I entered the shopping complex with my wallet brimming with counterfeit money. I had George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Franklin in my pocket, multiple times, faces pressed against faces, moolah, cheddar, scrilla, dosh, cash, greenbacks, sawbucks, dollars, pockets full of that cheese. Eager to enter some of the world's most cheapest shops I duck into the first one I pass, it turns out to be a knife store. A store that only dealt in knives or knife related paraphenalia. I grab two hundred dollars worth of gear off the walls and place it in front of the clerk before taking my wallet out of my pocket and pluck bills from it, letting them drop down onto the register whilst I shake my head from side to side.
“That's how we do it though.” I say slowly.
I take the knives down to a fountain with me and begin to drop them in the water amongst the coins and milk teeth.
“Say mister, why you throwing knives in the fountain?” said a smart ass kid. I turn over my shoulder and flashed my eyebrows.
“What's it look like I'm doing kid? Cooking a pot roast?” I say.
I am in the car with Bill. We are searching for a parking space.
“How's your family Bill?”
“Not bad. Eldest just got a job in a Subway.”
“You know, I always wanted to know why Subway is such a big franchise. Like, they only make sandwiches. Why not other breads...other spreads?”
“I can't find a place to park.”
“Just park there. Over there by that palm tree.” I say. The car is parked and I look around. It was strange to think that I was there at that moment in time, unknown to anyone outside of that space, as if my existence at that point was neither here, nor there, yet in a state of flux, as is the shape, of space and time. I measure my pulse. Ninety seven. I take out my cell phone and access it's apps (programmes), viewing a three dimensional rotating image of myself. I upload data.
“What you doing over there?”
“I'm using apps. Want to look?” I say. Bill looks over my shoulder and whistles.
“That's a killer app you got there.”
“Take a look at this, I designed this one myself. It tells you if a celebrity is dead or alive.”
“Cool!” says Bill. We turn to each other and smile.
The nightclub was hot enough to make me sweat, dancing to minimalist house in the dark. Green lights rotate inside mirrors, flashing the faces of drugged Americans. A woman reaches out to me and starts shouting in my ear. I shout something back and we dance. I signalled I was going to the bar to get a drink, my feet sticking to the dance floor. Pushing my way through I bump into people, leaning on them for comfort. The teenager behind the bar is wearing yellow framed sunglasses and a leopard skin Sumo suit. By the time she reaches me I have forgotten what I wanted to drink.
“You wanna beer?”
“No...no...water. I need water.” I said, eyes rolling in my head. She passed me a warm plastic bottle and I stagger away, pouring the water over my head, down my back. There's no vomit left once I heave. For a moment the entire world seems to tip upwards and I realised that I had perhaps had enough. I nearly collapse into someone, pushed away as I stumble towards the exit. I need to be outside. I feel like I can't breathe.
I was running down a road in the night. Fat insects flew around the glow from street lights and parked cars, sometimes smacking against the floor. I climbed over a low wall and begin to try and cross the interstate, eyeing up the traffic for too long. A fog had rolled in off the Pacific, making everything a fuzzy blur, the gaps seemed impossible to judge. I ran.
“How's your search going? For the edge of L.A?” said Bill.
“I don't think I found it yet.”
“Want me to drive round the outskirts, see what you can find?”
“Yeah, why not? I doubt I'll find the edge at the actual edge, but you never know. Maybe it's there all along.” I said. We took the 405 north, the slightly elevated interstate a constant artery of tarmac and metal. The evening was drawing in just as we drove onto the Antelope Valley Freeway.
“We just left Los Angeles a moment ago.” said Bill. I tell him to circle back around so I can get out. The air smells warm, there is the faint aroma of cannabis somewhere nearby. Besides the road everything is bumpy, the rock raising up covered in dirt and scrub. Bill is lit in the soft blue from his new iphone, yammering about how this spot was in Los Angeles and this spot was Santa Clarita.
“This is what I mean though. Does this feel like the edge of Los Angeles? Does this feel like the edge of anywhere?”
“Well, there ain't nothing else here.”
“Exactly. Where's the tipping point? There's no lines in the ground, no sense of the binary. This is just a little road that could be anywhere.”
“I guess. Want to drive back?”
“Not yet. Let's follow the border for a little while, see where we end up.”
We spend the next few hours carefully driving as close as we can to the Los Angeles city limits, I occasionally get out to get a sense of whether or not I have found the certain edge. The city of Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles. The state of California. The state of America. It seemed anytime I tried to find the edge of civilization it split, forming more bubbles of civilization, more motes of L.A. Floating in the agar-like continuum of reality. Motels, bars, strip clubs, diners, car parks, industrial units, houses, forests, mountains, highways, freeways, interstates, parks, hospitals, abandoned buildings, factories, beaches. I could tell for certain when I wasn't in Los Angeles and when I was, but never exactly where these two points met. I didn't believe that there was a gradient as such, that Los Angeles would simply fade into not-Los Angeles. We'd been driving for hours, fueled by roadside meats and gatorade. Bill watched as I stumbled around in the dark, kicking the detritus of people around; food packaging, used needles, dirty nappies, cigarette butts, discarded clothing, rotten plastic, clumps of human hair. Would I even know when I had found the edge? I questioned my practice as I looked into the shadows, pupils fully dilated, spit drying on both sides of my mouth. Now and then Bill would ask if we'd found it yet.
“No, no. Not yet. We need to go further.” I would say, beginning to suspect that Bill may be leading me on a wild goose chase. Nevertheless we traversed the outer orbit of the city, San Fernando, Verdugos, San Gabriel, Pomona, down to the Harbour and up along the coast. As dawn started to break I sat in the rolling surf on Santa Monica beach, watching my shoes fill with sand.
“Want to go home?” said Bill.
“Yeah.” I said, dragging myself up. It appeared as though I wouldn't find the edge of Los Angeles by going around it. I would need to employ some other methods.
The next day I went to a motorbike rental place and loaned a Suzuki SFV650 Gladius. I hadn't much experience riding motorbikes but after half an hour at a nearby parking lot I decided I was ready. I'd had an idea sitting on Santa Monica beach. Perhaps I wouldn't find the edge in such a careful, controlled manner, but experience it amongst the uncontrollable chaos life occasionally threw at you. I huffed a significant amount of nitrous oxide and set up my bike partway along Venice Boulevard.
“De fumo in flammam.” I mutter to myself before engaging the clutch. The bike lurches forward at first, but I quickly work out the gears. Before I know it I am already hurtling down the boulevard at sixty miles an hour. I feel the wind in my hair as I keep spinning the throttle, laughing madly to myself, lost in the wind. Cars and trucks speed by at a blur. Eighty miles an hour. I fly through an intersection, narrowly avoiding a BMW. The engine is screaming in protest between my legs as I quickly flick through the gears. Once I can see the beach I'm doing a good hundred and ten miles an hour. People, cars, road signs all become a violent rainbow streak as I propel myself closer and closer towards the sea. All around me are the honking of horns and the screams of people as the Gladius reaches its top speed, propelling me ever-quicker towards the coast, I'm unable to breathe. My head is thrown backwards so much so I struggle to see what's in front of me. With a spine twisting bump I feel I've hit the sand, the bike hurtling at one hundred and fifty miles an hour down the beach. Just before I hit the water I feel something.
Time seems to have stopped. I look around at my surroundings and see a whole crowd is on the beach behind me, faces locked in a slow motion scream of horror at the biker that has passed them all at such ludicrous speed. In the distance I think I can hear some kind of choir, the holy sounds of seraphim. The water beneath me is such a beautiful blue, I'm aware of the constantly shifting currents underwater of oxygen and hydrogen reflecting the pure, brilliant sky above me. Seams of gold appear on every corner, as if the world is just a door to heaven. Had I been successful? Was this indeed the edge of Los Angeles? The true edge of civilization? Before I can truly answer the question time seems to speed up again. The bike appears to bounce on the waves once or twice before it shoots out from beneath me like some kind of strange insect steed, it begins to flip and somersault itself apart until sinking below the surface of the water. I myself am miraculously unhurt, though for the second time in less than six hours my shoes are full of sand. I turn back to the beach and wave.
“Don't worry everyone. I'm fine. I think I experienced the true edge of Los Angeles, but you'll have to read my blog for a more detailed description.” I say. In the distance I can hear sirens, the type on top of police cars rather than the mythological kind. I consider my experience as I swim away, wondering if that was indeed the edge, or if it was instead what one experienced when driving at high speeds on a motorbike heading towards the ocean. Could it be replicated somehow? Was there more than one edge, or more than one way of experiencing it? I'd have to continue my search regardless. Yet after the night of disappointment the high speed seaside crash had exhilarated me more so than any simple tour of the city. As I floundered onto the shore just beneath the pier I decided I would try harder to substantiate that which was and not was Los Angeles.
