LEONARD KRIEGEL
69
litany. The indictments have been heard before: No streets to walk, no
Jewish delis or Greek luncheonettes to hang out in, no beer-stained Irish
bars to drink in. Shopping malls, sun, space piled against the long, te–
dious sky - accusations too petty to be serious and too repetitive to be
believed. Facing west makes most New Yorkers nervous. Like sumo
wrestlers, the states butt bellies, struggling for America's soul. Hegelian
synthesis was never meant to be pulled from our coastal wars.
Even if its streets were hooked into avenues with the grid-like regu–
larity of Manhattan, Californians would seek the promise of space. For
space is focus here. Walking on Fifth Avenue is no different from walk–
ing on Stinson Beach. One discovers California in patterns of memory.
Tea at the Plaza or a stroll into the lobby of the Pierre may be enough
for Midwesterners like Fitzgerald, but they 're not much to offer those
for whom the promise of maps is an emptiness that cannot be colored
red , or green, or white. Kurtz is alive and well in the pastel ennui of
Santa Barbara.
Maybe that's why even the most casual visitor senses something mys–
tical about the sheer magnitude of place here. Despite the hotels of the
rich that face the ocean like Monopo ly markers, I move into the invit–
ing emptiness the way I imagine men on this coast moved hundreds of
years ago - warily treading in time . People don't stroll in California,
they just push their bodies from one space to another.
"They
drive
to visit neighbors fifty yards down the road." Maybe so.
But walking is a different religion in California - liberty and equality in
each step, a hint of sex on the drift of wind. Walkers in the city, walkers
in the golden land: Middle-aged Ohio businessmen dreaming the sexy
dreams of youth, Kansas housewives spinning like whirling dervishes on
skateboards, forty-year-old surfers gazing over an ocean immeasurably
weirder than Nathanael West thought.
"You be a whore, lady?" The question hurled like a knife from a
black teenager, Raiders cap turned on his head, unlaced sneakers a defi–
ance of the light breeze that springs out of this cool August afternoon.
Quizzically approaching the bedraggled woman nestled against a marble
cornerstone of an empty glass office tower. Sunday in L.A., and Watts
folded behind them like a clenched fist.
The woman touches a wooden crutch casting a shadow as if it were
the blade of a sundial. Flat Indian face woos the feverish beggar in his
bright eyes. Thin fingers caress the crutch, liquid eyes float to the dirty
rolls of surgical stocking bandaging her left foot. An unbound Torah
scroll of a face loosens in the breeze. She smiles, he smiles, each radiant in
