LA Eastside

“You’re not crazy, you just want people to think that.”

“Na, I am. I did a lot of acid in the nineties. I’m certifiable.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What, about the acid? or the…”

“All of it. I mean none of it. You are a liar. You are either trying to impress, or trying to get away with deviant and anti-social behavior, or both. In any case, I am not buying it. Nor am I impressed.”

“Look, let me tell you a story about someone that I deeply respect and admire. This individual has had a profound impact on my life. All of what I am about to tell you is absolutely true. Except for some of it.

“One day, we were at a spot near downtown Los Angeles, but not quite in it, sort of on the immediate periphery, and a few of us were hanging out at this one particular place, and my friend suddenly told us that we needed to leave, immediately, because a certain demon had entered the same place, some kind of ghost from my friend’s past.

“So we split, and right then at that very moment, an LADOT DASH bus was just pulling up at the stop outside, and so we all ran and jumped on board.

“And it was during the MTA drivers’ strike a few years ago, you know, at the same time the grocery workers were striking.

“And so the DASH bus was packed full already, because there were no other buses to get around town, and it was a humid, hot day, and the bus was hot and sticky and smelly inside. And so then we pull up to the next stop, and there is a huge crowd of people waiting to get on the bus at the stop, and so they start piling in, one after another, and we get pushed further and further to the back, until my friend is all the way in the back. And they just keep coming, and so my friend starts yelling out, ‘Keep em coming! More! More! There’s still room back here!’

“Which of course, there wasn’t. There was no room at all.

“But the driver couldn’t see past all the people in the aisle, and so my friend just kept giggling and I kept laughing as we got more and more squished, it was crazy, everybody getting more and more packed in, and me continuing to laugh as the absurdity increased exponentially while the oxygen decreased proportionately while the bus groaned and swayed up Temple Street toward the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

“Another time, I was on the 70-A bus rolling through City Terrace around three in the morning and I started reflecting on the general, popular misconception about the nature of schizophrenia. Everybody thinks that it involves multiple personalities, or a kind of fragmentation of the psyche into different parts. This is inaccurate. This is a conflation of schizophrenia and what was known for many years as Multiple Personality Disorder but is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. But anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that schizophrenia involves a dissolution of the boundaries between one’s inner reality and the external reality of the world. The patient is no longer able to distinguish between the two. That is why the voices generated from within the patient’s own brain are perceived as coming from some other, external source. That is the cause of the hallucinatory experience of the schizophrenic. You can no longer accurately assess the source of your perceptions or the nature of reality.

“Another time, I was strolling through Pasadena thinking about this cute girl I had just fallen in love with recently when I came across a massive line of people that stretched several blocks around the corner, and there was this crazy desperation in their eyes, I saw some of them arguing, sweating in the heat, a few pushes and shoves, some obscenities. And I had about four dollars in my pocket and two dollars and seventy-five cents to my name because my train fare was already spent if I wanted to get home, and so I’m looking at this crowd, and I start wondering how long it will be before one of them takes a bite out of another one, and that’s when I start walking a little bit faster and cross over to the other side of the street.

“Another time, this friend of mine was doing a reading of my astrological chart, and suddenly I jumped ahead several months in my story and Venus was in retrograde or something and I was like, damn, well, I guess I blew that one, and I wondered if it was just an overeagerness, or a sincerely slipping grasp on the mechanisms of temporal control, or one of my periodic Mars attacks. Somewhere in there I lost a few days or weeks or years, and I realized that when people spoke to me, they weren’t speaking to me, they were addressing a version of me that existed ten years ago, an afterimage they still held in their heads. Or maybe it was the other way around. And I wondered who was the crazy one. Who was the crazy one?

“And I was really hoping that it was me, because, you know, I was looking around, and let me tell you, all the sane fuckers were looking pretty damn messed up. On the surface, the boundaries had dissolved and there was no distinction between the inside and the outside anymore, the whole thing had been purposely constructed as a big mixup around issues of inclusion and exclusion, the whole thing was a big jumble purposely designed to confuse and induce mass hallucination. This was not an embracing of the cosmic one-ness of everything; it was a packing in, tighter and tighter, within carefully structured parameters, it was an inside-out imprisonment through an invasion of the individual’s psyche, an internalized system of constraint that operated through a perverted manipulation and exploitation of our instinctual, underlying awareness of the porous and interconnected nature of everything.

“So, you learn to operate in the collapse of boundaries, you take on a schizophrenic mode and push across and through. It becomes a technology of survival. It becomes a technology of love. It becomes a bloated bus trundling up Temple Street, creaking and leaking. Keep em coming! More! More!”

…

“Whatever. I think that the only thing that you are really crazy about is that girl.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.”