L.A. Lost and Found:A Lay of the Land

"One night I was sitting on the bed of my hotel room in Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or got out..." John Fante, from Ask the Dust













A semi-first go around in Los Angeles is, I am gathering, a little different than expected, even for the expecting type. Years ago we had taken a road trip from the deep spring of the midwest down into Huntington Beach, down on the southern edges of things, and we conveniently avoided virtually all of the various highway mousetraps and merely landed on that beach, stayed in a hotel across the street, and watched from our room windows the ocean a block away and a van patrol the parking lot for unlocked bikes. Other than movies and the occasional glance of Jack Nicholson at front court seats for Lakers game, let's face, I would say, that was it. Now we are hunkered down good in

Pasadena, with the big bald green San Gabriels in the background, nice pockets of uplifting yellow and bread colored architecture all around us, and then the little pockets of cluttered misfit neighborhoods. As a new driver to the city all of this palette of palm trees, terra cotta, dry mountain,

and not so far off sea, is a little like random slideshow of color and confusion -- one moment you are driving alongside a Bentley, it seems, the next, a young girl in an old motorcycle is cruising up through the cracks of traffic spinning through red lights. Shops of barbed wire; shops of dog-petting cafes and jewelry that might set back a rich man for the next twenty years. L.A., I am seeing now, isn't trip necessarily of pure and immediate immersion, but one of necessary retrospection, where that

photo album inside the mind reveals itself slowly in the days when you return to the land-lock, and what seemed a mass confusion turns to a yearning again for those days of visual excitement and the reek of prospective danger down the next road to come. All in all, give me one of those fine stoccato pads that line the dusty ridges of the San Gabriels, with a turquoise pool and an arcade courtyard set up for dining nightly against the California sun shine...just don't make me drive the cross town to a Dodger game again for awhile, bumper to bumper, and let there be no doubt, the folks commandeering those BMW's tweaked, at the very minimal, by a series of six expressos throughout this particular day and a patience level that has to resemble the mind power of the hummingbird we saw nip at the foliage along Eaton Canyon Creek just hours before.