Palm Trees and Empty Pockets
The 405 unspools ahead of him like a gray ribbon someone forgot to cut, six lanes of brake lights shimmering in the afternoon heat, and Lucas Coloso grips the steering wheel of his '02 Civic with both hands the way his driving instructor taught him back in Ohio, ten and two, knuckles pale, even though the car hasn't topped twenty miles an hour in the last twenty minutes. The AC gave up somewhere around Barstow, wheezing out one last gasp of lukewarm air before surrendering entirely, so he's got the windows down and the desert-turned-coastal wind is roaring through the cabin, tangling his golden hair, carrying with it exhaust fumes and the faint mineral tang of the ocean he can't see yet but knows is out there, somewhere past all this concrete.
The radio hisses between stations, catching fragments of a Rihanna song, losing it to static, finding a stretch of talk radio where two men argue about a Lakers trade, losing that too. He doesn't bother fixing it. There's a kind of music in the chaos itself, in the sheer size of everything — the interchange overpasses stacked three high, the strip malls bleeding into more strip malls, the palm trees standing at attention along the shoulder…
