Part 14: Los Angeles Pompeii - Street Baseball
By Armando Ortiz
I walked across campus today, from the student union out to the new library. Every step I took brought back reminders of when I’d walk the dry and brittle field. The Southern California summer sun shone on me and the perspiration on my body transported me to that time, when days were hot, and afternoons were spent playing baseball, practicing catch with brown leather gloves, and drinking from the water fountains.
Today, a layer of grey concrete and black asphalt covered it all, like the sweat that covered the body after running up and down the bleachers that were there, the field was not there anymore, but was with me (but my feet were walking on the grass).
Layers of memories and strata of former realities lie beneath, unexposed to the eye and deep as the Grand Canyon, like the strawberry shortcake that I’d cut for my birthday. Like a time capsule that silently waits to be uncovered, unearthed at once as we walk past once beaten paths.
It seemed like walking through library stacks and passing encyclopedias of instances that were covered within the new structures. Then I imagined giant Caterpillar engines tearing through walls, crumbling adobe foundations and old rail tracks, and within the creamy icing and layers of cake I would find pieces of strawberry. Birthday celebrations and a time of carefree childhood came to be. Rows of dusty tomes describing a Los Angeles that was, with its collective history of gestures and looks, with smiles and frowns, with unknown pine boxes covered in dirt and memories hidden in that forest of the mind like a Pompeii of the American dream, like a desert mirage that dissipates as we arrive.
For an instant, I think of those Shanghaied from foreign lands, desperados enslaved in native shores, of the families that came from distant countries, traditions casting shadow of when the elderly were cared for and plates of food that were always shared. Images instantly conjured up by the mind, but I return to the present, and remember the child that didn’t fear the sun, and the home-runs that were scored during the endless afternoons.
The real libraries of this city are edited by film crews, and bulldozed by giant yellow tractors, reconstructed by unregistered names, making sterilized versions of what was and isn’t, projecting a collective memory of the population, but my experience is here on this land and on that invisible and forgotten field. Memories are like shadow puppets to the mind, every surface has unseen layers of personal experience and every detail is hidden behind a blinding silhouette.
Potter fields talk to us with multi-colored beaded work, Jade bracelets, and Mexican silver coins, click clack against each other inside Chumash baskets, where golden Mormon books, adjacent to iron skillets, porcelain pipes with sage, and tomahawk smokers filled with opium adorned by the scattered burial incense of tobacco, veiled over by cement sidewalks that are imprinted with acronyms of local hoods.
Hieroglyphs spray painted on the walls of crumbling plastered walls testifying of the presence of earth’s gypsies, shadows of the past casting images with the present light on nameless graves where mummified miners lay forgotten. What memories did they take into the eternal time clock?
Walking across campus also brought back that tumultuous time, when glass pipes were used and broken, and jitteriness was a vexing reality, mother would come home tired and unharmed at half past eleven, after the sirens and flashing red lights disappeared from down the street. Unknown shadows would merge with darkness stabbed by the hand of death that quickens time. The glare of the television had us captive and its luminosity kept us safe from the wails of night, its images somehow magically protected the home.
These memories unwove themselves with every step that I took and loosen up the dyes and the fabric that have always been there, like the time two junkies started fighting in front of the apartment and the hollow acoustics that could be heard outside the window, when a head bounced off the concrete sidewalk and the person laid motionless. We would order pizza to be delivered to the unsuspecting neighbor next door.
Now there is more of everything everywhere, throngs of students here and there, countless pedestrians exiting the subway, like a faucet that gushes people. Maybe I’m just getting old, becoming nostalgic for the past, somehow though the memories are there within the layers of experience and within the brush strokes of life’s moment, everlasting, the child inside the adult me, but I am here now.
We walk through every valley on this earth, and in death voiceless bones cannot be silenced and sacred artifacts, like holy temples that stand on perfect space, speak volumes of truth to me and everyone else.
The science building is not there, nor is the library, only a barren grassy field where time went by slowly because the memories we made on fields of grass, will carry us through the golden meadows of time becoming holier than thou art and thou was. And even when we return to the slides of our youth that have been replaced by condominiums images, like Lazarus are revived. It is in those visions, conjured up by memory, despite places covered over by a new strip mall, where we hear the hollow clang of the aluminum bat that sent the ball flying over their heads and it will be like it always has been, with the sun shining over our withering bodies.
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