sweetheart redux

7. It was it a night like any other.   No it wasn’t.   It was raining that night, I remember, and it doesn't often rain in Southern California.   I lived with Richard.   I lived with just Richard from the time I was two, when Beth and Richard got their divorce, until the time I was 6.   Then there was quiet and cynical Linda, my almost stepmother who lived with us for a few years, then just me and Richard again. Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night.   It was around 8:30 and Richard was on a date when Josie called me, crying.   She was my best friend for three years, and I was a little in love with her, the way in books and movies sometimes and I’m guessing in real life too (with other girls besides me), teenaged girls become obsessed with each other when they become close friends.   It was hard not to; she understood me so perfectly, from all the many hours-long conversations we had the endurance and the enthusiasm for, at the zenith of...

6. On a Thursday night (a school night), when I was 15, a thing happened that has made me feel closer to George than to people my own age, ever since. Richard and I lived in a small town about 30 miles east of Los Angeles proper, called Monrovia.   Monrovia nestles right up against the base of the San Gabriel mountains, like a dog curled up and napping at the foot of a master’s giant bed.   The flat, southerly part of Monrovia is mostly apartment buildings built in the 1950's.   One time I was walking around a neighborhood that had literally only pick-up trucks parked in the driveways and along the curb.   As the land starts to noticeably elevate, in other words, when you start to notice you're walking uphill, that's where the nice houses are, little mansions some of them, Ranch-style houses, also built in the 1950's.   I don't know if it's from something I read or saw a photo of, but I imagine that Marilyn Monroe stayed in one of these houses. ...

5.             The friendship of George and Richard was wrought with enough complicated feelings and nuances that I feel compelled to describe it in familial terms, but that does not provide the sort of shortcut I wish it would.   I want to say, “They loved each other like brothers, and like brothers, neither one could imagine life without the other, but, also like brothers, they did not always enjoy each others' company,” but this is not quite right, because, through Beth as well as Molly (me), George and Richard were connected to each other for over 20 years, but their connection had its lulls and eddies, and there were whole years where they only saw each other at holidays, when Richard would be dropping Molly off at Beth’s apartment and, like clockwork (because George was set in his ways) it would be George who answered the door, having arrived at Beth’s place a couple hours earlier to help clean up for Molly’s visit...

There’s a wonderful bookstore in downtown L.A. called T he Last Bookstore .  It’s in a huge space, and the whole second floor is cheapskate bookworm heaven because everything up there is $1 (and in absolutely NO sort of order, no genre or alphabetical organization at all, just thousands of books stacked willy nilly on at least 4 rooms full of floor to ceiling shelves).  The first time I went there, I decided on just 3 books, a Billie Letts novel, the worst Anne Tyler novel I’ve ever read ( Noah’s Compass , the only story of hers I haven’t loved), and Coney , a novel by Amram Ducovny.  This here paragraph is part autobiographical information (as per usual on this blog), part book review.  Coney is about a Jewish family in a very seedy Coney Island in the late 1930’s.  The book jacket calls this book “part noir thriller, part coming-of-age novel”, and I cannot fully agree with this, because the thriller genre uses tension and suspense , which the violent oc...