Memoir chronicles wild California summer

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This article was published 23/10/2021 (1440 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A tone of looming danger is set early in Vagabond, a memoir of a season spent amid the street punks, home bums, travelling kids, addicts, criminals and crazies of southern California.

“You hippies know what a serial killer is?” asks a man giving the author Ceilidh Michelle and her friend a ride to Slab City — the remnants of a Marine base in the desert where outcasts and nomads have set up a community that ebbs and flows with the seasons.

Montreal-based author Michelle, featured at this year’s Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, takes readers into the four months she spent, at age 21, living on the streets of L.A.’s Venice Beach and in the Mojave Desert in her second book, a memoir based on the journals she kept in 2008-09.

A slim book, Vagabond offers only hints at Michelle’s motivations for her dangerous foray and provides brief sketches of dozens of characters she lives and travels with. That reluctance to diagnose or rationalize is one of the book’s strengths. The author stands apart as a detached observer of her own life and the lives of others.

She begins her journey at not quite 21, living a life that’s already gone off the rails, in a sketchy Montreal apartment where she gets in fights with her paranoid drug-dealer boyfriend. Soon after, she takes off on a half-assed quest to join a California ashram she’s only recently heard about.

As a reader, it’s tempting to play armchair shrink, attaching labels to the denizens of Venice Beach and Slab City: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anti-social personality disorder, addiction. No doubt one or more of these and other diagnoses do apply to many of the residents in both settings. (The book is timely in 2021, when news and social media accounts are painting a picture of growing chaos at Venice Beach, fuelled by massive tent cities filled with mentally ill and drug-addicted residents. It also comes out in the wake of the book and film Nomadland, both of which were partially set in Slab City.)

But instead of forcing a frame around her characters, Michelle simply recounts their words and actions, without pushing a conclusion or judgment on the reader. Many of those words and actions illustrate the grim brutality of life on the street.

At one point, a Venice Beach resident offers Michelle a lesson: never show fear. “That’s how you have to be with men and that’s how you have to be around here. They’re always watching you. If you’re not hurt, it’s because they choose not to hurt you.”

Michelle learns that lesson first-hand in encounters with street gangs and a charismatic, chronic liar with a hair-trigger temper.

The life she encounters on the road is so degraded that it’s hard not to suspect that at some level she was deliberately courting self-destruction.

The closest she comes to explaining herself comes in a passage where she writes: “What if every day was like this one, a running through the hours, a grasping, a corporeal exhaustion, scrambling after sensual needs? … I wasn’t afraid of the other side of life, the infinity outside this human holding cell, but I feared the transition.”

Eventually whatever moments of freedom and fellowship she experiences are swept away by the sense that “we were inmates sharing an ankle chain,” and Michelle’s self-preservation instinct (the practical side of her nature that made her the only person she knew who regularly brushed her teeth) kicked in.

That’s good news for readers, who have another talented young writer to follow.

Winnipeg novelist Bob Armstrong exercises his vagabond side these days by hitting the road with his new solar-powered ultralight trailer.