Free Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood

absence like sunflower fields, and people were now actually living among them, making their homes not on the Westside or out in the Valley, but in downtown apartments and loft complexes that until only recently had not existed.
    And then there were the gangs. ’Banging had been a disease threatening to expand beyond the economically depressed shores of South Central and East Los Angeles long before I ran off to Minnesota, but now it was a beast grown as wild and unstoppable as a Santa Ana-fed brushfire. Gone were the simple affiliations of Crip and Blood, black and brown, eastside and westside. The homeboys and the vatos had seen their monopoly on tribal warfare crashed by young thugs of every color and nationality, from Armenian crews in Glendale to Cambodian ones in Long Beach. Tagging that had once been the exclusive eyesore of places such as Watts and Monterey Park now seemed to adorn every corner of the city, blooming on walls and bus benches, traffic signs and billboards, in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. If the messages were just as illegible as before, it was not without good reason: They were written in a host of different languages.
    All Tuesday morning, as the memory of my near-death experience at Moody’s bar the night before continued to unnerve me, I drove my faceless blue rental car from one end of my abandoned home to the other, making note of all the things twenty-six years had either altered, erased, or built completely from scratch. Theaters, shopping malls, schools, parking lots, even whole city blocks – nothing was exactly as I remembered it, and yet everything was exactly the same.
    Beneath the skin, it was all still Los Angeles. Benzes and Caddies ruled the roads like locusts and all but a few of the people who drove them – more international in origin or not – were too beautiful to be real. Los Angeles has always been a metropolis fueled by a single dream – becoming the Next Big Thing – and the weight of that wonderful, desperate hope looms over every inhabitant of the city like a pending death sentence. White, brown, rich, poor; musicians, actors, busboys, attorneys – no one is immune to the Dream. Outsiders often describe LA’s collective mood as ‘laid back’, but what it really is is a form of shock, a seemingly lifeless state the mind retreats to when the pain of wealth and fame deferred has become too great to bear.
    My exile to Minnesota had inured me to all these things, but they were fresh in my mind now. I had taken this self-guided tour of my old city believing it would better equip me for the job I’d come here to do, but I felt no smarter at the end of it than I had at the beginning.
    I was just happier to know I had someplace else to call home.
    While I was cruising the streets of Los Angeles that Tuesday morning, I succumbed to a lifelong obsession. Most people would think of it as no more than dumpster diving, rooting around among the discards of strangers to pull something out of a trash bin before the sanitation department can rightfully dispose of it. But this is a woefully short-sighted view of what I do. In my mind, the exercises I engage in are rescue operations, mercy missions intended to save imperfect but salvageable objects from a premature, and therefore wasteful, death.
    It is not an easy thing to do well. Separating those things that can and should be saved from those that are not worth the trouble requires a keen eye and years of experience. Sometimes I make mistakes. I snatch an old sewing machine or electric typewriter from the clutches of the gallows, get it home and open it up, only to discover internal organs no surgeon would dare touch. It happens. But these are the exceptions to the rule. I choose the subjects of my charity too carefully to err in this way very often, so usually what I gather to my breast as a prize to polish up and return to a purposeful existence proves itself deserving of my effort.
    Today, my find was an old reel-to-reel