L.A.C.

By Jack Joseph Smith

L.A.C. means "Last American City"
L.A.C. Segment This day was as meaningless as all the others. Spending too much time arguing with a right wing bum. A recidivist at that. Our street language from two different ages would never permit the weaving of a conversation, but obvious to each other being men inclined toward drink, we kept on yapping. Feed up with it the cowboy in the bunk below me exponded on the unlikelyhood, or sillyness, of one attempt- ing to become a movie star when not knowing how to roll cigarettes. He definately looked like Steve Mc Queen, and I was terrible at rolling cigarettes, having something to do with my not yet smoking grass. It was in the Los Angeles County Jail, or Glass House as it is called. There were eight of us in four doubble bunks in a cell that measured approximently eight by fourteen feet. Toilet included. Which with at least some decency of logic intended,sat at the opposite end of the cell door, or the "slammer" as I see it. There at the back, high above the toilet, concrete re- treated from the wall in an upward slant until it went into the form of a low laid rectangle incasing glass. A very thick glass. So in the daylight hours one saw a thinly blurred sky. And though it was nineteen sixty
six and a time before a complete technological society; I am sure that the glass was reinforced with some sort of chemical, some sort of plastic. Now "lights out" had drifted into the late night. The other five were asleep. Four gone away in lock up with "I'm mister Blue, won't tell you," done simply in song at dusk by the cowboy. I was only awake because the man in the top bunk across from mine was making such a stir, so that he and his sounds took all my attention. Suddenly he woke up, and turned over on his side toward me. He then asked if it would be alright if he spoke to me about the dream he was having. He was gentle. He said he would not have mentioned it to me, but he had noticed that I was awake. I told him to go on and tell me about the dream and this is what he said. "Naturally you know I am a Mexican. I have been Living on the streets most of my life. One night seven years ago I came up behind a well dressed man in the dark, and hit him on the head with an iron bar. It made a thud that I could feel in my knees. I had hit him for
money, but the sickness was too much, and I turned away and ran. The next day, and through the following week, I looked in the newspapers for a death notice about anyone who had been killed from a bash in the head in that area of town. There was nothing. And when I returned to the street corner a few days latter the street was normal, and I couldn't ask any ques- tions about anything different happening that was not normal, without me that is. For the past seven years I have had this dream often. I wander through a desert at night over white sand until I come to an area of rocks. At first the rocks are small, but they rise up becoming larger as I walk on. The larger they become the more spaces between them; forming tunnels. At last I am where the rocks end, and I am able to see twisted trees... beyond them. Here a face appears, as if it had come from out of the trees into the tunnels to meet and lead me out of the last of the rocks. The face is a ghost, because it stretches and changes often, and moves from tunnel to tunnel freely through the rocks without a body of flesh, bones, and blood. You see it happening,
but it has no snare: I can see the trees through the tunnels each time sure- ly, and they twist like trees growing out of the sand by an ocean of strong wind: The feeling from the face is not afraid. It sincerely seems to want me to walk with it; to whatever is beyond the trees. But I can not move from terror, and I awake from the dream never see- ing, never touching where the act of murder, if I really did kill him, wants to take me:" He stared at me momentarily while a dead end nineteen sixty four Lago de Chapala bar is going around my head with a Mexican doctor pissing his pants through his sing- ing of "show me the way to go home," as a young Mexican attempts to knife him in his unresisting heart for his disgrace, but midway sees all disgust lost like all our floor spit, and therefore exists only to distroy the body of his cherry nineteen fifty seven chevy: Like an insert I said to my cellmate, "I had freighting dreams too," trying to express that I didn't have any way of understanding what his dream was actually doing to him. In an uncertain manner I told him that I hoped the man lived, but if he was dead maybe the dream ment that he would meet the man when he died also.
What else was there to say. I went to sleep. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Possibly I had learned something in Los Angeles that was different. Some- kind of meaning that changes a person. Possibility still stood though, that I had not. Not to sound poetic. But something of a possible intelligence came to me way latter like this... (around the well we will reach even knowing the child is gone.)

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AI Interpretation

GPT

The narrator recalls a Los Angeles County Jail cellmate who struck a man for money and fears he killed him. The cellmate describes a recurring desert dream with tunnels, twisted trees, and a changing face; the narrator recalls violence at Lago de Chapala and offers uncertain consolation.

The cellmate found no death notice and cannot confirm a murder. The narrator admits not understanding the dream and leaves open whether the encounter taught anything, before the closing image of a well and a missing child.

Claude

The L.A.C. sequence defines its title, 'L.A.C. means "Last American City"', then gives a first-person prose account set 'in the Los Angeles County Jail, or Glass House', where a cellmate wakes in the night and tells of hitting 'a well dressed man in the dark' with 'an iron bar' and of a recurring desert dream in which 'a face appears' that is 'a ghost'. It ends with the speaker unsure 'that I had not' changed and a parenthetical image, '(around the well we will reach even knowing the / child is gone.)'.

The sequence moves from observation to confession to a dream, keeping the cellmate's voice distinct from the narrator's. The account is the speaker's narrative rather than verified biography, and the ending declines a tidy moral. Source spellings such as 'exponded', 'definately', 'approximently' and 'latter' are kept.