Sunset Strip

( Please note that there is a part missing between the Gas Station in Shasta and the trip to Los Angeles )
That evening I decided to drive into Los Angeles. I would be there very late, but I would miss the traffic. The conversation with my cousin had really started me thinking. I went back to the thought about our lives being a tapestry, and I was realizing there is not much difference between a net and a tapestry, and the difference between them. I wondered how many people were caught in nets of their own. When we enter life, we are a part of someone’s work - the life we weave is a part of a larger work and often just our past traps us before we even have a chance to start our own work. Nancy had grown up in Selma; a child of Dust Bowl evacuees, her entire world had been formed around a hub of grape farming. She had inherited her mother’s smile, her father’s laugh and her family’s religion.

I must admit that this has been a huge stumbling block in my Christian life. It has always seemed to me that Christianity does have a cultural component to it, that many people who are Christians in the United States would be Muslim if they were born in Iraq. It has always seemed to me that there are loving and gentle people of good heart who are associated with most of the world faiths, and there are people who love to condemn others in most faiths as well.

Well, the drive from Selma to Los Angeles takes abut three hours, and I was up and over the Grapevine by 2 a.m. I had an urge to Cruise Sunset Blvd. I grew up with television, and Sunset Strip was one of those great icons of my youth. I have seen so many car chases down Sunset Blvd., I knew I would be no stranger there.

Soon I saw an exit that proclaimed Sunset Blvd /Hollywood, and I took it - and for a little bit, I did feel I was in the wrong place. This road of my teenage dreams wound unimpressively through a residential neighborhood, then squeezed past UCLA. I craned my neck, looking for the famous coeds, but none appeared. I drove past the Hotel California, past the famous neighborhoods of star worship - but I saw very few people or cars. Then I surged out of Beverly Hills and into the Sunset Blvd. of my remembrance. It’s not difficult to find temptation on the Strip, and everywhere I looked there were girls: some quietly and some sheepishly offering themselves for sale to the men and boys who flitted like fruit flies on the Strip and the intersecting roads. I saw lots of police, but they seemed hopelessly outnumbered. The words of the Paul Simon song, The Boxer, found their way into my mind: “There were times when I was so lonely that I took some comfort there,” and I wondered what drove the men to circle and the women to offer themselves up to strangers with such ease. I thought, “Somewhere there is a wife sleeping, comfortably unaware; and someplace else, a girlfriend fretting. Somewhere, a family room with a picture of a pert young girl with a flawless complexion looking out over the mantle. How many faces did I see that where in some living room in a distant land, framed with love and remembered in adoration? I wonder how long it takes for a policeman on this beat to lose faith with his or her fellowman, and distill all of us into a caricature of these evening immigrants. They are explorers and inhabitants of a world that borders Suburbia. Sedans and station wagons replace covered wagons and sailing ships - but there is only bitter harvest here. No minerals, no lumber - only broken dreams and passionless passion. I’m sure both seller and customer each will bear the marks of the blows that cut them down. I admit that I was fascinated by this swarm of people – the furtive looks, the outlandish appearance, the men in cars darting from lane to lane. Police with stoic understanding, stopping, questioning. Lights glimmering neon; proclaiming billboards elbowing each other; while in another world, not too far away, families slept and college students worked into the late hours forming paragraphs about social justice and world change. I suspect every major city has their Sunset Strip. It’s always a place on the “other side of the tracks,” just outside our understanding - but close enough to point at. I think each of us has our own Strip as well; it’s a place were we can occasionally blur the line between right and wrong. It’s also a place we can easily recognize in others. And just as it seems that those of us in Portland and Sacramento like to point toward Sunset Blvd. and Times Square, in our own home towns there are streets that slither through the gardens we have built.

I wanted to see Grumen’s Chinese Theater before I left, and I finally found it a few blocks away on Hollywood Blvd. The sun was coming up; the tops of the buildings were soaking in the light. There was a relay going on, and the people of the night were handing the baton over to the people of the morning. The bus stops were filling up with tired-looking people, most of them Hispanic or black, and most seemed to be headed into the richer neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and Belair. I suspect these were the domestics, the ones who mowed the neatly landscaped yards, who tended the dogs and washed the cars and a thousand other menial jobs. Some of these people stared at me with fierce pride, but most simply seemed to be asleep on their feet , thinking of the last moment of love’s embrace or of bills to be paid .

I pulled into a Denny’s for a cup of coffee and a quick breakfast. I know I must have had a book with me; if I eat alone, I have to have something to read with me. I’m sure there is something Freudian about that, but I think I will save the money on the exam and use it to buy more books. I was probably in Denny’s for about an hour, and when I came out I saw a new crowd taking the baton. These were the secretaries and the young executives, some at the bus stops and some in their own cars, filling up the Strip once again. As I looked at these people, I saw some staring back defiantly and others asleep, thinking of last moments of love’s embrace or bills to be paid.


My next stop was Chula Vista, just South of San Diego. There was a dear online friend I planned to visit there; her screen name was Quietedone, and her real name was Cathi.