L.A.C.

By Jack Joseph Smith

; LAs, Cy. mearis "Last Amerieam 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 attempte ing to become @ 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 grasse : It was in the Los Angeles County Jahl, or Glass House as it is called. There were eight of us in four doubble bumks 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 ite 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 1f he spoke to me about the dream he was hawing. He was gentle. He said he would not have mentioned it to me, but he had noticed that I was awakes 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 Imees, I had hit him for
money, but the sickness was too much, and I turned away and rane 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 ise: For the past seven years I have had this dream oftens 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 one 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 treeseo. beyond theme 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 tumnel to tunnel, freely through the rocks without & body of flesh, bones, and blood. You see it happening 2
but it has no snares 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 winds The feeling from the face is not afraid. It sincerely seems to want me to walk with 1t# to whatever is beyond the trees. But I can not move from terror, and I awake from the dream never seo= ing, never touching where the act of murder, if I really did kill him, wants to take meg" He stared at me momentarily while a dead end nineteen sixty four Iago de Chapala bar is going @round my head with a Mexican doctor pissing his pants through his sing= ing of “show me the way to go home," as & young Mexican attempts to knife him in his umresisting 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 celImate, “I had freighting dreams too," trying to express that I didn't have any way of understanding what his dream was actually doing to hime 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 alsoe
What else was there to say. I went to sleep. Maybe he dide Maybe he didn't. Possibly I had learned something in Los Angeles that was different, Some= kina of meaning that changes a person. Possibility still stood though, that I had note Not to sound poetics But something of a possible intelligence came to me way latter like thiseecs (around the well we will reach even knowing the child is gones)

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A prose-poem narrative set in the Los Angeles County Jail, where the speaker shares a cell with a Mexican man haunted by a recurring dream of desert rocks, tunnels, and a ghostly face — the aftermath of a possible murder committed seven years earlier.

The poem layers confession within confession: the cellmate's dream, the speaker's own memory of a violent bar in Mexico, and the uncertain moral of whether meaning was actually learned in Los Angeles or only imagined afterward.

Claude

Glossed on the page as 'Last American City,' this prose memoir sets the speaker in the 'Los Angeles County' jail - the 'Glass House' - in 'nineteen sixty six,' an eight-by-fourteen cell with eight men and a toilet under a slab of 'very thick glass' that turns daylight into 'a thinly blurred sky.' After lights out a Mexican cellmate confesses he 'came up behind a well dressed man' and 'hit him on the head with an iron bar,' then for seven years has dreamed of crossing 'white sand' to 'twisted trees' where a faceless ghost wants to lead him on, but he 'can not move from terror.' The speaker can only offer that maybe the man lived, or that the dream means the cellmate 'would meet the man when he died also,' and closes with a late, unbidden intelligence: '(around the well we will reach even knowing the child is gone)' - meaning come too late and in the wrong shape.

The flat prose is itself the form of jail time, an undifferentiated stretch with only the thick glass marking day from night. The poem's center is the dream, whose geography - rocks rising into tunnels, then 'twisted trees' beyond - maps guilt as a landscape you can see across but cannot enter. What makes the piece honest is its doubling: the speaker, hearing the confession, has his own intrusive memory of a 'Iago de Chapala' bar, a doctor 'pissing his pants' singing 'show me the way to go home' while a young man tries to knife him, so that violence is not the cellmate's property but a shared American air. The speaker resists turning the night into a lesson - 'Not to sound poetic' - and that refusal is the poem's integrity.