SUNSET BOULEVARD

I wrote this poem after I first visited LA for the funeral of a friend, in March 2016. It would be his birthday tomorrow - and this date also was the day I first visited AJU Campus two years ago.

We were friends of the same friend who hadn’t seen each other in years. Over the past three days, time had contracted. We drove down from Los Feliz all dressed in black and took a right turn into the afternoon light. You can’t come to Los Angeles and not have at least some fun, Christa said, and DJ let me smoke a cigarette inside the car. I leaned back like maybe a movie star would and blew the smoke out through the open sun top into the gentle March air, toward the famous palm trees, and I thought how run-down and quiet Los Angeles looked, how airy and pretty, these famous low, white buildings. My skirt squeezed my empty stomach, and my blouse looked washed out and saggy. We talked again about the summer when we had first met, we discussed once more our friend’s ex-lovers and what had gone wrong with the mother of his son, we shared gossip and anecdotes past the Viper Room and the Whiskey-a-Go-Go and through the Dead Man’s Curve as if all these stories were proof that he was still alive. The colorful wreaths in the trunk smelled heavy in their intense turquoise, yellow, pink, and orange, glaring like icing colors, so many flowers, so much green and wisdom and wealth along this former cattle trail. We wanted to send the wreaths out into the ocean, a ritual supposed to give meaning, three figures dressed in black at sunset on a beach watching two colorful wreaths floating, swallowed by the waves, floating, but we couldn’t find a beach where we would be unobserved, sending out wreaths to G-d knows where in memory of the dead is forbidden without a proper permit, plus my plane was leaving in a few hours and we still needed to eat. The Santa Monica pier shimmered silver as we veered back on whatever freeway DJ and Christa thought might be least clogged and had dinner somewhere not far from the airport. Everyone stared at us furtively, we were untouchables in the lit center of the restaurant with its open glass doors and heaters on the terrace, we drank fast and ate little and laughed loudly, dressed in black, tired, out of time, and then we raced to the airport, past the sparkling refinery that DJ had pointed out to me when he had picked me up three days earlier, the refinery where our friend had often filmed commercials, and I thought of Bruce Springsteen and one summer in another century, and then I cut the line at security by pointing to my clothes, mumbling something about a funeral and feeling guilty about it, but it did help me reach the gate when they were about to close it and the moment I sat down in my aisle seat I fell into an empty sleep and didn’t wake up until the plane touched ground in New York, where the A/C was blasting, my suitcase was missing, and it was snowing.