The World in Detail
Night walks in my neighborhood
A wisp of jazz drifts through the night air, curling round a lamppost like a cat: the sound of a single saxophone playing in an apartment on 6th Street, some unknown neighbor letting his loneliness escape through a brass horn, through a window, through the shadow-battered alleys between the backs of buildings, through the darkness like an incense flavored with the dried-up years of his life…music of the night, a poetry of walled-in hearts, of shadows on drawn shades, of the gentle terrors of memory. Sharing his sorrows unknowingly with me as I walked past his second-story soul, he played on, I walked on, the street was long and the night was long and my way was long, and I soon left the horn man behind.
Sometimes I don't go anywhere when I go on my night walks, but usually I wander down to La Cienega somehow, marching down busy boulevards between the traffic and the neon, or ambling along side streets under shadows of the parkway trees. Down on La Cienega, catercorner from a towering mall, is a Borders
bookstore with an oddly ramshackle little coffee counter by a sweeping corner window on the second floor. That's my usual anchor point for night walks; there's espresso there, and students digging into schoolbooks with their cellphones jammed against their ears as they read, a few eccentric regulars burying their hornrims in some esoteric text, and me staring out the window at the headlights and taillights
passing below as I nurse my decaf. I never stay more than half an hour unless I'm meeting a friend there. It's my turnaround; the night itself's my goal.
You can see nothing of this world from a car: but what I see and hear and smell and feel is the world in detail, the naked textures of the night...I walk through Park La Brea, the hulking towers with their rows of windows recede like desert monoliths into the fragrant night, and I come upon a stairway that dives boldly underground beneath a blaring lamp...here I see a row of cars in a carport,
there a row of phones by a burger stand, appliances waiting for a hand to wake them, as so many sleepers likewise wait behind those windows in the air...I stop in at the newsstand on Wilshire, see if there's a chess game going or a new rag on the shelves in that little island of light...I cut through the park by the museum and breathe in the odors of sage and rosemary that grow by the fences...I go home to my fourth-floor room and pass by the parking lot where my girlfriend and I forgave each other on one glowing midnight late last year. Walking, walking, seeing, touching, hearing, smelling. Smiling invisible smiles at other shadows walking by on their own way, feeling the reverberations of all those lives in all those windows in the sky.
Here, in my city, in my neighborhood, in the world in detail.
Words & pictures by Richard Risemberg
Go to A Word from Eric Miller