On looking for a place
Location location location – such is the power and frequency
of real estate agent numbspeak that one begins, in the midst of the frantic
scramble to find a place, to absorb it and apply it to other areas – to orgasm,
or to ontology. It is a wagon train of vacuity, and in a sense it unlocks the
secret principle upon which America’s manifest destiny was built: the search
for an anyplace, a utopia, an Eldorado, the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is the
lure of the emptiness on the map which exists, the map, anyway as a picture of
the adventurer’s advance and vocation – to claim by describing. It is the
American songline: location location location. This is the no there there of
Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase, with 3br, a spectacular view of a spectacular
view, and it won’t last long on the market at these prices.
The homeless and the homefull – such are the pertinent
divisions in the state of our nation at present. We drive around Santa Monica
with one (increasingly maniacal) eye peeled for the For Rent signs, and the
other observing the native custom of slowly, slowly traversing the street at
the lights – often because the natives have no other choice of speed, hobbling
on canes, being convoyed in wheelchairs. Santa Monica has more than its share
of retirement heavens. It is into this set that Whitey Bulger famously faded
while avoiding the nationwide manhunt for him, and what my wife and I want to know
is not the secret of his relationship with his FBI controllers as he finked out
his crew or if he strangled his sub-captain’s girlfriend, but how the heck he
managed to successfully wrangle a “fabulous 2 bedroom 2 bath with patio
must-see” out of the maws of Westside Rentals, which has its mits on the whole
rental business in this town.
Meanwhile, our standards fall as we strive for our own location
glimmer. What you can get for a cool 1500 per month in other gooberish
divisions of Los Angeles, such as I don’t know, Baldwin Hills, is simply
laughed at in Santa Monica. Fork over 4000 and we will talk about a washer
drier in your unit, sucker. Temporarily homeless and camping in our Airbnb
rental in Venice, we feel the stress of the moment, our suitcases piled
everywhere, poor Adam having to sleep with his parents like he did when he was
three months old, and every day another irritation as one or another of our
daily routines has to be modified. In this state of motion without a
pre-determined endpoint, work suffers. I have three editing jobs to do, and I
want to finish the sixteenth chapter of my novel, where the characters seem to
me to be frozen in midgesture and the lovely farce of revelations and incidents
I dreamed up weeks ago is beginning to fade, as the faucet of my invention (in
a full bathroom with Jacuzzi bath and Mediterranean faux ceramic tile) is shut
off. I need an imaginary plumber to unclog the pipes of my imagination,
evidently. I need the wings of an angel to lift me above the wagon train of
location location location that has led us all here to butt up, in our trashy
glory, against the Pacific, which lends all this tawdriness its weather. We are
not worthy. Really.
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