FULL BLEED: GHOSTS OF CALIFORNIA

Matt Maxwell
5 minutes ago
7 min read

This comes in several different parts, all imperfectly melded together. Maybe you'll see the seams in these imperfections. That's good. Perfection is dull and dulling.

--

My friend Kaleb Horton died last week. It was sudden and unexpected and he was young, as these things go. But if you know Kaleb, you know he wasn't actually young, if he ever was, though he still had a smile and presence that one might call wickedly cherubic, always something sharper underneath it.

His death wasn’t supposed to happen. It never is, right? That’s right. We’re supposed to have that long and fulfilling life and career, leaving behind some kind of legacy, whether in blood or works or writings. We know that this corpus can’t go with us, so we craft our own ghosts in life. We create some remnant, in the tallied collection of our efforts, our own etchings on the stuff of time, on other people around us should we be so lucky. Even in the atomized reality we’re in now, friends and groups scattered in overlapping but never touching networks like the canopy of a forest almost in contact with one another, but somehow not quite.

Overlapping but never touching.

In our lifetimes, we’re writing these pages or posts, taking these pictures, painting on pages, welding steel into something more, being with these people not ourselves. Whether or not this constitutes a magnum opus or not is outside of our control. As is the reaction to any piece of art that we make. We can only make and do and be and cannot bend that in the way that we necessarily desired. We can not make people love or hate us, not by intent. We can be and evocation happens or no.

But these actions and feelings, this working; these are what our ghosts will be hewn from. Maybe that’s not the right word, but it’s a good one. All of our doings and actions become the medium. Everyone we've ever met is going to get their time with the chisel, working away that which didn’t fit in their memories or resentments or forgiveness, last moment or forever ago. Chip, chisel, craft. Pretty soon you’ve got a ghost. A ghost is not a person, not our friend or loved one, not a reflection even. Something closer to a series of impressions, songs picked up at night while driving, from a desert radio station that hasn't been broadcasting in ages, ask anyone at the cafe you stop at later. But you still heard and felt it. He's still there.

--

Maybe it’s different with writers, or for that matter, musicians and artists. I’ll stick with writing as I’m afflicted with that, as was Kaleb. So the ghost I’m conjuring up may primarily my own, but if I’ve any manner of skill, I can convey that sense to you. This was a thing that Kaleb was very good at, had a facility for, not to imply that it was easy necessarily. I know he still sweat and agonized over those words. He could transmit himself in his work, in a direct kind of way, could relay and deliver his love of the subject. Or, if he didn’t care for it, use humor as a knife. The best humorists do this and have done it for a long time. That doesn’t make them laugh out loud funny, necessarily. But they could use the comedy as a folded jacket to hide the switchblade underneath. Or to reveal the tragedy, even the emptiness of its origin. Golly but Kaleb sure loved Big Bang Theory and the collected comedic works of Timothy Allen.

Of course the writer’s words aren’t them actually being there. There’s a sense of them, a touch of them, the word choice, the turn of phrase, even the idea that they start with or the path they start down once given an assignment. That’s not them, but it certainly sounds like them, should they be any good. (And if they have no voice, well congratulations on blowing the only assignment that is worth a damn. Kaleb never ever did.) Their words aren't their flesh and bone, but there is a sense of the writer in it. There better be.

So you can read a piece by Kaleb, and if you’d spent any time with him, you can pretty easily imagine it coming from his voice, maybe like he’s right there, close enough for you to ask to pass the salt, whether you were at Chili John’s or Bob’s in Toluca Lake or the Idle Hour. All those places in LA that he loved because they themselves were ghosts, but the kind you could sit and spend an afternoon in. A place that was older than him or his parents or grandparents in some cases (Okay, Idle Hour isn't that old but it makes the effort. It's got roots in those times.) And Kaleb thrived on ghosts, things out of time, things that should have been left behind but have refused to go so easily. Things that are out of fashion but durable all the same. Bands that might never have set the whole world on fire, but set fire to the hearts of some and maybe even many. And sometimes those ghosts are ideas, even ideals. The very concept of someone making their living writing long, thoughtful pieces about today and the past reaching out into it, in this day and age? Itself a thing of the past now, but in the memories of enough that maybe it could be made to stand up and dance, even if in its insubstantiality it could cast no shadow on the sunniest day.

But it was what he wanted to do, even if the world had largely moved on from that. What happens to the ghost when the family in the haunted house moves out? The spirit retains, holds fast even with no one to haunt. Which is of course poetic but not true, not entirely. We're still haunted by his writing, those echoes of him.

I always looked at his work and was astonished that he wasn't calling the shots, more celebrated than he was beyond those overlapping circles of friends and folk struggling through the same sorts of unfairness he was. I was reminded of a documentary I saw on the life of Louis Armstrong, and how a critic or maybe fan saw Armstrong's apartment and its bare refrigerator and wondered why a man of his abilities wasn't eating steak or whatever else he wanted, why he wasn't running things. I don't have an answer to that one. I don't know why Kaleb started writing during one of the last sorts of crests of online magazines as things began to fade, aside from the obvious issue of timing. Why outlets as clearly desperate for consistent and sharp and sturdy and unbreakable writing didn't have him on speed dial.

Like I said, I got no answer to that. I mean, I do, but it's largely rhetorical and unimportant. The largest part of it being that the world he was fondest of and best at writing about was regarded as passing into history if not mythology. And geography. The West, should it not be Los Angeles or San Francisco, Seattle or even Portland, doesn't have that kind of pull, perhaps. Certainly not Bakersfield. The west was where all the loose pieces, those that refused to fit into the Rube Goldberg trap of the United States, got rattled to when time tilted the table. We've all heard it.

I joked about this with him, how we're both from places that are ignored or despised (the central valley in his case, Orange County in mine) though for very different reasons. Both regarded as hellholes, one dirt and scrabble, the other nouveau riche and the spawning ground of every cliche rich-kid villain in a teen movie. Both regarded by us a home that wasn't so easy to return to, time being like that.

We both understood UFOs working best as a folk mythology, probably why he once told me not to watch a show that he'd worked as a researcher on (and I'm imagining they disposed of his research and did what they were going to do anyways, which was to make more prestige-flavored time wasting: my words not his. As an aside, I did and it was terrible because it didn't understand the truth of the lights in the sky, that they only matter for what is stirred within upon their sighting). We both took photographs, him much more leaning on the feeling of time and place, of a past that was persistent into the now, refusing to fade away; myself much more interested in the tone poetry and texture of these places, particularly Los Angeles itself. His work here always impressed me with the sweep of a place, the drama of even a pickup parked in front of a diner that but for a few details could have been from the seventies.

Or the forties. They're still there if you look.

I'm gonna miss walking and talking or driving and talking with him. Getting told that if we drive any further down this road, we'll end up in Malibu and neither of us wants that.

There's more to say, more I'm never gonna say. More I don't even know how to.

But I'll leave with this. Early last year, a million years ago, he and I and his wife Marie, were driving from Burbank over to Hollywood to catch a showing of Nightmare Alley at I think the Egyptian, on a silver nitrate print, you know, the kind that show all of time's fingerprints on the film stock itself and could burst into flame if you look at it sideways. I'm trying to get us parked to get there in time to get seats that didn't suck (great plan, genius). It's raining, as it does from time to time, even in LA. I'm getting anxious. We've been up and down Hollywood Boulevard, taken a couple orbits around side streets, trying to find a little asphalt sanctuary to park at for a couple hours. And I despair about it, out loud. And he says, not verbatim, but words along these lines: "It's Hollywood, you look long enough and you'll find a place to land."