Filed under: Made in Los Angeles | Tags: Griffith Park, jackie robinson, los feliz, nadia comaneci, Neal Cassady, olive hill
I set out on the road from Los Angeles to New York in the hopes of shaking off the dust that had settled on my soul after exactly two years of living within walking distance from everything I ever needed: the Post Office next door on one side, a local branch of my bank on the other, the canopy of massive Moreton Bay figs 
leading up to Griffith Park (also the Ennis House), more Frank Lloyd Wright on Olive Hill, the subway (yes, the subway), two little movie theaters, and, in the second year, a sometimes lover who came calling when I left the door unlocked and didn’t when I didn’t. My life in Los Feliz was a perfect haven of loneliness — as Alex pointed out after my last trip to LA, “There’s nothing more beguiling than a perfectly constructed utopia.”
“I don’t understand you. You’re not afraid of anything — look at the things you’ve done — and now you’re such a coward.” This was the lover speaking. There were too many books in his apartment, nothing — ever — in the fridge, and always little piles of photographs, pulled from, or not yet organized in one of at least fifteen albums with faux leather covers. Because most of them were from the road when he was younger, time spent in that room always pitched me into some dream of the American youth that had evaded me. Because: I wasn’t American (at least not until recently); I was a girl; I grew up in New England, not in California; I went to private school, where there were no boys, no football, not even a proper prom, or lockers.
The photographs were always changing, as though he spent some part of every day revisiting that dream himself (only he’d lived it; there were the documents to prove it). He was seventeen and lying in a truck bed looking like a young Neal Cassady. 
He was driving. Save for the consistent and distinctive malocclusion, I couldn’t reconcile the scrappy dead-ringer for River Phoenix with the moody upstairs neighbor. He had a touch of “Glory Days” about him and could watch endlessly pinnacle moments in famous athletic careers, Jackie Robinson, Nadia Comaneci, Ali. He was a YouTube junkie and a rowdy drunk and every edge was rough; his smile made me think of scrap metal. He was a fool for Shakespeare and said things like, “Girls should all be shot the minute the sun comes up.”
If I entertain a softness for that kind of man sometimes, it’s not so much wanting to be with him as to be him. But “may no fate willfully misunderstand me and [fully] grant what I wish…”
I left town, and all of that perfection, and might say my hopes were realized; I’m still shaking dust, in fact. Miraculously, when I went back this June, all that utopia was there, intact, albeit in a new arrangement. For four straight weeks every last little thing was perfect, and I filled up on that perfection until I almost buckled; I packed some in my pockets for good measure. Only it doesn’t work that way. I still love you, California. And you still make me lonely.
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