splendor and salty warmth of my inadvertent Pacific vacation, I concluded I was managing handily. I was on top of things, even having laughs. I turned back from my ocean view to look beyond the beach and saw that Mickey had vamoosed; he’d been iced of course.
But I was healthy. And fully awake.
CHAPTER THREE
CITY OF LITE