Flight from Heat and Unsaid Advice to the Young

Posted on July 9, 2002 in Cafes Reflections Weather

We’ve got to do something about the windows in the bedroom and the study. The late afternoon sun pummels that side of the house with an incessant barrage of photons from about four in the afternoon until seven in the evening when the roof of the condo across the street finally screens us from the attack. The morning air feels hot and flat, “like the inside of a bus” said fleep of his similar situation in North Hollywood. The inversion layer holds the smoke of the factories and of our cars down, shadowing the mountains with a sheer piece of cottony gauze. It’s not nearly as bad here on my hilltop as it is in fleep’s part of the Valley of the Valley Girls, but it is bad enough.

Before the sun can turn my condo into a broiler, I get in my truck and glide down the hill to Tully’s, to spend my afternoon writing to old Sixties and Seventies tunes. The barristes mostly ignore me (my favorites aren’t around today) and, before I take on the beginning of the second chapter for real this time, I take a moment to imagine the advice I’d give them, what I think I know about them. The girl working the counter today, a young, plump blonde, newly graduated from high school and aiming to matriculate in the fall at Pepperdine, barely trusts me. She thinks that I am like all the other older men who hang around the place, just interested in her body, of which I think she is slightly ashamed because she’s larger than most girls her age. What I’d like to tell her is that I am a Prozac eunuch. For another thing, a woman’s looks mean nothing to me if it is clear that she lacks a mind. My wife is both beautiful and intelligence. Perhaps I amplify her beauty a bit because of the intelligence and the energy that I love. Few seventeen and eighteen year olds interest me, except as I might be interested in a daughter or a son of that age, having none of my own. Very few of them have evolved any kind of individuality, you see. They still suffer from the lingering conformity of the high school years. The shaping of people in those years is like a dental tech creating a temporary crown in your mouth, using a piece of putty that she perpetually pinches and tamps down while it hardens; she has you clamp down on it again and again so that it gets to know its place in your jawline. If you chew the wrong kinds of things, if you smash against it with nuts or hard candy, the temporary either shatters or comes off. Then you get the lecture from the dentist, that this is only a temporary and not made for the tougher foods that you crave.

And so it is with late teens: some subjects cause them to crack, so you have to keep things polite, limited to hellos and light, empty-headed teasing. I just watch from the comfy chair in the corner, knowing, I think, the fear and the reason for it, knowing that those kids aren’t quite ready for these truths, that they have the temporaries on their minds still, and aren’t able to distinguish between me and a common masher. For their safety and my own sanity, it’s best to keep things as they are, professional, friendly, slightly distant, and kind without granting them a glimpse of the knowledge I have of them.