A Childhood Tale From the City of Second Chances

It’s been more than a year since I left the city of my birth and I want to tell you how I remember my hometown. I was raised in Los Angeles, married and divorced more than once there. I buried a father and gave birth to a daughter. In between, in Venice and Silver Lake, Westwood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, I wrote 11 books. I stood on decades of late-afternoon balconies, watching the sun set in an orange so aggressively metallic, so chiseled with brutal glare, I thought it might scar my face.

But memory is not static. It’s in flux, it mutates through time and accumulation. There’s a give, the way the cliffs above the Pacific Coast Highway shed themselves in the rainy season. We are always left with too few artifacts. Proof is illusive. Then the sea breeze rolls in, the Santa Anas blow, there is salt and citrus like bullets in the air. And it’s possible that personal history always becomes a sort of fiction.

The Los Angeles of my re-created childhood was a region I walked through, knew with intimacy: bougainvillea-draped shortcut alleys, how to zigzag between stucco and hibiscus to the beach. In my world, the blue bus line of Pico Boulevard was the vein. My boundaries were the airport to the south, as far as I could walk north on Santa Monica Beach and the La Brea Tar Pits and Farmers Market to the east. There were rumors of tattooed sailors in a port called San Pedro that I envisioned as being more exotic than Hong Kong, with rummed men with dragons inked on their arms and ships with all the flags I had ever learned in sixth-grade geography. It was said there were movie stars in a place called Malibu. And people who spoke another language, came clandestinely from Mexico, and lived by a river on the other side of downtown. All this seemed improbable. In any event, it was farther than I could walk or dare imagine. My measurements were human in dimension.

My family lived on Sepulveda Boulevard, in a series of stucco bungalow apartments built in the ‘50s to accommodate World War II soldiers who vowed to return with their young wives to the land of orange groves by the ocean, and did. It was the architecture of pragmatism, conformity and greed masquerading as necessity in the new American pseudo-tropical fashion. The illusion of the tropics. This was the blueprint for the new slums in the sun.

The design was minimal in all the wrong ways. Even the foliage was uniform and boring, rubber trees and oleander, green at the periphery and an absence of startling color. It was the tropics subdued, easy to mow, without fragrance or intoxication: the virtual tropics. The conceptual latitudes. It was a mean, hardscrabble piece of desert with an Okie twang, and to call it the tropics was a collective hallucination. By 1960, it was already shabby, though no one seemed to protest.

There is something about the implications in the minimalist architecture and landscaping that occurs to me now. It was as if the dwellings were deliberately designed for transience. Apartments without dining rooms, as if anticipating a world where families disintegrated and everyone ate alone, in front of the television. Apartments lacking insulation but possessing the obligatory balcony with a dried-out soiled pink geranium. The flowerpot like a burnt prop that spoke of some fundamental violation. There was always smog and the residues of a human misery we didn’t possess a vocabulary for. Our apartments and tract houses seemed devised for people who would be spending their lives standing in lines, being identified by number, rather than name. We were proto-welfare state, Sun Belt style.

The apartments where I grew up were so similar as to be almost identical. They faced a burlap brown bean field where tractors one day appeared. They claimed they were building a freeway to San Diego but who could take such an idea seriously? San Diego was farther than I could ever walk, farther even than the blue bus line. It might as well have been Paris or Singapore. It had nothing to do with my life, which was linear, straight as Sepulveda or Santa Monica or Pico boulevards, curving down to the bleached blue pocket of ocean. My childhood was summers of walking to the beach, finding glass soda bottles that could be redeemed for two or three cents each. We found them under the Santa Monica Pier. We found them in gutters and alleys beneath fronds and jacaranda petals fallen on cement, curled like so many severed purple ears, slowly fermenting. An armful of glass was bus fare and ice cream.

I later called myself a latchkey child of the already decaying streets of a Los Angeles that from inception harbored secret slums. It has always been a city of subtle psychological apartheid, us and them. A city of what could not be spoken. A city of we who actually lived here and the others, the ones of rumor, the ones who might come here if lured.

There was nothing glamorous about West Los Angeles in 1960. In the montage of ambiguous fragments I call memory, it seems the other inhabitants of this realm had arrived not by choice, but more often by calamity. My neighbors came for their health, the promise of a winter in permanent remission. It was a region where a brother had asthma or fathers were recovering from heart attacks. This Los Angeles was the last outpost. It was where you hung on, inches from the sea. It was the last stop before drowning or China or having to learn a new language.

This Los Angeles was where you came for a second chance after going broke in Baltimore or Milwaukee. It was where you went after the scandal. It was a world of divorcees and single mothers, though that term hadn’t yet been invented. But I knew. I baby-sat for them. It seems curious now, but my childhood had a quality of stigma, of words that couldn’t be uttered. The poverty we didn’t speak of, the diseases whose names we couldn’t say out loud, the family dysfunctions, the dreary housing. “Alcoholism” and “cancer” and “divorce” were still dirty words.

They were building the freeway but it wasn’t for us. There was a global agenda that also had nothing to do with the people who actually lived here, grew up here, hung their sheets between trees of hard avocados like so many green stones, their towels beneath orange trees with fruit that tasted chalky and bitter. We never ate it, not even in August, when it was over 100 degrees.

There were always two distinct cities in this basin. There was the city of little neighborhoods where we, the indigenous population lived, and often lived poorly. We were the offspring of catastrophe, personal and climatic--the Dust Bowl, the failed families and farms, the legacy of sharecroppers--and we came for the great American lottery of a second chance. And, in stark opposition, there was the city of myth they were building all around us. The city of dreams, of tycoons and stars in organ-shaped pink swimming pools in the hills, some hills, somewhere. This other Los Angeles was as distant for us as San Diego or Honolulu. There was the actual city where we walked to the beach and the conceptual city of the future that they were creating for another group of people entirely. We rode buses and hung our laundry in the gritty, glaring sun, but we were fundamentally inconsequential bit players. That’s what our indifferent architecture told us. We were transient. The sooner we left, the better.

They were fabricating the new city over and through us, and we were in the way. Our houses were bulldozed for freeways. The new Los Angeles selected for another breed of individual entirely. You didn’t come here because your daughter had weak lungs or they foreclosed your hardware store in Indiana. You came for another climate, and it had nothing to do with temperature. It was psychological. It was about power and money, the new industries with their more potent fuel of images and sounds, the record and movie business, real estate and investment, fashion and stardom.

It was the world before lunching right replaced sensibility as the new art form. It was Los Angeles as she was before her innumerable cosmetic procedures, the tawdry stylists, the elocution lessons, manicures, implants and braces. It wasn’t yet a city of mirrors.

The Los Angeles of my perhaps fictional childhood was a second-rate southern fishing village, almost a small border town with a drawl, with a trailer park on sand at the edges. We moved slow. We caught bonito and bass from the Santa Monica Pier and walked home, barefoot, on streets where we did not yet have drive-by shootings or multinational entertainment conglomerates. Culver City and Mar Vista were as distinct as feudal kingdoms. Downtown itself was almost an abstraction. We only went there on field trips.

Now that I observe Los Angeles from my apple orchard in the Allegheny Mountains, I understand why my hometown has become the flagship city in crisis at the millennium. As the mythic allure of Los Angeles dissipates, as technology makes it viable to live in Maui or Telluride or here, it’s like a vast set being struck. They’ve put away the costumes, crated up the props, and I know the Los Angeles that remains. It’s my hometown, populated by the legions who lived on small change, on the margin, while the conceptual city came and is leaving.

Now Los Angeles is the city of our children and there’s nothing virtual about it. They never liked their bad acid-trip stucco apartments, like visual sores, like third-rate motels, emblazoned with insults in six languages, and now some of them are drugged and armed. They’re the children of the bulldozed-for-freeways-tract-houses who came for a second chance and didn’t get it. They’re the children of broken families Southern California-style, with a view of alleys of scorched oleander and abandoned shopping carts. They’re the children of the too-bitter-to-eat citrus. The children of the blue bus line.

It isn’t that Los Angeles suddenly changed. It’s rather that the virtual Los Angeles is fading. And the Los Angeles that was always here, all along, growing silently, breeding and molting, fermenting under that garish outrage of sun, is finally beginning to emerge. It’s been learning to speak and scream. No one seems to have noticed. But the truth is, we who call Los Angeles our hometown have been in a bad mood for years.