prompt: deal, title: the street of dreams in "the next big thing" flash fiction

The Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone existed long before Cinema, is centuries older than motion pictures, and will exist for eons hence. Perhaps less obviously than it does now, but it suffused the Spanish and American histories of California from their starts, manifesting in myriad ways.

Henry Gaylord Wilshire had most likely never heard of the enchantment on Southern California, known as it was mostly only in mage circles and First Nations oral traditions. He was born thirty years before the public exhibition of the kinetoscope, the precursor to film projectors, some fifty years before the first feature filmed in LA but, in its way, the illusions claimed Wilshire same as any of us with a moron’s dream of wealth or fame or even just making millions of people happy.

Wilshire moved from the Midwest to Southern California in his early twenties, like so many of us charmed idiots, got into real estate development with a little bit of success, using that money as his springboard into a long string of spectacular failures at running for public office. Made a little bread partitioning out barley fields then, all of the sudden, he got stars in his eyes. Failing election for Congress as a Nationalist then as a Socialist, then again as a Social Democrat, then L.A. City Council, never succeeding. Along the way, he made a deal to donate a plot of land to develop into a thoroughfare, with the caveat it would carry on his name: Wilshire Boulevard.

With that money, he moved other places for times, burning his cash trying to get into publishing, standing for Parliament in Britain and Canada, Congress again in New York state, always failing, always coming back to LA where the bustling street bore his name, trying to trade on its fame to buoy his fortunes. It never worked. The boulevard’s regard grew exponentially, but Henry could never keep up with the reputation of the real-estate throwaway that bore his eternal appellation.

He eventually ended up in the business of patent quackery, pedaling medical devices that did no good for health and usually harm, claiming the powerful benefits of “electricity” and “radiation” without knowing what those words even meant. Magnetical turbans, Ion-a-co belts, all varieties of pseudoscientifical garbage, the stuff of wasted pipe dreams, until dying destitute in 1927, the same year talking pictures debuted as the next big thing. No legacy at all, beyond the boulevard.

He didn’t know the causeway named after him would cut through the heart of that Hopi mystic’s cursed roach-trap for irresponsible dreamers, through the center of the union-defined studio zone where you don’t get stipends as it’s considered your home, through the cartoonish decadences of Beverly Hills. I’m sure he would despise how the only thing anyone other than nerds like myself remember about his complicated life was a street he gave away in his early thirties. But wherever the Hopi magician is? Wherever his essence went after death? I’m certain he’s laughing about it.