9:29 p.m. - 2003-01-30
spillway
I went skating up the Arroyo Seco on Monday. It's one of the tributaries of the LA River and, like its destination, follows an immense, paved, spillway through town. This particular "river", except during the rare SoCal rainstorm, describes a slimy brown line, 4 foot wide, maybe 10 inches deep, down its spillway's center. I hail from the fossil-rich limestone banks of the blue-green Guadalupe, and the churning red waipukas of Hawaii; it's hard for me to look at this toxic thread and think "river". But maybe that's just me; certainly the individual I encountered bathing up around Via Marisol held a more generous definition of the term. I'd spotted his laundry drying on the concrete banks about 200 yards south, but didn't recognize it as such. Even if we had, it certainly wouldn't have prepared us for the image of its owner up around the bend, laying riverwise, like a mummy in the shallow flow. He stood up as we drew nearer. Dude could have been 30, dude could have been 60; he had one of those knobby, Okie, physiques alcohol and hardship tend to sculpt. A few mossy tendrils clung to his hair.
"How's the water?"
"Heh, heh, just mumblemumblemumblemumble", and then I had skated past.
I tried to think of the worst hangover ever, of the shakiest, pukingest, most painful case of the DTs I'd endured. Then I tried to imagine stumbling down from my cardboard home on the riverbank and immersing my burning skull in that cool, enzyme-rich, fluid; but knowledge of the unsavory urban effluence that fed this creek precluded sympathetic speculation.
Dude had achieved official troll status in my book.
Tuesday I had an insane fever...maybe that's what I get for staring at a naked troll. Anyway, at the end of this day where everything had gone painfully wrong, I found myself in an empty little Thai restaurant, eating coconut-milk soup with my girlfriend while the state of the union address played on a TV in the kitchen. And this waitress, she was cleaning the dining room. But it was already clean, y'know? She just wanted it to be like, extra-nice...and she seemed happy. And the whole notion of this girl making this place, this beat little storefront in one of the ugliest, litterbug-livingest, graffiti-writingest, don't-give-a-shit-about-nothin'est neighborhoods in one of the ugliest, don't-give-a-shit-about-nothin'est cities in the US; the fact that this girl was tidying up this already spotless little dining room while the world outside (as peripherally evidenced by the state of the union address droning in the kitchen) went completely to hell, I dunno. It just struck my fever-addled mind as a beautiful thing.
I guess I'm easy.
