LA -- a book from :B (Pt. XIII)
Continued from: When in Madison and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, if Anthony ever dreamed he would be down and out in Los Angeles, he did not dream Panto would be part of the equation, nor that he would participate in Panto’s discord. Maybe Anthony has been hitting the art supplies a little heavy, squeezing paint tubes and adrenal glands of all that they contain, but the issue of befriending a cripple, and an odd one at that, feels preordained, with all of the divine associations still intact. Anthony sketches Panto from memory from time to time, and these depictions all diverge from one another more than they converge on the substance of memory. A captivation with the mutability of Panto’s face has kept Anthony from focusing his attention on the figures and faces of Los Angeles’ glamorous denizens, much as their beauty or rugged good looks awe, and a lack of adequate attention may in turn forestall his consorting with and knowledge of such people as he sees on a daily basis. When considering his place in the fragmented menagerie, whose streets resist concise definition, inspiring a lack of feeling by way of their incongruity, the memory of Catholic mass and its phenomenon comes to mind, until a tipping point is reached, and the past becomes heavy with meaning in contrast to the pressed and brittle day to day. Disinclination is moved by the sluice as would a wheel in water. Texts, though, never materialize upon the first blush. That initial memory that caused the resolution to text, however, continues to infatuate. At other times when the forms and colors of the Catholic mass spontaneously produced, Anthony was hiding to the library in downtown Los Angeles, riding its escalators alongside the downtrodden, or else he was walking toward the ocean with his surfboard in tow alongside the elect, both of which settings featured the homeless at the periphery…
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a year ago · Russell Block
