I just caught myself doing something extremely odd; something that I’ve done habitually for years. It’s in the general class of little quirks which we tend to notice especially in generations older than us. I suspect that’s because the original underlying cause of their habit is obscured by time and “progress” and made to seem all the more out-of-place as a consequence.

My specific quirk concerns those plastic rings which hold together multipacks of cans and bottles. Whenever I’m about to dispose of one, I always take a pair of scissors and snip through every closed loop in the plastic so that none of them are joined together. I can remember very clearly why I do this, although I couldn’t tell you when it started.

At some point in the past, I heard a story about scavenger birds (seagulls and the like) who were getting their heads caught in the loops of plastic can-holders and then slowly choking themselves to death. I believe that the story specifically mentioned cutting the loops apart to avoid their suffering. I wouldn’t class myself as a rampant “animal lover” exactly, but something about the story hit home. Et voila, many years later I find myself standing in my kitchen cutting up plastic rings. Each time I do it, I remember the original story and ponder its veracity, even as I snip snip snip away.

The really crazy thing is that I then hopefully deposit the plastic in with the recycling, telling myself “well, I snipped it in case they reject and landfill it regardless.”

I fully expect, many years from now, to be standing in some kitchen snipping away whilst incredulous offspring or offspring-offspring (should such people ever exist) ask me “why the heck are you doing that?”

“Seagulls, dear. Seagulls.”

I’m not even particularly fond of seagulls…

“Hey! Wezzak wibnekfahtilbrid…”

The car rattled on up the hill, and another cherished memory died in me.

See, 20 years ago I would have been that kid, mind awash with devastating leaf-baked insults, hurling them at pedestrians like so much free candy.

“That told ‘em”, we’d think. Only it didn’t tell ‘em. Tangled in a 25mph slipstream, the syllables tore apart. The witty words became a foolish jumble.

Back then, oblivious, I’d pull my head back into the car laughing so hard that my guts hurt. One night on Market it was too much; the laughter stuck in my stomach and turned it inside out.

I horked up a whole one-pound burrito, slightly digested, into Brian’s glovebox. His rust-bucket Mustang wasn’t worth two dimes as scrap metal and he said he didn’t mind. But even through the post-spew blur I caught that resigned tightening of his jaw.

Me and Brian always walked places after that.

Unless Denny drove, of course. Denny wasn’t his real name, but we called him that on account of where he worked, serving up spit-garnished burgers to Crazy Old Men. That’s how we referred to them – anyone who talked back to us, anyone who threatened consequences; who tried to act younger than their age. Anyone over 25, basically. All of them were Crazy Old Men.

Sometimes we’d go eat when Denny was working – we had a honorable agreement that our burgers came without “special sauce”. And then Denny would drive us across town to hang out on street corners and smile winningly at girls who always called us “douchebags”.

Denny wasn’t worried about a repeat of The Glovebox Incident. He knew that our agreement worked both ways – he’d never add unauthorized ingredients to our lunches just so long as we didn’t piss him off. I’d rather have bailed from the passenger seat than throw up in Denny’s car. No amount of outbound burrito was worth a lifetime of sputum-laced beef.

Anyhoo, it was Denny who came up with the only phrase worth yelling from a car window. He’d obviously been thinking about it for a while, in the quiet periods between loogie-burgers. When we turned up at the end of his shift one day he was bouncing with excitement.

“Man, you gotta drive. I gotta show you guys something.”

I wasn’t gonna argue – I loved driving, and my own car was out of commission ever since the gearbox fell out into the middle of the road. I took the wheel and Denny settled into the passenger seat. He was strangely quiet, right up until we hit the first red light of the journey. In a flurry of action he wound down the window, leant his whole body out of the car and waved his index finger at the people walking by. And then he yelled, slowly, deliberately, clearly…

“Mah finger smells of poop!”

I gunned the engine and we squealed away from the lights roaring with laughter. It was the most sublime moment of our young lives. And from that day ‘poop’ing became an essential part of our existence. We’d take it in turns to drive and to “poop” at passers-by. We were the quintessential rebels astonishing everyone in our path, fingers held defiantly aloft, smearing feces between the eyes of a hopelessly square world.

Nothing lasts forever, of course. Denny died a couple of years later; ran his car into a fire hydrant and flipped it. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and that was pretty much that. Seatbelts weren’t part of our world. They were for Crazy Old Men like our fathers, filed in the same category as trust funds, retirement plans and “yessir”s. In a sense we were dead right on that one – Denny never had to worry about any of that shit.

No witnesses to the accident came forward, although we were sure there must have been at least one. The cops reckoned that Denny crashed while trying to lean across the car towards the passenger window. The funeral was a bit of a shambles. My one clear memory is of Denny’s brother punching Brian square in the jaw after he referred to Denny’s death as “a ‘poop’ too far.”

Funny how the past fades, though. I hadn’t thought about Denny or about ‘poop’ing for years, not until the kid in the Camry brought it all flooding back. It weighed on my mind a lot after that, and boy, is the mind a funny thing.

Well anyhoo, that’s how I’m explaining it away. See, I started to get seized by this idea. Bringing the ‘poop’ back to the world, starting an international youth movement of jovial ‘poop’ing, the fragrant finger spreading across the globe through word-of-mouth and internet message boards. It’d be like the flash-mob phenomenon, only more scatalogical, myself the surprisingly fresh-faced leader of this irrelevant cult. Enthusiatic online hagiographies and interviews in the New York Times could only follow.

I really saw it like that, in my mind. So it must have been about a week after the Camry-yeller that I’m walking through Union Square and the time seems right to bring the ‘poop’ back to an unsuspecting public. There’s a nice crowd of victims in the busy square – tourists and Marina girls, skater punks and businessmen. And boy would Denny ever have got a kick out of this.

So there’s me, slap bang in the middle of the square, hopped up onto a bench, finger extended high above my head, screaming at the top of my lungs…

“Mah finger smells of poop.”

…and then there’s silence. I can see a group of college girls nearby rolling their eyes and turning their backs on me, perfect asses jiggling beneath impossibly short skirts. Most other people just glance at me and then away, hardly acknowledging my presence, observing the golden urban rule – never make eye contact with lunatics. A very few stare pityingly, and suddenly I’m aware of the tiny ripple as everyone in the square inches slightly away from the weirdo on the bench.

I see myself clearly, then, skin over-aged by the California sun, hair greying. A tiny bald patch which I usually refuse to acknowledge. I run my hand over my chin, feel the ragged mottled accumulation of five days’ stubble. I’m a mess.

I jump gingerly off the bench and walk quickly, head down, trying to lose myself amongst the tourists as quickly as possible. And deep inside me, the seventeen year old boy I once was stirs, turns languidly over onto his side and sneers. He states his opinion to no-one in particular.

“Crazy old man.”

And there it is – the down-at-heel, grimy air which permeates and pervades everything in Britain. Partly it’s due to age; the overwhelming weight of history. Partly it’s due to the fact that Britain is a strangely lazy, slobbish nation.

Also highly noticeable after a year’s absence, the peculiarly ineffectual English parenting technique of yelling “shaht aaahp” at your offspring (3 separate counts witnessed in the space of 15 minutes).

And the roads. The roads are tiny by the standards of the asphalt airstrips which Californians drive on.

But after that, it’s all the same. It’s all familiar. It’s reassuringly still home.

And I wish that it were as exciting as it sounds, for your sake, but this is just the way she dances.

I lost any sense of self-consciousness a long time ago. I’ll dance anywhere with floorspace and a diry beat, no idea whether I look like a smooth mover or a drunken octopus; no real cares either way.

And we grab at each other; dance hip to hip; grind against each other. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to having making love in a room full of strangers.

But this isn’t the start of some great romance. I don’t even know what it actually is. She’s the same with all the boys, and I’m the same with all the girls. But something always draws us together, more outrageous than usual and darker too.

It’s a battle of wills. She’s used to forcing a surrender, but I’m hell-bent on victory.

So far it’s a draw.

He distributed his product — the one we named him for — to the village, and occasionally to bewildered tourists from the Palace-turned-hotel which overlooked the streets from the top of the hill.

We called him the Milk-God because he claimed to be Kalki, the tenth avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu. Many privately believed he should be soundly beaten for his heresy.

Worshippers returning from the temple of Hanuman away to the north would often taunt him. “Milk-God!” they would cry, “where is your white horse? Where is your flaming sword?”

He would smile at them patiently and reply “Horses come in many forms. The nature of a horse has changed over time.” And he would gesture at his bicycle.

“But where is your flaming sword?” they would taunt. And he would murmur “the time has not yet come.”

And this is how the Milk-God’s strange routine proceeded for the next three years. Every morning before the sun could reach its full heat he would pedal through the winding streets dispensing his divine bottles of milk and collecting empties from the doorsteps of the houses. He would disappear between eleven and three when the sun was at its hottest, reappearing near the Palace under the shade of an Acacia tree, attempting to sell his last few bottles to visitors.

And still he maintained that the Raleigh was his steed, and still that “it was not time” for his flaming sword. Some still grumbled about his disrespect for the traditions of their religion, but by and by he became a tolerated, eccentric feature of our little community.

On the Fourth of July, when most of the American tourists were celebrating their Independence Day up in the hotel, a rumour swept from house to house in the village.

“The Milk-God is planning to reveal himself!”

And so he was, in a small square barely more than a courtyard. I was sucked into events only because I happened to be passing. People had already gathered, the gossip spreading like wildfire. As I walked past a doorway on my way home I saw him lurking in the shadows. He had a sword with him — stolen from the palace by later accounts — and he was wrapping it with some kind of cloth. As I passed, he finished the binding, poured kerosene onto the cloth from a small bottle and struck a match. I watched fearfully as he strode out from the doorway towards the square. He glanced at me but did not stop, and I followed him at a distance.

As he burst into the crowd the anticipatory chatter died instantly, people scrambling back from the sheet of flame erupting from his hand. He strode to the centre and up onto a small platform.

“People of Samode!” he bellowed. “The time has come that you see my flaming sword, and that I tell you the purpose of my coming. Man has fallen far and ceased to believe in the small miracles of life. And I come to do only one good thing – to show you again that God is in everything, even the skinniest most unaccountable delivery boy.”

His eyes blazed with passion and the crowd stared at him as though seeing him for the first time. He dropped the sword into the square suddenly — it must have begun to burn him — but he kept up his defiant gaze, sweeping his eyes across every one of us.

Suddenly, a voice began bellowing from behind the gathering. “Enough of your nonsense! You are no more Vishnu than I am Ganesha!”

A shot rang out, and the crowd screamed, stampeding for the edges of the square. When we looked back, the Milk-God had fallen from his perch. He was sprawled face-up in the dust, a bright red lotus blooming through his shirt just above his heart.

He lay gasping, a pool of blood gathering beneath him. People began to inch back towards him, gathering around his fallen form, their faces filled with shock. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows but slumped back to the ground. And with a final gasp, he uttered the last sentence he would ever speak on earth.

“As I said it to you, now you can see it. How far man has fallen.”

No one spoke of the Milk-God after his body was buried secretly in the hills. No-one invoked the name of Vishnu or Kalki either. He may have been nothing more than a skinny, eccentric young boy with delusions of grandeur, but one strange fact remained.

For five years following his passing, no cow within a hundred miles of Samode produced so much as a drop of milk.

The legs where a tail should have been were a dead give-away too.

She was just lying there on Malibu Beach, covered in wet sand and gasping in the late-afternoon sun, her fair shoulders turning slowly pink as they burned.

I sat down next to her, curious.

“And what are you doing here?”

She offered one word, “banished”, and then fell silent.

I stood again, picked her up and dusted her off.

“You wanna get something to eat?”

It seemed like the right thing to do. We walked back to my car and she fell exhausted into the passenger seat, raining dried bits of beach all over the carpet. Her eyes drooped closed and I fastened her seatbelt around her.

I drove back along Highway 1 and up Sunset into Hollywood. We stopped at Mel’s Drive-In on Highland, a few blocks from my apartment. She wolfed down a tuna salad and two plates of fish and chips. I couldn’t believe that anyone so skinny could eat so much. I guessed it had been a few days since her last meal.

She finished with an odd little burp and then turned her gaze on me. I noticed her eyes for the first time – so dark that the pupils seemed to merge with the irises. She smiled, a huge open grin which was gone as fast as it came. I felt my heart jump.

Who was this girl?

We walked out to the parking lot.

“Whaddya wanna do now?” I asked her.

“Sleep.”

I figured she didn’t have the money for a motel so we drove slowly back to my place. She pressed her nose against the window of the car, gawping at the immaculately dressed, perfectly bleached and deeply tanned Hollywood crowd.

“Like fish.” she said suddenly.

I glanced at her, puzzled, and she turned to me.

“Vacant. Four-second memory” she elaborated.

I smiled. “I thought goldfish had a three-second memory?”

She grew deadly serious, turned her black eyes full on me for a second and then shook her head whispering “Shhh.”

“Four seconds. Smart ones five. Still can’t hold a conversation though.”

I was silent after that, and two blocks later we turned off onto Hobart Boulevard – home.

I didn’t even have time to show her my bed. She flopped down on it still dressed and passed out. I left her where she was and went to buy some food at the 7-Eleven on the corner. Frozen fish seemed to be a good idea.

I checked on her quietly when I returned half an hour later. She was shivering on top of the bed, bone-white and covered in sweat. She was murmuring the word “palace” to herself over and over again. I figured she must be going through some kind of withdrawal, and suddenly I felt helpless.

I’d picked her up because I felt sorry for her, but my apartment certainly wasn’t a rehab clinic. “Palace”. Was that a nickname for her dealer? Maybe the place where she got her drugs? There was no way I was about to start venturing out into Los Angeles looking to score heroin from the sort of people who carry guns as badges of honour. I carefully put a blanket over her and left her to her fevered dreams.

She awoke six hours later and padded into the lounge.

“I’m dirty.”

I showed her to the bathroom and told her how to work the taps. I left her a towel and listened to the sound of water rushing into the bath which echoed through the door. It seemed to go on forever, and I started to worry that she’d flood the place and get me evicted.

But it stopped before any ill-fated tide washed out into the rest of the apartment and I heard the splashes as she climbed in. She was there for two hours. Every twenty minutes I’d knock on the door and call out to her. She always answered but I was terrified that she’d drown herself.

Eventually she emerged wrapped in a towel and disappeared back into my room. Ten minutes later I heard a call. “Hello?”

I went to see what she needed.

As I pushed the door open and saw her I gasped. I probably should have turned away, but something kept me riveted. She was sprawled naked on my bed, legs parted, her small breasts rising and falling as she breathed. She beckoned to me.

“Banished, I am” she said. “Done wrong. But the legends say that if a human man takes me, takes me in and makes me his for a day, the ocean can be mine again. Will you save me?”

I stumbled back towards the door. “I… I can’t.” I stammered. “I mean, I don’t know you, and I just wanted to help, and…”

She pouted.

“My only hope?” she half-asked, half-stated, turning her head to one side.

But I couldn’t. I’m not one to take advantage. And those trackmarks, fading now, but still vivid on the insides of her arms…

“Put on some clothes and I’ll cook you dinner.”

She turned away from me, curling her arms up towards her head.

“My only hope” she whispered in a broken voice.

I put it down to delusions, maybe the drugs or her withdrawal from them. I wondered if there was someone I could call – someone with experience, someone who could help. Probably not in LA. Sink or swim in this town — on your own.

So I accommodated her for the next few days, unwilling to turn her out onto the street, and unsure of what else to do. She continued to eat prodigious meals, and she kept entreating me to make love to her.

I took her out to see the town. She tripped hopscotch-like over the stars on Hollywood Boulevard and spent twenty minutes riveted, gazing up at the Chinese Theatre. Her opinion of the people never changed, and she stated it often.

“Fish.”

Her withdrawal seemed to lessen. She would still quake and shiver when she first went to sleep, but the subject of getting her a “fix” never arose.

And, of course, she reeled me in eventually. For all her troubles she was beautiful, and her innocent entreaties started to work their way past my principles and strike home where they could do most damage – my libido.

I’d tried to banish her to the couch, but just after I’d settled into bed a week after I met her she drifted softly into my room. She was naked again, and she slid softly between my sheets, pressing a warm hand against my chest.

“I just need to be close.”

I lay there, willing her to leave, trying to be as still as possible. When I moved to turn away from her and lie on my side, my hand brushed her waist. She grabbed it suddenly, firmly, and guided it slowly across her thigh, down between her legs.

“I have to have you” she whispered, almost a hiss. Despite myself, I fell.

“I’m drying out” she said to me. “So many glittery streets, but everything is so hard and full of bright light. I feel brittle. I need the ocean.”

It was the early morning. First light was washing through the louvers on the bedroom window, making her face seem almost ghostly next to me. I felt a pang of guilt.

I’d taken advantage, despite myself. I still didn’t know her story. Didn’t even know her name. I figured she must be from the coast if she missed the ocean – maybe Venice, maybe Malibu. Perhaps not even LA. Further north, somewhere like Santa Barbara. Another washed-up little white girl from a classy neighbourhood, led astray by this maddening sprawl held captive beneath its freeways. Led here, into a strange man’s bed, paying for random acts of kindness with her body.

I couldn’t take that payment, not without giving more. Not without keeping the balance in her favour. I gave her what she needed, driving her back down Sunset, back towards her beloved waters. She pressed her nose to the window of the car again, taking in the streets and the people as though saying farewell.

“Still fish” she murmured.

I only realised how shallow her breathing usually was when we crested a hill and the first glimpse of the Pacific dropped into view. I actually heard her lungs filling with air at the sight of it. Her eyes shone brightly, that luminous black that could swallow a man’s soul.

Traffic was light on Highway 1. Most people were already at work. I should have been too, but those excuses could be made later. Here and now, this seemed like something I should do.

She jumped from the car while we were still gliding towards a parking space. Her feet hit the floor at 15 miles per hour and she just kept running.

I slammed the car into “park”, ripped the keys from the ignition and took off after her, skimming over the parking lot and the sand, unable to make up the distance. I started shouting after her to wait and she looked over her shoulder, smiling at me dreamily.

But she kept on running, tearing her clothes off now, and splashing into the surf, water flying up above her head. Her skinny little body seemed to flash in the sun as the water engulfed her.

She kept on going, further and further out from the shore. I stopped when the water reached my knees, panting, and just watched her as she started to swim. Powerful strokes, almost fish-like, taking her
further and further into the Pacific.

When she was five hundred yards out, she turned in the water and gave me a long, graceful wave. I like to fancy that she mouthed “thank you” at me, but I couldn’t be sure over the distance.

She dived, and although I scanned the water for several minutes she never resurfaced. It was the last I saw of her.

I never did find out what she was called. But sometimes she appears in my dreams, skimming back through the waters of Malibu and up onto the shore. When she does, the first word she speaks is always her name.

“Ariel.”

As the road gets towards Interstate 5, it winds gently up into the hills above the San Luis Reservoir. And just as I’m cresting the hills, the rock strata of the lake’s shores clearly visible away to my right, the sun crests over the peak directly in front of me.

It hits the last remaining wisps of fog clinging to the landscape and the roadway, turning them gold in sharp contrast to the blood-red of the rising sun. Everything is bathed in a multitude of colours.

It feels like someone rammed this 2-lane highway right through the middle of a newly-born Earth.

It’s magical, and it reminds me again of one of the biggest reasons that I love California. It’s big, and it’s truly beautiful.

All of a sudden, the drive feels like an adventure again.

The winding ribbons of the freeways are so bright it hurts the eyes.

It’s almost too much; too crazy. I’ve never seen anything so out of control, so wanton, so… American.

At this height, as the plane begins its final descent, the City of Angels wears a halo; a filthy crown of smog encircling countless square miles.

It’s not the picturesque hills and “Victorians” of San Francisco, and it’s hard to fall instantly in love with LA. Even from a distance, she’s clearly a filthy whore of a city.

As I step out of the plane at LAX I’m wondering what new tricks she’ll be able to teach me.

All of her lights and her shapes, the loves and despairs, the smiles and the tears are veiled from view.

As the sun descends and the fog rises, 49 square miles dissolve into a gentle orange haze.

From the city’s hills you stare down into nothingness. You are alone. You are quiet. You can sleep and dream quiet dreams.

Because the city is there when you need it; waiting for you to dive in and swallow the full force of life.

But it also knows when to leave you alone.

A perfect balance.

There’s a mountain range out there which didn’t exist this morning.

All across the forested hills a few miles to the west, the clouds have gathered and risen in majestic snowy peaks, spilling over the dark green foliage and glowing in the evening light.

It’s breathtaking, and I have to make an effort to keep my eyes where they need to be – on the road.

Another five miles and the fog has gathered fully. As the traffic races down the curves of the freeway ahead of me, it’s momentarily lit by a fan of Jacob’s Ladders.

I want to take a photo, but I can’t possibly do it justice through a windscreen at freeway speeds. It’s probably dangerous too.

Instead, I just drink it in; commit it to memory.

Big scenery in a Big Country.