Betray - Latin tradere - to hand over, deliver

 

 

He can't stand the old man's nagging. It is either kill the bastard or leave. So he leaves, puts out his thumb and heads for the coast.

It isn't that great. At dusk people seem to emerge like Golems from the grey detritus at the side of the freeway, arms extended to capture the night. People he doesn’t want to meet. He is chased for blocks by a gang of knife-wielding refugees, screaming curses at him in some guttural inbred Eurotrash language. Again, he is rooting through a dumpster, looking for a tasty morsel amid the plastic trash, moldy Cheetos and soggy tissue phlegm of some apartment complex. When, from the deepest foulest center, up pops a head, grizzled and filthy, w/ red crusty eyes and a toothless mouth like a knife slash across a piece of rotting meat. It looks up at him and w/ breath like the groaning, morning-after expulsion of every bad taco in Los Angeles, whispers… "Blow job, Sonny?" He runs even harder then.

He is lonely and sad, prey to every monster in town. Not a good time. But then there is the ocean. It beckons him. He could spend his life watching its waves.

He is on a beach north of Santa Barbara. The sun is setting, melting like red butter onto the soft pale pancake of the Pacific. Dolphins are playing in the silvery surf, riding the waves. Further out blue whales surface and roll. On shore the piers and pillars of a rotting oil pipeline march into the depths. Once servicing the abandoned platforms out beyond the mist. He stands there enthralled, almost happy, when a hand taps him on the shoulder. The first human touch he's had in months...