Kiki's Mother as L.A. Thunderbird

They found her skating on the Venice Walk.
Once around the lap at the Olympic
and Dick Lane tagged her Slats, and coach John Hall
threw infield chairs to see how she’d react.

In no time, she could hip-check and slash,
skate through the legs of Big Tina Flores
to score. One by one, New York Bombers crashed
over rails or themselves. Tenderly they rose

to find a full Whip in the making, each
skater banking hard and faster each time
round the track. Then hands reaching back, then linked,
the four snapping forward number five—

Lapping, her thin body blurred, and when she leaped
across the pooled heads, she flew toward history.

31

Mateo Cruz hoped for the best once he heard the first sparrow and garbage truck and saw the dark sky give way to gray, settling into some final overcast. The 64-hour performance project involved writers and painters on two-hour shifts making art in a downtown gallery window. He was into his second hour and still didn’t know why he was there. Kiki Lamonica had guilted him into signing up, even though he was a cook, because she did not want her friend Babs Deutsch, poet and organizer of the event, to have to pull a double shift in the middle of the night. In the spirit of the project, he tried to write a poem but got stalled at the ninth word.

So at 6:15 a.m., a scribbled idea about salmon poached in carrot broth and a possible new vinaigrette recipe behind him, he wondered what to do about the old man pacing back and forth in front of the window.

Kiki, as pushy as she could be sometimes, meant well. He had a boss like her once, always suggesting new experiments for the menu. On special occasions he would try the new dish, declare it a special for a week, like the balsamic-glazed rack of lamb over chili-corn bulgur, but most of the time Mateo wanted to be moved more intuitively before changing the bill of fare. Kiki wanted children, even more than she wanted to get married, but she never pushed him too hard on the issue.

“Can I help you?” he asked the man through the glass. The man glanced up and then down but could not read Mateo’s lips. He turned to his pacing like a new row of soybeans that needed to be walked. “What are your kids’ names?” Mateo said to the man’s back. “Did you hear the river was being moved? How many syllables in a tanka?”

Kiki was afraid her career would make her infertile. She thought of it the way she thought chocolate might eventually ruin her figure, but for now she enjoyed her clients, the depressed or manic, the court-ordered or compulsive. She knew she could help them, if only a little.

One afternoon, Mateo stopped by her office on the fourth floor of the Northwest Building and found it brimming with an almost liquid light. She wore sunglasses inside on such days, blaming the glare off the concrete floodwall a half-mile away.

“Sometimes the sun goes so deep inside me,” she said. “I feel like a part of it stays there permanently, spinning out new planets in everyone else’s direction.“ In the gallery window, he thought of Kiki naked in her office chair, bathing in blinding white at her desk, her hazel eyes hidden behind dark lenses.

If the man would have simply looked his way or made some other gesture that acknowledged him, the situation may not have felt so strange. With twenty minutes left on his shift, Mateo stood up and started pacing back and forth himself. Cramped as he was in the display area, that meant he turned around about every eight feet and marched back where he had come from. Even though this was clearly provocative, he was tired and really didn’t care. The old man paid no attention to Mateo and kept walking his longer, invisible rows.

Babs showed up with five minutes left. It was her job to cover if the next person was late or didn’t show. She had a small valise with her, and Mateo imagined the scores of sonnet drafts on onion skin that might be inside it.

“When do you suppose you’ll offer that rack of lamb again?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m a little tired of meat these days. I’m thinking poached salmon, maybe, or maybe a cod fillet wrapped around an aggressive chutney.” He looked for any sort of skepticism in her eyes.

“That might taste good,” she said, nodding. “Especially with couscous and an IPA.”

He gathered up his own drafts. On one sheet was an entire column of synonyms for "bright." He wished Babs luck and passed through the front door.

“Thirty-one,” the old man said.

“What’s that?” Mateo barely turned in his direction. He had been thinking of oranges, how they were made of countless tiny reservoirs of taste. “What did you say?”

“Syllables.”

Chloe Rook Explains What Makes Me Tick

It’s rhythm. It begins near your navel and goes down when you breathe in. It rises as you exhale, sometimes clear out your mouth.

It’s the sound of your feet on the sidewalk, the softer sound passing over wood chips in Rasmussen Woods, the sound of your rubber soles on terrazzo as you walk from your desk to the restroom. It’s the echo in the restroom, your voice against the canyon wall, the cave. It plays the sound of your past against the sound of the next moment.

It followed you in your car that day to the double falls outside of town. It’s waited for you all these years to hear about why nothing happened, why you turned around and came back. It’s the rhythm of three moments: the drive there, the turning back, and now.

It lies down inside you like breath, like the bass line of grief, two thimblefuls so powerful, if you let them leave you you might die. It’s the life in you you have to give away. It wants to be prodigal, to upset you running away toward the world. It’s the music of letting flesh and blood go join the circumference of the world, the round song of ancient birds, the round violence of Asian war, of leaving someone behind.

It’s never idea. It’s rhythm of cornstalk following Buick following the color of his cheek. It’s the rhythm of summer air so heavy the insects labor through their song, and baseballs die in midair just over second base, and the woman high in the stands blacks out, comes to, then talks nonsense, all the while her sixteen-year-old daughter fumbles with her summer skirt watching Jeremy, the boy at bat, who just last night in these bleachers put his lips to her neck, her ear.

It’s never idea. It’s rhythm. It’s rhythm in your chest and in the sound it makes in air and something like the sound of words on a page but never that perfectly, never that or else you will have become a sorcerer and your writing the spell that without help of potions or swinging watches would make us lose, or find once and for all, ourselves. Writing’s not magic but the rhythm of it.

On the Hillside in San Clemente

From this padded captain’s chair, over the vinyl tablecloth where he spread out the news, he made his last peace with the excellent and terrible world, the ocean out there going flat to deep to flat, and always the far but definite line, and always, first, the things between the coast and him: thickening traffic north to south, neighbors downslope building into his view, these roses in need of deadheading surviving still the greedy ice plant that kills the lawn, the emptying planters weeded until nothing remains, these torn curtains pulled aside and behind where Olive always sat, and these newspapers—ragged columns of rage and heartache—these hands bulging with the old blood’s excavations.

How many mornings must have seemed like the last when, at 5:30 a.m., sweater buttoned halfway, he sat down to steaming decaf, pulled a tight rubber band off the Los Angeles Times and slipped it temporarily over his wrist. He knew the headline and photo right off, as if he’d been the editor to choose them, and he read the whole first page before continuing any one story, saying under his breath the day and date and edition, knowing there were differences always from bulldog to final. He cursed and blessed, quiet as the sleep just ended. By now, he saw on the water the first charter boat, or Catalina, or an idle destroyer.

That last night, he got up to use the bathroom at 2:00 a.m., left the light on, and returned to bed. In the morning she found him curled fetal, as always, but blue now and cold, with no kind of look. She sits in his chair now as someone drawn to the same ocean, but not its sterile coast, where the rich have no backyards. She rises early to bring in the news to this meeting ground, to lay the news out and read, to lift her eyes suddenly and look into the neighbors’ early kitchen, gold dog already scuffling near the sliding door, to curse their smug palm dusting ten degrees of horizon, to come back to the world she’s made, picture and word come to haunt easy as the ghost with the hand and breath she feels but won’t touch. Close as it is, she won’t even try, steering through the obstructions—still, like him, in a dangerous human current.

Kiki's Grandfather

A few years before Jack Maynard retired, one of the business agents stopped by his office just before lunch. Out of earshot of the secretary, he asked Jack for $30 to help pay that month’s insurance premium. His boss knew him to be a solid family guy: three kids, a pretty wife, no more than the occasional boozy evening, no poker debts, no girls. He was the one who opened negotiations on organizing the prison guards at Terminal Island and the bakery drivers at Oakmont Mills. He worked with the lawyers to close on the master agreement for Buy-Rite Foods. The man suggested collateral, but Jack said not to bother and gave him enough for three payments. The man’s face was the color of lead.

A few years before he retired, Jack bought a mobile home and planted it on a leased lot on Flathead Lake. Every morning during his vacations, he got up at 5:15, earlier than Olive or any visiting children or grandchildren, and when the sky was clear he drank his coffee and watched the sunlight hit the highest glaciers in the national park to the north. At the lowest angle, two or three mountaintops flamed orange in first light, then softened as the light moved down the slopes and eventually spread across the whole valley and the long expanse of water to where he sat. By then, he’d be reading the Daily Inter Lake and missing the Los Angeles Times. By 6:30, he’d be wondering how hungry the salmon were that day.

In Pocatello in 1917, before he left high school to join the army, Jack almost drove over a cliff while hauling an off-balance load for Bistline Lumber. It was icy, the mountain road narrow. Several times later in life that moment rushed back when he felt the right front wheel lose purchase and the fore of the truck drop a few inches to the side where the packed dirt ended. When he corrected, the load shifted, forcing the back wheels to skid toward the drop-off. Not even five seconds of dread, but the moment haunted him enough to keep him awake the night before his first daughter married, the night of his sixtieth birthday. Even though Jack prayed all his life, he wondered then and since if fate took over when life happened too fast for prayer.

Wilbur Milken left a security deposit at Jack’s office anyway: two deep-sea fishing rigs with heavy-duty reels and steel line, a 9-1/2 foot custom-made bamboo rod, two fly reels, and a tackle box stuffed with line, leaders, and flies. They blocked Jack’s office door the morning after the men had talked. Six weeks later, Wilbur was dead of blood cancer.

Sometimes he found it hard to explain to his grandchildren why, when they pulled a salmon into the boat, they didn’t either kill the fish right away or throw it overboard. After all, when they landed trout at Rock Creek, he showed them how to use the back of their knives to knock out the fish before setting it in a bed of leaves in their creels. In the middle of the lake, fresh-caught fish usually danced on boat-bottom while one of them re-engaged the engine and steered toward a landmark as the other let the trolling draw the tackle out again. Once the rod sat in its cradle, bent with the boat’s motion, someone threw the exhausted fish into the ice chest, where it flopped around a few more times before dying. Sometimes, to explain all the hurry to get the line back at depth, Jack said, "You can’t catch anything if the bait’s not wet." Sometimes he just said, "What a beautiful dancing fish."

The week of his retirement, Western Union delivered congratulatory telegrams twice a day to his office. Fourteen hundred people, including a bishop, an ex-governor, and two U.S. senators, showed up at the Century Plaza for his testimonial dinner. From the dais, he looked out at the crowd—his children and grandchildren at three of the front tables, friends and wives of friends, representatives of all the locals from LA to Albuquerque, representatives from industry, everyone from the Western Conference, all but one from the national office in DC—and he was not sure he could give his speech. A powerful friend from the other side of the bargaining table, Thomas Vick stood at the mike, remembering how Jack had brought him to believe in the labor movement. "Jack Maynard wasn’t just about higher pay and benefits, although he always demanded them for his drivers. Pappy, as the rank and file liked to call him, was never about threats and humiliations. Pappy brought every issue around to dignity, and he fought every fight based on that." Tom’s voice went in and out of Jack’s awareness. In no time, everyone was standing and clapping and someone was pulling his chair back so he could stand up and he was shaking Tom’s hand over and over until finally he was alone at the podium.

After he retired, Jack and Olive spent April to October at Flathead Lake. His best friend and former secretary-treasurer, Johnny Arnett, rented a cottage a few miles up the west shore, and he fished with him most days. Johnny grew up in Hell’s Kitchen and married an Old-French, old-money Louisianan who made him feel unworthy of her each day of their marriage until she died of an aneurism. After finding out he had diabetes, Johnny retired at 59. He was the one who, without fail those afternoons—the fishing behind them, the naps taken, the crackers and smoked kokanee set out on the patio table, the first scotches in their hands—would look out toward the water, over boats bouncing in their slips, and say, "It’s not such a bad life."

After he corrected the truck’s drift the second time, Jack stopped in the middle of the road and took some deep breaths. The canyon had darkened since he left town. He felt cold sweat on his forehead. Fifty years later, the Times reported Jack’s testimonial was held the same day Jimmy Hoffa was sent to Leavenworth for jury tampering. As predictable as his friend those late afternoons, Jack always said the same thing back to him.

"Johnny Arnett," he said. "You’re a beautiful, beautiful man."

The Names of Beaches

Mostly they come from the street that ends there, like T Street at the end of Trafalgar, like Riviera at the end of Riviera. But they might be named after a famous local, like Doheny, who built a town in 1920. Or after an obvious landmark, like Cotton’s Point, which floats above the sand and holds up the mansion Richard Nixon used to own. Or Trestles, where Santa Mateo Creek creeps under the tracks to meet the sea. South of here, below where Paramahansa Yogananda built a center for the study of quiet, someone named the beach Swami’s, and it stuck.

A name can get too general, like Malibu, which really refers to miles and miles of sand, and maybe only then to keep the property values up. In San Diego, the Silver Strand separates Mission Bay from the ocean, and Coronado from the city of Imperial Beach, but as a name it refers to too much, perhaps eight miles, of real estate. The best names are the local ones, names that refer to a stretch no more than a hundred or so yards before one word yields to another:

Pocket
Aliso
Camel Point
1000 Steps
Salt Creek
Dana Harbor
Swim
Doheny
Capistrano Park
Poche
North
Mariposa Point
Linda Lane
Corto Lane
San Clemente City
T Street
Boca
Lost Winds
Riviera
Calafia
San Clemente State Park
Cotton’s Point
Trestles
San Onofre

Palisades

Deep in the Midwest, Dr. Kiki Lamonica lay on a wicker sofa on her friend’s three-season porch, a sticky breeze blowing through the screens and all across the top of her body. The air, until then, had not moved in days, but now it played over the little beads of sweat on her brow, and into one of her ears, and through the spaces between blouse buttons to the skin below her neck and between her breasts, across the tops of her thighs to her feet.

Luscious, she said to her friend. A cardinal whistled in the bushes.

Sweet torture, the friend said back. Denise Fleener slumped in a wicker chair beside a potted banana plant, her legs propped on the wicker ottoman. I cool off, then the breeze kicks out. I begin to boil again, then back comes the breeze.

There must have been hundreds of days like this when I was really young, Kiki said, but they all collapse into the one where my mother and brothers cram into a sky-blue Impala convertible and head down Sepulveda on our way to Santa Monica Beach. “The Witch Doctor” is playing on the radio. My mom was probably never happier than when she was driving to the ocean for a bake on the sand.

Do you remember Doheny Beach? Denise asked. Kiki had moved south from L.A. in fourth grade, and it was at Mission San Juan Capistrano school where she made friends with Denise. I’m napping after a swim with most of the Dana Point gang. We’re all dead on the beach. My eyes are closed, of course. Then Fred McCanne crawls on top of me and starts kissing me so hard it hurts. Neecy, Neecy, he keeps moaning, and he tries to stick his tongue in my mouth. His boner keeps jabbing my thigh. This was eighth grade!

Back then, my mom and I still went to the beach together. I felt like I didn’t know that many people. I usually body-surfed until I got tired, then ate a cold hot dog without a bun, some chips, a coke. Palisades was pretty empty most of the time, just piles of kelp and a few locals. Mom lay there smoking, reading a trashy novel, turning every thirty minutes like a pig on a spit. When she got up to cool off, she never waded past her knees.

Denise moved to town just two months earlier, after she’d been offered the assistant directorship of the hospital. Kiki ran into her at Hy-Vee, and once before today the two had gone out to The Crossroad to catch up. They still couldn’t believe the coincidence.

Had you ever even heard of Kasota Bend before you saw that opening? Kiki asked.

No. Never.

My mother visited me once, back before Ben and I got married, and not too long afterwards she called and said, Honey, I love you, but next time we talk about getting together, let me just send you the airfare.

I don’t think my folks will ever visit. They’re afraid the grandkids will forget them in their absence. Besides, they think I live north of Ottawa, and they’re really confused about where that is.

Kiki looked at the ceiling from her position on the sofa. She moved slightly to pull away from where she had stuck to the cushions.

You never really knew Mom very well, Kiki said. No one did, really, except Mike’s mother. She struck at out marriage, twice, and that near-miss with the ambulance driver turned out badly. I think she just decided at some point that loneliness was in the cards for her.

What do you miss most?

The sarcasm, maybe. I suppose with my grandparents in the same house, that was her niche. I’d come into the kitchen to ask her something, and before I opened my mouth, she’d look at me and say, The answer’s no. Or she’d claim to have voted for Pat Paulsen for president. Years later, when she got skin cancer, she blamed it on too many game shows.

My mother dreams of tumors. She spends a mint on all these teas that are supposed to shrink them.

As I got older, I wondered more and more about what I could do to make my mother happy. My brother’s family had taken her in after my grandparents died, after she had to retire, but I thought she needed something more from me. I’m supposed to be the healer now, after all. It didn’t occur to me to simply ask her advice about things, to let her be a mom. Jesus—

Neither of them was looking at the other. Kiki still stared at the ceiling, and Denise focused through the screen at the lilac blurring in the heat.

I could have asked her how to fix the tear in the afghan, Kiki continued, or who I was most like as a girl. Jesus, if I were my patient, I’d know just what to say. I’d suggest rather than declare. I would use my quiet voice. I’d guide myself to the land of self-forgiveness.

Kiki, Denise said, still slumped in her chair.

I’ve never been abandoned. I think I’ve made more victims than become them. I once cheated on Ben, you know.

You don’t have to tell me that.

I think at some point in my mother’s life she decided to shrivel into nothing in the sun, like a sand crab, and later when the cancer started taking bits of her away—the tip of the nose here, the corner of the lip there—well, that was a start.

We saw you two once, Denise said. Up on the higher sand, when we were all walking from Doheny to Shorecliffs. There’s the new girl, someone said. We still thought that, even four years later. Someone said we should say hello, but no one made the first move, and we kept walking, past the falling-down beach club and the fancy homes.

I saw you, Kiki said.

Why didn’t I ever tell you this before? We were good friends later. Denise looked in Kiki’s direction, but Kiki had her eyes closed and didn’t notice.

I saw you and hated you a little when you passed, Kiki said. If Denise was looking at her now, that was fine. Her eyes closed, Kiki felt naked but not at all guarded, and that was fine. The breeze had stopped.

Kids are such dopes.

I hated you a little then, Kiki said, but I didn’t want you to come over, either. I’d have to introduce everyone to my mother. And of course I was ashamed: She was divorced, and we were Catholic. We lived with my grandparents. All of you were so beautiful, walking by.

Cruel dopes, Denise said.

It was OK, Kiki said. You needed to keep walking. Back then, Mom and I watched over each other while we simmered in the heat.

Here's a Story My Friend Told Me

Ike golfed his last round as president months before, uranium and krill were discovered in Antarctica, and Irene and Earl met at the King’s X off La Cienega, her day shift at Douglas tucked away with letters to the Department of Defense, the failed renderings of bombers. They would have strolled long at Venice Beach, skated the boardwalk. She would have thought of us, then put the thought away when that new man took her wrist and whipped her forward, like the crucial moment on "Roller Derby," the show she almost skated for ten years before, lanky and quick—then pregnant with her first.

It was dark on the sand except for the stray glow of street lamps. Irene and Earl looked west, black as the night swam west, and they smoked and necked. They got married in Tijuana the Saturday they found out about my sister. They told everyone else the next day: Louise was glad for a father again. Pat smiled, as always, at love. Then come the days or weeks I don’t remember, when we never left after all, grandparents steady in my mind, Irene alone a lot downstairs or late home from work. We must have neared Valentine’s Day—Alan Shepard three months from space, Marilyn Monroe taking her first nude swim in the White House pool—the night I rode with Pop to drop off Earl in Canoga Park. Long palm boulevards cut through orange groves scenting the night. The corner we left him at, his house forever a blank, I wonder why I went along. I didn’t say goodbye.

The actor Jack Elam still reminds me of his face: that wide smile, those eyes glassy with drink and enthusiasm. Earl turned around in exotic, citrus-smelling dark, February 1961—walked back to his ex- who never, after all, was ex-. Pop and I drove home the long way, not talking, windows open to each neighborhood, its barking dog, its bike in the drive, each neighborhood a heart, the streets where homes were dark enough for stars. Down thick bright boulevards we drove home, where I was sure, before we returned, the female ritual had already begun and ended.

This is About a Boy Who Lived Around the Corner from Where I Grew Up

Calle Real

At the dump behind the hill in back of
Real Street, he shot bottle, snake, and sparrow
with equal joy. He peed on the Frigidaire,
aimed rocks at a motion in debris
or love-stained bedding. He never put fire
to anything, like friends might, just to watch
curl and acceleration take their life
toward some decisive brink before
they ran. He spent those last half hours before dinner
rummaging through cold come up from the coast,

and it was not necessarily Heaven
in that new dark, and it was nothing like
Torment going home to plain cooking and six
others saying grace in unison, warm
in electric heat and the TV on
until bedtime. On the other side
of Real Street, he lingered because the bats
came out and crickets went quiet. Beyond
the hill, past his home, the reddest
western sky was sinking behind Catalina

into the sea. And the whole world could be
watching it, that slow burn through smog, an eyelash
of white that might be missile or jet
lit above the curve of earth. In his
small bowl of dusk, he emptied the rifle
and kept pellets for later. By now
he was thinking of where his feet landed,
the last twitches of a bird, the puma
just now leaving her cave somewhere close. Then
these lamps, all these houses that knew him.

Waveless

Paramahansa Yogananda moved to California in 1925 and established the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. He drew followers of every type: big names of the day, like Luther Burbank and George Eastman, as well as ordinary folk who looked for beliefs that could unite all religions, east and west.


I only know of him because of the meditation center on the bluff in Encinitas, a floating blue and white cake above the beach everyone calls Swami’s. I sometimes think of people inside the compound, sitting on benches or the dichondra, eyes closed, breathing in jasmine and fuchsia. I wonder sometimes if I turned away from that bluff and paddled my board west: How long until every smell but salt disappears? When will my aimlessness finally lift me up, into the waveless air?

———

Swami’s Beach

In walled gardens behind the palisade,
walkways curve through fern and rhododenra,
one made space to the next, a man sitting
on a bench with his eyes closed, a woman
at the next turn staring straight through the earth
to the dark instant back where time began.
After a rain, snails dry out on the path.
Always the gulls overhead, dipping past
sight and sound. Fifty years earlier,
Yogananda himself touched this azalea.

Outside the compound, two surfers walk tenderly
down steep cliffs toward the beach, their boards brushing
manzanita along the trail. One daydreams
his way under Swami’s blue dome, floating
in space above the floor. One daydreams blue
in every direction, a wave that won’t
dissolve at shore, a wave to eliminate
time. They reach water with hours to spare. No
cars honking, no boss calling, they slide down a wall
of world gone moments later. All morning

they paddle back to deeper water, regret
meeting desire, desire meeting regret.
In between, that fast falling like love,
that flower we smelled once
in a town we no longer can name.

The Street I Grew Up On

Calle Abril

Mudslides paid the price for that view. Years turned,
there on the hill above a mile of homes,
pigeons blasting out of palms, the ocean
going gray to blue to gray. Years alone
with pepper, bougainvillaea, and rose
before the month chubascos rumbled north
and drove the garden sideways and splintered
the trellis. Each night the picture window
shimmied. Then the ice plant slipped. Then the yard.
Two days, the olive falling toward its corner.

She couldn’t quit being stunned. Not by a storm
but by its bright next morning, clear, a roof
flipped into the pool down the road, a swarm
of neighbors raking, suddenly talkative
at the curb. That evening, they went inside
to find themselves on the national news.
After the terrorist bomb, they saw towns
like snags in a huge river, their hillsides
giving way, and like themselves one or two
weeping, grateful, the channels all spilling out

to the sea. She spent every next morning
sawing a tree to logs and hauling fill
from dirt pile to back slope. Into the vee
where grass ended fell new parts of the hill,
and across 50 miles of waves she saw
the vague fleet moving south, and she heard their guns
through the afternoon like moments of time
far away from that time, that battered lawn.
Swallows heard them too, carving her vision
right and left from their own high place in the eaves.