I’ve been crazy about two neighborhoods in my life. The first is where I grew up, a little 6-block radius of Greenwich Village. It’s hard to know if I could have been crazy about the neighborhood at the time, as kids don’t generally show enthusiasm about things like neighborhoods, but as soon as I left I remembered the diner where I knew all the waiters, many of whom were drag queens, and the blooming magnolia trees outside a church I’d pass on the way to school. It seemed to me I’d never grow attached to a place like I was then, and maybe that’s still true, as I can’t imagine anything like looking out of my bedroom window from my seat on the sputtering radiator and seeing four feet of pristine snow and hearing two dozen pigeons making a racket. When I was reading Portnoy’s Complaint I was struck by a line: Portnoy’s mother holds the very young protagonist up to a window and says, “Look, baby, a real fall day.” Your first experiences of beauty, of anything, can’t be overwritten; no matter how many pretty winter vistas I will see, my favorite will always be the first one. It was as if winter had never happened before, because it had never happened for me in any other way than it did on west 11th street.
That being said, of course, I moved away and new things presented themselves to me as an adult, new beautiful things that I could appreciate in a way that I couldn’t have as a child. The idea of being on a walk and grabbing an orange off a tree and munching it as you amble around will always seem novel to me, because as an adult I am struck with wonder at the things nature can offer us for free (limes are $.50, which is absurd, because if you take a walk on Laurel Terrace in Studio City you can snatch as many limes as your purse or hands will allow. I know that this makes me sound like I have four dollars in my bank account and all I want to do is eat citrus fruit, but it’s more that I have a kind of awe for the weird nature of California, which will always feel alien to me as a New Englander and a New Yorker and a Greedy Gus Who Loves Limeade).
Neighborhoods in Los Angeles are so different from each other, climate-wise and people-wise and things-to-do-wise, that if you end up in the wrong place you could end up hating the entire city. Van Nuys can easily make you wonder why we’re all bothering to stay alive. When Molly moved to Silver Lake after we came back post-college, I had never been east of Hollywood. Ten years ago, there was nothing east of Hollywood that would have appealed to me then. Nobody I knew lived there, it was far from my home and from school, and I didn’t drive on freeways because I kept knocking off my side-view mirror while attempting to squeeze my wide load of a car into our tiny garage.
I took the 101 to Molly’s house and boom: there was a huge sparkling lake with seagulls and rows of giant cypress trees, millions of taco stands, dazzling hillsides with wildflowers and 100-year-old craftsman houses painted pink and red and dark green. It completely changed my love for Los Angeles in a way that is embarrassing to admit, because it had been there all along without my knowing it. It’s strange to be out of your element while at the same time in your element: of all the places I’ve lived, LA is the place I know the best, and yet I still got lost all the time on steep and narrow winding streets as soon as I found myself east of Vermont. My west-side friends get prickly. I have picked up the phone and heard “I don’t know where I am!” as if I had picked them up and dropped them on Mars. I understand. Nobody likes to feel lost. I ask them if they see the reservoir, but they’re looking for freeway signs. I feel as though I’ve claimed my spot here: I have the drive I take when I’m upset, the place I know I can park myself for three hours and I’ll run into someone I know, someone familiar I’ve seen around or one of the people I already knew who ended up as a neighbor. I’m working on my Spanish. I am beginning to recognize the individual crazy people who push carts on Glendale and who rant at Sunset Junction.
Maybe as an adult we find different comforts in the familiar than we did as children, when so little was familiar to us anyway. To live in a place where you feel like you can stick a root in the ground if you had to and you’d be happy is something that some people never find. A friend of mine discovered, later in her life, that she had a brother. He had been living with his mother (the two shared a father) and didn’t know the other half of his family. My friend’s mother told her that they should make every effort to include him, telling my friend that this boy was “a man without a country.” It seemed both sad and vague, like not having a passport or a sense of smell, something which, lacking it, would not seem necessary until you have occasion to really miss it, to know what exactly you’re missing. What a wonderful thing it is to look out on something as simple and stupid as a man-made reservoir and identify yourself with it, stare at it and walk around it and learn its borders and the surrounding map of its dusty city blocks, its bodegas and postal centers, and to take part of it for yourself.
