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Alta l July 2, 2024

All Souls Cemetery, Long Beach

In the Cemetery Where Jenni Rivera Is Buried

Because Long Beach, California, is a place where a moonlit Marine can easily find a muscle queen willing to kneel in the soggy sand and fellate him while foghorns and ship horns bellow in the distance, certain residents refer to it as Schlong Beach. My girlfriend, best friend, and I learned this tasteless sobriquet upon moving into a ground-floor condo in the middle of the city’s gayborhood. A fat masseuse rented the unit to us. She insisted that we pay her in cash and that we keep the potted ficus moping on her veranda alive. The landlady also imposed a rule that made our home feel unlike a home: no hanging anything on the walls.

We agreed to her terms, but the emptiness soon grew oppressive.

Our home felt like a generic coffin.

LA Times l February 15, 2024

Bjork by Spike Jones, in LA Times

These never-before-seen photos of Björk at Chateau Marmont are giving otherworldly glee

Adulthood had given Mike a power he was eager to exploit; he could buy alcohol legally. Since my underage friends and I relied on people like Mike to supply us with Boone’s Strawberry Hill, we used caution around them. Mocking these losers could endanger our access to saccharine wines. It also could endanger us.

Mike gestured at my face with his half-empty bottle of Zima and asked, “Anyone ever told you you look like Buh-Jork?”

“You mean … Björk?”

Mike ignored my correction, instead asking, “What are you? You’re so … exotic.” He rambled on about Buh-jork’s “kind-of-Asian-hotness” until friends came to my rescue.

LA Times l May 17, 2023

Screenshot of LA Times article

A Witch Goes to a Strip Mall and…

The last time she’d heard glass break, her head had been used to shatter it. He — she hated to even think his name — had slammed her head into the long oval mirror hanging in his bathroom. She had protected her face by lowering her head, tucking her chin against her neck, and for days after she had harvested pieces of glass from her scalp. When she told her cousin Valentina what he had done, she offered to have her husband “take care of him,” but the witch had told her, “No, prima. I can handle it. He’ll be sorry.”

From the ATM, the witch had withdrawn $300.

Tasteful Rude l March 14, 2023

Photo of a man holding a surf board at Venice Beach

Beautifully Ruined: Kate Braverman’s Lithium for Medea

The last time I visited Venice Beach, I made one of my wildest teen fantasies come true.

At one of the many beachfront stores where bathing suits cost five times what they should, I bought myself a gold lamé string bikini. The day was overcast but warm enough to be mostly naked outdoors and so I wore my purchase out of the shop and onto the footpath.

A nasty breeze blew my bowl cut crooked. The clouds parted. I wondered if the 24-karat glare from my bikini was bothering any seagulls. I curled my toes. Moist earth sucked them. I thought of Rose, the cocaine-fueled protagonist of Lithium for Medea, the late Kate Braverman’s first novel. In one of the book’s later chapters, Rose has an epiphany about the wetness that I let lap and slurp at my feet. Rose arrives at the understanding that our ocean isn’t pacific.

New York Times l April 28, 2022

Former Cop Don Jackson on TV

Former police officer Don Jackson helped reveal the brutal reality of policing for Southern California’s Black citizens

Before George Holliday caught the L.A.P.D.’s beating of Rodney King on camera, the former police officer Don Jackson helped reveal the brutal reality of policing for Southern California’s Black citizens.

The night of Jan. 14, 1989, Don Jackson, a police officer turned activist, arrived in Long Beach, Calif., riding in the passenger seat of a rental car driven by Jeffrey Hill, another activist and an off-duty state corrections officer. Both men wore plain clothes, and clandestine chaperones escorted their Buick. A van carrying a television crew tailed the rental car.