"La Tuna Canyon" (Pt 1 of 2)

Van Nuys, July, 1980

We flew up the freeway on-ramp at Burbank and Sepulveda and the little stereo wheezed and whined as the car caught up to freeway speed.

Late at night those freeways open up and reveal their immen­sity, five lanes on each side, usually choked with millions of cars and trucks everyday all day but now they became huge dark concrete rivers spotted with brake lamps and headlights for miles ahead. Our destination was a place called La Tuna Canyon, somewhere out on the other side of the valley.

It was a long drive, out to where the lights of nighttime suburbia no longer flowed together in endless mass. Here they shone in pockets of new develop­ment, separated by areas of great flat black darkness that in sunlight of daytime only reveal empty lots dotted with scrub brush, rotting mat­tres­ses, abandoned appliances, rusting masses of twisted metal and dead cars.

At night it was much like the dark of desert, and it seemed far away. This was undeveloped land. I knew then if I were to take the same drive twenty years down the line those empty ignored lots would be filled with apart­ments and condos with dumb names and security parking; or redundant mini-malls with fast food waste and dollar stores. Clean cut concrete ripe for urban graffiti and San Andreas tremors.

We settled in as Jim Ladd pontificated in his too-perfect radio voice about injustices of some kind.

“Where do we get off?” I kept asking as the drive got lengthier and lengthier.
“Up there” Flores kept saying. I was getting agitated. Flores just giggled.

After a way-too-long drive we got off the freeway, pulling into a pocket of civilization. We cruised slowly along a deserted apart­ment lined street until Flores directed me to pull over. We stopped in front of a multi-storied apartment building and I tuned off the motor. On the front doors it read "Canyon View Rest Home". I stared at it in disbelief.

"You gotta be fucking kidding me?" I said.
"Nope...this is it, he lives here...with his aunt or someth­ing...just wait here" said Flores.

In a flash he was gone, and I was alone. As I sat there waiting for him I tried to fathom a drug dealer who lived with an aged relative in a rest home. The thought was baffling in itself, yet I knew Flores, and I knew he was a beacon for things on the edge.

The street was empty, still and silent. A slight breeze blew in and over the car like a spectre, the trees shifting and swaying in the dark, their movement defined in the shadowy dim of the street lights. A dog barked in the distance. Time passed slowly and I cursed at the paranoid inconvenience.

After what seemed like an eternity Flores reappeared with his connection, a guy named "Fred". Heavy set with short jet-black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in camouf­lage pants and a loud Hawaiian shirt, he floated by with great bounding steps, his feet seemingly wanting to go in dif­ferent directions.

They walked past me and Flores motioned for me to get out of the car and follow. I sighed. We got into another car parked down the street, a big four door thing that looked much like what an undercover cop would drive. Fred started the engine. I realized then that we had to go someplace else to get Flores his god damn weed, knowing full well at that moment that there is nothing worse than a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend at one-thirty in the morning.

Seldom do these things go smoothly.

(c) A.C. James