Excerpted from We Had it Coming, coming soon from OR Books. Read ORB's interview with Luke.
I started watching the Game Show Network right around when the pandemic and middle age and suburbia all hit me concurrently none of which I have yet to and will likely never rebound from and something I still can’t get over years later watching anew every evening eating our little coffee table dinner is how on most of the games every contestant is this kind of pure grotesquerie from California which is the most uncanny state in America the most uncanny country in creation. I’m reminded of when I used to watch Nathan For You and I’d think it’s a trick it’s all actors but no it’s just that people there are like that. Californians are a species who simply want to be able to drive two miles in under 90 minutes if they’re lucky and who love to be insane. No one will ever figure them out. Not Steinbeck or Hammett or Lynch or Chandler or Didion or West or Tarantino.
Ahhh shit a millipede or something like that an associate of the overarching millipede enterprise just skittered past me and I made a noise that I’m not exactly proud of. It was a pretty big one too.
It’s pouring rain in Massachusetts today and cold already this early in September and I’ve seen some of these types of guys in the basement before so this had better not be the harbinger of an exodus of some kind. I flailed for something to kill it with out of instinct and it was quicker than I was and ran for cover and now it’s gone to the limbo where nightmares have their smoke break.
The spiders have been finding their way inside too now that it’s getting colder. I just saw a remarkable one outside this morning while taking out the trash. It had erected one of the most elaborate webs I’ve ever seen. Adjusting for scale it was like a spider mansion. One with craftsmanship behind it. Holding up in the downpour better than even the spider itself probably would have ever dreamed. You could imagine the other older spiders coming over to admire it and they’d all be standing around going now that’s a proper web until whoever the biggest one was decided to eat everybody.
Oakland Review of Books
I was trying so hard earlier to think of the other California writer I wanted to mention above in my little list there and all I could recall was that I had posted a picture of the book that I can’t remember on Instagram roughly ten years ago which isn’t an especially efficient mechanism for remembering books. I scrolled down and down and down into my past aging myself in reverse and there it was in 2012 sitting on the side table of a California hotel.
Ask the Dust by John Fante.
Let me look up a couple of quotes from it real quick to jog my memory.
"All of us were here for a little while, and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all; we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die."
"I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast. I had to get away from that town."
Yeah that definitely sounds like the type of shit that I would have liked back then. Now too but especially back then.
I have only been to California five or seven or ten times and I don’t really know what I’m talking about. About California specifically but also anything.
There was the time I was young and definitely going to be a rock star making a record there and the time a girl took me home and the house was peculiar looking and not knowing anything about architecture I didn’t realize until much later she was a descendant of the main California architecture guy and the time I was almost going to work at Instagram haha and did all these interviews at the fake town they have there and the time I’ve talked about before bumming out Elliott Smith at the Troubadour and the time with John Legend and a hot air balloon and the time on the beach by the iconic rock formations where another girl started to sour on me and the times in San Francisco getting mugged every five minutes due to woke prosecutors.
One night my friend took me to an indoor hotel pool tiki bar way up on a hill and then I spent the rest of the trip trying to drink in as many famous cocktail spots as possible and shortening my life drink by drink.
How many more drinks will it be before it all turns?
It was the fourth of July and it was so cold. We stood on a roof watching the muted fireworks through a mile of fog thinking this fucking sucks. No one told me to bring a winter coat to the fourth of July in northern California.
Mark Twain did I suppose.
Sometimes people from over there try to tell me that the water is just as if not colder than it is here in New England and while I logically accept that they are probably right I still do not believe it. How your brain won’t let itself process things you don’t want to believe.
Another girl I once loved is standing by that very same cold Californian water and looking prettier than the ocean. She’s adjusting how she’s posing and trying out different looks while I’m getting ready to take the picture. I’m going hold on hold on ok here we go wait hold on and then she smiles and goes come on is it a video and I go haha got you again. We had a good laugh about that classic gag even though we were pretty miserable at the time if I’m being honest. Were probably not going to make it out of that one.
And did not.
Most things I try to remember about having been in California feel like they happened on some sitcom I watch to fall asleep to. Not because many of them are filmed there but more so that I usually don’t remember the plot or the dialogue of my own experiences and it’s all operating there in my subconscious in the background fucking me up from the past even when I’m not paying attention.
Don’t misunderstand me I love it there and I want to be there right now although I just saw it’s 110 degrees today so maybe scrap this whole idea.
Also there are the fires and the droughts to consider. Nonetheless I am pulled there in a type of longing specific to me but also with the same cliché longing we all have in common for the West. That has called people there forever with all the songs and movies and all of it. How if the continent were a table and you turned it on its side and gravity came into play we would all tumble westward. I’m pulled both by the idea of freedom and the expanse the land itself represents in the American mythology but also the lie of the myth. I want to experience the lie. The make believe of it all that people know is make believe but let themselves operate inside of anyway.
Being lied to isn’t so bad sometimes compared to being aware of how things actually are. You wouldn’t want to go around like that for very long. No one wants to know all the secrets.
By the way I know it sucks to live in California in the same way it sucks to live anywhere in America and in a lot of ways more so than anywhere else but the heart wants what it wants.
The girl I love now and I talk about taking a trip somewhere but the thing is I don’t want to take a trip anywhere I want to actually be somewhere else. I want to live somewhere else besides an hour from where I was born and guess what I never will. It’s just this for the rest of my run.
Maybe when we’re older we say sometimes. Maybe we’ll go somewhere when we’re old.
Donald Trump is on the TV. He’s an evil disgusting piece of shit and maybe our worst living human being who I hope has ____ by the time this comes out but every now and again he says something accidentally poignant.
“And remember, Florida’s easier than other places. You have the ocean and you have the sun. There’s something about that that works.”
He was speaking in Las Vegas.
“But, you have the sun, too, but you don’t have the ocean. I can tell. You definitely don’t have the ocean. Maybe someday you’ll have the ocean, you never know.
“Someday. Hopefully it’s a long time away, right? Hopefully.”
" 'Maybe someday you’ll have the ocean.' Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing him against me. 'Yes,' I said. 'Isn’t it pretty to think so?' "
Could be I’m just reading pathos into it because it also sounds like something a girl might say after she leaves me.
Whatever girl. Every girl I ever knew.
“Maybe someday you’ll have the ocean.”
That is honestly all I do want. I have never really cared much about money or becoming wealthy or famous or anything like that I just want to someday to live by the ocean. To have the ocean.
I wonder about this impulse I have to drink and to smoke all the time two things that undeniably will make me die sooner than I would have otherwise and you would think there is some death drive thing going on there some desire for nothingness but it’s the opposite of that for me. I am terrified of dying almost every hour of the day I am awake and a few of them when I am asleep.
Something changed about the way I dream in the past few months. My dreams used to be disjointed and abstract and absurd jumbles of unconnected vignettes that dissolved if you tried to catch them upon waking but now they’re consistent scenes with a coherent plot and identifiable people familiar to me who behave like normal people behave albeit with the tension heightened significantly. And when I wake up I can remember them and they follow me around for a lot longer than they used to. Maybe it’s something metaphysical or maybe it’s just that I take more vitamins now before going to bed and they fuck with my brain water.
I’m not sure if either of those types of dreaming are common for most people or not. I have no idea what other people’s dreams are like and could be that’s exactly the problem for all of us. I guess we all dream about going to California and “going to California” but despite all of the books and movies made about the literal act of that and the metaphorical act of that none of us have ever been able to agree about what going to California means.
The game shows though. There’s this one called America Says hosted by John Michael Higgins who is an absolute pro and a delight (and from Boston by the way). You will know him from the Christopher Guest movies and more recently from everyone being mad that his character in Licorice Pizza was racist. I don’t particularly have a take on that movie besides that it was some real California shit.
America Says is kind of like Family Feud in which teams called THE DOG PEOPLE or CHURCH PALS or THE UNEMPLOYED LA ACTORS TRYING TO GET ON TAPE have to answer questions based on surveys. Family Feud has more money so they can fly contestants in from around the country to showcase how uncanny America is on the macro level but the other shows like this just have to recruit people at the Glendale Galleria or whatever so it’s mostly the Californians.
In the final round the teams often get caught up on one of the clues like they were so close to winning the fifteen grand but they just could not clean the board and there’s this moment when the mean sounding buzzer goes off and they all stand there frowning and feeling dumb doing the aw shucks motions like you’d expect someone who just lost to do but more than that more than anything else they’re waiting for our man to turn over the missed answers so they can understand just how it was that they lost.
So they’re standing there dejected on TV thinking that if they learn the mistake that they had just made it will make it easier to accept the losing after the fact. Needing to comprehend what went wrong despite not being able to go back and change anything either way.
It’s like when you hear about someone dying that you only kind of know or used to know and you want to be able grasp how their passing transpired which has happened to me more times than I care to reflect on right now in the past few years like to my old musician friend in California a couple months ago for example. People you know enough to mourn but not enough to be officially looped in on the specifics. HOW DID HE DIE WHAT WAS IT? you want to scream at everyone but you can’t always ask that. You can’t walk into the room they died inside of like a doctor and look at the chart and frown.
The impulse is to want to understand whether or not you have to worry about losing in the same way as these poor assholes did or if you would have known the correct answer to counteract the riddle. If you would have survived long enough to show up on the next episode.
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