The Tiger, The Tutor, and The Delivery Girl Pt. 21
Tags: Salvation Mountain, Slab City, Science Fiction, SciFi, Los Angeles

I thought back to the Wall of Roses, and how vividly I still remembered seeing it in grainy videos during History Class, on the news, so many countless, idiotic parodies.

Air Time

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander back to what I’d learned from Daedalus.

I wondered what the truth looked like, when you could finally paint a full picture of what happened from a patchwork of conflicting stories.

My dad, all those years back, used to watch the monitor we’d installed for customers. I remember him flicking back and forth to the news when it was dead. He’d click his tongue, waving the remote at the news every time they’d air anything about the Sea Wall.

They need to stop giving these Communists air time, he used to say, stirring the chili, we used to just show up to the job we signed up to, no questions asked.

I swung my feet out into the empty air, feeling it tickle my dry soles.

I thought about what it meant to show up to a job like the wall. Folks hadn’t known then, but found out years later in lawsuits, that the harnesses and they’d given workers were only guaranteed to work at 1200 feet. Thousands had plummeted to their deaths after lines twisted and snapped, unable to bear their weight.

Thousands of others perished in the abandoned Catalina Tunnel project, after a contractor’s pressurized walls burst, flooding the worksite that Taylor Immenson had been overseeing. Overnight, Immenson had lost a quarter of his workforce along the wall, and was told to continue at the same capacity.

After months of petitioning to the State about conditions directly, they’d gotten crickets — that much everyone knew — people shied talking about it because many of the laborers had been prisoners and parolees. The less they knew the better, I guess.

Many of those people had been tracked on a masonry career program aimed at giving them a second chance. No one bothered giving them any time in the news until Immenson started his strikes. I hadn’t learned about that part until college.

I thought back to the Wall of Roses, and how vividly I still remembered seeing it in grainy videos during History Class, on the news, so many countless, idiotic parodies.

Lines of parked bulldozers in front of a destroyed portion of the wall, their excavation blades piled high with thousands of roses — one for each worker lost in the tunnels. He paid a high price for destroying the wall with his workers.

The only remains they’d ever found of Immenson was his personal harness, found abandoned at the top of wall.

Just like Jimmy Hoffa, newspapers joked that they’d buried Immenson’s body inside that portion of demolished wall. Others joked that it was Immenson who had buried something inside.

It seemed was funnier when everything I’d ever known sat situated far away from the realities of the wall. Without any irony, we’d forced some of our most vulnerable citizens to give their lives doing a job no one else wanted.

Maybe it was because of the same guilt that Immenson wouldn’t rest until they took his life, too.

I shivered, wondering what Daedalus was remembering to herself, last night in the infirmary. I wondered how much she knew about what happened to Taylor, how he died. If he had died.

The dull ache in my thigh was starting to flare up again, and I knew it was probably time to head back and take another dose of painkillers. My stomach flipped at the thought of taking more of Salvation Mountain’s expired medicine.

Grumbling, I slowly made my way back down to the infirmary and eased my way through the clogged tunnels at night. It wasn’t bad here, and it made me think of some parts of Malibu growing up.

I imagined staying here, blending into the dirt and paint and sand.