WHISPERS THROUGH AMERICA

[trigger warning: discussion of suicide]

[There, you’ve been warned. You should also be warned that even I don’t like the kid very much in this chapter. He can be a very whiny and extremely stubborn fool from time to time. Even so, this is not some fluff piece to praise and glorify his lifestyle. This is what really happened.]

Joseph Campbell called it “the abyss”, or “the dark night of the soul.” Nietzsche called it Zarathustra’s “down-going”. Chuck Pahlaniuk, author of Fight Club, called it “hitting bottom.”

The kid had no idea how to hit bottom, but he knew he had to try. How would he know when he was finished? He figured that it was one of those things that you just know when you get there.

He’d always been passionate not only about stories, but about a life that embodied the greatest truths contained within them. Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces was not just a tool of comparative mythology to him. It was a road map. The kid had struggled through the grief of discovering that his life was going nowhere. He had received a call to adventure and answered it with passionate action. He had met friends and helpers who guided him along the way. Now he was barreling towards his worst fears and the most desolate stage of his life. He had to see it through – go the whole way, nothing held back. Otherwise it would all be a play-act. The kid had to know who he really was when the chips were down.

He dawdled after saying goodbye to Elijah. Just like his first night out in St. Louis, he spent the night at a cheap hotel – this time in Hollywood. He found that the whole journey repeated itself in cycles like this, echoing the same themes over and over. One of these themes was that he always resisted going further. He always dipped his toe so timidly in the water before diving in. Even his eagerness to strike out after the dullness of Venice Beach was barely enough to carry him through the next day.

Hollywood on a bright morning was spectacular. The kid played the happy tourist for a while, ambling down the Walk of Fame and taking pictures of the sidewalk stars. The rush of childlike joy was incredible.

Being an architectural nerd, the kid had never dreamed he could simply stroll on over to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock house, a circle of ancient-looking stucco buildings arranged around a quiet grove on a low hill overlooking the city. Inside it felt like a Zen retreat, a world apart from the bustle of LA. The interior was still closed due to COVID, but the grounds were a welcome rest.

From there, he stocked up on a few supplies – a tarp from Home Depot, another battery brick for his phone – and planned to make his way up into the Hollywood Hills to hunker down for the night. That bus journey took him the rest of the evening.

The kid immediately despised the Los Angeles buses. They seemed to be to Los Angeles as the subways are to New York, but vastly less efficient, much more expensive, and terribly convoluted. The entire city is an irregular patchwork of districts that sit at random angles against each other, and the bus lines reflect the chaos in their incomprehensible system of letters and numbers and colors that may as well have been assigned at random. It’s a city you have to learn by heart, rather than figuring it out by any rational process. If you know where the major boulevards and avenues are located, then you can usually get within a reasonable distance of your destination – and the kid was quite happy to travel on foot – but for the out-of-the-way kind of places, you have to navigate an insane mess of smaller bus routes. Sometimes these routes just don’t run, or they run on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or they cancel at the last minute, or they just happen to run an hour off schedule. To his great frustration, the kid found that Google maps was the most reliable way to check the bus times, but only in the way that taking a shit just happens to be the best way to evacuate waste from the human body – there had to be a better way to do it, but there simply wasn’t.

Clambering up a steep hillside in the pitch black of night, he was literally trembling as he hunkered down in a bush for a moment to calm himself down. Going further seemed too risky, but staying so close to the road and the beginning of the path was even riskier. He was surrounded by wealthy estates just a hundred feet away on either side. What if a concerned citizen noticed him? His heart beat like a maniac as he imagined the cops or the park rangers around every corner. He tried to lay out the facts calmly for himself: there was no going back, not at this time of night. He was already tired enough to fall asleep right away. And so what if he was discovered? He would just tell them he didn’t want to sleep on the sidewalk and disturb anyone’s home or business, that he didn’t want to be bothered or to bother anyone else, and that since he had a little camping experience, he’d just hike on up into the woods for a night. It was the truth. He tried to believe it.

Pressing on upward through a narrow path, he still felt like a criminal. He dressed in black denim to avoid being seen, which would have the unfortunate effect of making him look far more suspicious if he did happen to be caught. His heart was still thudding as he settled into a hiding spot among some dry grasses. It was only a few feet from the path, but he had seen no other signs of anyone else around, and it was so high up in the hills that he figured he was in the clear. He set his alarm for five in the morning and finally lay down.

That was another first for the kid: sleeping outdoors and alone. He didn’t know how long he’d actually slept in between the tossing and turning, listening to every rustle of leaves and every animal that skittered through the brush, always imagining someone turning up to discover him. The whole night had felt dangerous, but when the sun rose, all his fears of being found had suddenly evaporated to nothing. He greeted the morning with outstanding joy. The sunrise over the city was a golden celebration that made him want to sing.

The kid had more firsts to accomplish that day in the city. He found a laundromat where he spent a few hours fumbling with the machines and hoping he was doing things right. The kid had always felt like everybody else had read a manual for life that he had never been able to find. He might as well have been an alien from another planet. The laundromat was an environment so basic and so banal that he felt like a moron for not simply knowing instinctively how to wash his clothes, like a baby duck is supposed to instinctively know how to swim when you throw it into the water. He got overcharged for detergent and dryer sheets because he didn’t know any better, and he left them on a bench when he left because he didn’t have room to stuff everything into his backpack, but he was delighted with himself again anyway. He had gotten away with something. He had pushed through his confusion and gotten it done. As far as he was concerned, it was a grand success.

He gave his sleeping bag away, along with the tarp he’d just bought the day before. He was already struggling with the severe importance of maintaining a light backpack, and the perpetual urge to try to compress more stuff inside to make life easier. Finding that balance is unfortunately one of those things that only experience can teach.

His next purchase was an iPad. It was lightweight and compact, but it was nearly a thousand dollars and if he didn’t manage to make enough off art to cover that investment then he’d just have taken the final step off into the financial deep end. It was a serious gamble; he knew that. That’s the point in life where he was – take gambles, try new things, try anything. He was getting desperate. Any new chance he could hook onto seemed like manna from heaven. It would stave off the despair for a while. It would make him feel like he was really living and making something out of his life.

He spent that night scribbling half-assed art on his new tablet at another cheap motel in Redondo, and told himself it would have to be the last hotel for a long time.

The next few days he tried to enjoy his aimless wanderings down the coastline. San Diego was another pointless destination that gave him a sense of purpose, but he was in no hurry this time. Still, none of the beaches really appealed to him and nothing seemed worth doing. He spent most of his time either walking or planning his next move. A Netflix subscription kept him sane at night while he finally watched Breaking Bad, part of an ongoing effort to catch up on pop culture.

He thought he’d be clever and scout a night at a secluded tip of land called White Point beach in San Pedro. After waiting an hour on a bus that never came, he power-walked his way through a sea of houses packed into tight rows. It was a suburban prison he could not escape from.

After five endless hours, he found the beach. There was a small area with benches where another homeless man was setting up his tent by the tables. “Do you see the spiders too, man? They’re everywhere .. must be thousands of ‘em.”

The kid gave a pained smile. This man was at least friendly, and seemed to be of no harm at all. It was more sad than anything else. All the same, the kid didn’t want to stay too close. He said goodnight and ventured further down the road to the rocky beach and the surf at the bottom of the cliff. It was not a beach in the sense that he had thought it was based on the satellite image on Google maps. It was more of a dock with some palm trees and a wide patio with tables and some palm trees for shelter. The bathroom hut had working water fountains that he thanked the stars for, drinking deeply and filling up as much as he could carry. The most comfortable place he could find to spend the night was a lumpy patch of ground in a partial grove of palm trees, but at least the whole area at the bottom of the cliff there was secluded enough that the kid figured he wouldn’t be bothered. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave him a night of rest.

The kid climbed back up through thick fog, catching another bus further south. He arrived in Long Beach to find a surprisingly calm city. It was like Venice without a boardwalk. Row after row of apartment buildings overlooked a blank stretch of sand that extended as far as the kid could see. There were bathrooms and showers, here, too. It was a comfortable spot. He spent that afternoon trying to relax, but sunning himself on the sand had never really been his style.

There was a beautiful library in town where he spent an afternoon lamenting his lack of privacy with which to make art. His art, his writing, it all suffered under the weight of strangers’ eyes. Even if they were totally unconcerned with the kid, the kid was concerned with them. It felt like a wall of crushing artist’s block. He simply could not get “in the mood,” or so he told himself. The truth was that he was never really planning on getting into the mood at all, and deep down he knew it.

He had not come out to California to suddenly achieve a spectacular rise from the bottom. It was not the time for building or for improving himself. This art thing was just a delusion to shield him from the rapidly oncoming insanity of being broke, on the street, with nothing. He would eventually stop telling himself he was so different from all the broken-eyed vagrants and zoned-out addicts he shared the sidewalks with. His warm illusions were being stripped away from him, pried from his fingers as he struggled to hold on. The streets were less of a noble forge that he had hoped would beat him into manhood, maturing him past his childish naivety; and more of a meat grinder that threatened to destroy him completely. In theory it sounded good, but in practice he was begging for mercy.

He had no idea what was about to come, and that sheer uncertainty terrified him more than anything he’d ever known. The fervor that had brought him this far had now deserted him. When you come face to face with death, your poetic ideals can no longer help you. The kid was on the fast track to a primal reckoning that would teach him what he really believed, and what he didn’t.

Everything was spread out for miles on Long Beach, so it took the kid two hours to walk back to the spot where he slept on the beach. He walked until his feet stung like he was walking on knives. He thought about what would happen if he just kept walking – further south, further down. He didn’t have anything better to do. After all, why try to maintain structure and discipline at this point? There was no reason to keep behaving. He could do anything. But he needed sleep, so he stuck around the beach until morning, shivering again under the sea breeze.

His next expedition to the next bus line took him on another long walk. He was readjusting some weight in his backpack when he heard someone calling out to him.

“You! Hey, you!”

A construction worker in a bright yellow hard-hat was leaning over the top of the fence in his worksite. He was pointing at the kid.

“You’re too young to be out on the street like that, man. Sign up for People-Ready. That’s PeopleReady, not LaborReady. They used to be LaborReady.

They’ll get you a job in a day! Just go into an office and say you’re lookin’ for work.”

The kid had only the vaguest idea of what a temp agency was. His plans for work had consisted of putting out online applications on Indeed, and maybe trying out Worldpackers or Workaway as a last resort. He could hitchhike out to some remote farm for a work exchange; it would be another adventure. Trying for work at a temp agency had never even occurred to him, and this conversation felt oddly scripted, like a sponsored commercial.

“I’m David.” The man said. They couldn’t exactly shake hands due to the fact that David was twenty feet above the kid on that construction fence, but the sentiment was there.

The kid thanked him for the advice. He nodded along to all the suggestions, eager to listen to the opportunity, even if he figured it would come to nothing. Shortly after that, he reached his next destination – the Surfliner train in Santa Ana – and signed up right away for PeopleReady on their website. He stopped in irritated disgust when the form required him to list a job reference who could walk into an office with him. That was a lost cause.

Still, he enjoyed the ride. Trains bore all the romance of travel for the kid. The reminded him of his family’s time in Europe when he was real young; and on top of that, they were the safest, fastest, most comfortable way to travel long-distance. The fifty bucks for the ticket stung, but the kid thought it was worth it. He booked another cheap motel on the way to San Diego. It hadn’t taken long for him to burn his way through the four grand he had saved up. Now he was below a thousand.

He got McDonald’s and holed up in the motel. Hours of doodles and half-assed, half-finished projects had at least yielded him a single commission to illustrate a character. It was exactly the opportunity he wanted. It felt like squeezing water from a stone to get a single drop, but at least it was work. When he woke late the next morning, dazed and exhausted, the client had vanished from the internet without a trace. The kid had sent over watermarked sketches before he fell asleep last night, proving that he was doing the work and that it was well on its way to becoming a finished masterpiece. Not only did the client never pay a cent, but he didn’t even have the decency to explain anything about why he’d changed his mind.The kid’s fighting spirit died right then and there. It didn’t feel like he’d been scammed or jerked around by a single shitty person – it felt like the whole world had betrayed him at a critical moment. As he continued slipping to even lower depths of mental health, he checked out, found another bus, and rode down to Ocean Beach.

Trevor had suggested Ocean Beach as a good place to meet other travelers. It had a reputation as a hippie mecca, not unlike Venice. Then again, Trevor was the kind of wide-open puppydog who could charm anyone into anything. He claimed you could just walk into the Ocean Beach hostel and find work. The kid never even tried.

He was so shut up inside himself that he felt like he was behind iron bars. There was something between him and the rest of the world, something that felt insurmountable. He mused that San Pedro had been cursed – that he’d never felt happy since leaving that town. The truth was, he’d never felt happy for a long time. His passion had all leaked out of him until he’d finally arrived at this cold, grey coastline that felt like the edge of the world.

“Now, when we fought, you had that eye of the tiger, man; the edge!” The kid remembered Apollo Creed’s fiery words to Rocky in the third movie. “And now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning. You know what I mean?”

The kid had no idea what Apollo meant. It was like some kind of code that he couldn’t quite crack. All the kid knew was that he felt like an old man already. Merely at the tail-end of his teenage years, he was already yearning for the raw fervor that a rapid maturity had given him though puberty. Just a few years back, he had doubled his rep counts in pushups, squats and pullups. He had grown more as a person than he ever had before. Now at age twenty, he was beginning to plateau. He was even slipping back now after a long depression had sucked all the joy from his life. How was he supposed to get his fire back again? He had lost the conviction of his Christian faith, and now even the esoteric hope of his new spiritual quest seemed to have deserted him. He had nothing left to fight for.

I've been walking around the beach while the sun sets. I finished Into the Wild. 

[The kid stubbornly waited until after the beginning of his own vagabond experience to finally seek out Chris McCandless’ story, offended by the comparison and how it seemed to undercut the unique purpose of his own self-destructive spiritual quest.]

I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I feel like I've come to the end of the line, at least as far as the past few weeks are concerned. I just haven't made it to the slabs yet. 

I hate it when I can't find a reason to live before the sun goes down. Feels like if it goes down, I'll have run out of time. Like that one nightmare I had. Things always seem to come back to that. 

Something tells me I should keep shedding any and all inhibitions and just do whatever I feel like, fuck the law, fuck people's opinions ... fuck especially my own hang-ups. 

But it's still cold and I'll still freeze if I give up any more clothing, won't I? And I can't just live without a job. If I choose charity, then I'm just being a freeloader. I can't do that in good conscience. I can't. I won't. 

I'm considering just leaving, just walking until I find something ... something. Anything? I don't know.

I'm tired. I want to know what I should be doing. I want a purpose and the ability to fulfill it. 

Why should I do anything? Why should I be alive? 

Why shouldn't I have killed myself two years ago? 

Can you answer me that? 

If there is a god, I hate you. 

If there isn't, I guess I'm fucked. 

I guess the only thing to do is have some fun. You're alive one day and dead the next; money and power and pleasure is the only thing that matters -- only the now, only the here. This, this, this moment is all we can ever have. 

There is nothing new under the sun. 

We are all slowly rotting corpses. 

Some of us just rot faster than others. 

My last will and testament is: fuck yourselves. Die painfully. None of you cared. And neither did I. I'm not blaming anyone -- I'm blaming everyone. We're all guilty of apathy and hate and we should all kill ourselves at the nearest opportunity. 

It's getting cold out here. 

I've been listening to some of my favorite songs -- years, decades of emotion bottled up, I thought over all of it, and two little tears was all I could spare for it. Just two little tears. That was it. Two tears, a little runny nose, and a stone face. A beach getting colder and darker, and I'm no closer to any kind of answer or purpose.

Nothing.