Summer Triptych

Birthday

There were two ice cream trucks that would roll through the neighborhood multiple times daily, stopping at the corner of our block to play a jingle and wait for customers. Altogether, my neighbors and I listened to the 30 second tune for about ninety minutes each day. On the Fourth of July, my roommate M. and I finally responded to the call, getting root beer floats for the occasion. Taking the fizzy, saccharine drinks from the tall window of the truck, we grinned ear to ear in our regression to kids with a frozen treat. M. took an edible and we watched trippy music videos together: Bjork dating a gentleman cat, FKA twigs encountering a cyborg dragon among the clouds, Janelle Monae wearing vagina pants in the desert. I imagined how the visuals registered for M., getting high vicariously through their wide-eyed stare at the TV as Monae’s mouth fractured, kaleidoscoping into a million shades of mahogany and pink. Then the fireworks started.

It was an arid summer in Los Angeles, as it often was, and authorities had been warning against lighting fireworks on the fourth. The preceding months had already been scattered with reports of fires across the city, so even a minor blast risked kicking off a much more deadly chain of events. A few days prior, LAPD had seized thousands of contraband explosives, and, in an attempt to safely detonate, they had damaged homes and injured seventeen.

Still, out of nationalistic fervor, contrarianism, or simply a need for explosive release, the sky was ablaze almost immediately from sundown. The pops and fizzles came from all directions, small bright dots shrieking upwards until they split into yellow and red filigree. Each explosion was small, but together they coalesced into motley unity. Once they reached the skyline, it was impossible to tell whether the lavender fountains and neon green streamers came from anarchist teens or their conservative aunts and uncles. Violent, beautiful, and ill-advised, the display was definitively American.

As the festivities continued outside, M.’s trip went south. They became convinced the tree in front of our home, its leaves extending close to our front door, would be lit on fire by the light show. M. foretold that both we and the house would follow suit. Glued to the window, they stared at the tree with the listlessness and anxiety of stoned terror. I coached them back to the couch and made us sandwiches out of my months-old passover matzah, smearing peanut butter across the crackers and folding them in half. Focus shifted from the fireworks outside to the enclosed space of our living room. We spoke for hours, M. with the filterlessness of THC, and I comfortable in the knowledge that they wouldn’t remember our discussion the next day. The city at large was on fire, but at that moment the center of our world was so tiny, located in our middle school memories, our family gossip, and the question of what we’d eat for dinner the next day. When the booms and flashes faded, albeit only slightly, I walked M. up to bed, watched them climb under the covers, and turned off the light. It was night now, so I closed the blinds and lay down, listening to the synesthetic lights skyrocket across my shut eyelids as I retreated further inwards.

Planets

The gangly woman who took my order was spritely in her psychedelic t-shirt, though her hair was gathered in two large gray braids and she called me “darlin’” in an old western drawl. At first I interpreted it as gentle condescension, but as more customers trickled in I realized everyone was “darlin’” to her. The chrysanthemum tea was syrupy and golden, like the July sun that crashed into the patio, making the decorative succulents and steel chairs appear artificially bright. A woman to my right sat poised with her hair meticulously gathered into a voluminous dark bun, wearing a baggy tangerine dress that billowed about her with the slight wind. She was performing effortlessness at the highest level. Across from her, her partner had thrown on dirty flip-flops and neon basketball shorts.

As the afternoon dragged on and the space filled, the voices at neighboring tables became suffocating; I slipped out of the hipster cafe into Lincoln Heights, passing by bodegas and dilapidated apartments as I wandered aimlessly. I saw Lincoln Park, dotted with tents and geese, the towering research centers of USC’s medical school looming to its right. Down residential streets, lawns were littered with both garbage and decor—unplugged fridges baking in the sun, gnomes and manger scenes, rusted pinwheels unmoving in the still air.

Beyond an overpass, a 7-Eleven, and a Carnitas Michoacan, I reached a shaded patch of dirt, where I stood as a man to my right leaned on a bus stop pole with a large Swiss Army Knife in hand, gently applying it to his cuticles, sloughing away dead skin. He casually strolled away before any transport arrived. To my left, a bush beautified the parking lot of an occupational therapy clinic, an empty container of gas station sugar-free lemon lime parfait nestled neatly among its leaves. More strangers came to stand beside me, and we waited together the way people always wait for LA buses: impatiently. Bus schedules here were like sheet music for jazz, they were made to be improvised around, and drivers loved to play the scales from Pasadena to Venice Beach. Our eventual ride was particularly crammed, filled with Spanish chatter and jostling limbs at every stop. As a woman with dwarfism and a young boy with autism entered the bus, bodies shuffled to provide them seats near the front. Together, we barreled south.

The outside world was deathly still when I got off the bus, the sudden absence of others huddled beside me palpable, their warmth replaced by the impersonal sun. Crossing over the empty Los Angeles River, I felt as if I was the only living person on a foreign planet. Insectlike cars scurried past and the yawning concrete basin below shone bright taupe and gray, the sharp tang of trash piercing the air as I continued my space walk into the arts district.

There were three paths from the gallery entrance. To the left, three white twenty-somethings sat on laptops in a glass-walled conference room. In the middle, a set of hippie-ish abstract paintings sat mounted on wood. To the right was a video installation. I went right and sat on the cold floor below a projector, watching a recording of a man shimmying carefully across the ledge of a building. He made small leaps inward until he reached the secure center of the roof, writhing and crawling along it to the far end where a disinterested audience in aggressively stylish clothes stood on their phones, some typing and others recording. The video cut to the man tiptoeing across a narrow strip of asphalt that separated the lanes of a busy road, with a crowd following behind him. It seemed like an exodus. The video cut again, and the man was confined to a small gallery space, as a new audience watched him tearing into a large sheet of white paper hung on the wall, stomping it to the ground, muddying the pristine surface with his bare dusty feet. He fell to the floor. The work was named after a Greek myth about a failed escape from the underworld. Though he was eventually dragged back down to Hades, I found a reverence for the man, the bravery of his journey and the strength of his pounding footsteps as he trudged through each scene. Even if his effort came to nothing, there was beauty in it.

The compositions in the neighboring room had to have been the product of an acid trip, chunky stripes of primary colors forming Wiccan-looking, undulating symbols out of heavy impasto. One of the pieces was more representational, though any perspective was flattened so that land and sky were seen simultaneously from every angle, great galaxy-like vortexes hovering over auburn mountains and an alien river, fleshy swirls of paint stretching out into space above it all. The scene was impossibly dense and varied, a million dimensions collapsed together, rubbing up against each other, both negating and reifying their neighbors through contrast in some neverending geographic dialectical method. I floated aimlessly about the scene, an astronaut disconnected from his ship. It was overwhelming, but there was comfort in allowing the whole thing to just wash over and through me, to become nothing but a pair of eyes desperately trying to take it all in.

Stranger Danger

O. was older and larger than his profile, and now that I saw him in person I could tell that the baseball cap from his pictures had been covering an I.T. manager–esque hairdo, with blue studs in his ears, shaved sides, and a thinning strand at the back that looked like a rat-tail. He led me to a door with a Human Rights Campaign sticker, which reassured me, and opened it into a vortex of stuff. The living room was so flooded with comic books, obsolete electronics, and other geekish paraphernalia that there was hardly any space to walk. I held on to some hope.

O.’s partner, G., was the one I’d been attracted to the whole time, with his spiky fringe and young dark eyes. When O. gestured at the couch, I asked that we go join G. in the bedroom. Squeezing past a six foot tall rack of shoes, I entered a decently-sized room made impossibly cramped by even more stuff, this time in the form of clothes littered across the bed and floor. G. stood by the bed in a black tank top, in the midst of the herculean task of organizing. Small and stubbly, he was more washed-up emo than Scene kid. We may have said hello to each other, but it didn’t matter. His frame was compacted and quiet in a way that made it impossible to imagine him speaking, even if he did.

All these red flags should have been relatively stock-in-trade, given the kind of meeting that this was, but there was something in the hunch of G.’s shoulders and the stillness of the air-conditioned room that made me realize it was dread, not excitement, that thrummed in my chest. I turned to O. and announced that I was in over my head, a statement that appeared so unsurprising to him that I don’t think he even blinked. I apologized for wasting their time, and saw myself out. As I left, I admired their apartment building, a two story pockmarked concrete block in Hollywood that was quaint despite its touristic location. I walked back towards the subway on the Walk of Fame, skimming the names of bygone stars as I stepped on them, recognizing none.

As I walked, my phone clicked with a new Grindr notification: I had been tapped by a beautiful young man—he was toned and tall, with the cheekbones and poofed hair of the leading man in a college musical, masculine but unbrutish. I messaged him, admitting that I wasn’t interested in bottoming (what his profile stated he wanted) but would still be happy to meet. He turned me down, and I apologized for the false start. He immediately became defensive, insisting that he wasn’t disappointed, that he had had no expectations, that HE was the one rejecting ME. All this came with a barrage of cry-laughing emojis. I felt anger rise in my throat—he had tapped, made the first move, and now wanted to rewrite history so that I was the unrequited one! This boy wanted to dole out the bare minimum of a flame emoji, then recline on his chaise lounge and be hounded by hungry bottoms eager to reciprocate his affection, and more.

All at once, I felt sad that I couldn’t offer to O. what this man, all these men online, with their blank profiles and unsolicited dick pics, played with and disposed of so cavalierly: not just my libido, but my youth, and what little ephemeral beauty came with it. O. hadn’t been that way. He’d doggedly and politely pursued me over text, made me feel desired with his gratuitous compliments and hornily confessed desires. I wanted to go back to the crowded apartment and kiss him long and deep on the mouth, run his hands over the ribs that protruded from my chest and were covered in his. Snapping out of my frustration, I found myself at Hollywood and Vine. I texted O. one last time, asking him to still enjoy the photos I’d sent. They were just torso shots, but I had used the natural morning light of my room and the curve of my back to exaggerate my boyish stature, give my skin the newborn sheen of Botticelli’s Venus emerging nubile and immortal from her scallop shell. But it wasn’t morning anymore, and in the revealing afternoon glare I was clearly no Venus.

The light wouldn’t last long. Summer would end soon, and in the humdrum of school, fall would tumble into winter into spring, and years down the line I might be trawling myself for anyone that could give me momentary, secondhand access to the newness I had now intrinsically. A pang registered from my stomach, then a second deeper, lower, from the pit of the same. There were hungers to tend to in the meantime, each urgent in its own way. I had so little time to move with this body and see with these eyes that I was desperate with youth, so afraid of losing feeling that I felt I had to experience and catalogue all that I could while it was still possible to do so. I stepped onto the escalator, allowing it to carry me down into the dim station, to the clacking and grinding of the speeding trains.