cracked concrete streets, roiling in a hilly city at night, all the sodium lights on that haven’t been shot out by vandals. every part of this city is owned, but parts are abandoned all the same, and great lots are overgrown and wild. up and down hills, we look for the right house number, the wrong kind of neighborhood for a little law office, but i am sure of the house number, so we keep walking, stumbling uphill on the sidewalk coming apart at the seams. the closer we get, the more i know that the house will be an abandoned shell. it should have occurred to me while we were still in glendale that my grandmother’s been dead since ‘97. gardenias grow everywhere, even during the nighttime, succulents grow everywhere, so silent, and bougainvillea shivers everywhere. this is los angeles. the house is empty, mostly dusty, and not so real, and beyond it, the jungle begins tumbling all over itself, a great grown-over cliff lolling into an unquiet sea of vines and savagery. we manage down through the kind of gate you’d find on a basketball court, let in by a man who doesn’t speak english. sweating becomes shivering, no humidity. after a day of walking, on a dirt floor under great green trees, we do lines of coke, resting a minute on the search for something that isn’t there.
