The Wilshire Sun. Joshua Baldwin

      My aunt, with pronounced reluctance and disgust, agreed to drive me over to my grandfather’s. In an act of passive hostility she drove an extraordinarily roundabout and pothole riddled route through Brooklyn into Queens (the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods had apparently experienced a great chemical fire the night before, and many of the synagogues, churches, and warehouses had been reduced to black and blue crutches) and used the Queensboro Bridge to enter Manhattan. The rainy and thick gray mid-afternoon sky filled me with a great lethargy, and I nearly asked my aunt to forget about continuing uptown, she had better just drop me off at the Karen Horney psychiatric clinic that greeted us as we swung off the bridge and slammed onto the pavement of 62nd street. But I stopped myself, and instead, noticing a Chinese takeout restaurant, the Fantasy Wok Palace, I proposed that we stop for a plate of cold noodles with sesame sauce, and maybe even some mixed dumplings. My aunt shook her head and said, “Looking rather fat, you are, young man, let’s better hold off on that now. Besides, I’m sure your grandfather will be spoiling you with cold cuts, butter rolls, and lemonade.”

      There were no cold cuts and butter rolls, but there were bottles of beer and a tray of pretzel rods. And sitting in the dining room at the long pinewood table, enjoying the beer and pretzels, I asked my grandfather if he had ever been to Los Angeles. “Well sure,” he told me, “when your greatgrandmother was still alive, a long time ago. It was a different place then—really just a musician’s town, and I rode out there with a musician in fact, a fellow by the name of Timothy Q. Dorothy, a Dixie style drummer. He had some summer employment with a nightclub band out there, and when I saw a poster tacked to the cork board in the mailbox room of this very building that read something like ‘Looking for trip companion to Los Angeles to share driving and gasoline expenses. See Timothy Dorothy in apartment 12G ASAP if interested,’ I went knocking on his door right away, and we made arrangements to leave three days hence. We drove non-stop, switching shifts at the wheel every ten hours, and all we had for food was a great big pail full of sweet corn and several pounds of raisins. I spent that whole summer in Los Angeles, living in a bungalow off Pico Boulevard somewhere in the middle of town. I believe I saw Charlie Chaplin washing his car with a tremendous purple blanket once, and he wasn’t wearing any shirt. I tried to break into the nightclub scene there myself, as a comic, but it didn’t work out and come September I was on the train back to New York City. Why, are you thinking of going?” He must have forgotten I ventured there in April—he’s gotten quite senile with certain things.