The air pollution in the L.A. basin has definitely gotten worse since I visited L.A. about this time last year. Even in Camarillo, where we were staying, the “marine layer” was thick and brown. Doesn’t anybody in Southern California know or care about this appalling (no pun intended) situation? Or has everybody basically resigned themselves to literally living in Hell?
We visited a friend of Eric’s with whom Eric used to teach at Fairfax High School. He and his wife had recently sold their modest house in Gardena at about a 3,000 percent profit and had used the money for a down payment on a Spanish-style home near La Cienega Boulevard and 18th Street. Although this neighborhood is referred to (presumably straightfacedly) as “Beverly Hills adjacent,” it is in a gritty, very urban area, bracketed at 18th Street by a huge, big-box shopping center which attracts vagrants, teenagers, and gang members. The lots are so claustrophobically tiny that there are no front yards and almost no space between the side windows on one house and the windows on the house next door. The house we visited requires extensive remodeling to replace the previous owners’ plastic wall paneling, smoked-glass mirrors, cottage cheese ceilings, insensitive room bifurcations, and other horrors. The back yard is only a few feet away from La Cienega Boulevard, with heavy traffic roaring past 24 hours a day and huge billboards (glaring with gazillion-watt lighting at night) looming overhead. The punch line is that this “entry level” home (it has a tiny bedroom and a den downstairs and a hastily-added upstairs addition, created by the previous owner to remedy the bedroom problem but now in need of a complete remodel) sold for nearly $800,000, and is now worth closer to a mil. If I were Eric’s friend I’d take the million bucks and get the hell outta Dodge. Wouldn’t you?
If Eric and I miss anything about L.A., it’s the Mexican food. Here in New York we basically have to cook it ourselves; there are numerous Mexican restaurants on the Island and in the city, but although the food is passable, it is never as hot as we long-suffering leathermouths require (sorry, Dave’s Insanity Sauce dolloped on as an afterthought is no substitute for slow-simmered habaneros and chiles de arbol). So, while in L.A., we made sure to have lunch at Barragan’s, our favorite old Mexican hang in Echo Park. We were gratified to note that the food at Barragan’s is still delicious, the margaritas are still very reasonable and quite potent, and the restaurant’s ambience is virtually unchanged (i.e., no trendy decor or ill-advised menu additions, no groveling concessions to the Atkins diet or servile capitulation to the low-fat edict, no one on the wait staff is a budding actor/screenwriter/musician...in fact, no one on the wait staff looks to be under the age of sixty). We also visited El Coyote, another Mexican joint a few miles to the west. It, too, had changed very little from the way we remembered it: in its kitschy, 1930’s-styled environment (lots of plastic plaster statues, velvet paintings, etc.), the kitchen was still pumping out the same “gringo Mex” grub that made it infamous (spaghetti as a side dish?) and its margaritas were still kind of funny tasting but no one could argue that they didn’t get the job done. The neighborhood around El Coyote seemed to have a lot more bars on windows and doors than I remembered, and no one was visible in the streets when the restaurant closed at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. That’s another thing about L.A.: you’d think, being a major metropolis and all, that it would have some semblance of nightlife. But in most parts of town they still seem to roll up the sidewalks pretty early. Maybe it’s because of all the drive-by shootings.
Part of the time we stayed with Eric’s mother in Camarillo, about 55 miles from downtown L.A. Her house was built in the 1980’s, along with all the other houses in her suburban development. There are three basic house designs in this development, all of them the brainchildren of the developer. Eric’s mother’s house is the smallest of the three plans, with two bedrooms and a den. The house’s squat appearance and fake rubblestone front always makes me think of the Flintstones. The garage is easily three times bigger than the house’s second bedroom. Although a small park and several shopping centers are within easy walking distance, I have only rarely seen anyone on the development’s wide, immaculate sidewalks, day or night. The curtains in the houses are drawn, no one seems to frequent the carefully landscaped yards, and no children are seen playing anywhere near the houses, although each house has between two and five vehicles parked in the driveway. Many days, says Eric’s mother, she has no one to speak with unless she makes a phone call to a family member -- nearly all of whom live in other states.
Eric’s mother and his late father bought their house in 1984, when they retired to California from Centerport, New York. When I think of the difference between the Centerport neighborhood they moved from, and the Camarillo development they moved to, I can’t help feeling they made a deal with the devil. They may have thought they were escaping from harsh winter weather and high taxes, but instead they exchanged those perceived ills for an eerily sterile, peculiarly insulated existence in a nothing suburb. In Centerport the deed to their house gave them permanent dock rights...the water was just steps away from their front door. The neighborhood was woodsy and secluded, looking down to the harbor from gentle slopes covered with tall old oaks, maples, tulip trees, and dogwoods. According to Eric’s mother (and Eric) the family had countless friends in the neighborhood, and everyone was always going to parties, dinners, and backyard get-togethers. The towns of Northport and Huntington were nearby, with shopping, boating, and town beaches. In the winter, the kids all went sledding and skating. It was (and still largely is) a beautiful, idyllic spot.
Eric’s mother grew up on the Lower East Side, surrounded by her immigrant parents and two sisters and a lively extended family. Later they moved to the Bronx, and then, like many other post-WWII families, Eric’s newly married parents began a steady, upwardly mobile trek: first to Fresh Meadows, then New Hyde Park, then a couple of defense industry-related detours to Los Altos, California and Huntsville, Alabama, then finally back to New York. After a life with so many changes of scenery and such a kaleidoscope of family, friends, and memories, for Eric’s mother to be spending her old age in Camarillo, in this ticky-tacky necropolis, seems anticlimatic, to say the least. But I guess hers is an archetypical story...and very L.A.
To get to JFK, we caught the Long Island Rail Road from Stony Brook to the Air Train, which took us from Jamaica station directly to our flight terminal. We reversed this operation when we came home. It wasn’t super-fast, but it was very reasonable, and we didn’t have to do any driving (except less than a mile between our house and the Stony Brook railroad station). Try using public transportation to get to LAX! Especially at night.
And so I close these random observations with one thought: It’s good to be home. After all, I might be in Camarillo.
