What I Did on My Vacation
Every spring I take a week or so off to restore the enthusiasm that got me started writing a column in the first place.
It’s a good time for a vacation, not the least of reasons being that editors are most active in the early spring, and it is wise not to be in sight when bubbling hormones set them clamoring for change.
During my absence, for instance, someone sold our editorial page to People magazine, and while that in itself has little to do with me personally, I begin to get sweaty palms when this sort of thing occurs.
I ask myself, what next? And then off I go.
It’s a spring break. Not one that sends me boozing and ripping bikini tops off women on the streets of Palm Springs, but a time that lends itself to contemplating what it is I do and where I do it.
A friendly little martini on a quiet evening is the most I need in my cruel middle years, and ripping off bikini tops is not among my prime interests anymore. I can’t remember if it ever was.
What is important is seeing in leisure the place one often observes from the perspective of a rocket car hurtling through a redwood forest. So I spent two weeks wandering through what anti-abortionist Randall Terry once called “a true mother of harlots.”
He meant, of course, Los Angeles.
Not everything is sexually oriented in the Mother of Harlots, despite the trial currently under way that attempts to equate human copulation with holy ritual.
Legal scholars are following the proceedings closely, for while the Constitution is clear on the separation of church and state, it says nothing about the separation of church and sex.
Will and Mary Ellen Tracy, as you know, ran a church that professed to incorporate le sport , as the French say, into its theistic ceremonies. The cops said it was whoring and arrested them. They in turn are suing the city for denying them such a pleasurable path to heaven.
But there I go, contributing to the reputation borne by the Mother of Harlots as a repository for smut, rather than encouraging a new image of L.A. as a playground for the environmentally inclined.
My wife is among those who would rather save a tree than kiss a king. It was not surprising, therefore, that on Earth Day she dismissed my suggestion to spend it shooting dolphins off Baja and opted instead for hiking in Franklin Canyon.
Our hike was mostly uphill, which I found somewhat disquieting due to my participation in the Korean War. I kept remembering a gunnery sergeant who put nature walks in skewed perspective when he asked, “Why climb a mountain if you’re not going to shoot somebody at the top?”
At this crest, however, there was no clang of human violence but a world of silence and gentle winds, of red-shouldered hawks wheeling overhead and alligator lizards scurrying through the underbrush.
The Santa Monica Mountains slope to the distance in deepening shades of green, and the far-off towers of Century City are wrapped in mists as soft as a baby’s kiss.
It’s a long way from the Mother of Harlots.
Not so far away in terms of moral serenity is the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club. No stillness abides there. No hawks dip.
It’s a place nestled into other mountains, where men with tattoos and women in skin-huggers teach little children how to make tight clusters of bullet holes on targets shaped like human torsos.
That’s part of L.A. too, Greater L.A., up Fish Canyon out of Duarte. Pickup trucks and vans gather there, and country music from car radios sends ribbons of cacophony twanging through the whap of gunfire.
It’s a world you don’t see driving up Melrose or down Sunset.
The targets shaped like human torsos are combat targets. Whap! to the heart. Whap! to the head. The echoes cling to your soul like a memory of war.
“It’s a sport,” one man said when I asked its purpose. He wore a camouflaged T-shirt. Muscles bulged. His manner was defensive. Instinct told him a fruitcake liberal was nosing around.
“Like tennis?” I asked.
“Like whatever you do to relax,” he said, turning away.
Whap! went his rifle.
A poster on the side of a building said the California State Varmint Callers Assn. was inviting one and all to “learn the art of preditor (sic) calling.” It said: “Hunt coyote, bobcat, fox, more.”
Git them preditors. Whap it to them good.
We ended our vacation with two movies, both of which also seemed to represent the dichotomy that is L.A. One was “Henry V.” The other was “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
Kowabunga, dude, and into the breach once more, dear friends. Whap!