Los Angeles, 1954 (CalTrans)
The hound swayed, turned, and ducked into the old Los Angeles bus depot near 7th & Main, and bottles rolled and rattled across the back one last time.
Revived by a sudden bustling throughout the cabin, Armen straightened his frame and leaned out into the aisle. He followed the rows of seat backs toward the dash lights and stepped down into the city. He followed the curb to the Republic Liquor Store, up to the Nickel, circled around to Skid Row, and then followed 6th to Wilshire Boulevard. He’d seen downtown LA on a couple of occasions as a boy. It had seemed a serene place, empty and peaceful as a desert, and like a desert, alive in its own way. Windows glowed, lit up, and went dark, just as though they were occupied. Traffic lights changed states punctually. Cars streamed through, occasionally acknowledging each other with a pause or a signal. All this human activity without the humans themselves, except for a few ragged surface dwellers, and even those few vanished as he made his way out into the limitless expanse of Los Angeles.
Armen had no doubt that the skyscrapers were well-stocked with Losangelinos, even at this hour. Across the frontier he saw countless single-family dwellings, apartment complexes, mobile homes, and hotels representing millions of sleepers. And come morning, their myriad sacred vehicles would wake and migrate to the roadways.
Again, there were those few souls who walked the earth incarnate, whom one might see here and there on the streets, but no surface dweller would choose to live under that revered California sun; not, at least, without a protective shell. It was evidently common knowledge among Losangelinos that one could live outdoors only by reason of poverty, insanity, or intoxication, so they moved from shell to shell as the night followed the day and the day returned the favor. Armen wondered at the pleasantness of the night air, and he wondered what all the shells were for.
As Armen wondered, he wandered west down Wilshire, past Good Samaritan Hospital, MacArthur Park, and then Lafayette Park. He didn’t feel well. He felt weak, light-headed, and feverish. He sat down, propped himself up against a fence, and fell asleep.
A rangy, neglected tea tree reached through the chain-link diamonds. Armen heard something rustle behind him. He turned and leaned over get a better look. It was a small, sudden, squirrel-like sound. He smelled the omnipresent stale urine, but no particular body odor. Then he spotted a fat little animal. It looked like a little porcupine, or a hedgehog, only with a long narrow beak. It was dark in complexion, so he could barely see it, even as he looked directly at it.
La Brea Tar Pits
He jumped slightly and muttered to himself, “is that a bird?”
“That’s a beud,” came the casual reply from under the tea tree.
Armen paused to think. “What kind of b-bird? Are you some kind of parrot?”
“A beud of paradise.”
“That’s a plant.”
“Not this beud. This beud’s a beud.”
It spoke in a peculiar dialect of the Queen’s Commonwealth that Armen couldn’t quite place. He asked, “say, where are you from?”
“Paradise.”
Armen woke as someone tripped over his feet. He got to his feet and walked on to Rancho La Brea, and there he waited for the tar pits to open.
That day, he visited the ice age beasts of Pleistocene Southern California: sabre-toothed cats, dire wolves, lions, mammoths, camels, horses, condors, and so on. He wondered how they’d got themselves into such a fix. His eyes rolled into his head to get a break, and a coyote whispered a shout at him, “Hombre! Pssst! Hombre!”
“No hablo español,” Armen replied out of the corner of his mouth.
“No problemo, amigo. Wha’ chu doin’ here?”
“Research.” Armen made it short as possible.
“Where’s your notepad, maaan?”
“Up here.” Armen hit the side of his head.
“Wha’ chu wanna know, maan?”
“How to float.”
“Float? Ha! You askin’ the wrong guy, maan!” The coyote couldn’t contain himself, and kept laughing until Armen began to walk away.
“Wait! Wait!” The coyote begged, and then he continued. “I can’t tell you how to float, man. But I sure can tell you how to sink.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, maan. All you got to do is stand still, maan. Nothin’ to it. Just stand around on the tar, and you sink! Just like that!”
“I’m not talking about the tar pits, Wiley.”
“What? You think it’s different out there? There black tar all over this town, maan! You go try it! ‘Course, you want to float you don’t try it, maan, ‘cause you’ll sink for sure, maan! You got to keep movin’ ‘less you get off the black top, muchacho.”
“Alright,” Armen answered. “I hear you. I won’t stop moving until I’m off the street. You’ve got a deal.”
“Bueno man. Then I guess you’ll been movin’ now.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Armen wondered whether this was why he rarely saw anyone on the streets of Los Angeles. Perhaps the coyote was right.
No one seemed to notice that Armen was holding a conversation with one of the displays. It must not have been an uncommon thing to see.