Song of the City of Angels

One of my first long journeys was to Los Angeles. I had not traveled much at all, only a trip to Salt Lake City to see St. Judy when I was eighteen. Every other journey had kept me within the cloying arms of the South, so I was a not much of a wayfarer for a long time. But a friend from graduate school was from LA, and he invited me out to spend a week. It was an interesting and odd trip.

We did all the touristy things: a Dodger game, Universal Studios, Knotts Berry Farm, and he and his wife were nice. It’s just that they were also strange. He was doing a doctoral program in the area, and she was working for a pro-life center in downtown LA, but that’s not the weird part. As soon as I arrived, he took me to Burbank where they lived, but he said that the next morning they were moving to Costa Mesa, a very long trek across the heart of Los Angeles. I hadn’t known this when I was invited out, but it was no problem. I would help them move. “You can drive the truck, right?” he asked nonchalantly. Not wanting to appear daunted by the prospect of driving across LA on a weekday, I said “Sure, no sweat.” But there was sweat. My first visit to a major city, and I’m supposed to drive?–a moving van?–in LA? I was scared, and the smog was hanging over me like the cloud of worry in my mind. Fortunately, things went well, and I was able to complete the gauntlet. I followed my friend to his new place, and he pulled into a funeral home, no doubt to use the parking lot while we moved into his apartment nearby. “So where’s you place?” I ask innocently. “Right here,” he says, just as innocently. “Right where?” “In the funeral home,” he explains casually. “You’re going to live in a funeral home?” the boy from Tennessee asks incredulously. We do some weird things in the South, but we don’t usually live in funeral homes. “Sure,” he says, like I’m the one who’s being weird. “I get free rent, and all I have to do is answer the phone all night and tell people where to pick up bodies.” “That’s all, huh?” “Yep, and I’ll get a lot of work done on my dissertation because it will be quiet.” “Well, it will be quiet, but I don’t know about getting any work done,” I say.

So we begin moving him in. I can still see the foreboding stairs going up to the small apartment from the parlor. At one point we are moving the refrigerator, and we have to turn it around to get it heading up the stairs in the right direction. I back into a room and turn around to see an uncovered corpse lying on the table. We had entered the embalming room. My friend took all this in stride, but it was my first introduction to southern California culture, and I was rather stunned. So my first trip to LA involved driving a moving van in commuter traffic and stepping around a corpse with a refrigerator. I slept very little as the phone rang all night, every night, and my friend arranged for the dead to be gathered from the city of angels.

I actually came back again, and my friend was even weirder. I ended up leaving early because he offended the woman I was with–something derived from his wacked out religious views on love and sex. This was a man who said that he was going to decorate his children’s bedroom walls with torture scenes from the Bible: Samson with his eyes gouged out, Deborah cutting off the head of Jael, various nightmares from the Book of Revelation. He’s probably a full professor with an endowed chair somewhere, and his children will murder him in his sleep one day.

Of course it was easy to see the weirdness in LA from my former friend and otherwise, but lately I’ve come to see a new LA. When I was here in May, my new colleagues and I met up there, and we spent a lovely day on Sunset Boulevard having lunch, drinking coffee, and buying books. I saw an LA I hadn’t seen before: one where people actually lived, and not in a funeral home. I have a number of colleagues who live in LA and drive out to Cool University because they just love the vibe. And of course there are a number of LAs, each with a different character and geographic center. Since that May trip, I’ve been there to see a Lyle Lovett and K.D. Lang concert at the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park, the Old Crow Medicine Show (Tennessee boys) at the Avalon Theatre at Hollywood and Vine, and most recently, Lucinda Williams at the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. I’ve found LA to be actually inviting and easy to get around in. At the Lucinda Williams concert we parked right next to the theatre for $6. That’s right–$6. It would have cost $30 in Boston and would have been several blocks away. And while not everybody is beautiful in LA, a lot of people are, and it’s nice just to sit and watch people walk by sometimes. You can also get most anything you want to eat. There is the House of Pies near Sunset Boulevard, and last week I found potato pancakes at the diner next to the El Rey. My new friends noticed what I had and asked if those were latkas. “Hell no,” I said, “they’re potato pancakes.” And we all laughed because we were in LA, and everybody was beautiful, and we were all happy to see Lucinda Williams. And I laughed also because I didn’t have to drive a truck or stay in a funeral home.