Tales Of An Upside-Down Traveller, Part 2: Churros and Los Angeles By Foot

I’ve always felt that you get to know the soul of a city through the soles of your feet.

At seven o’clock on a Monday evening, it felt like I was going to come away with knowledge of the soul of Los Angeles that would have made Lucifer jealous. Of course that is an exaggeration, but as Next and I looked at the long stretch of lights lining South Sepulveda Boulevard that climbed gently away from us and fell away just as gently behind us, my feet believed it completely.

Oh how we’d laughed and mocked when, with our bellies full of take-away Mexican food, the response to our request for directions to the cinema was, “Oh you’re gonna want to drive or take a bus. That’s a long way. Bus stop is up over the other side of the road, on the next block. I sure as hell wouldn’t be walking. It’s way too far to walk.”

We walked. Laughing smugly, we walked. And walked. And walked some more. At about this time we started swearing – mainly at whoever the fucked up excuse for a cartographer was who drew the small map we had purloined from the reception desk of our hotel.

And as we walked, Los Angeles spoke to me through the soles of my feet, making clear the subtle and the overt hints it had presented all my other senses from the moment I had arrived.

“Here,” it said, “Is a place that stands in direct denial of the ground it sits upon. Here is a place that exists where it ought not and announces its defiance loudly.”

It was a distracting yet compelling message and, as we strolled hand in hand, laughing and bantering along the long slightly undulating stretch of road, I opened myself up to it.

Everything we passed and moved over spoke of artifice imposed upon the landscape without concession. L.A was not a place that had evolved to meet the demands of its surroundings, but rather in spite of them.

It was the flat, harsh yellow glare of the early morning sky that had first brought me up from sleep that morning into a state of disoriented semi-consciousness. Gradually other sensations filtered through my bewilderment: the light weight of the slightly coarse linen sheet that wrapped around my limbs, warm in the open space beside me; the mixed scents of sex, perfume, shampoo and burning tobacco; the dry, slightly metallic, burnt and used taste of the air that was being carried to me from an open doorway; the slightly muted sounds of cars made odd to me by the lack of the accompanying hiss of tyres on bitumen.

I opened my eyes and breathed in deeply, absorbing the thrill of excitement and disbelief. It was true, it was reality. I’d made it. I was actually in America.

When I had first made my weary way from the belly of the Qantas Airbus, through the dull sheen of LAX customs and officials and into the dizzyingly thrilling kiss and waiting arms of Next, I had little energy or presence of mind to indulge in my curiosity about my new surroundings. Instead what was uppermost in my mind were five things: my urgent need to go to the loo, a desperate longing for a strong coffee and something to eat, the necessity for a long, hot shower, the overwhelming need to fuck Next until we had saturated every bit of furniture and bedding we came into contact with and we were no longer able to move, and sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.

The elevator shuddered and issued a feeble, “Bing!” as it came to rest at the main concourse. The doors slid open reluctantly and I could see that the construction that had been taking place on the lower levels of LAX was doing its level best to creep into every bit of extraneous space available. Everywhere I looked people were being pressed in against each walls, desks, tapes and each other in wide, slow moving queues and squirming, multi-hued bunches. About a third of the distance between the top of the massed heads and below the high ceilings, I could see signs that showed there were in fact some toilets in this place and, even better yet, a place that served food and coffee.

Her fingers gripped my hand tighter and dragged me into the mass towards the signs that held so much latent promise. My bags juddered and bounced behind me, just as I juddered and bounced through the crowd.

We gained our primary destination and I left Next standing guard over my belongings while I performed my ablutions. I’m sure that were it not for the support of my bones I would have melted into a puddle on the floor out of sheer relief. That done, it was time to address my next most pressing urge: coffee and food. In that order. And fortunately the solution to that lay only a few metres away to our left.

The coffee was, not to put too fine a point on it, abysmal. It was warm...ish, and it was brown...ish and to this day I’m still entirely unconvinced as to the right “creamer” has to any claims for existence. But the “coffee” did contain the requisite amount of caffeine to suit my needs. Aside from Next, America was not doing a grand job of advertising its attractions so far.

That was when she introduced me to churros. Oh. My. Oh my, oh my, oh my. Welcome to the world of junk food - the land that invented takeaway and corn syrup. That churro (actually there were two of them in a paper bag that I’m sure was only there to absorb a tiny portion of runaway grease) was so obscenely and sinfully delicious that my tongue wanted to leap out of my mouth and do a lap of honour around that little airport café. It was so wrong and so bad and entirely scrumptious. A crunchy, sugary, cinnamony, doughnutty, custardy, fatty blend of all that makes arteries go clang and bowels go on strike. It was that good.

“I told you,” she said, her words dripping more smugness than the churro dripped grease and sugar. “I told you you’d love them. Didn’t I tell you they were good? I did, didn’t I? I told you.”

“Mmmhmmm,” was the only reply I could muster around the mouthful of deep-fried dough and sugar and the all-encompassing replete feeling of fullness emanating from my belly.

I kissed her then with my cinnamon lips. Her kisses tasted infinitely better than the churros.

Time then, to see to the urges that remained - our hotel beckoned.

Standing outside the entrance to the airport reminded me again that I was no longer on my home sod. Even though I had thought I had prepared myself for the sight of cars driving on the wrong side of the road, it still caught me by surprise. I managed not to be a complete idiot about it for all of fifteen seconds – that lasted up until the moment I had to cross the road. Of course I had looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic and then jumped in surprise when I was nearly bowled over by a minivan coming from the other direction. She was chuckling about that on and off the whole time we waited for out shuttle-bus to arrive. And when she wasn’t laughing aloud, her eyes were showing me that given the chance, she’d be rolling on the ground cackling until she passed out from lack of breath.

But standing on that traffic island, in the hot and pre-cooked air, underneath the rumbling overpass above us, surrounded by roadways and buildings that edged out any glimpses of the sky, pondering the goodness of churros and watching the traffic roll past us, I had confirmation of one major American stereotype: Americans like things to be big. Everything was huge and oversized – of particular note to me at that moment were the cars.

Now, Australia is a car-loving country. In point of fact, you can more readily divide most Australians into two competing religions – Ford worshippers and Holden idolisers - than you can by any other distinction. Big, petrol-guzzling, loud and thundering, and above all, fast cars were the highest of aspirations for pretty much everyone I grew up with. “You just bought a three million dollar apartment in Double Bay? Huh. But I bet you don’t have a Torana XU-1 with triple barrel double overhead carbies, do ya?” That though, has changed over the years as the price of fuel - and the big cars that chew it - has climbed and climbed, outpacing wage growth like a Saturn V rocket outpaces a pensioner climbing a step-ladder. These days, cheap, small to medium sized cars dominate the roadways of Australia.

The result of that was that I experienced an overwhelmingly surreal sense of disconnect from reality as I watched one gigantic hunk of metal thunder past after another – the occupants of each behemoth dwarfed to the point of looking like they weren’t old enough to drive – even if the blue rinse said otherwise. I laughed when I saw a tiny woman of about five foot nothing climb up into the driver seat of some fuckoff huge black SUV pickup like she was scaling K2, and I laughed when some seemingly tiny bloke climbed down out of a similar vehicle only to realise that he probably topped out at six and a half feet tall. It was like being inside a living M.C. Escher drawing.

The shuttle bus drew up to the curb beside us. I laughed with childish delight again. It looked just like a miniature version of every school bus I had ever seen in American movies or television – only with a more subdued and tasteful paint job. We clambered aboard, stashed the bags in the rack behind the drivers seat (shit, that was on the wrong side of the bus too, and fuck me sideways if it didn’t look better kitted out and more luxurious and comfortable than my lounge room) and collapsed into our seats. The driver plonked himself down in his recliner chair, closed the doors and started off. Next hooked her arm in under mine, wrapped as much of herself as possible, gave me a few more better-than-churros kisses and nuzzled her head down on my shoulder. The bus broke out from under the masses of concrete onto a very, very wide stretch of concreted road and into the harsh and hazy sunshine.

I gawked like a proper tourist and made a mental map of our progress as we bundled our way through the up-sized traffic to our hotel as Next quietly instructed me as to the proper amount and way to pay and tip our driver.

Between us and the far-off low hillsides and mountains, everything was so flat it looked like the landscape had been steam-pressed and covered in concrete. Somewhere off in the distance was a cluster of high-rises that looked like a handful of needles stabbed into the middle of a dancehall floor. Of course, like most areas that surround airports, this area was largely industrial, which added to the sense of temporary and impermanent newness of the city we were travelling through. It reminded me rather unfavourably of Brisbane and all the reasons I left it.

After that, the hotel itself came as a delightful surprise. In amongst all the wide flat roads, the flat concrete landscape, the intermittent concrete, steel and glass blocks of taller buildings, the slapped together and temporary but functional look of industrial buildings, the Embassy Suites South LAX Hotel made a mockery of the impression given by its name and looked both astonishingly incongruous and immensely inviting. It looked like it belonged in an old episode of Zorro; like a building that was still locked in a time before California was dragged into the union and still looked to back Spain as home.

We walked through the heavy glass and brass doors into the cool foyer, and the illusion of time travel deepened. Terracotta tiles beneath our feet, tiled mosaics along the walls in bright azures and jades, trickling and splashing fountains and cool and verdant green of ferns and palms and all those plant things that I don’t know the name of for fear that my knowing will cause them to instantly wither and die. The foyer opened out into a tranquil inner courtyard, wrapped around by four floors of wrought-iron balconies and walkways, the blue of the sky visible through the skylights up above. We pilfered a dozen or so flyers, maps and guides - placed by the foyer specifically to tempt wayward tourists like ourselves in such pilfering and hopefully (I guess) to indulge in whatever salacious and arcane pleasures might be had in the city of Los Angeles – and made our way through the courtyard to the elevators. More glass here, and more better-than-churros kisses before the doors opened up on our floor.

On the short walk along the walkway balcony to our room, I divided my time between looking down into the green atrium below, and unrepentant and libidinous perving on Next’s arse as she sashayed along in front of me. Her arse won the contest for my attention well before we’d reached the halfway point.

I followed Next and her arse up to the door and over the threshold into our room, or rather, into our suite. The suite was a subtly confusing mix of typical hotel furnishing combined with some large solid antiqued wardrobes and the illusion of space created by the division of the space into two rooms. The sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, newspapers on coffee tables and two fuck-off huge flat screen TVs added to the unexpected “homely” feel. I watched Next sashay into the adjoining bedroom and made to follow. I almost missed a step as I passed the bathroom and saw the shower. Oh gods, I needed a shower. But more urgently than that…

I closed on her and my hands were in her hair, at her throat, on her body, my lips were on hers and I was kissing her with all the urgent hunger, all the hurtful longing, the breathless lust and the overwhelming love that had built up over the seemingly endless time we had been separated. Thought vanished from my mind, my body felt light and hyper-sensitive to every touch. Aroused is too small and meek a word for the feelings kissing her and having her in my arms brought to life in me. Her kisses and her hands and her body and the moans that escaped her lips spoke the same things to me, “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed this, I want this, I need this. Always. I love you, I want you. Always, always, always.”

Somehow, time started again. We came back from somewhere the other side of the Andromeda galaxy and found, somewhat to our surprise, that we still needed to breathe. She buried her face into my shoulder. Her hair smelled of coconut and pineapple, like a tropical escape, and her cheek was soft and smooth against my neck. Her small fist thumped down on my chest. She lifted her head to look up at me.

“You made me dizzy.”

I grinned and peppered her face and lips with light kisses.

She grinned back and wrinkled her nose.

“And you need a shower.”

“Oh hell, yes. A shower. I definitely need a shower.”

“Well why don’t you do that and I’ll make you a coffee. They’ve got these lovely little coffee bags in the kitchen.”

“Screw the coffee, I want you.”

“Go on,” she laughed. “Go have your shower, stinky man.”

“I suppose that’s not a bad back-up plan. Tell you what, why don’t I have a shower while you have a smoke and make us coffee.”

She thumped my chest again. Grinning, I made for the shower.

There is nothing like a shower to make me feel human. A swim in the ocean comes close, but no amount of coffee or food or sleep approaches a shower for helping me feel awake, alive and functional as opposed to a scruffy, smelly, diurnal zombie. I stepped from the shower, towelled myself dry, wrapped the towel about my waist and padded barefoot past a steaming cup of coffee, across the lush carpet to the balcony where Next stood, wrapped my arms around her waist and kissed and nipped at her neck.

I looked over her shoulder, out across a busy roadway and the planes rumbling in and out of the airport, to the haze covered hills beyond.

“I’m here baby. I’m actually in America.” I chuckled at a sudden incongruous thought. “I never imagined I would say that. See how much you’ve corrupted me and how much I love you? I willingly and happily came to the land of the great Shaitan to be with you.”

She laughed, turned in my arms and kissed me. I kissed her right back, of course. I looked down onto her smiling face and instantly I was back out beyond the Andromeda again. Gods I love this woman. I knew that the coffee was destined to go cold and unappreciated.

The towel hit the floor somewhere between the balcony and the bed.

There is, I think, something that goes beyond sex. It’s that feeling of intimacy where all sense of boundaries and separation between two people disappears and “I” becomes “We” as everything else melts away. Not just your own drives and desires, but time, the surroundings, thoughts, become not so much insignificant, but rather all merge together into one singular, timeless and overwhelming shared Now. For all the disparaging of such a concept as being hopelessly flavourless and “vanilla” or irredeemably Mills and Boon romantic, and for all the increased social drive to push for the extreme edges of sexuality since the birth of the Pill and bell bottoms, nothing comes close to that sensation for me. That’s not to say that I don’t get a hell of a lot of pleasure out of indulging in some of those extremes, or that those extremes or even the most simplistic of forms of sex exclude such intimacy, but more that that feeling of the shared now is the pinnacle.

We found that eternal eye blink of a moment once again in the middle of the day, in a hotel bed in Los Angeles, with the roaring and rumbling of cars and airplanes playing in the background and it was, quite simply, glorious. Clothes and bedclothes were scattered over the entire room and the air reeked of sex. We could feel it on our skin, on the sheets; we could taste it in our mouths, on our lips and with each breath.

We curled up against each other, and slept.

We only slept for a couple of hours, but I hadn’t slept so well, so deeply and so comfortably in a long, long time - in truth, not since the last time I had slept with her in my arms. I stretched languidly as I woke, my body remembering the feel of our bodies moving against and with each other, of being inside her, of hands clamped on her wrists, her nails digging into my back, the smack of my palm on her bare skin, the hot liquid gush of her orgasm, the strong rhythmic squeezing of her cunt as I filled her, her hungry lips sucking our cum from my fingers, my arm across her throat, my fingers in her hair, her teeth in my shoulder, her heels pulling my closer, our bodies shaking and trembling. I stretched again and opened my eyes to see her watching me.

“Hey baby,” she said.

“Hey sweetheart,” was my reply.

“This place smells like someone’s been fucking. I think we should complain to management.”

“Dirty bastards,” I laughed. “But I reckon I can live with it. We’ll find a way to have our revenge. Know what I’d like right now though? I’d love a coffee, or maybe even something to eat as well. Is there somewhere nearby we can get a feed? Anything in those brochures?”

She sat up on the edge of the bed, sheets wrapped around her and hunted for the flyers and her clothes.

After rifling through the pamphlets, we reluctantly agreed that though it would be a suitably bizarre LA kinda way to enjoy an evening meal, the Medieval Recreation gig was a bit too rich and a bit out of our way to indulge in. Instead, we settled on the age old stand-by of dinner and a movie.

“You know what this means though, don’t you?”

“Mm?”

“I’ll have to have another shower.”

“Oh no! How will you cope? Two showers in one day? You’ll melt!”

“I’m livin’ on the edge, baby.”

Showered and dressed, we made our way back down to the lobby and prevailed upon the fella at the desk to give us some directions and a map. We looked at the map and the cinema didn’t seem that far away and it was a nice balmy evening we decided to forego a taxi and go by shank’s pony.

With my arm about her waist, we pushed open the hotel doors and walked out into the concrete landscape veneer that is Los Angeles and began to make our way along South Sepulveda Boulevard.