I meant to bring a notebook with me to L.A. I wanted to write that three boys with cropped t-shirts, baggy pants, and cowboy boots got out of the back of a pickup truck to take photos in a craft espresso store for their pop-up clothing brand, that the mosaics in the sidewalk glimmered nicely in the sunshine, that a hip clothing store looked like a Gregg Araki set, and that I could be inspired to make a painting or sculpture if I read more books.
Driving from LAX, my girlfriend said she had a surprise for me after my six and half hour flight. She appeared from the baggage claim unannounced and full of joy like a bag herself, and we embraced. I missed her and I felt like I hadn’t seen her in a long time, although it had been less than a month since I said goodbye to her at the Amtrak station, which took her to Logan Airport.
She went West to L.A. and I went East to Bologna, a nine hour time difference. In Bologna, I was working on an art show. In L.A, she was mourning her late grandmother and enjoying time with her family.
I bought a pack of cigarettes for myself and only smoked one before giving them away. I had a craving for cannabis, so I had my new, overly generous and excited, Italian friends bring me nuggets of marijuana in crumpled balls of tinfoil. In a mixture of Italian, English, and contemplative pauses, they explained that they paid upfront for the weed and needed fifty euros from me, or that they spent fifty Euros altogether and this was part of a larger drug deal that fifty Euros had bought, or that I can make fifty Euros easily if I wanted to resell the weed to one of their friends, but that they did not pay that much for it. Whatever they said, it ended with an outstretched hand, a universal gesture for “please, pay me now.” I hadn’t had the time to stop at an ATM since arriving from Providence. Also, I had exclusively been using my nearly maxed out credit card and my boss’ business card to make purchases in Italy because I forgot to tell my debit card’s respective bank that I was travelling and needed their permission for numerous international transactions. I didn’t realize that I still had to do that.
I tried explaining to my Italian friends in broken translations that the gallery told me via email that they would cover any costs related to recreational drug use, although I was unsure how this transfer of funds was actually meant to go down, and that they needed to text Gaia to get her fiscal code to do a bank transfer for the weed. They looked back at me like I was trying to steal their Euros and I wondered, teetering between not knowing and being certain, if I did a poor job at explaining the bureaucratic financial situation I was in as a middle man between a gallery and resourceful Italian men on the streets. I told them I would see them later, which was true, but I also wondered if it was possible for me to behave in a way that would mystically and tragically stop us from ever seeing each other again.
I grinded up singular weed nuggets with my fingers and distributed it into rolling papers that I bought with the cigarettes that I had thrown away earlier in the day. I smoked the joint in the terrace with the two cats who were brothers and exhibitionists. When the art show was finished, I realized I still had eighty five percent of the marijuana my new Italian friends bought for me. I decided to leave it in the upstairs Bolognese apartment. Just a few months earlier on a flight back from Rome, my bag was searched and my weed gummies were confiscated. I was given a warning to never travel with weed again.
Fifteen minutes away from LAX and an hour since landing on the shiny tarmac, I smiled at the sight of palm trees and clear skies while Betsey excitedly told me that the surprise she had planned for me was a visit to Watts Towers. Her excitement excited me equally, although I didn’t know what Watts Towers was.
“Don’t look it up. You’re gonna love it.” She explained to me while driving with two hands on the wheel and putting KXLU on the radio. After going the wrong way, she turned around and we soon approached Watts Towers, a series of public sculptures built by the Italian artist Simon Rodia over the course of thirty three years (1921-1954). The centerpiece of the work was three larger towers built of cement, steel bar, and found objects, all creating concentric, and elegant shapes and gestures around a straight, long, spearlike center bar. Surrounding these larger towers were other smaller towers, which had hut-like structures at their surface with fences, engravings, and more found objects embedded in small crevices made by Rodia. Everything was made from the same materials and the same man, an incredible technical, physical, and artistic feat in the middle of an otherwise unassuming suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“Wow, these are stunning.” I said to Betsey as we walked around the periphery of the sculpture that almost spanned an entire block, reading plaques that explained its complex and impressive history.
She explained how the last time she was here, she and her dad were able to walk through Watts Towers and get closer to the sculptures, which is how I imagine they were intended to be experienced.
“LACMA is doing preservation work.” She motioned to the physical evidence of the museum’s project, a temporary tent with tools and a generator. The sculpture lacked classical structural integrity that you would see in a building or a house, meaning it needed almost year-round attention to replace and repair dislodged objects, cracks, and minor damages in the work’s facade.
In 1957, a fire destroyed Simon Rodia’s home and the towers became an unpermitted structure subject to dismay and hypothetical destruction by the city of Los Angeles. Two years later, in support of keeping the tower intact, engineer Bud Goldstone designed a stress test to prove to the city that the towers were structurally sound, despite their unconventional construction. In his test, a crane pulled upwards on the main tower with 10,000 pounds of force. The tower only moved 1 ¼ inches and the city decided it was both safe and culturally worthwhile to keep the towers around.
We sat in the sun of a nearby park looking at the towers from a distance while local children kicked around a flat soccer ball and played music from their phone speakers. I had a headache that made the world around me vibrate with what felt like the pulse of my heart. Every beat was like a ripple in a pond, and faces, houses, pavement, feelings, Watts Towers, and my own body started to perceptively melt. I looked at my hands incrementally to check that I wasn’t a puddle. I asked Betsey if the world around her was melting too.
“Is everything melting to you? I have a headache.” I said.
“No, but maybe you need some food.” She responded, as if the world melting was something that happened in Los Angeles all the time. My headache worsened and soon I found myself laying facedown in Betsey’s lap, sustaining a quiet groan and trying to hide my eyes from the Californian sunlight.
She rubbed my head, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. My head really hurts.” I replied, talking into her legs. She kept rubbing my head and I fell asleep to the steady beat of my brain melting.
