Some of the Target staff left their checkouts to go over and shake his hand and tell him that they loved him. I looked down at my tube of toothpaste, averting my eyes, and to tell you the truth I felt very sorry for the poor bastard.
Languages
“I’m going to cycle around Europe,” he told me as we started on our second beer. “I dunno, maybe stay and work a while. Maybe learn a language. I’ve always wanted to learn a language.” He had lived all his life in Los Angeles, so I asked him what about Spanish, did he know that Los Angeles has more Spanish-speaking people than any other place in the world, after Mexico City? He said, “Ah, I don’t like Spanish, never liked it. It’s such a—an ugly language.” I asked him which languages he liked. “You know, maybe French, Italian, maybe Polish or something like that—hell, I dunno, maybe even German.”
Cracks
My son and I were walking down the street and as usual he was carefully stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk. When an old hobo shuffled past in his broken shoes, my son told him matter-of-factly, “If you step on the cracks you’ll die.” Without stopping the man nodded his grizzled head profoundly and said, “Yeah brother, they hard rules. One false step and it’s all over. They hard rules right there, brother.”
The mysticism of the freeway
“The freeway experience . . . is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can ‘drive’ on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participants think only about where they are. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over” (Joan Didion, The White Album).
Venice Beach
Along the brokenhearted strip of break dancers, jugglers, graffitied trees, sinister musicians and fortune tellers, amid the slouched storefronts peddling pipes and hotdogs and T-shirts and tattoos, the medical marijuana clinics are newly painted, clean, seedy, legitimate. A guy in dark shades and a bright green lab coat takes a drag on his reefer and sings out, “Step inside, ladies and gentlemen, right this way, the doctor is in. Headache, back pain, insomnia, sadness—it’s good for whatever ails you.”
Australia
I told him I was from Australia. “Australia? For real? It must be nice, all them animals. But you got no sidewalks in Australia—man, that’s an amazing place.”
Mexico
When I told her I wanted to go to Mexico she said, “Mexico? Mexico? What you wanna go there for? Mexico—oh God, it’s so gross. You been to Sacramento? You been to Vegas?”
Dentist 1
He stumbled into the room, leaning heavily against the wall. His speech was slurred and he had to strain to keep his eyes open when I explained the details of my daughter’s accident. She had been running outside with her friends at a Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach. There was a steel handrail. She didn’t see it. She ran right into it. One tooth out. Both front teeth broken. He made me repeat the part about the Mexican restaurant. I explained that we had wanted fish tacos. He slouched out of the room, bumping into the doorframe and murmuring to himself as he wandered off down the hall. It was nine in the morning, and he was either very drunk or (I surmised) had for some years been helping himself to the opiates from the medicine cabinet. Their website boasts that they have their own qualified anesthesiologist; they can provide sedation upon request. When I walked out and told the receptionist that we would not be coming back because the doctor was not sober, she feigned mild surprise—“Really? Not sober?”—and then whispered confidentially, “You could try coming back tomorrow.”
Dentist 2
Our next dentist was a pretty Iranian woman who pursed her lips sympathetically when my daughter explained how she had broken her teeth. We read the comic books and children’s magazines in the waiting room and we got her teeth repaired. She never groaned or flinched, not even once, until it was all over and the dentist gave her a mirror so she could admire her perfect teeth. Only then did she burst into tears, because she had already grown used to those ghastly tomboy fangs. Their jagged edges had become familiar, and she resented her new unblemished American teeth.
Reality
In Balboa Park in San Diego we saw the man with no arms singing country songs and playing guitar with his toes. My son whispered, “Does that man got no arms?” I nodded. He said, “Is he playing with his feet?” I nodded. Then he said doubtfully, “Is that man real?” The boy had been to Disneyland, he had been to Malibu, he had seen the film crews at Santa Monica and Altadena. He knew that in California you can never be quite certain whether or not a thing is really real.
Dentist 3
A few days later I heard her telling one of her friends: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a dentist.”
Catechesis
The day my mother turned seventeen, she went to the local Canberra police station to apply for a driver’s license. When she walked through the door in a short summer dress with a ribbon in her hair, the driving instructor looked up with interest. When she flashed him a smile and said she would like to take the driving test, he thought she was very pretty. When she batted her long lashes and said it was her birthday, he beamed at her and fumbled madly for the police camera, then took her photo and, without further ado, issued her an Australian driver’s license. It was, he told her with a sly wink, a birthday present.
And so, without so much as turning a key or operating a windscreen wiper, my mother was authorized to pilot the most dangerous piece of high-speed weaponry ever devised by the crooked mind of man: the automobile.
My mother’s older sister had saved up and bought a brand new Mini Minor, the kind all the cool kids were driving in those days. To celebrate my mother’s seventeenth birthday, they went on a road trip together to Melbourne. Now the highway from Canberra to Melbourne, if you have never made that journey, is an easy eight-hour drive that takes you through sprawling dairy country, down along the languid Murray River, and up through the hills of the Great Dividing Range. My mother being a licensed driver, her sister gave her a turn at the wheel. On a long, perfectly straight road, without another vehicle in sight, my gleeful mother held the wheel and plunged down her accelerator foot. In the passenger seat beside her, her sister closed her eyes and began to dream. The Mini Minor gathered speed. It began, ever so slightly, to wobble. My mother pushed harder on the accelerator, smiling at the charming dairy fields. When the poor little car began to shake, my mother did as any person driving for the first time might do: she accelerated a little more, and then, to compensate for all that wobbling, began to nudge the wheel from side to side—gently at first, then harder, with a certain jubilant vigor. Side to side, side to side: no doubt about it, it had been a splendid birthday. Dreamily she watched a flock of birds go by. The car was wobbling wildly now. She swerved the wheel harder and felt the accelerator go—at last!—flat to the floor.
That was how it happened that, on a long straight stretch of road, with no vehicles or obstacles of any kind for miles around, the brilliant new hundred-mile-an-hour Mini Minor found itself toppling and rolling like a rugby ball, over and over, until at last it came to rest in a wide ditch, crushed and crumpled, while my mother, breathless with exhilaration beneath a shower of glass confetti, still clasped the wheel with both hands—in fact, still rocked it back and forth with dazed but undiminished glee.
Though
