Imperial (116 page)

A girl rapidly rollerskates down the smooth grey street of Ocean Park, leaning forward, her hands clasped behind her buttocks. What is she but a liquid vessel of beautiful mortality, approaching the desiccation that Imperial seeks nobly, crazily, selfishly and impossibly to overcome. Everything around her has been tamed and perfected, excepting only the still low crash of waves.

Beyond her, the sea is an almost solid blue, with only the unruly white shinings of a single breaker-concretion marking the boundary with land, which, like one of Diebenkorn’s canvases, is perfectly flat in its sandy zone, then worked and wiggly-squiggly where there is grass.

Elderfield believes that the artist had nearly abandoned the Ocean Park series when he died in 1993.
Still, he always seemed to be in the process of leaving for a destination that was unknown.
What could that be, but the antithesis of Ocean Park, which is to say Imperial?

As a matter of fact, in 1970, a year of several Ocean Park works on paper, we find Diebenkorn accompanying the Bureau of Reclamation to one of Imperial’s other rival zones, this one in Arid America itself: namely, Salt River Canyon, Arizona. The two specimens I have in my book of reproductions (“Lower Colorado,” Nos. 2 and 6) each portray a zone of confined darkness like water, enclosed in other mostly rectangular sectors of varying desiccation.

TOWARD IMPERIAL AND BACK AGAIN

I have left Ocean Park with the mountains ahead, and as I cross Lincoln with its many, many yellow painted lines and come up to Tenth, the mountains continue to disappear. I go up a hill lined with trees and small square houses, up past the small white blocky apartments of Euclid where it flattens out like a Diebenkorn canvas so that again I can see past the dark green trees and pale green palms (which are paler green past the Sunset Grill). In this smooth-rolling California automobile I have now achieved a perspective convergence of Ocean Park with the mountains ahead, which become paler and greyer block by block; at first, thanks to the sea air, they were almost as ultramarine as the sea.

At Twenty-fifth I turn around at Clover Park. It is here that Ocean Park readies itself to become a Diebenkornscape on my windshield’s gallery wall. From here, we first see the colored signals in black vertical dominoes. A giant plantain or banana tree here and there reminds me that Los Angeles never was nor could be desert; other trees have been landscaped into balls on branches; some hedges have been manicured into cylinders.

At Seventeenth I receive the first intimation that Ocean Park will drop into greyness; indeed, it will end abruptly. At Fourteenth I begin to discover a growing line of sea above the low horizon. Tree shadows on the sidewalk, then the dark gentle drop of pavement on either side of Ocean Park, past well-treed side streets, prepare me for the drive down the dip at Euclid; and the ocean flattens and widens before me and it is also now above me, because Ocean Park will ascend again, so that the ocean is above the next horizon; this is very strange water over me. I ride down another dip, bottoming out at Lincoln, at which point the ocean has once again been lost; but once I get to Highland and Beverly, I see the ocean there again, flat ultramarine zone above a concrete road-bridge and the first intimation of tan beach; all water lies over the bridge.

The bridge was at Fourth, and I pass beneath that overpass and come out onto one more dip, a very gentle one which is marked by white crosswalk lines and double yellow lines that curve. Ahead I see three walls of trees, the center one of which is palm trees, and then I have reached the final edge of Los Angeles.

Chapter 121

LOS ANGELES (1950)

The Indians sternly beckoned us to be up and onward, now for the first time explaining to us, that there was no water until we had reached the mountains in view.

—James O. Pattie, 1830

TÍPICO AMERICANO

D
o you remember the orange groves of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire? Oh, I’m not saying they’ve dried up and gone, not quite yet. As late as 1960, we overhear Mr. R. J. Smith of Sunnyland Citrus informing his colleagues in the Mirror Building of Los Angeles:
Well, I think that there are a number of people, Harry, in the orange juice business that we run across occasionally. I believe there is a processor in Long Beach. I’m not too sure. I have heard of him. I know that there is a small one in Anaheim.
But Los Angles sternly beckons us up and onward; there will be no oranges anymore, not until we’ve reached the mountains of commercial prosperity. I’ve never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.

In 1931, Otis P. Tout crowed that
Imperial County since the war has been the beneficiary of the great “era of concrete”
which renders highways numerous, fast and convenient. And now at midcentury, lucky Los Angeles has derived even more benefits from concrete!

In 1947 Jack Kerouac finds Hollywood Boulevard
a great, screaming frenzy of cars.

In about 1950 they first started complaining about parking downtown, said Marjorie Sa’adah. Currently there are seven storeys of parking under Pershing Square . . .

A historian helpfully explains that
the city’s transportation system resulted not from conspiracy and not from consensus but from temporary convergences of diverse and sometimes impractical agendas.

That must be why it is that in 1956 Kerouac updates his report to mention the eye-watering smog:
A regular hell is L.A.

And the improvements continue! By 1955 the Los Angeles River will boast channel-inert paving with continuous reinforcing steel, not to mention the double-gated pipes which empty into manholes on five-hundred-foot centers—a triumphal advance over the previous era of four-inch weep holes on ten-foot centers.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

New residents come to California, and come and come, . . .
reports an angry observer.
Old maids change addresses almost as often as call girls do . . . The question “Where d’you live now?” is as common and as necessary as “What’s your present job?” or “Still married to the same one?”

Among those new arrivals were my parents. This is how they remember their half a dozen-odd years in that zone at the end of the 1950s:

At first we lived in Santa Monica—it was a sleepy town, with charming Spanish style houses, not very large . . . We lived 2 blocks from the Brentwood Country Mart and sometimes we glimpsed a movie star shopping there.

Downtown L.A. hardly existed—it was mostly warehouses and freeway interchanges. Once we took Grandma Louise and Grandpa Archie there for a delicious Mexican dinner in the Mexican neighborhood of Alvira (sp) Street, but it was pretty much terra incognita to us at the time. There were no skyscrapers in West L.A. or Santa Monica, but they were just beginning to build some in Westwood (very sophisticated, everyone thought, like New York City) . . .

In West L.A., there was a Japanese community with several (very cheap) little restaurants and shops. We took you and Julie to eat there sometimes—it was about all we could afford! These people were left over from the concentration camps and usually worked as gardeners.

The yards were smaller than we were accustomed to, but still there was a great deal of open space. Driving from Santa Monica to Long Beach or on to Irvine, one passed along empty beaches and through many orange groves . . .

We loved to go to the desert—partly because it was cheap, but also because we could see the stars there so well at night . . . We used to stop and buy date shakes and tangerines . . . We also went to the high desert near Palmdale, usually with some friends. We usually had guns and shot at tin cans.

So for my parents it was not quite
a great, screaming frenzy of cars
in Los Angeles. Their experience encourages me to browse through the 1951 Orange County directory with less cynicism. From Swim Suit to Ski Lift in Less Than Two Hours, it proclaims. If it was ever true, could it still be so even now? In 2007 I telephoned my friend Jake in Long Beach; he burst out laughing, then began to consider it as a literal proposition, and finally said: Do we have to assume that one end of that trip is in Orange County? You could probably take the 605. So the thing you’d want to do is start at the northernmost point, say, Seal Beach . . . I think it would be a near thing but you do it now. Hell, it might be easier now, thanks to the freeways . . .

In short, not everybody believes that
a regular hell is L.A.
Not even Kerouac consistently believes it. He grants South Main Street to be
a fantastic carnival of lights and wildness.
(He goes on to say:
Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner.
) He pays due tribute to the Angeleno incarnation of the feminine:
The most beautiful little gone girls in the world cut by in slacks; they came to be starlets; they ended up in drive-ins.
If Los Angeles is to him, as it was to Nathanael West in
The Day of the Locust,
a sickbed of desperate and perishing illusions, those illusions can sometimes be lovely indeed, and the California Dream need not remain entirely bereft of reality.
One passed along empty beaches and through many orange groves . . .

Moreover, the Colorado River Aqueduct (length: four hundred and fifty-seven miles) will soon be able to deliver one million, two hundred and twelve thousand acre-feet per year; and by 1966 the Lockheed Aircraft Company considers it safe to report that water is one of the commodities still available
in abundant supply at fair costs.

Chapter 122

SAN DIEGO (1920-1960)

So, you see, we have to add to Barbara’s list of the uses of water the curious thing it did for the Indians. Streams of water decided where they should live, who should be their friends, who should be their enemies, and what languages they should speak!

—Irmagarde Richards, 1933

TÍPICO AMERICANO

The San Diego city directory of 1950, which is about four times as thick as the San Diego city and county directory of 1901, announces that the city’s population is now three hundred and sixty thousand, and the county’s is five hundred and fifty thousand. No, wait! Our figures have fallen out of date; five hundred thousand people now live in the city
alone.

And there’s no cost to agriculture, because San Diego is perfect! For 1950 I proudly report a new high for San Diego crop returns: $62,391,353.00. Wowie, zowie; I sure can’t help believing in people!

Needless to say, there’s no more glowing talk about the fertile New River Valley, which along with the rest of Imperial County was robbed away back in 1907. But San Diego is big in every sense; San Diego has gotten over the slight. There remains a great deal to boost and boast about. For instance, the capacity of San Diego’s water reservoirs is 133,700,600,000 gallons. The average daily water usage in the county is 44,360,000 gallons. The latter figure goes into the former three thousand and fourteen times; that’s more than eight years’ worth of water we have stored up! Another interesting exercise in division yields that the average per capita water usage in San Diego County is not quite eighty-one gallons per day. In 2000, that figure will have increased to a hundred and twenty-five gallons per day. Well, why not?
WATER IS HERE
.

Shall I say how and why? It didn’t look promising at first. Between 1941 and 1943, water usage doubled.
Luckily the rainy years before the war left the reservoirs brimming. Still, it was clear that the city—and the Navy—would soon need the water from the Colorado River.
What to do? In 1944, the San Diego County Water Authority commences operations. In 1946, the San Diego County Water Authority joins the Metropolitan Water Authority (which you will remember equals Los Angeles) in order that, in the Authority’s own words,
it could receive deliveries when the pipeline from the Colorado River Aqueduct was complete.
In 1947, when only three weeks’ worth of water remain available to the county, the first drop of water from the Colorado reaches the San Vicente Reservoir of San Diego.

Thank God for the Colorado! But Pipeline Number One isn’t enough. Better add Pipeline Number Two! That happens in 1954. And so capacity is doubled.

Chapter 123

TIJUANA (1966-2065)

Tijuana multiplies film’s capacity for spectacle . . . Film can further exploit the spectacular character of the city as an astonishing and scandalous space by reproducing its strong stereotypes and the intensity, strangenesses and pain of its social dynamics.

—Norman V. Iglesias Prieto, 2006

A LEER OF CHROMIUM TEETH

In 1966 the great science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick publishes
Now Wait for Last Year,
one of his most resonant parables about addiction, futility, disorientation and painful choices. The setting is, at times, Tijuana. His prominent narrative device being time travel, our dates may now vary more dramatically than is customarily the case in this book called
Imperial.

The Tijuana of 2055 is a place where one can check into a hotel room with an insectoid enemy alien.
It had always been like this here, and even now, in wartime, Tijuana remained unchanged. You could obtain anything, do anything, you wanted. As long as it was not done blatantly on the public street. Especially if it had been consummated at night . . . Once,
presumably in 1966,
it had been abortions, narcotics, women, and gambling. Now it was concourse with the enemy.

Let us ingest a capsule of JJ-180 to find out what happens next: In 2065, Dr. Eric Sweetscent, anguished by guilt over his failed marriage, his wife’s addiction to a toxic drug, and his own inadvertent complicity in precipitating the occupation of Earth by the empire of Lilistar, enters a pharmacy in Tijuana.
A different pharmacist, this one a black-haired elderly female, greeted him.
Sí?
she leered, showing cheap chromium teeth.
Dr. Sweetscent has come to purchase a poison of West German manufacture, perfectly named g-Totex blau.
As he signed she wrapped the black carton. “You are going to kill yourself, señor?” she asked acutely. “Yes, I can tell. This will not hurt with this product; I have seen it. No pain; just no heart all of a sudden.”
And Sweetscent thinks to himself: Tijuana is as it always was.