In California

Los Angeles averages about 15 inches of rain a year, which is roughly equal to the average annual snowfall in Washington, DC. This morning, two strange things occurred nearly simultaneously as I lay in bed emerging from a dream about acting in a play. The first thing was the sound of my housemate’s footsteps and then the unlocking of the front door. The predawn hour of his departure was highly unusual and, in my dream-like state, slightly unnerving. I was about to drift off again to sleep but I started to hear something else. It was the sound of rain.

I got dressed and showered an hour later and drove to Santa Monica for a job interview. The air is mysterious in LA and whether it’s the heaviness of smog or the grayness of the marine layer, there is a remarkable variety to the sky’s personality, despite its sunny reputation. Leaving Santa Monica and heading to Los Feliz on the 10, I listened to Neko Case’s “In California,” whose opening lyric could hardly be more fitting: “In California, I dream of snow . . . “

It was cold as well today and I wore my turtleneck and jacket, which I haven’t worn since I left New York, and used the beige, portable umbrella which had been sitting in the bottom of my suitcase. At Sabor y Cultura on Hollywood Boulevard, I dropped off my résumé with a woman who wore her hair short and dyed red and sported a silver ring through her left lower lip.

“Do you have any experience?” she asked me, and I told her I did and she said they weren’t hiring at the moment but they might be soon. She pulled out a file-folder which contained a stack of résumés and put mine inside.

“There,” she said, “Right on top,” and she showed me how she’d placed my résumé on the top of the stack.

“Thank you. I appreciate it,” I said, and I left.

I’ve left New York twice now, it occurs to me. And this last time was anticlimactic and somewhat dull, with my father arriving in the station wagon, and us filling it so quickly we were home in time for a late dinner. This, opposed to the first time I left New York when I was very much alone and heavily romantic about it. That was in January 2000 when I was nineteen years-old. It was a Saturday. I’d spent the morning working my final shift at a packing and shipping company in the West Village and on the train back to Brooklyn Heights I told myself that I would be back and that I would specifically be back to Brooklyn.

Later that evening, after loading down my 84 Volvo with my possessions, including an enormous Hewlett-Packard printer, I said goodbye to Apartment 5R and drove north on Clinton Street towards the Brooklyn Bridge. I double-parked on Clinton & Joralemon and ran into the corner deli to get a cup of coffee for the drive to Pennsylvania. Inside, two girls whispered to each other, and before I left one of them came up to me and told me I was cute. I have no idea what I responded, but I left pretty quickly. I had to hurry because it was late and it was supposed to snow pretty heavily that night---which it did, the first flakes falling, I recall, as I approached Princeton. It’s amazing the detail with which one is able to remember certain days.

There was a leaf lodged between the blades of my windshield wipers all afternoon today and I knew I should have pulled over to remove it, but I couldn’t be bothered. Sitting on the Hollywood Freeway at two in the afternoon, I thought about this and what it said about me. A nagging “to-do” list began to scroll through my mind, with each item signaling the brain’s neurons to remember another one. To wit: send in the rent check; buy shoelaces; check the car’s oil; call the podiatrist; call mom; write Katherine; send out another dozen resumes; apply for a library card; return DVDs to Blockbuster; respond to David’s e-mail, console him for the loss of the cats, apologize again for being so out-of-touch for so long, promise it won’t happen again.

In Studio City, I parked the car on Moorpark and thought, “Everything’s so green here,” and listened to Neko Case:

“They try to tell me LA is beautiful / When it rains.”

Katherine, thanks for the umbrella.

Reston

I wanted to talk to Katherine on the phone but it was late and I couldn’t reach her. I didn’t want to talk in my parents’ house, where I was visiting for Thanksgiving, so I grabbed my phone, got into my mom’s car and drove. I drove to the south side of Reston, which is the older side, or at least the side on which fewer new development is occurring. It is also the older side of Reston as far as my own life history is concerned. I grew up on this side of the Dulles Access road, in a neighborhood called Boston Ridge, in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac.

I crossed the Access road and turned left on Sunrise Valley Drive and as I approached Boston Ridge, I decided to turn in. It was dark. There aren’t that many streetlights in Reston. Boston Ridge was built in the late 1970s in the middle of old forest and the place is still thick with trees. It was late November and the road was strewn with dead leaves which clumped in piles in the gutters where cars had scattered them.

I pulled up in front of our house, which, of course seemed small to me now. I sat there and looked at it for probably less than three minutes, enough time to notice the same brass pineapple doorknocker which I remembered from childhood, which I remember using occasionally but mainly when hoisted to its height in the arms of my mom or dad. We moved out of this house when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I think at some point I had been back to this neighborhood since then, but I don’t remember it.

I pulled out of the parking space and spent a few minutes looking around, seeking with the headlights of the car a playground which had been, as I recalled it, hidden in the woods nearby. I could not find it. The trees were thicker than I remembered but everything else was diminished. The hills and rises—the gradient of the land—which seemed so troublesome to a kid on a bike now seemed insignificant.

I didn’t feel any sadness or nostalgia indulging in this sudden trip down memory lane. Perhaps it was the darkness. Boston Ridge was familiar to me in sunlight; when you’re a kid you don’t go out after dark. Viewed through the headlights of my mom's Volvo, the neighborhood looked familiar but in a somewhat generic way. Piles of leaves and bare trees, moreover, are intrinsically nostalgic anyway. Winter is just evocative for some reason; perhaps it's the attendant notion of death.

I drove on to the Langston Hughes Middle School where I went for seventh and eighth grades, and South Lakes High School, where I went for ninth and tenth before I convinced my parents—through unabashed pleading—to transfer me to Interlochen and thereby save my soul.

Or whatever. I did feel something as I sat in the parking lot in front of South Lakes and it was a profound sense of regret. What a privilege it is to be young, I thought, and relatively innocent. But I spent much of that youth being unduly hard on myself and on those around me. I was always looking for the next thing, the thing that I did not have, as though unattainability was itself a virtue. I’ve never been one to linger and I didn’t linger that night. The school is currently undergoing a major renovation and there were trailers and construction equipment everywhere. But I didn’t stop to look around. I didn’t even get out of the car.

Is This Home?

Well, it’s happened at last. I am blogging tired. What is blogging tired? Well, it’s kind of like blogging drunk only a yard more irritable. Let’s see if I can pull it off.

What did I do today to make me so tired, you ask? Well, first of all, I woke up in Virginia at five in the morning, which, as my internal clock has now adjusted to Pacific Time, felt more like two in the morning. I was not exactly eager to face the day, let me tell you.

But face the day I did. My parents drove me to Dulles, bid me farewell, and after submitting to the TSA grunts (I inwardly commiserated with a particularly bewildered oldster who’d been pulled aside for a pat-down), I was in the terminal. I had about an hour, so I decided to get breakfast at the only place open, a bar & grill called (I think) Max’s. The eggs and potatoes were fine but the bacon was burnt to an unpalatable crisp. I was also given—and therefore charged for—an orange juice which I did not order, but after I drank it and enjoyed it, I decided not to make a fuss. Do you see how hard my life is?

We boarded the plane and it took off more or less on time. I watched as the cars, trees, and houses of northern Virginia receded into model scale. Soon we were above the clouds.

There was an annoying family seated across the aisle. They had brought a portable DVD player (who buys these crappy, useless devices?) and were watching Home Alone on full-blast without headphones. I complained about this to the stewardess but I don’t think she was entirely on my side, and instead of asking them to turn it off, she simply requested that they lower the volume. I bitterly read Maugham’s Of Human Bondage with my fingers stuffed in my ears.

We reached Colorado and the snowy Rockies which jutted out of the earth like white volcanoes. An hour later, the pilot pointed out the Grand Canyon which, thankfully, was below my side of the plane, so I had a clear view of it. “It’s so vast,” I thought. “It goes everywhere.”

A little before 11 am, we were descending over Greater LA, which looked bright and warm under all that sun. This is the only view of the freeways that makes them look grand, I told myself; from above. When we touched down, I closed my eyes, as I often do before a landing. Moments later, I was in the terminal, heading for Baggage Claim.

Happily, my bag was first out of the chute; the only time that’s ever happened to me. I headed out to the bus line to determine where I could catch a bus to Encino.

You cannot catch a bus to Encino. You can catch a bus to Westwood, from whence you can catch a bus to Sherman Oaks, from whence you can catch a bus to Encino. Once I’d figured this out, I determined that an hour and a half would be a long time to go without food, considering the last time I’d eaten was over seven hours ago. There was no food in the terminal I’d left, however, so I had to drag my bag several terminals down, where I managed to snag a vanilla milkshake.

About an hour later I was in Westwood, where I had a good deal of trouble tracking down the next bus I was to take. Eventually I found it and soon I was on my way. As we made our way over the Santa Monica Mountains, I began to muse on the irony that it was taking me almost a third as much time to get from LAX to the Valley as it had taken me to get to LAX from Virginia. I decided not to dwell on this. Soon I would be home, where I could have something to eat and take a nice afternoon nap.

Sadly, it was not to be. When I arrived, around 2:30 in the afternoon, my house had a guest who I had not been anticipating, and he was sitting on the living room couch, thoroughly engrossed in a full-volume screening of Bruce Almighty on the flat-screen television that dominates the wall adjacent to my bedroom.

“Do you want me to turn it down?” he asked me.

Rather than responding truthfully and thereby risk getting into an extended conversation about it, I said, “No, I’ll just be leaving.”

Which is what I did. And so I’m here. At the Coffee Fix, my home-away-from-home on Moorpark in Studio City. And now I truly am exhausted. I think I’ll finish this mustardy sandwich I have before me and by the time I’m done, perhaps sleep will be prepared to do its worst: overcome even the most vociferous of screwball comedies screaming from the next room. If I can sleep through that, I know I’m set.

Strike One

Here’s what the writers strike is like, for those of you who were wondering. It’s festive. Outside CBS Studios in Studio City, a Gatorade truck pulls up and delivers bottles for free to picketers. On Veterans Day, writers brought their children to the picket line. If you approach these strikers you will hear, mixed in with the chants, the unmistakable murmur of gossiping and, yes, networking. For those on the ground, the strike seems to be about, as much as anything, the rare chance in this impenetrable city to see people outside in large groups.

This is not to say that the strike isn’t being taken seriously. If there’s something a little unreal about the middle-class marchers enjoying their free food outside the studio gates, the fearful undertone of murmured conversations in Hollywood coffeeshops is real indeed. In fact, no matter where you go, it's difficult to escape discussion of the strike. Everyone, including people uninvolved in the industry, is talking about it, because in LA everyone is ultimately involved in the industry. Some of these conversations are amusing. When you overhear gas station attendants and maintenance men discuss residuals, you feel like you’ve learned something about the character of Hollywood.

My reaction to the strike can be characterized as mild dismay. As fate would have it, I arrived in Los Angeles on the very day that talks between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down and hours before writers “walked off the job.” This was not the full-steam-ahead start I’d hoped for in Hollywood.

It has not, however, been uninteresting. One learns, among other things, how begrudgingly close the filmmaking community actually is. It is, in fact, a little like attending a large university, with Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter as the student newspapers. Gossip flies, even among friends of mine I’d never suspected were privy to much insider information. They aren’t really, of course; it’s just impossible not to overhear certain things. Four people, for instance, assured me within days of the strike’s initiation that on the last day of talks the writers and producers “were really close” to a deal.

“They came very close,” one friend said, “and then everything fell apart.”

Another friend told me, “You know, they nearly made a deal and then it fell apart.”

Later, when I found myself speaking with someone else about the strike, I made my own contribution to the narrative.

“You know,” I said, “Apparently, they were really close to making a deal before things fell apart.”

“That’s right,” my friend nodded sagely. “They were really close.”

I felt like I’d learned a lesson not only about how word gets around in the entertainment industry, but also about how to appear like you’re a part of things when you’re really not. And, at this point, I, of course, am decidedly not. Not that I’d necessarily hoped to be “above the line” within two weeks of setting up shop, but when the walk-out was announced, it was as though I could see my prospects visibly dim. The longer the strike goes on, the longer it will take the industry to recover once the strike is ended. And that, I assure you is not simply the popular line that I’m regurgitating.

Thankfully, today it was announced that the warring parties have agreed (much earlier, it should be noted, than many had anticipated) to go back to the table. This comes within days of the announcement that Local One, the Broadway stagehands guild that’s also currently striking, and the League of American Theatres and Producers have decided to start negotiating again. It’s too early to tell, but perhaps this won’t be the winter of our discontent after all.

Tour Americana! Part Three (The West)

I arrived in Flagstaff, Arizona as the sun was setting and after finding a motel on Route 66, I headed downtown to get a drink. I gave myself a quick walking tour and then ducked into one of the many sports bars and I sat at the bar and read The New York Times on my iPhone.

It got dark early and when it did it became very cold. Although the high temperature that day had been in the 60s, the low dipped down to around 28 degrees, which I thought was delightful. Downtown there was a mixed crowed of college students and retirees on the streets. There was a large number of high schoolers as well and they gathered at the town square to hear a local band play. It was too cold for me to linger, though, so I kept walking.

Flagstaff has a city ordinance that keeps its streets dark at night as a courtesy to the Lowell Observatory, which is nearby. The darkness seemed to enhance the coldness which, combined with the town’s frontier architecture and nearby alpine mountains, made me feel more like I was in Alaska than Arizona. I liked Flagstaff a lot.

My mother’s parents met in Flagstaff, incidentally, but I don’t know much about the circumstances and I don’t know if they ever returned.

All the motels are located along the northern side of Route 66. Railroad tracks run parallel to the southern side, and if you stay in one of the motels, prepare to have your sleep interrupted at irregular intervals by the thumping of machinery and the high shriek of the conductor’s horn. Katherine, when I was talking with her on the phone that evening, asked me what the noise was. “You can hear that?” I asked.

The next morning, I woke up early and went into town for breakfast. I looked at the map and saw how close I was and determined that I would make it all the way to Los Angeles that day. I was on the road a little after eight.

Arizona along Interstate 40 is a mostly flat and barren desert and after a few hours I was getting bored. I decided, without much forethought, to take a detour. A few miles south of Kingman, I pulled off the Interstate and got on Route 66.

The glory days of this storied highway are long past but I am pleased to report that it lives on in the hearts and minds of many a bearded motorcyclist and they were pretty much my only company on the lonely two-lane road. The pavement itself is narrow and cracked. There is no shoulder. Its two lanes, one in either direction, aren’t very commodious even for a motorcycle, and my Cadillac felt like a quarterback in a laundry chute as it thundered down the road.

It started out as flat and dull as the Interstate. I had been hoping for some roadside attractions, like a diner or a gas station, but there was nothing. There were some pretty serious mountains up ahead but they didn’t impress me much. I was looking for signs of life.

It was boring and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The road, which had been straight as a rod, became more curvaceous and irregular. Then, very quickly, it became impossible. Without realizing quite how I got there, I found myself hugging the side of a mountain and terrified for my life. There was no quardrail. The highway seemed to have become narrower and it curved at ninety, one-fifty, and nearly one-eighty degree angles every hundred yards. I could barely manage five miles an hour. Any faster and I would plunge to the most pointless death imaginable.

Moreover, I was alone. The motorcyclists had long since passed me and I was now on my own. There were few roadsigns but those I saw mentioned a town called Oatman which was about five miles away.

They were surely the longest five miles I had ever driven. Route 66 was horrifyingly switchback the entire way. Moreover, as I was driving west, I had the privilege of being on the edge of the mountain rather than the inside. Even though there seemed to be no one on the road, I could hardly straddle the lanes since every few yards I was rounding a corner into god-knows-what. I sweated through my shirt and sat on the edge of the seat and after forty minutes or so I traversed the hellish five miles.

And then I arrived at Oatman. It basically meant rounding a corner and then finding myself in the company of aged motorcycle anarchists and their sunburnt women, Arizona mountain men, bearded survivalists, and packs of burros roaming the street.

Oatman is an old mining town that began as a tent camp in 1915. Aside from the t-shirts and touristy knick-knacks, not much seemed to have changed since its founding. I got out of my car and walked around, careful to avoid the burro shit clumped along the street. There were leathery motorcycle geezers everywhere, drinking beer at two in the afternoon. The largest—and oldest—structure in town is the Oatman Hotel where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard improbably honeymooned (he liked to gamble with the old prospectors).

I stayed for a little while and took a few pictures. It was a strange experience. The town is literally in the middle of a mountain, nestled between peaks. Its eastern approach had been treacherous, and its appearance suddenly along the road had been startling. And welcome—I was glad to simply see some other living humans.

The rest of Route 66 as I took it leading back to the Interstate was mercifully straight—or at least manageably so. It took me less than an hour to reach the California boarder, in a town called Needles. I stopped there and put some gas in the car and thundered on toward the coast.

Tour Americana! Part Two (Little Rock)

My mother spent a portion of her childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, but when I stopped there around noon on November 1st, I was unable to locate the street she lived on. She had told me it was near the Governor’s Mansion, which I did manage to find—a modest two-story Colonial behind a wrought-iron fence in an otherwise iffy neighborhood. She also remembered that it was close to Little Rock Central High School, which she said she remembered well, although she did not go to school there. Then again, anyone, I would suspect, who lived through the 1950s in America, remembers this school. It was here that the 1954 Supreme Court integration mandate from Brown vs. Board of Education ignited a firestorm of southern bigotry. In September 1957, nine black students arrived to enroll at Little Rock Central High, but were met by an angry mob determined to resist integration. Eventually, the threat of violence swelled to such a point that the students were sent home.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, as righteously indignant as he was ornately named, wasn’t much help. He sided with the segregationists, who, determined to block the black students’ entry, had set up camp in front of the school. Governor Faubus sent in the police—not to disperse them, but to augment their numbers. The next day, at the request of Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann, President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school. At the same time, the President federalized the entire state’s National Guard force, effectively taking it out of Governor Faubus’ hands.

The students were enrolled and did attend classes that year, during which they were the victims of their white classmates’ racist calumny and occasional violence. Meanwhile, the protests from Little Rock Central High’s parents continued. By the end of the year, the Little Rock School Board—with the support of Governor Fabulus and the Arkansas State Legislature—decided to cancel classes for the entire next year rather than integrate the schools. Eventually, further court decisions forced the School Board’s hand, and classes were reopened in 1959—and begrudgingly integrated.

The school itself, it should be noted, was constructed in 1927 and is outlandishly beautiful—and immense. Its entrance is reached by two grand, mirrored stairways, which rise above a series of Italian archways, and a small reflecting pool. The building is triangular in shape, with twin two-story wings jutting outward as you face its front. Its size is all the more astonishing in the neighborhood of modest one- and two-story houses in which it sits. Across the street is a new museum, run by the National Park Service, which tells the story of the Little Rock Integration Crisis and honors the “Little Rock Nine,” as the black students who integrated the school came to be known. The museum opened just over a month ago, in September 2007.

Tour Americana! Part One

Last week I drove from my parents’ house in northern Virginia to Los Angeles. The trip took six days and covered about 2,700 miles and seven states. I started on Tuesday, October 30 around noon. Earlier in the day, I’d stopped at my mother’s sixth grade class to say goodbye to her. She introduced me to her students and told them that I was moving to Los Angeles which, I was disappointed to note, didn’t seem to impress them very much. We hugged, and one of the students asked my mom if she was going to cry. She didn’t, as far as I could tell, and in any case, in about an hour I was on Interstate 80, heading west.

In Roanoke, Virginia, I stopped at a Triple-A travel office where I was given several heavy bags full of books and maps. The agent I spoke with asked me if I was driving alone. I told her I was. “So,” she said, “Do you have a job out there?” "No," I replied, "Not really,” as though there were varying degrees between having and not having a job. Maps in hand, I saddled up again and drove south to the town of Wytheville, Virginia, which is where I ended up spending the night.

I awoke the next morning to a frost and I used the plastic Kaplan ID, which I still carried in my wallet, to scrape the ice off my car. I stopped in at several Wytheville eateries, hunting for breakfast, but in each, the stench of cigarettes and grease overwhelmed the appetite and I decided to wait until Knoxville to eat. Actually, the biggest struggle of my journey consisted in locating food. Driving the Interstate Highway system, one is presented with endless opportunities to gorge on fried mystery meat of questionable nutritional value. I became obsessed, as never before, with finding fresh fruit and vegetables. In Knoxville, I found a brewery downtown where I was served pasta and beer and that was about as good as it got.

There was something strange about Tennessee, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. In the brewery, for instance, they were playing John Carpenter slasher films at two in the afternoon. When I stopped at Nashville later in the day, I encountered several odd characters walking the streets, and in a downtown coffee shop I was served by a suspicious-looking man in a comically oversized cowboy hat. Something was going on here but I was dazed from driving and hardly knew what day it was, let alone that it was Halloween.

Downtown Nashville was dead at five o’clock, which suited me fine. I walked around for about an hour, took some photographs and moved on. This was pretty much what it was like the whole trip. Most of the cities I visited were moderate in size—in any case, much smaller than New York, of course, and getting into the center of them and then getting back out proved to be pretty simple. I could usually manage a quick survey in about an hour or two and finding a place to park was never hard. The density in these places was largely confined to a few square miles, and all of the cities were well-served by freeways, so entry and escape never included the stop-and-go misery that’s de rigueur in New York.

After Nashville, I drove on for another hundred miles or so until I came to Jackson, Tennessee, where I found a cheap motel room. Finding affordable motels was usually easy, especially as I only had two criteria to fill: 1) that the rooms don’t reek of cigarette smoke, and 2) that the hotel have Internet access. By the time I reached Jackson, I had crossed into Central Time, and it was eight o’clock in the evening. I ordered pizza and after a few hours was asleep.