Chapter 8 from Heaping Stones

Veronica worked at the Financial Aid Office at Cal State Long Beach and had to be there the next morning at nine, so she left my place around seven in order have time to go home and clean up beforehand. I drifted in and out of sleep until around ten. When I finally made the decision to get up I felt good, rested, despite the fact that we had stayed up until almost three fucking and talking and playing around. After eating some breakfast and taking a huge shit, I decided that I wanted to get out of the house, that I needed to move my muscles. I thought about going surfing, but there hadn't been much surf for weeks and I was sure I would have heard if that had changed. As I was getting dressed I noticed my bike leaning up against the wall next to my desk. I decided that a long bike ride was exactly what I needed.

I started riding south on Temple, towards the water. Fifteen minutes later I was down by the Belmont Pier, on the cement path that runs almost the length of the beach, on which I began riding west towards the Queen Mary. It was a nice day, I noticed. A light offshore wind was blowing and the gray marine layer and cool air of the day before had been replaced by clear blue sky and warm sunshine. Even though it was summer, it was the morning and a weekday, so there weren't too many people around, just a few sunbathers scattered here and there on the sand and the occasional jogger, rollerblader, or fellow cyclist on the path. This relative emptiness made the whole scene seem wonderfully spacious, made me feel almost as if both my body and mind could splay out infinitely in any direction. Drawing from this rush of freedom, I began riding fast, crazy fast, as if some great calamity would befall me if I didn't make it to the Queen Mary in as short of time as possible. I had always been a very active person, at various points in my life seriously into baseball, running, tennis, hiking, and in recent years, surfing; but over the previous year or so my level of physical activity had dropped thru the floor. I really missed it, I realized, as I sped down the beach path. It felt great to stretch out my muscles, to feel my heart beating and the blood moving thru my body. I was still in good shape, I decided, as I pumped my legs harder and harder; no matter how fucked up I'd become emotionally at least that hadn't yet been taken from me ...

I quickly built up a ridiculous head of steam and kept it up for as long as I could, before dropping down to a speed that was simply fast. At that clip it only took me about five more minutes to reach the parking lot down by the Queen Mary. Once I got there I stopped and looked at all the smaller boats in the marina and in the direction hulking old British ship itself, which from my current position I could no longer quite see. Mostly, though, I was lost in the feel of my beating heart, of the glorious biomechanics of my revived sweating body. It didn't take me too long to recover from my ride, though, and as I did I became restless; so I soon jumped back up on my bike seat and started peddling in the direction from which I'd come, though at a much slower and relaxed pace than before.

It really was a beautiful day, I began to more fully notice, as I cruised back over the ground I'd just torn thru. Beautiful enough, I decided, to cancel out the fact that the actual beach in Long Beach is a truly ugly stretch of sand. Back around World War II the federal government built a huge breakwater to protect the Naval Shipyard just up the coast. In addition to protecting the Shipyard, however, the breakwater killed the surf along the entire length of Long Beach and began acting as a kind of garbage collector, holding most of the refuse that makes it to the ocean near shore. Because of this, the beach is always kind of dirty, and often smells a little weird. Plus, the lack of surf is so obviously unnatural that it makes the place seem sort of emasculated, defiled and wrong. To make matters worse, at some point, in the early sixties, I think, offshore oil platforms were allowed to go up very close to the shore, closer than anyplace else in California, and maybe the world (I could easily swim to the nearest of these platforms). In order to help disguise what these things are, the two closest of these islands were given these weird beige facades that at night are lit up with these trippy pastel lights, which has left coastal Long Beach trapped in a kind of bizarre Art-Deco hell. I don't know who authorized these fuckers, the Feds, the State, the County, or the City, but somebody should have been put up against the wall over these monstrosities, or at least been forced to spend the rest of his days living on one of these industrial Gilligan's Islands, waking up each morning to the sight of some tower of arty stucco or steel and being lulled to sleep each night by the sounds of the grinding stinking oil rig that it so lamely tries to hide ...

But the day was simply too beautiful for my mind to really start veering into such angry political rants. At least I have a beach, I thought. Think of all those unfortunate souls living in places like San Bernardino or Idaho or Kentucky. As a native coastal southern Californian I knew what having access to an ocean meant: expanded horizons: the understanding that there was a beyond across all the blue-green water, where people spoke different languages, thought different thoughts, dreamed different dreams ... The knowledge, in other words, that I was only one of many and that there was a whole world from which to choose and the choices my ancestors made may not necessarily have been the best ones ... And it worked the other way too: this "beyond" also came to me. Long Beach is a porous port town, thru which just about everyone and everything passes eventually. To be from Long Beach then is to be from Marseilles, Venice, Durrell's Alexandria, Veracruz, New Orleans, Cape Town, Hong Kong, the Mekong Delta, Oakland, the Castro district, and an ancient Japanese fishing village all rolled into one. My ancestors came here from Ireland, Scandinavia, and northern France, via Canada and Michigan mostly, but I'm attracted almost exclusively to dusky women: Latinos, Africans, Mediterranean types, eastern European Jews ... How would that play in Tupelo or some northern Norwegian farming village? Not well, I'd guess. But that's Long Beach in a nutshell: a fecund mix always on its way to becoming a hive of caramel colored denizens, overflowing with hybrid vigor and beauty. So what if the beach is dirty and sad? So what if our government officials are stupid enough to put oil rigs a stone's throw from our most precious environmental resource? Besides, maybe all this dirt and stupidity is a good thing: it helps keep the rents down, the poor interesting people in, and the mix of genes and ideas churning and churning and churning ...

I'm not sure if these kind of lofty thoughts were going thru my head as I peddled my bike back down the beach path that day; but I'm sure that I was experiencing their meaning, at least on some unconscious level: I was in too good of a mood, had been too completely popped out of the self-pitying malaise in which I'd been wallowing for so long, not to have been infused in some way with the wild dreams of all those around me. I decided that I was in such a good mood that I wanted to stop riding and just drink it all in for a while. I let my bike roll to a stop, got off, and carried it out to maybe six or seven feet away from the waterline, where I stood it up in the sand, and then sat down a few feet in front of it.

There was no one within probably fifty yards of me in either direction, and even though I was in the middle of a city of around four hundred thousand, which is part of a sprawling urban area of several million, I felt almost alone, as wonderfully alone as a person might on a summit in the high Sierras. I took off my shirt, laid it on the sand behind me, and then laid my head back onto it; and I immediately felt the warm rush of sun hitting my chest, entering my body, and then moving down thru my limbs, all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes ...

Then, for the first time since I'd left my apartment, Veronica began creeping into my mind-and I began tensing up, began feeling trapped by the emotional demands I knew she'd soon be making on me. What does she see in me anyway? I then asked myself. It's not like we have anything in common; we can barely even hold a conversation, unless it's based around sex, based around me laying down a bunch of semi-bullshit about how hot she is. I should just get rid of her before things get out of hand, before she gets hurt. She's so fucking horny, though, so easy. I mean, she practically begged me to come in her mouth last night. "I want to taste you," she kept saying between sucks. "I want to taste you bad." (That was so cool, if a bit weird.) How am I supposed to walk away from that? But she's so stupid, so annoying. I mean, what was that astrology shit she was talking about while she was getting dressed this morning? Endless blathering about her being a Virgo and me being a Scorpio and the time of the year and the planets aligning and how all this crap somehow meant that we were meant to be, that the forces of the universe wanted us to "join as one." Jesus Christ, how can anyone believe that shit? Fuck it. I should just be mellow, just be grateful that I'm getting some. I mean, she's giving me the only sex I've had since Maggie left-and it's good sex too. Nobody says you have to love her or anything, Rob. Besides, it's not your job to look out for her: she's a big girl and can take care of herself. It's like, don't make life so complicated. Don't ruin things by forever thinking about their ethical reverberations. This day's so awesome, the sun and the cloudless blue sky-don't let your jabbering mind cancel that out! For once in your life don't beat yourself up for having basic human needs. For once in your life just relax and enjoy things for what they are ...

© 2005 Rob Woodard. All Rights Reserved.
May not be reprinted in whole or in part
without written consent from Burning Shore Press.