More of My Pasadena History

If you are a frequent reader of the blog, you know that much of what appears on here is an exploration of two of the main characters of my life, my mom Jill Crane and her best friend Bill Tunilla, and the years spent with them in Pasadena.  

Whenever I walk around my old Pasadena stomping grounds (often), I take note of the changes versus all the things that have stayed the same, and I take it all so personally, thinking things like “When I was a kid, I had no idea they would build a Target on this block someday.”  I have a hard time keeping up, and often give Geof (who is unfamiliar with the area) directions that apply to the Pasadena of two decades ago, like the other night when we went to a movie at a Pasadena theater he hadn’t been to before and that I guess I hadn’t been to since I saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” which seems like just last year or something but was actually released in 2005 (I looked it up).  I told him “Just park behind this building,” but there was a structure in the place where I’d imagined the old parking spaces to be, but that was okay, because there was a brand new parking lot the next block over, where I’d imagined a building to be – when was the parking lot put there?  How and why do things change in the place I feel to be mine?  I used to think my fascination with walking the same blocks of Pasadena I used to walk as a kid and revisiting the mostly completely changed old spots I used to know had something to do with my interest in time travel – I believe that time travel is possible, and to some degree, when I re-walk the same paths from my childhood, I get the feeling that such repetition and circling back will someday be a part of what makes time travel possible.   

But I have totally done too many drugs, and I think my belief in time travel sounds like a drug-person’s thoughts, right?  I just recently discovered a different way to describe my fascination with Pasadena as it relates to my childhood -- Metaphysical Solipsism, "a type of Idealism which maintains that the individual self of an individual is the whole of reality, and that the external world and other persons are representations of that self and have no independent existence" (http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_solipsism.html).  It’s true that to some degree, when I walk around the old streets I used to walk with Bill (dead) and mom (dead) it seems weird that the place exists when my old Pasadena companions don’t exist anymore, and I do sort of believe, against logic or the decent amount of self-involvement, that Pasadena is mine.  

I’ve been sort of researching my personal landmarks for years, for facts to flesh out my own personal Pasadena, and in particular, facts about the location of House of Fiction, Bill’s old bookstore, where I spent so much of my childhood just hanging out and getting primed for a bohemian adulthood (I remember sitting at the store and pondering the poster for the 1980’s Bukowski biopic Barfly that hung from a wall, thinking it was pronounced “Barflee” and wondering what one of those was, and then, years later, when Bukowski-literacy was a necessity to a writer-drinker, thinking “Oh, it's Bar-fly”).  Every so often, I’ve done internet searches on Bill’s name and the House of Fiction, as well as other of my own landmarks, partially to satiate my old curiosities about certain places I remember, and partially to help flesh out my writing when Pasadena appears in my writing.  I didn’t used to be able to find much, but about half a year ago I stumbled on http://pasadenadigitalhistory.com/, which provides history and photos of many of these landmarks of mine.   

For instance, when I was a kid, it was one of my – goals?  predictions? – that I’d be familiar with gay culture someday, and there was a gay bar called Nardi’s next door to the bookstore that I was always so curious about, always trying to see inside, and excited when I’d hear their Juke Box through the wall, often playing that Smithereens’ song “A Girl Like You.”  I  am so intrigued by the Pasadena Digital History information on the bar: 

from the site: 
Only infomation given on envelope, is Nardi's bar. Do not know whom the people are in the photo. Date taken: 4/14/1945. Nardi’s existed at 665 E. Colorado Boulevard under a variety of names. In the 1943 Pasadena city Directory it is listed as Elmer Nardi Liquors; 1947 Nardi-Waldorf Cafe; 1960, the Waldorf Café, and in 1970, Nardi’s. As near as we can tell, the bar was demolished in 1998 to make way for the Laemmle theater complex

I also had a childhood fascination with flophouses and there was one two doors down from the bookstore, “Crown Hotel,” which was destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.  I'd gotten to go inside it when it was a filming location for a while, and one of my grown-up friends, Michelle, used it to film her short film Pin Feathers, but it was just an empty building at that point -- none of the rumored hookers or their imaginary retired hobo flatmates lived there anymore.  
  

I don’t know – I’m writing about my solipsistic nostalgia sort of jokingly above, but the fact of the House of Fiction having been demolished (currently the site of the movie theater where I saw Me and You and Everyone We know), and of Bill and Mom both being dead, of course gives me a feeling of deep sadness, and I am both pained and grateful for the constant dreams I have of us all spending long hours hanging out at the bookstore together, though the store is usually partially demolished and often under new management.  I found a short film (below) on Vimeo the other day (by film-maker George Porcari) that is about the House of Fiction and Bill, and it is the jewel of my Pasadena-personal research – my poor mom and poor Bill leaving their sanctuary at the end, on the day the store closed, slated to be torn down and turned into something more profitable, the way it always goes in this fucking country.  

All generalizing aside, nothing special ever survives, ever.



The House of Fiction from George Porcari on Vimeo.

Tender Monster Destiny

Tender Monster Destiny

            Hope Street is a street just like any other in Los Angeles, except that its name makes it seem promising.  A useless person sitting in his or her car at a stop light and seeing that they are about to intersect Hope would probably think, Could this be a sign?

            Are there plain white college boys hidden in apartments on this street, writing screenplays for a movie they’re going to make someday for Public Television about their L.A. experience?

            The name makes this street sound full of action and import, a street with a secret, a street that lives out its charm with the clean bend of palm trees and Hopscotch formations drawn on its pavement.

            It was on this street that Joe’s car passed Judy and John Freshflower, the ex-proprietors of a Chinese restaurant that used to be next door to Joe’s store.  It’s Christmastime, and these are Christmases lived covertly in the lives of our imaginings, our imaginings being the sanctuary against what’s real down here. 

            From the age of seven, I knew I wanted to be famous.  I wanted to be the Beatles, so that I wouldn’t have to lay in bed listening to them on the radio, growing anxious thinking of how I would never be able to express in words the way their songs on the radio made me feel nostalgia even for the present moment. I wanted all the other people who were listening to the radio at the same time as me to be listening to songs sung by me, and I would sing songs about their favorite memories, of a father wearing a Santa Claus beard, a hydrangea bush peeking out from under a blanket of snow, going on a game show, drinking beer with a first boyfriend.

I didn’t become famous.  I became a typist in a mortuary.  The antique shop Joe owned went out of business, and he became an old man working at McDonald’s. 

Tender. Monster.  Destiny.  At night when the curve of a freeway overpass moves your body closer to death and waitlessness, the lit-up McDonald’s seen down below seems the perfect beacon.  I’ve been to McDonalds’ throughout the country but I was never an adventurer.  I was an agoraphobic who would tell my hosts when they’d get home from work that I spent the whole day feeling out the city, when really I’d spend the day sleeping the sleep of store-bought pills I got in a 30%-off bin at the grocery store Nora and I used to live near.

       In college, my roommate Nora and I ended up with two cats, Blackie and Rose White. The grass and wildflowers in our back yard grazed the low slopes of hanging clotheslines. We mostly slept over at her boyfriend’s house because our own house lacked panache and never had any food in the fridge.  She’d pull her car into the space next to the trash bin, and Blackie and Rose White would gallop through the weed jungle to     greet us.  Nora and I referred to the cats as our family, though we often forgot to feed them.  Rose White ran away, and one morning I found Blackie curled up behind an old paint can in the garage, dead.

            Judy and John Freshflower owned the Chinese restaurant near Joe’s old antique shop.  What Joe and I had was the surrogate father and daughter relationship that could only be shared by a man who thought he drank too much to have his own family, and the daughter of a woman abandoned by a man who’d said he was just going out for a pack of cigarettes, just like all the fleeing husbands of the nineteen-fifties are purported to have said to their wives.  What Joe and I had with Judy and John Freshflower was the kind of friendship that people sharing the same small square of carpet in a giant city develop.  When Joe would babysit me at his shop, he’d park in a lot overlooking the alley behind his and the Freshflowers’ businesses.  Often, exiting the car, we’d find Judy sitting at the wire table she’d set up in the alley, drinking tea from the blue kettle on the table’s yellow tablecloth.

            One time, she let Joe pass ahead of me a little bit before stopping me.  “Young girl, I would like to show you something.”  This was our first moment.  Judy grinned a big, Americanized grin.  “Are you ready?” she asked.  She pulled back the yellow tablecloth, and there, sitting under the table, was Blackie.

            I did not know who he was then.  I didn’t yet know about time travel.  Then, I was just a quiet eleven year old. I wore my pink satin baseball-style jacket with the denim heart sewn on the back and my name written in cursive letters with fabric paint in the middle of the heart.  Years later, I would go to college in another town, where Kurt Cobain’s ghost never walked me to Planned Parenthood but where the ghost of a happier rock star would tell me, “Hey, take it easy.  You’re young and life is so cool!” and I would never listen.  Years later, I understood what Judy had revealed to me that day in the alley.  Immortality.  Tender destiny.

            The day mom realized dad was never coming back with his cigarettes, she walked to Joe’s shop and invited him out for drinks, his treat.  She was pretty and complex.  He remained her best friend through all of the new boyfriends she met and walked away from.  There was a schizophrenic with a beard, who glued covers of mystery novels to pieces of cardboard and sent them through the mail to our subdued apartment in the valley, where we dutifully threw them in the trash and wished out loud that he would not stalk us.  There was an artist with worn-through long-sleeved shirts and silky hair, who jumped up and down on the Murphy bed with me one night when I couldn’t get to sleep, and ruined holidays with his moodiness.  There was a Vietnam Vet who was homeless when we first met him.  There was a lawyer who used to live in New York in the apartment where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.

            Joe was the man who drove me to and from school when mom was at work, and who drove me from school to her work, to pick her up.  For awhile, Joe and I had a routine of stopping every Tuesday morning before school at a small bakery, for cheese danishes.  “Does the woman who worked there still remember us?” the little-girl-me who wanted to be famous asks.  We also had a routine of going to a video arcade after school on Fridays, and one of renting movies from the Central Library.

            Tender.  Our longest-running routine was of waiting in a park near mom’s office for her to get off work.  The drive there from my school was a drive through Mexican neighborhoods with colorful tigers painted on grocery store signs and baby girls dressed like morning glories.  This was before mom started working at home.  Joe and I would sit together in the park, not talking, the actual moments as quiet and poignant as memories.

            Monster.  I am now the kind of young women who forgets to feed her cats, letting them run away or die.  When I moved back to L.A., I put my Bachelor’s Degree in a desk drawer, and, not foreseeing any way to ever become famous, became a typist.  Joe’s antique shop went out of business; eventually, the building was torn down.  I dream of that place, but without its electricity or walls, or its merchandise.  On the other side of the shop there used to be a bar called Nardi’s, with a juke box that played lovelorn songs by Elvis Costello and the Pretenders that we could hear through the wall as we sat in the shop, playing card games or checkers.  Now it feels like Elvis is dead.

            Destiny.  At a red light on Hope Street, on our way to a coffee shop where mom waits for us, Joe spots the Freshflowers and decide to pull over. 

            “Joe.  I haven’t seen you since the store got torn down.  How are you?  How have you been?”

            “Not so bad, John.  I was selling things on E-Bay for awhile but I wasn’t making enough money, so now I work at McDonald’s.  It’s…and you?  You guys moved the restaurant over to that marketplace across from the new Target, right?”

            “Yeah, but we’ve been having some trouble.  Actually, we’re closing down in a few weeks.  We’re going to have to find a location with cheaper rent.  But you have to come to the restaurant before it closes, have a meal on us.”

            “I certainly will,” Joe says, but he never makes it to that last meal. Christmas morning, he wakes up with the stomach flu, and once he has recovered, he finds Judy and John absent from the space where their wasted efforts occurred.  What matters, though, is this chance meeting on Hope Street.  Judy is carrying a purse made out of woven white plastic straw, with blue and red and yellow plastic flowers sewn on it.  “I have something for you, young lady,” she whispers in my ear, smiling.  Her purse moves with something alive inside of it.  I open the purse.  Dear god, it is Blackie.  

Yesteryou Chapter 21

21.

"Why do you love me so much?" Beth asked George once, and he was so irritated by the question that he was tempted to pretend he hadn’t heard.  The question had so little to do with what effect his love for her had on him; she was really just asking him to tell her about herself.  It was so selfish.  But oh, how could he not give in to this request.  It was the innocence at the base of her selfishness that was one of the most irresistible things about her.

"Oh Beth, he replied, "I don't know, you're just special," and then what he'd never actually said to her before, "I really do love you."

Now, he brought the bedside phone into the bathroom so as not to wake the three gently sighing sleepers in the hotel room, and he dialed Beth's home number, just in case.  No answer.

Yesteryou Chapter 14

14.

"So tell me more about your childhood," Richard beseeched Beth on their first date.

"Hmmm.  I don't think I will," she teased.

"What?  Come on, that's not fair.  I just bought you a sundae."

"No, it's just that -- it was no good, you know?  I had toast for every meal, and every man who ever set foot in our house was horny and poor.  Mom always slapped us too hard -- I had an imprint of her hand on my check for a week, once -- but she was too stupid to stay mad at for long.  Gloomy stuff like that.  It's so boring, though, really.  I can't stand when people talk about their dysfunctional families, like it's enough to make them interesting, just because they suffered a little.  Everyone suffers, even if you have a happy, smart family, you end up suffering wondering if you're happy and smart enough.  That's just life."

"Well, what do you like people to talk about, if not their childhood, their family?  I agree with you, by the way, about the dysfunctional family thing.  People usually get this very boastful tone when they talk about having a bad childhood.  Is that what you mean, Beth?"  Such intense, eager attention, such eagerness to understand her and all his adept paraphrasing and his steady gaze, it made her feel shy, and she just shrugged in response.  Her hand lay on the table, and he suddenly picked it up and put it to his lips.  "You're so beautiful," he told her, “and your hand feels like a little bird when I hold it in mine,” and for at least a half hour afterwards, she felt wholly, purely happy, with a happiness unquestioning as a sleepy kitten.  Richard thought about this first date.

As if reading his thoughts, Molly, just waking up, asked, "Do you think mom has ever been happy, dad?  I can't imagine it."

"Oh, Molly.  How could you say that?" interjected George.  "You're not remembering things right.  Remember Fridays, when your mom got off work?  We almost always went to the 99 Cents Store before I dropped you guys off at home or took you with me to the bookstore, and remember?  She gets so excited at dollar stores, just how cheap it all is.  She just loved going there with you and being able to buy you cheap little necklaces and potato chips and things like that and making you at least temporarily happy with her."

"No way, she didn't even notice I was there." 

"Well, I know why you think that's the case, Molly, but you just have to believe me, she thinks and talks about you all the time.  You're her love."  Molly was about to say something in response, but then there was a sudden pressure drop, and she hated to fly, she was scared of dying in a plane crash ever since she saw a biographical film about Buddy Holly, so for a second she closed her eyes and held her breath until it felt like the cabin pressure was normal again.  George, Richard and Molly were sitting next to each other, in a plane, flying to Philadelphia.  Richard had bought three one-way tickets, imagining himself leading an expedition through this city he'd never been to before that would last three or four days, and end in finding Beth.  In a way, he liked how unrealistic this plan was, yet he secretly expected it to be successful, and felt grateful to the other two for being so quick to believe, as he had, that the Liberty Bell postcard had been a wordless request for rescue from Beth.

The plane landed at the Philadelphia International Airport a little after midnight.

Yesteryou Chapter 9

9.

George loved to buy drinks for Beth, he loved to be around her when she drank, because when she drank, she became so relaxed and so much kinder, and she almost never lost control by becoming too drunk, at least not for the first several years.  She just became happy, when normally she was guarded and dour.

It was a dark and stormy night.  There was something they'd been talking about that George couldn't stop turning over in his mind as he sat in his car in the bar's parking lot, watching the neon light of the sign catch on the rain drops and turn them red on his windshield, while he waited for the car's engine to warm up. He'd told Beth about driving Molly to Josie's house, not worrying about betraying Molly's whereabouts on a school night, because it never occurred to Beth to worry about her daughter.

"Josie's probably having more problems with this man she used to see.  I overheard the two of them talking about it," -- and Beth explained that an older man who'd been involved with Josie was following her around now, or so it seemed.

Things should matter more.  Bad guys should be brought to justice.  Men who say disturbing things to women who don't want to speak with them should be humiliated, the woman should scream at the top of her lungs, or cry, instead of holding it in, until everyone turns around to look at them and then sees, knows that the man has been doing something wrong.  Normal people, who don't like novels and cats, who are outwardly aggressive, deserved to be made to feel embarrassed in turn when they embarrassed a weird person by responding to a question in an exasperated tone, or feigning superiority in any way.  Human frailties should be protected, not teased out and diminished through crass, unrelenting humor.  These things George believed.  Sometimes it was truly unbelievable to him, the way things didn't seem to matter enough to other people, and he was unsure whether this was bravery or desensitization on the part of these people.  For instance, when Beth had been telling him about the man who was after Josie (and by proxy, Molly), she was speaking of a grown man taking advantage of a young woman, but the words she used were so vague, she could have been talking about anything as benign as the girls being in trouble for shoplifting, and George had to remind himself:  this man had fucked the child Josie and now wouldn't leave her alone -- this act was evil. 

Now, as he backed out of the parking lot, lamenting Beth's parental negligence, he decided it was necessary to check up on Molly, or else something awful might happen, some new cruel or perverse incident that wouldn't register as unacceptable to anyone but himself.  So he drove to Josie's family's house, mentally replaying the best parts of the evening he'd just spent with Beth, surprised when, pulling up to the house, he saw a man dressed in a bulky black parka and black pants standing with his back to the street, the binoculars he held to his eyes trained on the house.  The man turned to face George as George got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.  So this evil man really did exist.

"Hey old man, what do you want?"

The best George could compose himself was to reply, “This isn’t your house.  What are you doing here?”

"How do you know I don't live here?  I know you don’t live here.”  The man was obviously enjoying the confrontation.  “My wife is inside fucking our neighbor right now, old man.  I'm just spying on her, just wracking up evidence for the divorce."

"That’s a lie.  I know the people who live here."

“So do I.”

The man didn't smell like alcohol or weed, but there was something definitely wrong with him.  He smelled like sweat.  Pugnacious a moment ago, he became almost shy now.

“Are you Josie’s grandpa?”

George answered, “Yes, I’m Josie’s grandfather.  What are you doing here?  It’s not proper to be standing outside like this, no one knowing you’re out here.”  But at the moment, he could not recall even what Josie looked like, he was thinking only of Molly, his smart, funny little friend, who he'd driven over here to save, because she’d intended, somehow, to protect Josie from this disgusting man who stood before him.  George had a stooped posture and a slow gait caused by deformed toes on both his feet, and a lazy eye.  He looked vulnerable and years older than he was, but goddammit, he thought to himself, goddammit, he was still a man, and his anger drove his basically fragile hand to Calvin's Adam's Apple, hard.  Quickly, he punched the man next in the balls, and before the man could get more than one punch in, the punch that broke George's nose so that from now on his face would look different than it had the first 48 years of his life, George grabbed the man's ponytail and used it to pull him down to the mud.  "I'll kill you," Calvin said, doubled over and rocking on the trash-speckled, muddy gravel that filled in the walkway in front of the gate.  “No you won’t,” George said.  He remembered what Josie looked like, all of sudden; she was like a foal walking unsteadily on legs that were too long, and when she spoke, it was so painfully evident that she was afraid the things she was saying were incorrect.  And Molly, Molly meanwhile was a feminist; she prided herself on having hairy legs and hairy armpits, and arguing with grown men in a loud quivering voice whenever she spotted an injustice.  But, just like Josie, she was a child.  They needed protecting.  Molly would live forever, George would make it so that Molly lived forever.

George kneeled on the gravel and watched the man writhing.  He punched him again in the balls.  "Goddamn it, she should have just called the cops on you,” he said out loud to himself through half-hysterical, soundless tears.  “Stay away from them.”

The main thing that plagued him as he drove, first scared of himself, then exhilarated, sensing a rare clarity of action, to his apartment, was the fear that he'd somehow accidentally attacked the wrong man, that the lurker had not been Calvin.  He would consider his soul irreparably doomed to hell if he'd made such a mistake.

So he called Molly, though he felt guilty calling so late.

            "He's a kind of big guy with long brown hair and big eyebrows.  I think he has a moustache sometimes.  He's totally ugly and scary-looking, like with Charles Manson eyes, like, this gross, creepy stare," she told him.  "Why, George?  Did you see him?" 

            "Oh thank goodness, thank goodness," George said, never having felt more relieved in his life -- he'd done something right.  "Molly, please don't get upset.  I just beat him up.  I drove by because I got really worried after your mom told me about Josie's problems with him.  I really lost control when I drove by and saw standing outside the house.  It's okay now though, he’ll leave you girls alone.  But I, you know, I pulverized him, I think; I’m not very strong, but I played dirty.  I – you know I don't believe in violence, but -- what do you make of all this, Molly?  Are you mad at me?  Maybe you should call the cops and say there’s a strange man knocked out in front of your friends’ house, and they’ll take him away.  I didn’t stay to see if he was going to try to stand up…” George trailed off, and then he began another string of worried non-sequiturs.  She knew she should interrupt him, and she grasped for some sentence to say out loud that would make sense of what he’d done, but she couldn’t think of what to say; she felt so full of gratitude it made her dizzy, like a wave of fever.

The next morning, she’d go to school, though the night before, she'd been planning on playing hooky with Josie.  She called Josie as soon as she got home, and when she asked how Josie’s day had been, Josie responded, “Really amazing actually, but I did something that might upset you.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I – you know how I have caller ID, and how Calvin calls sometimes and I don’t pick up when I see his telephone number on the caller ID screen.”

“Of course.  You don’t want to talk to him.”

“Right.  But this morning the phone rang, and I saw that it was him calling, and I was planning on answering and just screaming at him to leave me alone, telling him I was going to call the police or that I have a stun gun I’m going to use on him if I ever see him again or something, but before I could say any of this, he begged me just to listen to him before I hang up.   He told me he only spies on me because he knows how vulnerable I am, and he wants to protect me.  When I brought up some of the gross things he did to me when we were dating, like by way of saying ‘How can you wanna protect me when you’ve done bad things to me yourself?,’ he started to cry, he begged me to forgive him, and promised he’d never bother me again.  He confessed to being outside the window last night, like we knew he was, and he said that he got beaten up really bad and mugged in front of the house.  I actually feel bad for him, his voice sounded awful, like all raggedy and weak, like he’d been choked.  I told him I forgive him, Molly, and I don’t think he’s going to stalk me anymore, I think he meant what he said.  But I feel bad, because I know I have you all riled up to hate him on my behalf, and I really don’t hate him anymore.  Are you mad at me?”

She would never tell her so, but Molly was mad at Josie; it seemed unforgivably wishy-washy of Josie to forgive Calvin, and she also felt foolish for having gotten so swept up in a melodrama that she’d thought had been a matter of life or death. 

Now, why would Josie want to forgive Calvin?  This, Molly couldn’t understand.  She’d been molested by a babysitter’s teenaged son when she was three, and now she believed in there being bad guys, bad guys like in movies, like the irredeemably evil Lex Luther, like the Joker in Batman.  She didn’t respect people who could maintain a position of ambivalence.  Ambivalence was borne of an acceptance of most people’s moral ambiguity. 

            Not that Molly was ever very normal, but she became that much more uncommon the day after the rainy night on which George beat up a bad guy for her benefit.  Vomit rising to her throat from a visceral sickness caused by what felt like Josie's betrayal, Josie who at different times had loved her maternally, sisterly and romantically, Molly ached to sink back into the comfort of her adults, her George and her Richard. 

            “Uh, I don’t really know what to say right now, Josie.  I feel like you’re letting him trick you, you know?  Or, I feel, like, bummed.  I don’t know.  Can I call you back later?”  She never did.