The Air Behind Me

by Elmo Keep

In Los Angeles, downtown is empty as a matter of course. The city has no center to speak of, its sprawl seemingly endless. Helicopters circle above like buzzards. At one point, we counted six in formation. We didn’t know where they were going.

“That’s weird,” said a friend who lives here.

Weirder is when it started to rain.

I am thirty-four years old and I saw snow for the first time in my life, on the peaks of the San Gabriels, far in the distance from where I was driving on the freeway under a hot sun. At night, I went to parties in the hills at houses perched atop the canyons where everyone is from somewhere else and the city stretches out below us for miles.

On another day, I walked from where I’m staying on Hope and 5th to the Million Dollar Hotel. The Hotel Rosslyn’s famous sign is updated now: The New Million Dollar Hotel. Fire proof rooms, it read. They’re for rent. Perhaps I could stay, I thought, looking at fairy lights hanging from the windows.

The hotel borders one edge of Skid Row, which takes up three thousand acres of downtown. So endemic is its poverty, so impossible to ameliorate, that the city has given up trying to fix it. On the day I skirted its edges, the police shot a schizophrenic homeless man to death two streets away.

A few days later, at the Echo on Sunset, I waited for a hot band to play. A friend I know reps them at her agency. She and I know each other from Sydney, where we’d lived in the same Darlinghurst sharehouse a few years apart. By the time I lived there, she’d already moved to New York. Tomorrow I’m picking up the truck I’ll drive across the country to that city where I’m going to live. My friend told me dreamily about all the space in Los Angeles; seven years in Manhattan were enough. I listened like I understand, but part of me couldn’t wait to get out of here. I don’t care how small the space might be.

I liked the band fine. They were great. And wasted as hell. Before, we’d been at a bar up the road sinking chili margaritas. I wonder if anyone in the thousand-strong crowd could tell.

I think about us when we were so much younger and we met at that show. We thought music was everything. Your favourite ever band was playing that night, supporting Patti Smith. I know now you were only there to see them but I was only there for her; I didn’t even notice you were standing next to me the whole time.

After that show, the band sprawled on awkwardly placed couches on the Opera House forecourt lying under the stars, where you’d come outside to follow me and had ignored their presence completely. Not like the kids at the bar tonight who’d walked right over to give high fives, to shake hands, to say, hey, so excited to be seeing you play.

There would have been people at that show tonight like we were back then, finding each other for the first time together. Statistically it has to be so. But that was oceans ago for you and me. Here now, the moon is full and upside down.

I didn’t stay for the whole set. I walked out into the street and hailed a cab, leaving the sound of the band hanging in the air behind me.

Correction: This piece originally identified the mountains as the Sierra Madres; they are the San Gabriels.