L is for Los Angeles
Introduction to “L is for Los Angeles”
True story, of course.
I don’t know that I will ever write a story for my father; he was not a man who displayed or inspired much passion or imagination. Though he was there for the first 40 years of my life, I feel like I only got to know him (and even then, just a little) when he found out he was dying.
That may be another story for another time. For the time being, this will have to do.
I remember being in the back of the stationwagon...unseatbelted, unseated, unafraid. Through those big windows, the city of Los Angeles floated around me, above me, buildings towering, neon glowing, lights flashing, streets full of cars and noise. It was better than Disneyland.
We were on our way back from my aunt’s house, my mom’s sister. My aunt lived in Los Angeles, which we thought was so daring. I mean, all of us suburbanites were here because Los Angeles was here, but she was the only person I knew who actually lived in Los Angeles. She had a cool old house on 92nd Street; she’d married into a little money, a guy who owned some real estate and ran a liquor store and (I found out much later) was a decently-successful bookie.
My mom was asleep. My sister was next to me, asleep. My dad had the radio on low, R&B drifting from the front of the car to the back where I was laying, staring up at the city. The station he played only on nights like this. My dad, the midwestern Methodist banker, gray of suit and of personality; my dad, whose collection of Four Tops records I found after he died, records I had never heard played.
I loved these rides. The city felt unsafe, unpredictable, unknown, thrilling, alive. It was all so different than the suburban life that enveloped me; my nearly-all-white elementary school, my neatly-mowed neighborhood, my friends who were all pretty much just like me, my very safe very normal very predictable life. Just laying there, feeling the road, hearing that sweet sweet music, watching through the windows, I felt my heart beat faster; I felt breathless.
I don’t know that anything makes me breathless anymore. But I still go out into the city at night, looking for it.
