Harbor Boulevard

By Mel C. Thompson

Our protagonist hears from his friends in Costa Mesa that a kind of personality-cult leader is currently trendy among the higher social circles of Orange County. Because he views himself, despite his age, as an aspiring socialite, he insists on meeting the man who goes by the name Solomon Wedge. (The name is a hybrid of the Solomon of the Hebrew scriptures and the dangerous surfing spot off of Newport Beach called The Wedge.) Our socialite is not a believer in superstitions new or old, but agrees to a kind of initiation rite in order to be on the inside of all things Orange County. Although the initiation consists of merely walking the length of Harbor Boulevard over the course of a week or so, the protagonist is nonetheless too insecure and cowardly to endure the enterprise alone, and so he brings along an inscrutable friend who is never quoted directly, but only spoken about by our hero. In spite of this annoying limitation, the partner is a kind of force of nature, or perhaps an alter ego. The story is driven forward by stark personality divergences in the two traveling companions and by the fact that Solomon awaits them at the end of their quest. Whether what they encounter has nothing to do with Harbor Boulevard or everything to do with it, only the reader can decide. Like an empty container, perhaps the street has the potential to be filled with anything we put in it. The street in the story seems at least twice as long as the actual one is, but its true length is anyone's guess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mel C. Thompson
• Release date: May 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463107683

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

Book preview

Harbor Boulevard

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2019

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, CA 94549

[e-mail]

*

For more information about Mel C. Thompson’s work, or to learn more about how you can support his ongoing literary projects, including his work with other authors published by Mel C. Thompson Publishing through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing services, please contact either the email address or USPS mailing address listed above.

*

This book is dedicated to all the teachers, fellow students, choir members, fellow parishioners, minsters, doctors, psychologists, lovers, friends, fellow musicians, employers, school counselors, recording engineers, small press publishers, live poetry promoters, therapists, dentists, orthodontists, periodontists, policemen, social workers, firemen, professors and others who rescued me so many times I lost count. Only when I was already an old man did I realize that they were all keeping a madman alive for no other reason than that they somehow believed I, that very madman, could somehow bring something of value to the world. How everyone put up with me and my completely twisted life, I cannot imagine. But I thank you all for taking me in and dedicating some years of your life to an almost impossible case. Thanks to you all, I am still alive; and without help I certainly would have never made it to middle age, let alone old age.

*

Notes On The Contents

The text begins with the contents of the manuscript itself. At the conclusion of the story, several pages of numbered notes can be found. These notes, among other things, reveal some of the autobiographical elements that played a part in the story. At the very end of the book are several pages of author's commentary regarding the sources, inspirations and methods used to construct this work. (If one doesn't like spoilers, then it's best to save the commentary until after one has finished reading the manuscript portion of the book.) The notes and commentary also reveal many of the musical, cinematic and literary sources for several quotes and themes which may strike the reader as familiar.

*

Harbor Boulevard

1.

You will never be able to make sense of all this work you are doing. How could anyone ever repay you for all your efforts? You cannot buy your years back with any amount of money. Will fame comfort you in oblivion?

Our ancestors settled here generations ago, but who remembers their names? Do you think you will be remembered three generations from now? No, it is not logic that drives you onward, but rather the great magnet (1) that pulls you to itself through your endless toiling.

And yet, all this time, the sun and the moon and the tides have remained faithful and generous to us, never once asking for reward or recognition. They too are drawn forth by an irresistible force which moves all things, but itself never moves. (2)

Whatever this unknowable thing is, it has set you on your way from the beginning, and it alone meets you at the end of the road. (3)

The Analects of Solomon Wedge (4)

*

Our friends had told us that Solomon Wedge had refused to meet us under ordinary circumstances. In order to meet him we would have to comply with a certain strange demand. We would have to walk most of the way across Orange County to meet him.

Because Orange County is an entirely car-centered metropolitan area, middle class people most typically meet by just getting into their cars and driving over to each other's houses. If the person needing transportation is extremely poor, he may be relegated to taking a demoralizingly-slow OCTA bus for hours on end in order to visit someone. However, in this case, Solomon had ordered us to walk, for days on end, from the very beginning of Harbor Boulevard to the end of it, after which we would be free to meet him at Le Pain Quotidien in Fashion Island for some tea and pastry.

Once in Solomon's presence, we were assured by our friends, some great information would be relayed to us, information which they seemed confident would prove transformative. This all seemed to be nothing more than New Age mysticism or some cultish mind-control rubbish, but alas, on sheer principle, I would not let the matter go, since, to be honest, I am a know-it-all who just has to be hip to every major gig in town. Such are the follies of the human ego.

Harbor Boulevard starts, curiously, just over the border with Los Angeles County, and goes all the way to Costa Mesa, ending up just about a mile from the Newport Beach border. For the purposes of this odd quest, we would be, as Kazantzakis used to say, hajjis, and Newport Beach would, temporarily, serve as our holy city. Of course most people with any self respect would refuse to undergo such an ordeal to have what would otherwise be an ordinary conversation. But we had been repeatedly told by our friends that Solomon was no ordinary man, and thus our curiosity overrode our common sense. We had, as the common folks say, taken the bait.

Our friends are noteworthy for their manias and enthusiasms, and so we were almost certain they were exaggerating the importance of any possible meeting with this little-known phenomenon. But having sworn to myself that no significant development in Orange County should ever be allowed to escape my notice, I felt forced to comply with Solomon's off-putting instructions.

We asked our friends, who had relayed Solomon's orders to us, how Solomon would ever know if we simply waited a week, parked our car a few blocks away from his house and arrived merely claiming to have walked the whole way down Harbor Boulevard. Our friends stared at us in a perfectly weird way and said ominously, Oh, believe me. If you're lying to him, he'll know. You can be sure of that!

Why on earth could I be intimidated by such a patently nonsensical threat? And why would I admit these things to the reader now? Well, I confess, I am not always reasonable; and I admit this with no small amount of shame. To put it bluntly, I felt I had been conned into an old-world type of superstition, the sort which I would usually be too embarrassed to speak about in polite company. However, I must speak about it now since my book publisher seems utterly indifferent to any embarrassment I might feel when he points to my perfectly miserly book contract and says, Well, if you're to get your next manuscript out on time, it looks like you'll have to go with this story, unless you have some hidden masterpiece you've not told us about.

And so I was, by superstition and competitiveness, forced to go on this silly journey; and to add to my humiliation, I was obliged to turn my notes about this journey into a book or risk entering into an ugly state of being called breach of contract. Oh, what a pestilential life one leads sometimes, even in the lap of luxury, seemingly otherwise protected from all the world's ills.

2.

Even if we gave you everything you've been pining for, you'd burn out on it soon enough. We could pay your way to London, Paris, Montreal, New York, Toronto, Brussels, Chicago, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Berlin and Tijuana, (5) but still you'd end up bored. Work-ethic proponents will claim the rewards of life are infinitely better if you've earned them. If only that were true. Your associates will always say that the magical kingdom you seek is elsewhere, but you can only be fooled by that ruse so many times before true wisdom becomes involuntary. But even so, I command you to go on the journey, but this time look for something other than victory and you just mind find something you didn't know you were looking for. (6)

The Analects of Solomon Wedge (7)

*

Our journey started out awkwardly in Los Angeles County in the rather upscale community of Rowland Heights. On that day there were ominous clouds in the sky, many dark gray and heavy with water. In the distance one could see whiter, puffier clouds, and even patches of blue. The sky itself was confusing. Was it going to rain heavily, or would a favorable wind come along and blow the clouds apart to reveal a bright, blue sky?

There were large houses in the hills, but they were intermittent. One saw large, green open spaces where a few deer and mountain lion might live in some symbiosis with the carrion-hungry condors circling above. For a while we didn't see anyone else on the sidewalk, and so I walked with no small sense of loneliness. This was, after all, Harbor Boulevard, and one expects to see the dwellings and associated infrastructure commensurate with the presence of hundreds of thousands of people. And not only was I lonely, but I was caught off-guard by an unseasonably cold and harsh wind. Visions of my unsatisfying childhood and traumatic love-life came pouring into my mind, producing streams of melancholic ideation. Giant electrical power lines crisscrossed the landscape, hoisted aloft by imposing, impersonal-looking metal towers.

Every five minutes a late-model car would drive by and slow down just a bit, the driver within not looking at us in exactly a hostile way, but in a way that said, I can see you haven't really made it yet and don't really belong here, after which the car would speed off almost angrily, as if the driver had stomped on his accelerator and revved his engine to kind of teach us a lesson of some sort. It was disturbing that our trek had begun this way and we hadn't even hit the Orange County line yet.

*

My traveling companion is dispirited. He insists we call this whole exercise off. He is cold, hungry, thirsty and in need of a restroom. He complains that he was never that enthusiastic about the idea of going on this quest anyway. What