Page 239
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Maria's seven-day fast beneath the lifeguard tower turns the beach into a site of prophecy, spectacle, and makeshift sainthood.
The phrase 'Jesus of Los Angeles' is simultaneously earnest and outrageous, which is exactly why the page works. Maria's stillness turns beach spectatorship into a temporary religious theatre shaped by tourists, heat, scorn, and belief.
Emptied of her house, Maria walks 'in the long hung cloth colors of earth and sun and moon' to the lifeguard tower 'with no lifeguard at all' and tells the teenaged girls 'in seven days I shall give birth under this sky to Jesus of Los Angeles.' On her seventh day of fasting the beach becomes pilgrimage - 'tributes of flowers,' 'offers of fruit,' scornful and reverent eyes alike - while her calm forehead keeps her eyes 'the same under lids or opened to the sun or moon' over the 'congested confussion' of the city. The vow is at once earnest and outrageous.