Synopsis
The craziness that comes with the summer heat gets into your bones, fraying relationships and making even thought a chore. Hitting the road leads to finding a mountain without even the weight of a name. Taking a job in a small-town diner where the Norwegian cook reads Cambodian books, it all begins to flow together, providing a certain kind of clarity and possibly even a purpose.
~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~
A thick layer of gray hung over the city for days. At night, the heat radiated by the concrete tried to escape to the coolness of the black sky but the clouds slapped it back down along the asphalt where it began reheating the overheated city. Air conditioners snapped on by the thousands, sapping the life from the city's energy grid and dumping the collected heat, along with the heat the air conditioners themselves generated, down into the sweltering streets.
Los Angeles often got warm. We expected warm, but this was hot; an unrelenting simmer that never let you forget the heat. Inside this natural and manmade convection oven, the inevitable turmoil could be seen after three days: the city began losing its precarious and precious balance. The swelter amplified everything that was jittery, anxious and edgy; and there was much on the street that was jittery, anxious and edgy. The nights became a time for thinking, especially about what was wrong. And about what could be different.
From a simple statistical perspective, the pragmatic results of the heat surprised no one. In the inner city, brains fried by prolonged heat, upped the ante on gang hassles, rape, looting, and general mayhem. Up market, in the consecrated grounds of the rich, random violence racked up bad numbers too, with news commentators reporting a noticeable uptick in freeway shootings and domestic violence. If nothing else, this seemed to prove that owning an air conditioner didn't make you immune from the heat-induced weirdness.
In fact, there was no escape from the heat or the madness that went with it beyond the expediency of leaving. Most couldn't leave their jobs and homes and run to cooler environs, but the rich became scarce. Beverly Hills was abandoned to security guards, maids and groundkeepers. And everyone who stayed fought the same battle. No socioeconomic group, no governmentally sanctioned, nor unofficial, ethnic minority or majority had genes strong enough or technology adequate to hold the craziness at bay. At the best of times, when summer comes to the city, the cops will tell you, life is a bitch.
My life approximated the summer. It was overheated, unproductive and promised nothing good. At that low point in my life, I had two people near me who were each worthy of the title friend. Perhaps that might have been enough at other times, but friendships do not tolerate the heat much better than other volatile and fragile creatures.
Not that I understand friendship in any precise way; in fact I avoid trying to understand anything precisely. Somehow, it seems to me that precision might complicate things in an unnecessary fashion. It also seemed a bit unhip. God forbid I should be unhip. It also put me at odds with my friends, as you will see.
Despite this lack of clear definition for friends, I knew that Ted was one, if only for historical reasons. Ted and I kind of grew up together. Now I deliberately inserted that “kind of” qualifier in there because I'm not sure that anyone grows up any more. We get older, sure, and we progress to a physical maturity as adult humans, but it isn't clear that there is anything to grow into. We sprout well enough, probably too well, in fact, but there is nothing in the adult world that supposedly looms above the world of children (it always seemed layered like that) but smog.
