afternoon cruise

Look where the hills crash into the flatlands. It’s a subtle crease, its fold follows Hollywood Boulevard from East to West. You’ll know you’ve crossed it when your calves start to ache and your ears start to pop and the smell of dry laurel makes you sneeze. 

Look, there’s the barbed-wire fence around the avocado grove and a man taking a shit next to the Episcipol chapel. And behind that is the old, decrepit mansion, owned once by a banker and now by the electric company. Watch the People let their Dogs off-leash. Don’t let the drone overhead know you’re scared. Walk reverently up the concrete stairs in the back and duck under the torii gate for a look at the garden.

I did think it was heaven when I looked back behind me, and the canyon had closed in around the gridded city. I had been allowed back into Eden, had thwarted the archangel with his sword, and now bathed myself in the perfume of the chaparral, the sages and hummingbird plants and sweetgrasses which grew in those hills. Small, winged creatures droned lazily through the floral incense. And I turned back, away from the city toward the little canyon, and there was a statue of the Buddha.  

I sat with him for a while. He just sat right back. 

And sits. 

And sits.

And sits, even now.

Let your gaze wander from his hollow stone eyes. My eyes often rest on a redwood tree, its green tufts and tendrils willowing their sorry sweeps to the ground and oh! there’s the devil, and I don’t smile when I see him. 

He’s a hiker, by the way. Sun-bleached hair, could be on a postcard. The sun casts deep shadows through the cedars. He looks up at me and gives me a wave. I wave back. He continues deeper into the valley. A sign marks his way: “Stairway to Heaven.” I glance at the Buddha, and the Buddha sits. 

I cannot sit. 

I follow the hiker deeper into the hills. 

I am quickly on all fours, scrambling up the hillside,rolling my forearms in dust. There is a dry riverbed from a recent storm, and there are snakes. It’s a doozy all the way up, and I am looking for a place to rest, but there is none of that up here, and it is suddenly raining and a different afternoon, and I am up the hill alone without my Jeep! 

And the path chokes its way around a graystone house with an iron gate. And I push through the gate, and there is a naked man kneeling on concrete, facing away from me. The fire behind him crackles gently, and I am lulled by the sound of his white noise machine, and by the violet light from his hue lamps. 

“Quick! Close the gate,” he tells me, and I do, and we are in the cool dark of his cave, the views of the city obscured by his velvet curtains, and I fuck him. So I do, and we do, and he groans, and I hear him, but I want to see him, and so I flip him over to look, and he’s not my golden hiker. He’s the man we saw shitting behind the Episcopal church.

I pull out and ask him why he fooled me, and he said he hadn’t, and I said that I would have fucked him either way if he had only been honest, which was a lie, because if he had been honest I wouldn’t have fucked him.

And while he was still naked and babbling and lashing himself a thousand times, I slipped out the gate and ran deeper into the hills.

The gardens thicken the higher you climb, and eventually I crashed into a cobblestone courtyard with a few cottages etched into the canyon. I was afraid and thirsty and I screamed for help until he opened his door to me. 

Notes from a tenor saxophone poured from the stereo, and he poured me a glass of seltzer, and I remembered that it's raining. He has jade trees and jacaranda and birds of paradise. And he is kind to me although his kisses are too eager. And he is honest. And we see a rainbow from his window which frames the steeple of the church and he asks me to stay, and I tell him I cannot, that I must find my hiker. 

I am running up the hill in pursuit of the Hollywood sign when I reach a flat and there he is. The Golden Boy in running shorts. And the air hangs and then seizes— have you felt that? The wind shakes up the dust a bit and in a second becomes still, suspending the particulate into a razor sharp glass which throws light directly into the iris. Two strangers; who grabs first?

We are in the chaparral, beneath the date palm, and there is no one but us. Hidden from the church and back trails and the electric company. Hidden from the princes of dark and light.

He grabs me. And, like a good Buddhist, who desires nothing, I yield. And, like a bad Buddhist, who desires everything, I grab back.

Sean Koa Seu's work has appeared in Midcult*, The Rebis, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Open Assembly. His zine LA Plays Itself was commissioned by Departure Lounge. He lives in Hollywood. He holds an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts.