Ever Since I Left

Stick around, nostalgia won't let you down. -- Jimmy Eat World

Ever since I left California, I've been wondering when I would miss it.

I lived there just short of thirteen years. A quarter of my life. And those thirteen years were hardly wasted time. I was busy. In retrospect many years I was everlastingly working, sometimes seven days a week -- sometimes nearly 100 hours a week, independent of the time I spent writing. And yet even when I was unemployed, broke, and frustrated almost out of my mind, I was busy. There was always something to do that didn't cost much if any money. I could hike any number of mountain ranges and parks, from the Hollywood Reservoir to Pico Canyon to Wildwood Canyon to Cahuenga Peak. I could (though I did so only rarely) go to the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu. I could zip down to Hollywood and catch an old movie at the Egyptian, or go just a little further and swim beneath the palms of Park La Brea. From there I could hit the Farmer's Market and do some writing over a cup of coffee, occasionally spying a celebrity walking obliviously through the crowd. And once upon a time, I could get some excellent beer and a wicked marguerita pizza at Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard, served to me by local legend Jimmy the Bartender. There were also, in Burbank, any number of comic book stores, curio shops, and secondhand clothing outlets where one could browse without buying anything: I was passionately in love with Book & Movie World on San Fernando Boulevard, and had a great fondness for Dark Delicacies on Magnolia. Los Angeles is nothing if not bursting with things to do.

There is, too, a mystique about Southern California and L.A. in particular. It's massive, noisy, rambling, dirty, gorgeous and crammed with history. The archieture, from Art Deco to Spanish Colonial, tells many a story and all of them fascinating -- I was always particularly fascinated by the homes in Beverlywood Canyon, where I ran into Kevin Costner and Christopher Nolan at different times, and by those south of my old place in Mid-City West near the Beverly Center, once you crossed 3rd Street. In the late afternoons, a beautiful whitish haze, like the filters you used to see in Tony Scott films, settled over everything, most especially the ever-present palm trees. Sunsets were drawn-out affairs, especially on -- go figure this -- Sunset Boulevard, which is precisely as beautiful, and as sleazy, as you'd expect it to be, depending where you end up on it. If you are an afficianado of movie or television history, you will soon begin to recognize one landmark after another no matter where you go. It's a curious thing indeed to stand on a spot once occupied by Guy Pierce, or William Shatner, or Sarah Michelle Gellar or Russel Crow, or for that matter, Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. Many is the time I have finished watching some old TV show from the 80s, only to find myself, purely by accident, at the exact location at which it was shot. It's a surreal experience, at once amusing and a little frightening somehow -- frightening because places have no memory, and don't care who stood where or did what.

When I think of my time there, all those years hustling for work, and either not getting it and fretting myself into madness over that fact, or getting way too much of it and falling asleep at the wheel on my way home from work, I am struck by the sheer weight of the memories, and their ferocious intensity. L.A. is a very tactile city in every respect. The sky is a deeper blue, the air has a taste like burned paper, the light seems to be almost a living thing, and the heat can break your spirit at times, as can the terrible, terrible dryness of late summer, when the asphalt shimmers and the tar bubbles and you long for rain with all your might. Your shoes crackle over broken glass, and my cousin Scott once reflected, as we walked through Hollywood, how you never truly appreciate just how much it stinks of human and canine piss until you travel about it on foot. In every way, good and bad, L.A. reminds you that you are inside of it, part of it, one cell in a very large, obnoxious body.

I could go on endlessly about things of this nature -- midnight swims beneath the stars in February, chance encounters with famous folks in nightclubs, sixteen hour days spent on set, on location, or in windowless editing bays in Mid City, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the bull sessions on balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip at three in the morning when we were all exhausted and sharing our fears...but that would not really be getting at the core of things. Most of everyday life in L.A. is as prosaic as anywhere else. Groceries need to be bought, and bills need to be paid. Laundry needs to be folded and dishes washed. The cat has to be gathered up from his sleeping place beneath the orange tree before you go to the gym, and dinner has to be cooked before you can relax afterwards. It would be the same in Topeka or Eagle Rock or Jacksonville -- or for that matter, York, Pennsylvania. What sets L.A. apart in a way that has so far prevented my inborn nostalgia from kicking in, is the accursed traffic.

Everyone has heard of how bad the traffic is in Los Angeles, but like battle or childbirth, it must actually be experienced to be understood. Sometimes I think the acute depression I suffered for the last three years I lived there was no caused by exposure to the ghastly chemicals used in the special effects industry, or the cruel and capricious bosses (many of whom are practicing sociopaths), or the unfairness of the pay vs. the brutality of the work, or the way the whole industry thrives on stealing credit from those who actually deserve it -- no, it was the fucking traffic. Words are an insufficient medium to describe how much I hated crawling through no-end-in-sight jams on the 101 or 5 freeways, or worse yet, the impenetrable vehicular prison created by events at the Hollywood Bowl. Rage does not describe the feeling I had every day when it took me 3 hours to drive from Mid-City West to Malibu, a journey which ought to take about 45 minutes. I got so sick of this commute I ended up abandoning the accursed 10 freeway for a massive detour on the 101 that took me through the mountains to the Pacific Coast Highway, literally doubling the distance of my commute to 60 miles one way, but at least allowing me to move the entire time. Indeed, sometimes when I think back to my years in La La Land, my main memory is of me fulminating behind the wheel of my car because it was three in the morning and somehow I was still stuck in traffic, far from home, with no prospect of escape.

Since moving back East, I have encountered new challenges to temper, mood and mental health, but none so consistently daunting and rage-inducing as Los Angeles traffic. Indeed, when I made my as yet only return visit out there last Christmas, I immediately found myself stuck in a jam on the 5 south, which I suppose was the city's way of welcoming me "home."

While living there, I noticed that the happiest and most successful people I knew had all made their peace with L.A.'s traffic. They considered it the price of doing business and were quite philosophical about it. This is a state of mind I could never consistently achieve. I went so far as to buy books on Buddhism to help me cope with my hatred, and they did help, but they did not cure my condition. I suffer from depression. My depression manifests not as sadness but as anger. Being stuck in traffic triggers my depression and therefore, my angry state, and if I have a visual image of myself, a sort of 3rd person view of myself in the last few years I lived there, it is of a sweat-drenched, middle-aged man in a shitty old Honda Accord, raging incoherently because the three-mile trip home from the gym is taking him half an hour, and all the peace he discovered at the treadmill and heavy bag has been destroyed by frustration.

I am a nostalgic person by nature. When I was in junior high school, I was sent into fits of sentimental longing by Eddie Money's song "I Wanna Go Back," even though the experiences he was singing about belonged to my future and not my past. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out, I also tend to romanticize things, even things in my recent past that I disliked when I was experiencing them. I don't think this is a very serious character fault, but the fact that I can regard the immensity of my experience in California so calmly, so unemotionally, says a lot to me about just how little I enjoyed being angry so often. Some people are rage-a-holics, but I have always disliked being angry, even though (and perhaps because) that emotion came over me so often. Outbursts of anger always make me feel foolish afterward, and often exhausted, discouraged and ashamed in the bargain. So I suppose anger, exhaustion, discouragement and shame overlay every memory I have of Los Angeles, acting as a kind of barrier to sentiment. I remember everything: I romanticize nothing.

How long this will last is anybody's guess. If my ex- was right, I will eventually begin to forget the effect all that wasted time and frustration had upon my psyche, and begin longing for midnight swims in the moonlight beneath the palms, spur of the moment trips to the Egyptian to catch a Friday night flick, Martinis at Maestro's with a good friend or a beautiful acquaintance -- all the things it is actually legitimate to sentimentalize about my former home. Perhaps at that point I will contemplate a return. If my life has proven anything to me, it is that I can do anything I actually set my mind to doing, provided I mull over the idea long enough, and thus wear away the edges of my fears. For now, however, the thought of crawling down Ventura Boulevard at two miles an hour, in the general direction of a shabby one bedroom apartment for which I am paying $2,000 amonth, makes my blood run as cold as the Pennsylvania winter which is now fast approaching.