An L.A. Memoir : Coming Into the City

THE PRIZE FOR SELLING 146 subscriptions to the Catholic Herald was a red bicycle and a trip to Disneyland.

I wasn’t all that thrilled about Disneyland. Yet I remember walking back from the 6 o’clock Mass with my father that morning; the summer morning’s silence; the sense of moment. I had never been more than a hundred miles from Sacramento; I had never stayed in a motel.

I rode shotgun alongside Mr. Kelley, the Herald’s circulation manager. The second-place winner from Holy Spirit (100 subscriptions) sat in the back seat.

All the way down Highway 99, past the truck stops, the Dairy Queens, the Giant Oranges, past Modesto and Fresno and the turnoffs to hundreds of county roads, in between the yes-pleases and no-thank-yous, we listened to Monitor--the weekend service of NBC Radio. Each hour passed with the announcer’s intoning from Rockefeller Center: “This is Monitor, going places, doing things.”

There had been a typhoon in Asia. Each time the static receded, more green bodies had washed up among the baseball scores. I stared out the car window, dreaming of Rockefeller Center.

Great cities were tall cities. New York promised most glamour for being the tallest, the coolest, the farthest from these even rows of green; this hot, flat valley floor.

In the late 1950s, it was still possible to imagine Times Square outside the studio--rain-slickened Broadway awash with neon--and the taxicab that brought Miss Arlene Francis to the theater.

Billy Reckers sent me a postcard from L.A. once--white, horizontal, vast--a vast Sacramento. The house where Gracie Allen lived on TV looked like the houses on 45th Street. The streets on “Dragnet” looked like the streets downtown.

But on two festival days, Los Angeles seemed more glamorous than anywhere else in the world.

New Year’s Day was blind and cold in Sacramento. We had the tule fog. We chastened our rooms and our memories, replaced the Christmas ornaments in their cardboard boxes, labeled the boxes, packed them away. On our black-and-white television screen, it was always bright for the Rose Parade from sunny Pasadena, the sunlight dancing on chrome, sunlight flashing from the rhinestones of the Rose Queen and her court.

On the night of the Academy Awards, movie stars pretended real lives, getting out of limousines, walking the gantlet of flashbulbs. Cleopatra, Tarzan, Mrs. Miniver were all neighbors, all lived in ranch-style houses in Los Angeles.

Mr. Kelley got us to Los Angeles by 6 o’clock, as he had promised. (We’ll stop for dinner, stay overnight in a motel in Hollywood, then drive to Disneyland in the morning.)

Was this it? Even Sacramento had its ceremonial entrance, over the Tower Bridge. After the long, straight line of Highway 99 and the drama of the Tehachapi Mountains--10 hours--we had undergone no change. We drove along Sepulveda Boulevard, looking for a place to eat.

We parked under the aerodynamic roof of a restaurant that looked like a butterfly. I ordered “chicken in a basket.”

We found a motel near the famous Hollywood Bowl. We got one room with twin beds. Mr. Kelley took one of the beds. I shared mine with the runner-up from Holy Spirit. We watched “The Lawrence Welk Show” because Mr. Kelley’s uncle was famous. Mr. Kelley’s uncle played the champagne organ. Mr. Kelley wandered around the room in his boxer shorts, scratching. I studied the hair on Mr. Kelley’s back as he talked to his wife on the telephone.

A few years later, Johnny Carson moved “The Tonight Show” from New York to Los Angeles. Carson told jokes that began with freeways as the metaphor for American innocence, for minding one’s own business, for being abroad in the great world (“I was driving along the Ventura Freeway the other day . . . .”).

By that time, Los Angeles had become the capital of America. By that time, most of America looked like L.A.

I MOVED TO LOS ANGELES WHEN I WAS 28. THE PART OF THE CITY I KNEW was the Westside, the famous side, from West Hollywood to Santa Monica, north along the coast to Malibu and south to the Palisades. The Westside did not define Los Angeles any more than Pasadena did. Pasadena was also Los Angeles, and Burbank was also Los Angeles and Torrance and Watts, Glendale, Tarzana, Boyle Heights.

It was 1979 and Los Angeles had not yet undergone its metamorphosis--not yet the Pacific Rim capital, crowded with immigrants, choking on tragedy. Los Angeles was a Protestant dream of a city, a low city: separate houses, separate lawns, separate cars. Los Angeles was famous among American cities for being the creation of native-born Americans--”internal immigrants” from Iowa or from Brooklyn. Its tone was comic. Its scale was childish--giant doughnuts and eight-lane freeways. Los Angeles was not the creation of foreign parents escaping tragedy; Los Angeles was the creation of American children.

People I knew on the Westside rarely went to the Mexican side. People in the San Fernando Valley expressed fatuous pride at not having been downtown for years. Orange County was the region’s largest attempt to secede from itself. But Los Angeles named everything and everyone, claimed every horizon. The city without a center was everywhere the city. L.A. bestowed metropolitan stature on the suburban.

America made fun of L.A.

Europeans admired, especially Brits admired Los Angeles.

In London, I met a specimen of one of England’s most congealed bluebloods who was disappointed to learn that I was from San Francisco; oh dear--he much preferred Los Annjilleeze .

In 1971, Reyner Banham, a British architectural critic, published his pop celebration of the city, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.” Banham wrote disparagingly of the California alternative--San Francisco--with its “prefabricated Yankee houses and prefabricated New England or European attitudes.”

Then David Hockney arrived in L.A. from coal-blackened northern England;dyed his hair, changed into shorts; eased into a primary palette. Hockney sold his canvas to the world: suburban tract villas, blond statue boys, an Aqua Velva Mediterranean.

Europe sought freedom from centuries. Europe craved vulgarity. Europe found innocence.

For all its innocence, L.A. was flattered by Europe’s attentions in those years. It was the stuff of sonnets--old men taking young men to the opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In a way, Europe was turning a trick on L.A., teaching the capital of childish narcissism the confidence of outward regard. L.A. soon came to believe that it was indeed an important city, a world city. “London, Paris, Beverly Hills,” read the perfume bottles. British actors and German divas were flown into town like so many truffles. In return, Los Angeles opened the last great European museum in the world, an authentic Greek temple at the edge of the sea.

I imagined I knew some secret about Los Angeles that other people did not know. The architect who Bauhaus’d his bungalow was living in a house identical to the house I had grown up in. The Sacramento boy still refused to believe that a horizontal city could be a great city. But there were times when Los Angeles amused me for taking all I dismissed as Sacramento and selling it to the world as glamour. What a joke!

I now realize that Los Angeles was doing the same with me. I was a Mexican from the Central Valley--even then L.A. was the second-largest Mexican city in the world--a Mexican kid from the Central Valley with a big nose and glasses. I had spent my life indoors, reading about London.

But in L.A. I passed for a glamour-boy.

“Because you can talk,” one angel explained. “All they want is to be amused.”

I had always been intellectually arrogant. In L.A. I yearned to become glamorous enough to be humble, in the manner of the angels.

There was nothing reticent about L.A. Glamour was instant. The city took its generosity from the movies. You’re beautiful if L.A. says you’re beautiful, goddamn it! It was the sons of Jewish immigrants, the haberdasher’s son and the tobacconist’s son, who established the epic scale of the movies. Movies taught one big lesson: individual lives have scope and grandeur.

Of course L.A. is shallow. Lips that are 10 feet long and faces that are 40 feet high! But such faces magnify our lives, reassure us that single lives matter. The attention that L.A. lavishes on a single face is as generous a metaphor as I can find for the love of God.

My favorite time in the city was twilight, when theater lights dim, when the curtain opens. Then the basin of L.A. released its cocktail scent, lachrymatory, grenadine, rose. I flew through the brimstone canyons in a borrowed convertible, heedless, drum-driven.

To my first L.A. party. Some gallery opening on Melrose. A Scandinavian diplomat stands all alone with a drink melting in his hand. The gallery is too crowded, too noisy. I have to shout my name in the diplomat’s ear. A golden ear, like a scroll.

Who was that? the Scandinavian diplomat later asked the gallery owner, who still later told me this story.

“You mean the professional tennis player?” The owner shrugged, confusing me with one of the Bombay brothers then on the international circuit.

(My first role.)

I became a writer in L.A. I jogged, I house-sat, I watched dragonflies patrol swimming pools. I turned the pages of fashion magazines.

I went apartment hunting in Santa Monica. The real estate agent drove me in her borrowed convertible to an apartment not far from the beach. The carpet was rust-colored shag. An aluminum sliding-glass door led to a redwood deck overlooking the garage. Dark-green plants were suspended in papooses of hemp. The previous tenant had left the kitchen cupboard filled with neatened piles of Playboy.

“It only needs . . . ?” the real-estate agent prompted.

There is a picture of me, taken one afternoon at the UCLA track field. I am stretching, standing on one leg like a tropical bird. The spread, when it was published, was titled “Boys of Summer.” I was far from being a boy that day, far from the gravity of the 12-year-old who won Disneyland. And the day was far from a summer’s day. It was Dec. 31.

The most depressing time in L.A. is the moment the screen dies, the theater lights come up. I came out of the theater on Wilshire, my eyes unaccustomed to the light.

Within a month, I was shivering in a thin sports jacket on a pedestrian island in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco. My pants legs were blowing in the wind. Shadows were stumbling around me in the dark, burping into aluminum cans or raging with sacrilege.

I was carrying a suitcase. If the trolley ever came, I faced several months in the basement apartment of my parents’ home, completing a book.

The angelic friends told me I was making a mistake.

I told them I could not find a bright enough apartment in L.A. for the price I was willing to pay.

The truth was, I had doubted. The truth was, I didn’t have even enough childish imagination to Bauhaus a Santa Monica apartment.

My last L.A. party: a party in Westwood, where I met the idol of my reading life, an extraordinary critic, a superstar among critics, a word-Adonis. Over there, on the sofa by the lamp, someone whispered. What, but here was a little gray man. He crossed his legs like a woman; his trousers were too high; his socks were too low. I noticed the pale, hairless shin as he dandled his foot to and fro.

A writer should be at least as glamorous as his calling. What good are all the gauds and greensleeves of Renaissance poetry, what good are all the leggings and ribbons, the codpieces, quivers, circlets of hair, if they make the banquet of a dry little man?

I will stay in Los Angeles forever.

But what good are leggings and ribbons and weightlifting salons if your soul is the bathroom mirror?

I’ve got to get out of this town.

For a time in San Francisco, I continued to wear my shirts unbuttoned far down. Aren’t you cold? people asked. I astonished a luncheon companion by dipping my fingers into her San Pellegrino water to anoint my hair. But then I left off. I was starting to go bald anyway.

ENTERING THE CITY that day, when I was 28, I drove down Highway 1. If there is a best way to enter Los Angeles, it is this way--from the north and along the Pacific Coast Highway. I drove past Pepperdine, past Malibu, past the gas stations and public beaches. A Saturday afternoon in summer, the great city at play, and the only premonition of tragedy a dab of sun block.

From Ocean Avenue, I turned left at Wilshire, passed the statue of St. Monica pining for her son’s conversion.

A few weeks before, I had left graduate school, a sad case in my cotton wash-pants, my short-sleeved white shirt, my head a well of poetry, a staircase of poetry, and the aforementioned glasses. I was spending the weekend with a college friend, now a professor at UCLA.

I found myself in Beverly Hills. Most of the streets were empty of pedestrians. I got out for a walk.

I paused at the window of a store on Camden. I went inside. No one paid much attention to me. I browsed and I watched. I had never seen people so formally dressed for the sun.

A man behind the counter asked if I wanted anything to drink. I recognized him. A bit actor on television. I . . . cast down my eyes. I asked him about an orange shirt, raising the shirt from the counter with one finger.

“Are you really interested . . . ? All those pins . . .”

I told him I was serious.

And so he unbuttoned the shirt, and I put it on.

A second clerk came over and draped a sweater over my shoulders. The two men studied the effect as if I weren’t there.

Toooo blue.

The bit actor crossed to a mannequin.

“Don’t say no till you’ve tried it on.”

He held the coat with its lining outward to receive my arms. I glanced down at the lapels. Gaudy, black-and-white checks. I didn’t dare.

Then I looked into the mirror.

Another man came from behind the counter and placed a straw hat on my head.

“There.”

At that moment, the door opened and Cesar Romero walked into the mirror.

“Great-looking coat,” he said, tapping my shoulder lightly as he passed.