It’s not like the movie at all. I only saw the first twenty-five minutes. I found a free version on Youtube. I remember the brown rabbits in the living room with the TV on and that’s about it.
The real Inland Empire makes my heart ache.
There are The Truman Show-type homes that keep popping up right against the foothills. Perfectly trimmed lawns, perfectly shiny cars. If you drive down Route 66 around sunset, the bright lights illuminate the Sycamore Inn sign, and across the street, the little fire shoots out of the Magic Lamp sign. I want to light a cigarette with the fire of the lamp so badly but I might be too short to reach it. Who knows if the Magic Lamp will ever reopen at this rate but we’re still waiting. Make your way down to the 60 freeway and head to Riverside. Grab a cocktail at the Mission Inn. Dip your toes in the swimming pool. Cool down in the shadows of the Inn’s triumphant Spanish Revival architecture. Forget for a moment that you’re in the once fertile womb that is now suffocating in the smog of the Inland Empire.
The Inland Empire feels like an obligation that I no longer want. It is crushing debt that I can’t afford. It is the worry that never leaves my mind and crushes me while it sits on my chest, keeping me awake at night. When I am in the Inland Empire, I do anything to claw my way out of here. When I leave, I find myself longing for the smell of fire season smoke coming from the mountains, even though it has kept me from breathing before.
This place used to be pure citrus groves and vineyards. The pride of Southern California was in the beautiful produce that this place made. Remnants of that triumph exist all over. There are orange trees in everyone’s yard. My brother dated a girl whose home is on what used to be an old lemon grove. The trees are all over her yard, and she has more lemons than she knows what to do with them. There are only so many lemonades and lemon breads that you can make. Old vineyard vines look like they are crawling out of empty lots along Foothill Blvd. It’s only a matter of time until Secundo Guasti’s vines, the Piedmontese winemaker whose vineyards stretched from Ontario to Fontana, become cardboard one-bedroom apartments renting for three thousand each.
But it doesn’t feel like the great Empire it once was in its peak produce production days. We boast the worst air quality in the United States of America. We are the workers who serve Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. We are good at finding ways out and getting pulled back in. Amazon warehouses and logistics centers are slowly replacing the groves and vineyards. Vagrant tweakers come alive in downtown San Bernardino, shoving around shopping carts loaded with trash bags filled with God know what. Once, a white guy dressed like a cholo with a bandana around his head stared into my car while I was on my way to the courthouse, willing me to look at him while my eyes stared straight ahead. From my periphery I could see him scratching his arms deeply, turning them bright red. His massive blue eyes pierced into my passenger-side window, and I begged for the light to turn green.
It’s a place that is filled with warmth and glorious sunshine. It’s California, after all. How bad can that be?
It’s too much warmth and too much sunshine. 110 degrees Fahrenheit with no escape. You’ll get consumed by the beating sun that will only relent when it sets, swallowing the massive sky and dragging it into darkness, until it rises in the morning to torture you all over again. Hot sunny days all the time is bad for your psyche because it doesn’t adequately prepare you for when things are hard or bad. It gaslights you into thinking things are good, when in reality, you’re suffering. It’s a climate that echoes the sheltered and suffocating home that I grew up in, which left me constantly questioning if it were possible for me to live life in any other way. It’s for your own safety, and it’s because we love you, and we don’t want you to get hurt, my parents would qualify. But too much of anything, even if it’s good or well-intentioned, can be bad. It can get so hot here in the summer that the heat will boil over and force the thermometer to crack.
To end it, you must get out. And if you have no way out, you’re done for. You’ll be locked inside the four walls of the 210 to the north, the 10 to the south, the 57 to the west, and the Nevada state line, driving around endlessly within those four walls like a game of Pac-man that will not let you quit. Speeding on never-ending freeways, chasing ghosts and becoming devoured by them, hitting dead-ends with tears streaming down your face as you panic, realizing that you might not ever get out. Stuck behind the painted backdrop that is the Inland Empire as your soul is sucked dry by the whirling dust devils, behind the facade of warmth and sunshine, forcing you to keep up appearances and smile.
Somehow I can never leave for good, even when I want to. I have to be confronted with these remnants of what once was, of what will never be again. That’s how you live life in the Inland Empire. You have to drive past old ghosts everyday in this sprawling and dusty place, as you pass by the orange groves, dried up vineyards, and abandoned houses. Maybe it wants me to find old artifacts buried deep within here. What exactly, I don’t know. What more do you want with me, you dirty old Inland Empire? What is it that you want me to find?
In my childhood home in this place, I was always surrounded by people, but always alone. I didn’t have friends. Your family, my mother would say, is more than enough. Friends come and go, but your family will always be there for you. To avoid my parents’ never-ending judgements of the few friends I made, I gave up making them, and spent my youth, for the most part, alone. When I was an angsty millennial teen, I coped with the loneliness and desolation of such an environment by spending many afternoons on Tumblr. In my little bedroom in my house against the Mt. Baldy mountainside, hiding from the heat, I was blasting Interpol and Bright Eyes on my boombox, responding to AMAs from anons. I was reblogging F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes from The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, GIFs of Le Notti di Cabiria and The Red Shoes, and dieting tips from skinny girls whose posts were tagged #thinspo and #EDTumblr. I was posting photos of me and Mark Bailey, may he rest in peace, and all of our inside jokes.
Mark was one of my few friends who helped me survive in the Inland Empire.
…to be continued.
Gemmy…