Salvation Canyon. Ed Rosenthal
turned into the ice cream shop. We sat down with our cones, and she asked, “Are you coming back on Sunday, like always?”
“Yes, for sure,” I said.
A few quick turns and I reached 4th Street to pick up the 10 for the drive to the desert. Once I passed Downtown, it would be a straight shot. With my bag of goodies beside me on the passenger seat, I felt lucky. I had closed a deal on the Landmark Eastern Columbia at the same time as Clifton’s. Two deals in the heart of the financial crisis, right before totally running out of money. I was elated. My career and family life were steady, and I was free to detach myself from everything.
I had come to Los Angeles in 1976, shortly after giving up on a college teaching career in New Hampshire because the technical economics required to complete a PhD put me to sleep. I wanted a more romantic, manly career, and spent six years drifting through furniture finishing, cabinet making, and carpentry. But I finally accepted the advice of a carpenter, Loren Evans, who told me as he handed me my last check, “You ain’t no carpenter, a cabinet maker maybe, but I doubt it, you better ride that horse in the direction it’s going.”
I loved Loren Evans and considered him a real man — he ran an all-male construction crew and was assertive, proud, and physically capable — so I took his advice as gospel. I’ve always been sort of like an empty beach onto which active males would swim up and land. I was always interested in men, not as sexual partners, but as an admirer of their active stances and their proclivities. I wanted to be one. I wanted to know what made them the way they were. And as an empty beach, there were always men landing.
The first whom I loved was Douglas Moore, one of the black kids I met when we moved from the Lower East Side to Rockaway Beach. I had just run a schoolyard race and had lost to Eliot Blum, a frail boy in my fourth grade class. After the race, I stood by Eliot and was grimacing at him when Douglas appeared from nowhere and told me in a casual and friendly tone, “If you want to fight him, you have to fight me.”
In no time, I decided to skip the battle and befriend the aggressive black stranger. I admired his forwardness and friendly manner, so when a few months later, he and his brother Terrell trapped me on the street with my shopping cart full of my mother’s groceries and pretended to steal them, I knew it was a hoax. Terrell had rolled the cart away and yelled, “We got your food.” But I could tell that confident Douglas was sharing a game with his younger brother. Terrell brought the cart back, and Douglas said, “We were just kidding.”
In my teen years, the projects filled up with a pack of new males. Larry Schnitzer stood out. He had come from a tough area of Brooklyn. I met him outside the fence of our junior high school as I was doing my paper route. He stood on the sidewalk in front of me, opened his hands, and motioned in all directions. He regaled me with stories of his fantastic victories against all odds. Dancing in his shiny loafers and carefully pressed slacks, he mimicked a gangster shooting a machine gun. “Crazy Schnitzer” became one of my best friends.
Even though I took the words of the charismatic master carpenter Loren Evans to heart, I had no idea what direction to go. After a few years and a series of dead-end white-collar jobs, I drifted into commercial real estate and got traction in a niche market. Drawn in by the beauty of the abandoned financial district in Downtown Los Angeles, I managed to coexist with a garrulous bunch of ethnic landlords inhabiting the area. At first it was weirder than weird for a former instructor and PhD candidate of a liberal bent to work side-by-side with an avaricious tribe of landlords, but they trusted me and totally distrusted each other — and with difficulty, I made deals with them.
Now, I drove by in a string of cars winding along the rim of the downtown center with the glass-skinned towers of the financial district off to my left. I told myself I’d sell one of those sixty-story buildings one day. The San Gabriel Mountains beyond them hugged the horizon, and the high-rises looked like children’s toys watched over by a graying grandmother. The mountains are the ancestors of the basin.
If mother earth were a broker, she might say, “I opened escrow on the deal twenty-eight million years ago, when I locked the Pacific Oceanic and North Atlantic Plates in a grind against each other.” When the two plates locked, friction between them built up until the earth’s crust broke, creating a visible fault and pushing up mountains. First, the earth’s crust has to move. The heated mantle is thrust upward, building mountains as the molten rock is released. It took the San Andreas Fault the twenty-eight million years to build the rim of ranges in the background of my two-hour voyage across the basin. The Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains. The San Andreas Fault is still active and heads east, like me, cracking the earth along its way.
My first date with Nicole, I took her to a Bukowski play on Traction Avenue where artists were first reclaiming the old lofts. I then dreamt about a woman in a gold lamé blouse and took it as a sign when Nicole wore a gold lamé blouse on our second date. Things moved quickly. Nicole came from a comfortable, down-to-earth family in Beverly Hills. Her mom and dad greeted me warmly.
I was selling a building for a nattily dressed landlord who took me to lunch one day. I told him of my upcoming marriage. “You’re getting engaged?” he asked, wiping his mouth. His sapphire cuff links shone in the dim basement. “Ed, get your wife used to the fact that you go away and she doesn’t know where you are.”
“Okay sure, Frank.” I nodded my head.
He walked me up Olive Street and opened the trunk of his Mercedes where he stored a beautifully pressed outfit and full leather set of men’s toiletries, always at the ready for his getaways. He winked, “Even if I just want to get hot dogs in Brooklyn.”
His advice was valuable to me. He was another real man who had landed on my empty beach. I respected Frank. He was an upscale version of my tough Italian friends in the projects. Once, he locked an entire family of jewelers in his building all night because they wouldn’t follow building hours. His words left a mark because I wanted to be like him, but I lost contact with Frank after the deal closed. That happens with a lot of clients. Being discarded like a used condom after a transaction was one of the things that was hard for me, but that wasn’t what happened with Frank. He had a heart attack a few months after the deal was done. He was hit hard and wanted me to remember him the way he’d been.
A few years later, Nicole and I were in Palm Springs. We were with another couple, and the husband brought up this great hike he had discovered in his LA Times. He suggested we should try it. I loved hiking and agreed right away. I’d been a regular in the Santa Monica Mountains, so I was game for a hike in the desert. When I got into his van, the guy seemed a little full of himself, but I’d been around plenty of guys like that. He explained how there were a few routes we could take. He mentioned how we could pick up Indian Canyon from close to where we were and go through Desert Hot Springs but that it would be better to drive Highway 111 to the freeway. I didn’t really care how he went. I was used to men like him making decisions, especially when you’re in their van on a trip they suggested, so when he told me we would take the interstate through the San Gorgonio Pass, it sounded fine.
It’s a lot easier to take a panoramic view of things when somebody else is in control, and I was enchanted by the startling pieces of desert landscape along the way, starting with the giant San Jacinto and San Gorgonio Mountains we saw on our way to the 10. Route 62 rode a steep incline through hills of green grey shale, the small flat pieces resembled backgammon tiles ready to flip and roll downhill. The road quickly bent east, and in another ten miles we turned off at Joshua Lane and drove into Black Rock Canyon Campground.
Jerry held the map out in front of him as he led us from his van through the continuing display of desert landscapes: a meandering grey wash, then a series of undulating yellow canyons, then a green woods with large fern trees and huge boulders on an angular hillside. The strenuous uphill climb ended when we poked our heads into the air at the top, pulling ourselves onto a large dirt plateau, and saw the gorgeous vista to our south, a wide cobalt sky, the tan sands of Palm Desert, the jade green Coachella Valley, and snow-capped San Jacinto Mountain. I was soul-struck and hardly heard him say, “I’m going to walk ahead to find the other view,” as he left my peripheral vision.
For the entire walk down Warren Vista Trail