Version 2006.05.21

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda
The End of an Era

### The View I Could Not Stand

Los Angeles had always been home for me. My choice of Los Angeles had not been volitional. To me, staying in Los Angeles has always been the equivalent of having been born there, perhaps even more than that. My emotional attachment to it has always been total. My love for the city of Los Angeles has always been so intense, so much a part of me, that I have never had to voice it. I have never had to review it or renew it, ever.

I had, in Los Angeles, my family of friends. They were to me part of my immediate milieu, meaning that I had accepted them totally, the way I had accepted the city. One of my friends made the statement once, half in fun, that all of us hated each other cordially. Doubtless, they could afford feelings like that themselves, for they had other emotional arrangements at their disposal, like parents and wives and husbands. I had only my friends in Los Angeles.

For whatever reason, I was each one's confidant. [* confidant- someone to whom private matters are confided] Every one of them poured out to me their problems and vicissitudes. [* vicissitudes- variations in circumstances or fortunes or in the development of something] My friends were so close to me that I had never acknowledged their problems or tribulations as anything but normal. I could talk for hours to them about the very same things that had horrified me in the psychiatrist and his tapes.

Furthermore, I had never realized that every one of my friends was astoundingly similar to the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology. I had never noticed how tense my friends were. All of them smoked compulsively, like the psychiatrist, but it had never been obvious to me because I smoked just as much myself and was just as tense.

Their affectation [* affectation- a deliberate pretence or exaggerated display] in speech was another thing that had never been apparent to me, although it was there. They always affected a twang of the western United States, but they were very aware of what they were doing.

Nor had I ever noticed their blatant innuendos about a sensuality that they were incapable of feeling, except intellectually.

The real confrontation with myself began when I was faced with the dilemma of my friend Pete. He came to see me, all battered. He had a swollen mouth, and a red and swollen left eye that had obviously been hit and was turning blue already. Before I had time to ask him what had happened to him, he blurted out that his wife, Patricia, had gone to a real estate brokers' convention over the weekend, in relation to her job, and that something terrible had happened to her. The way Pete looked, I thought that perhaps Patricia had been injured, or even killed, in an accident.

"Is she all right?" I asked, genuinely concerned.

"Of course she's all right," he barked. "She's a bitch and a whore, and nothing happens to bitch whores except that they get frigged, and they like it!"

Pete was rabid. He was shaking, nearly convulsing. His bushy, curly hair was sticking out every which way. Usually, he combed it carefully and slicked his natural curls into place. Now, he looked as wild as a Tasmanian devil.

"Everything was normal until today," my friend continued. "Then, this morning, after I came out of the shower, she snapped a towel at my naked butt, and that's what made me aware of her shit! I knew instantly that she'd been frigging someone else."

I was puzzled by his line of reasoning. I questioned him further. I asked him how snapping a towel could reveal anything of this sort to anybody.

"It wouldn't reveal anything to assholes!" he said with pure venom in his voice. "But I know Patricia, and on Thursday, before she went to the brokers' convention, she could not snap a towel! In fact, she has never been able to snap a towel in all the time we've been married. Somebody must have taught her to do it, while they were naked! So I grabbed her by the throat and choked the truth out of her! Yes! She's frigging her boss!"

Pete said that he went to Patricia's office to have it out with her boss, but the man was heavily protected by bodyguards. They threw him out into the parking lot. He wanted to smash the windows of the office, throw rocks at them, but the bodyguards said that if he did that, he'd land in jail, or even worse, he'd get a bullet in his head.

"Are they the ones who beat you up, Pete?" I asked him.

"No," he said, dejected. "I walked down the street and went into the sales office of a used car lot. I punched the first salesman who came to talk to me. The man was shocked, but he didn't get angry. He said, 'Calm down, sir, calm down! There's room for negotiation.' When I punched him again in the mouth, he got pissed off. He was a big guy, and he hit me in the mouth and the eye and knocked me out.

"When I came to my senses," Pete continued, "I was lying on the couch in their office. I heard an ambulance approaching. I knew they were coming for me, so I got up and ran out. Then I came to see you."

He began to weep uncontrollably. He got sick to his stomach. He was a mess. I called his wife, and in less than ten minutes she was in the apartment. She kneeled in front of Pete, and swore that she loved only him; that everything else she did was pure imbecility, [* imbecility- retardation more severe than a moron but not as severe as an idiot] and that theirs was a love that was a matter of life or death: The others were nothing. She didn't even remember them.

Both of them wept to their hearts' content, and of course they forgave each other. Patricia was wearing sunglasses to hide the hematoma by her right eye where Pete had apparently hit her: Pete was left-handed. Both of them were oblivious to my presence, and when they left, they didn't even know I was there. They just walked out, leaving the door open, hugging each other.

Life seemed to continue for me as it always had. My friends acted with me as they always did. We were, as usual, involved in going to parties, or the movies, or just simply 'chewing the fat', or looking for restaurants where they offered 'all you can eat' for the price of one meal.

However, despite this pseudo-normality, a strange new factor seemed to have entered my life. As the subject who was experiencing it, it appeared to me that, all of a sudden, I had become extremely narrow-minded. I had begun to judge my friends in the same way I had judged the psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology. Who was I, anyway, to set myself up in judgment of anyone else?

I felt an immense sense of guilt. To judge my friends created a mood previously unknown to me. But what I considered to be even worse was that not only was I judging them, I was finding their problems and tribulations astoundingly banal. [* banal- repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse]

I was the same man. They were my same friends. I had heard their complaints and renditions of their situations hundreds of times, and I hadn't ever felt anything except a deep identification with whatever I had been listening to. My horror at discovering this new mood in myself was staggering.

The aphorism [* aphorism- a short instructive phrase] that 'when it rains it pours' couldn't have been more true for me at that moment in my life.

The total disintegration of my way of life came when my friend Rodrigo Cummings asked me to take him to the Burbank airport. From there he was going to fly to New York. It was a very dramatic and desperate maneuver on his part. He considered it his damnation to be caught in Los Angeles.

For the rest of his friends, it was a big joke, and a fact, that he had tried to drive across country to New York various times; and every time he had tried to do it, his car had broken down. Once, he had gone as far as Salt Lake City before his car collapsed. It needed a new motor and he had to junk it there. Most of the time, his cars petered out in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

"What happens to your cars, Rodrigo?" I asked him once, driven by truthful curiosity.

"I don't know," he replied with a veiled sense of guilt. And then, in a voice worthy of the professor of anthropology in his role of revivalist preacher, he said, "Perhaps it is because when I hit the road, I accelerate because I feel free. I usually open all my windows. I want the wind to blow on my face. I feel that I'm a kid in search of something new."

It was obvious to me that his cars, which were always jalopies, were no longer capable of speeding, and he just simply burned their motors out.

From Salt Lake City, Rodrigo had returned to Los Angeles, hitchhiking. Of course, he could have hitchhiked to New York, but it had never occurred to him. Rodrigo seemed to be afflicted by the same condition that afflicted me: an unconscious passion for Los Angeles which he wanted to refuse at any cost.

Another time, his car was in excellent mechanical condition. It could have made the whole trip with ease, but Rodrigo was apparently not in any condition to leave Los Angeles. He drove as far as San Bernadino, where he went to see a movie- The Ten Commandments. This movie, for reasons known only to Rodrigo, created in him an unbeatable nostalgia for L.A. He came back, and wept, telling me how the shagging city of Los Angeles had built a fence around him that didn't let him go through. His wife was delighted that he hadn't gone.

His girlfriend, Melissa, was even more delighted, although also chagrined [* chagrined- feeling or caused to feel uneasy and self-conscious] because she had to give back the dictionaries that he had given her.

His last desperate attempt to reach New York by plane was rendered even more dramatic because he borrowed money from his friends to pay for the ticket. He said that in this fashion, since he didn't intend to repay them, he was making sure that he wouldn't come back.

I put his suitcases in the trunk of my car and headed with him for the Burbank airport. He remarked that the plane didn't leave until seven o'clock. It was early afternoon, and we had plenty of time to go and see a movie. Besides, he wanted to take one last look at Hollywood Boulevard; the center of our lives and activities.

We went to see an epic in Technicolor and Cinerama. It was a long, excruciating movie that seemed to rivet Rodrigo's attention. When we got out of the movie, it was already getting dark. I rushed to Burbank in the midst of heavy traffic. He demanded that we go on surface streets rather than the freeway, which was jammed at that hour. The plane was just leaving when we reached the airport. That was the final straw. Meek and defeated, Rodrigo went to a cashier and presented his ticket to get his money back. The cashier wrote down his name and gave him a receipt and said that his money would be sent within six to twelve weeks from Tennessee, where the accounting offices of the airline were located.

We drove back to the apartment building where we both lived. Since he hadn't said good-bye to anybody this time, for fear of losing face, nobody had ever noticed that he had tried to leave one more time. The only drawback was that he had sold his car. He asked me to drive him to his parents' house, because his dad was going to give him the money he had spent on the ticket.

His father had always been, as far back as I could remember, the man who had bailed Rodrigo out of every problematic situation that he had ever gotten into. The father's slogan was 'Have no fear, Rodrigo Senior is here!' After he heard Rodrigo's request for a loan to pay his other loan, the father looked at my friend with the saddest expression that I had ever seen. He was having terrible financial difficulties himself.

Putting his arm around his son's shoulders, he said, "I can't help you this time, my boy. Now you should have fear, because Rodrigo Senior is no longer here."

I wanted desperately to identify with my friend, to feel his drama the way I always had, but I couldn't. I only focused on the father's statement. It sounded to me so final that it galvanized me.

I sought don Juan's company avidly. I left everything pending in Los Angeles and made a trip to Sonora. I told him about the strange mood that I had entered into with my friends. Sobbing with remorse, I said to him that I had begun to judge them.

"Don't get so worked up over nothing," don Juan said calmly. "You already know that a whole era in your life is coming to an end, but an era doesn't really come to an end until the king dies."

"What do you mean by that, don Juan?"

"You are the king, and you are just like your friends. That is the truth that makes you shake in your boots. One thing you can do is to accept it at face value, which, of course, you can't do. The other thing you can do is to say, 'I am not like that, I am not like that,' and repeat to yourself that you are not like that. I promise you, however, that a moment will come when you will realize that you are like that."