Imperial (164 page)

We used to compete heavily with Cuba, he added. Sugarcane,
³²⁴
vegetables, before the embargo. We’ve always had barriers on that. It was a very U.S.-type island.

What do you think the valley’s going to look like a hundred years from now?

Well, I don’t think they’ll be making snowmen! But I think it’ll be a lot like it is now, with a lot of people in it. The number-one item will still be agriculture.

Mr. Finnell sat there in silence for a moment, and I sat there wondering whether that was the end.

A hundred-and-twenty-degree summer! he said with a smile, almost to himself. It’s still a great farming county, one of the best.

Chapter 171

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1975-2005)

The man of the land. He’s part commodities expert. Part businessman. Part grower. And this year, he’ll be picking six Dow products to grow bigger . . .

—The California Farmer advertisement, 1975

1

WATER IS HERE
. Well, here there’s life. There’s work! There are lots of
maquiladoras.
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.

The level of lead contaminants found on the site is 551 times greater than that recommended by the EPA.
I make twenty boxes and each box has fifty masks. They want the young pretty girl without experience.

What happens is that your hands start to burn. A smoke comes out of the plant that makes the people feel sick. Some people faint because their air-conditioning isn’t enough. They gave us pills for dizziness, and we often got dizziness. They took me to the hospital. They said it wasn’t that bad.
If we treat them good, there’ll be more of them who want to come.
If you get a lawyer, the lawyer charges you money. You get suspended if you don’t learn. You can’t complain or raise hell or they’ll fire you. It’s good, more or less.

It’s good, more or less. I wanted to work there, but it was very far away and I would have spent fifty pesos on taxis.

2

I would have spent fifty pesos on taxis.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.

3

You can’t complain or raise hell or they’ll fire you. Those assholes who try to control us, we just make fun of them. Teresa the Mexican surprised them all!

4

WATER IS HERE
.
But if water levels keep dropping, we will run out someday.

5

We breed cattle to get bigger and bigger—and better. So we do the same thing to farmers. There’s a white kind, and then when you’re drunk there’s a green kind that’ll end it.

There’s nobody in the valley that lives that way anymore. There were people who lived that way and planted their own beans, their own tomatoes. But the father died and the family changed a lot. They did not want to follow the family traditions anymore.

I guess what they’re afraid of is that the water would just get taken away.
“ Moisture Means Millions.”

What I don’t understand is that
we have the water,
so we should have had a better negotiating position.
Sympathy has no place in the courtroom, and the jurors were told that four times . . .

6

Americans are always very friendly with their big hamburgers. I used to dream about living in the United States, but I don’t anymore, because I don’t like the way I would be treated.
To finalize this letter, I ask you, what is enough, 1 million illegals, 10 million or until the other countries are empty.
Why should we support people who don’t belong here?
The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95. Sympathy has no place in the courtroom, and the jurors were told that four times . . .

PART TWELVE

DEFINITIONS

Chapter 172

IF MEXICO WERE ITALY (2004)

I
f Mexico were Italy . . .

If Mexico were Switzerland . . . Don’t even think that. But if Mexico were Italy, well, that could be possible. Every
supermercado
would be a
supermercato.

An artificial fountain would be spraying over lemon-covered coconut slices, Romulus and Remus uplifting greedy mouths to the teats of the bronze
lupa;
and Mexicans would be trying to keep illegal Albanians out!
If we treat them good, there’ll be more of them who want to come.

A book called
Imperial,
told through the marble reverberations of Rome, might conceivably be as vivid as the walls of the Vatican’s Gallery of Maps:
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
into white-coasted emerald lands in seas of lapis lazuli, filled with golden sun-stars and calligraphic trails, wakes of word-ships!

In the ruins of the Forum, next to the ice cream wagon, I’ve truly seen Antonietta Imperial Fruit.

Chapter 173

WHERE DOES LOS ANGELES END? (1834-2005)

The uncertain air that magnified some things and blotted out others hung over the entire Gulf so that all sights were unreal and vision could not be trusted . . .

—John Steinbeck, 1945

T
he important place in 1834 was San Pedro Harbor, which
furnished more hides than any port on the coast.
As an afterthought, our American observer wrote that
about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plane country, filled with herds of cattle, in the centre of which was the Pueblo de los Angeles—the largest town in California . . .

In 1873, we could say definitely that Los Angeles, once sixteen square leagues, had been reduced to
four square leagues, or 17,172.37 acres.
It remained quite distinct from Anaheim, Compton and other such irrigated islands.

In 2004 an Angeleno showed me how Echo Park kept its own character: A beautiful mural of a girl with flowing hair rationalized the land and then we coasted past a
quinceañera
store; on Sunset Boulevard we saw a lovely Mexican-looking girl with a parasol over her head; then down the dip we drove to the Flores Recycling Center and around the corner to a vista of blue-green palm trees on a hill looking down on Silversun Liquor. Hello,
MAGIC
Paint and Body!

This was considered
a fairly hip area,
said the Angeleno as we passed Floyd’s Industrial Goods at Hyperion. Indeed, Rough Trade (Sex, Leather and Spurs) was located conveniently across from Jiffly Lube. Then we merged smoggily into Silverlake not long before Tang’s Donut. I admired the white frosting on the red facade of the Vista theater. Before I knew it, we were riding on Vermont in Little Armenia, Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood—don’t let me forget to tell you about that stretched-out yellow church right next to Crossroads, the French Cottage Motel, then the grand high palm trees on the righthand side of Highland, you know, just before you cross Orange right before Days Inn. Once you reach La Brea, you relax and sit and
sit
in traffic.

It would be more accurate to describe our progress not in paragraphs but like this:

• the Saharan Motor Hotel

• Mexican Hamburgers Hot Dogs

• All-American Burger

• the Seventh Veil: Live
Nude Revue GIRLS GIRLS 18
&
Over

a stone angel on a plinth in an almost Moorish cobalt-blue niche with white squares subdivided into four diamonds each of which glowed behind her, and the address: 7180

then a once-red pillar above the street number, a haunted looking image of a glamour girl half drowned out by reflection of fences and palm trees from across the street

then

(seen through the sea-cool grating)

a tunnel with a blue ceiling of blue plates

a mural on the lefthand wall of a reclining woman with red drapes on the lush bed behind her, and on the right, black stone steps, probably granite, leading upward to another statue, neoclassical, of the eternal feminine clutching one breast and exposing the other, turning her stone gaze to right where it said OPEN although it was not open

which was why we then got back into the Angeleno’s automobile (he was an excellent person; his name was Jared); and before we knew it, we had reached the Crossroads of the World! (
UNIQUE OFFICES
.)

High in the air, a grubby globe whose blue seas were going grey but whose white continents remained white, doubtless thanks to solar bleaching, turned clockwise at a rapid clip; its own wide stand was two white legs connected by steel latticework widening as they descended past the American flag on its pole until they achieved rest upon a glass cylinder with a wavy fence around it; and cars grunted by in packs.

Anything beyond that bank, anything that west, is just ugly, Jared said. Bad, bad traffic.

He said that he lived much of his life in the car, talking and watching the cars crawl by so that it did not matter so much where he went or even quite how much time he passed in the car; being in the car was just like living.

And when he had said this, downtown’s skyscrapers blue-grey in a white smoggy air, the half-silhouetted masses of greyish-blue buildings and greenish-grey palm trees appearing and disappearing in the smog, grew strangely beautiful to me.

And in 2005 I was with an ex-Angeleno (my own species); she drove me up 405,
the 405
as locals say, past the Getty Center, getting off at Mulholland Drive (left lane), and up the green coastal hills, and Los Angeles looked like a wellscrubbed beachscape, complete with easy width and sweeping turns of pavement . . .

... And she spun me along Mulholland Drive, winding down across Stone Canyon and around the moist green hills with the San Fernando Valley below; white houses, the more expensive the more precious, then came dark trees and more white building-squares and mountains until the San Fernando Valley opened up, with the long straight ribbon called Sepulveda shooting through the white-and-grey-green grid toward the mountains.

In the valley, which Mulholland’s Owens Valley water had reclaimed, I saw Mexicali Tires on Van Owen.

Lovely white skyscrapers were sliced by the blinds of the hotel window, and embossed with bluish-black window-dominoes; sharp-angled towers met blue sky. Now in the night the same view altered to random small greenish rectangles of light in a black vertical nightscape, topped with the previously sun-hid words ONE WILSHIRE.

Later that year we were motoring through Irvine, and when I asked her what she saw, she replied:
Offices and cookie-cutter houses.
She insisted that here we were outside Los Angeles.
They were discrete places when I was growing up, and just because they’re now filled in with sprawl doesn’t mean they’re not different now. Anyway, L.A. is not Irvine to me.

What’s the difference?

This is Orange County, she insisted.

But to me, because I could not
see,
it was just hedges, freeways, office-cubes, cars, smog,
EXECUTIVE
PARK
s, the sky whiter than Imperial’s, my eyes stinging, the Washingtonia palms and eucalyptus; it felt very Los Angeles to me.

She drove me to Long Beach, Huntington beach, the Liquid Lounge beneath a bright blue-grey sky, Garden Grove, then Cypress, next exit; and we had come home by crossing the Los Angeles County Line. And to her it did feel like Los Angeles. I could not understand why. But here were Cherry Avenue North and South! RIGHT LANE MUST EXIT.
VIVA LAS VEGAS.
ORANGE AVE. ¼.

Artesia Highway and the Imperial Highway, what souvenirs were these? We’d better put them in a book of dull old history called
Imperial.

A white airplane crossed the freeway silently descending; my chest ached with smog, and plane after plane kept passing. Here hid a Los Angeles bungalow, painted white and adorned with many flags on its small lawn; here were more bungalows beneath the large trees.

Our overpass soared up above eucalyptus and pines on the median. On the Santa Monica Freeway I inhaled a summer breeze, and the world grew so green and cool, Los Angeles being an oasis here yet, decorated with the ball-shaped trees I remembered from my childhood.

I saw some pedestrians at the crosswalk at Ventura Boulevard, and I asked her whether that wasn’t as rare as rain in Imperial, pedestrians in suburban Los Angeles? She did not answer me. There was glaring white evening light on the grey tarmac, light on shiny white car-shoulders, office towers in shadow . . .