And the Livin’ Is Easy

Summer in the city.

Morning fog lays a cool silver rim along the ocean, but the temperature is already beginning to edge upward in the Valley.

It’ll be another one of those high-90s kind of days, even triple-digits in some places. Tank top and bikini weather.

By midmorning the fog will dissolve into an empty blue sky, and the sun will look down on L.A. like a relentlessly unblinking, single yellow eye.

There’s no wind anywhere in the basin. The day is as calm and still as a sleeping baby. Not a stir. Not even a whisper.

Except for a few early surfers, the beaches are pretty empty too, from the northern edge of Malibu down through funny old Venice.

That’ll change later on, because it’s Saturday, and everybody’s going to head for a seashore whose expanse and beauty match anything I’ve ever seen, from Hawaii to the French Riviera.

But for now there’s a kind of lull over the oceanfront and, in fact, over the whole city, a sense of anticipation, of waiting, like something beautiful’s about to happen.

You fall in love on days like this, or close your eyes and dream about a person you’ve never met at a place you’ve never been at a time that never was.

It’s summer . . .

*

I spend the day kind of drifting around looking for something, I don’t know what. I’m a fool in a daze, without any plan or purpose, floating on a tide of disinterest down a river that never ends.

Sometimes on days like this I find myself on a beach somewhere skimming rocks over the water, other times I’m on a hillside staring at a view I don’t really see.

I feel a little like Adlai Stevenson, who used to say all he ever wanted to do was sit under a tree with a glass of wine and watch the dancers.

Around noon I end up meandering down Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, where I’m with a lot of people like myself, smiling vaguely and looking somehow far away from everything.

It’s at the Promenade that I hear a bluesy baritone unwinding ribbons of pure satin through a growing crowd, singing “Summertime” in a voice that has the sweet consistency of honey in tea.

Summertime and the living is easy . . . . I track the music down to a guy sitting against a wall in front of Johnny Rocket’s, playing a guitar with his eyes half-shut, like a piece of kinetic art on a canvas titled “Summer.”

He’s a 52-year-old man named Jimmy Mitchell, who pretty much taught himself to sing and play up in Oakland, where he drove a cab.

He’s from New Orleans originally, and there’s a lot of Basin Street in his soul. Everything he sings, from gospel music to show tunes, is done blues style in the key of E. Mitchell calls it E-blues.

He has his own band, the Blue Tones, but between jobs hits the Promenade on weekends, playing for tips and the mood he sets.

“Summer’s a beautiful time,” he says with a lazy smile, “sittin’ here payin’ a few bills and makin’ the people happy. . . . “

Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high . . .

*

I keep hearing that song as I head up into the Santa Monica Mountains, where I meet Allen Emerson in his clattery old Dodge van.

He’s wandering the roads that wind and twist through the canyons, but not because he’s in any kind of lazy-dazey mood.

Emerson is head of the Arson Watch that patrols an area of the mountains from Malibu to Chatsworth. He’s been doing this a dozen years for practically nothing, except for a love of the natural beauty that makes L.A. different from almost any place on Earth.

When I ask why he’s on patrol on a day of good humidity and no wind, he lays out a map of the fires that blew through the mountains in ’93 and says, “That’s why.”

Dots indicating the fire zones fill the map from Calabasas to the ocean. That’s scary enough, but equally disquieting is seeing close up all the territory that hasn’t burned for a lot of years, sitting there drying in the hot sun, building up the kind of fuel that feeds the fires in hell.

The brush is thickening already up Las Flores Canyon, where everybody’s still trying to recover from that autumn horror two years ago. In some places, chimneys remain the only remnants of homes reduced to ashes. They stand like tombstones along the simmering ridgelines.

By the time I finish with Emerson, a tough, caring, dedicated old bird, I know that with heat comes danger, but I’m not going to dwell on it today.

There’s a lull in the city, a moment of sweetness, and I’m going to find me a tree, pour me a little red wine and watch the dancers.

It’s summer, and the livin’ is easy. . .