Under dark, glassy, reflective, translucent, stormy, gray, inky blue clouds Van Nuys awoke today.
The hot sun and its aggression were held back. And the light came up slowly. The workers sat in their cars along Victory waiting for the red light to turn green.
Humidity, and the hint of rain, the blessed promise of water, hung in the air.
Bulldozers carried pieces of broken-up pavement in the Wendy’s parking lot as mechanical jackhammers tore into old asphalt. Construction workers attacked the building, skillfully peeling and nailing glossy, modern effects.
West down Erwin, old cars and overgrown bushes flank houses where age and decay cannot hide. The past and its four-wheeled rusty remainders sit on driveways.
Victory, where quiet houses sit next to six lanes of traffic.
Back on the corner of Sepulveda and Victory, right where the police shot a man to death after he broke their window with a beer bottle, the empty parking lots and bank buildings are mute, without feeling, marooned in a landscape of cheap indifference.
There is no civic center, no park, no church, no place to sit. The frenzy of cars and donut shops, office supplies and Jiffy Lube, this is one of the many centers of Van Nuys. But the center cannot hold. The consensus of American life is scattered here, as it is all over the land. Somewhere in the shadows, thousands of homeless are waking up in alleys, in their cars, behind buildings. The normality of life seems normal but things are awry.
When the traffic eases, people will speed past here, and some will run across the intersection to board buses, and the day and its distractions will obliterate the early morning calm.
He is 94-years-old and lives alone in a stucco home in the West SFV he bought for $53,000 in 1974. His wife died three years ago and he tells me he thinks of her as gone on a long vacation. He can get up from the couch without a cane or walker. He drives a car. He goes to his granddaughter’s ball games. He shops, he laughs, he has no outward disabilities. And he came home 70 years ago, from Mindanao and the Battle of Midway, settled on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Frances, and they both had four children, three of whom died before they were three years old.
He is my Uncle Paul Cohen, who is now in his 13th year (not consecutive) as Commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the San Fernando Valley. They meet once a month on Sundays and are now down to 175 members, from their high of 350 more than ten years ago.
I sat with him in Woodland Hills last Saturday in those brown-carpeted, brown paneled rooms full of family photos and too many tchotkes. He had his plastic card table set up in the den, a place where he holds informal board meetings with the other veterans.
His son and daughter-in-law live close by. They eat dinner at Chili’s with Paul almost every night. Their children also live nearby, and there are two grandchildren less than 10 minutes away.
How has Paul lived so long? He ate meat often, loved grilled steaks. He wouldn’t know an organic vegetable from a conventional one, and his skin, remarkably free from wrinkles, is healthy but unguarded by sun-screen. When he was young, his Chicago was filled with unfiltered cigarettes, black chimneys, coal, stockyards, asbestos, lead paints, freight trains and steel mills. He lived through the most brutal battles of war, and came back to the grit and grime of the Windy City.
When he was young he almost played professional baseball and was in a semi-pro league that travelled around in buses. His dream was to get on the field and get paid for it. Instead he became a lifelong skilled handyman who could plumb and electrify, saw and build. He drove a truck but he really dreamed of driving in home runs. His passion for baseball was passed down to his entire family. And to this day his weekends are spent going to watch his granddaughters play ball.
Though he dropped out of high school to support his family, and never made it to college, he possesses that sagacious and practical wisdom mixing realism with optimism, and accepting human nature as it is.
“Mind your own business Andrew B.” he said. “That’s how you stay happy. Don’t worry about what other people are doing. Don’t butt into their affairs. Let them be.”
He had no gossip about the family, but still had an intense curiosity and memory about every person who we knew in common: cousins, friends, young and old.
We spoke about why he never worked with my other Uncle, his brother-in-law, who owned a successful heating and air-conditioning contracting company in Chicago.
“I’ll tell you what. I went to work for him one day. I had to disassemble and demolish a coal-fired boiler in the basement of an apartment building in Chicago. All the soot and the dust could only be removed through a small basement window. I shoveled all the coal and the dust up through the hole. Then I went up to my truck and loaded all of it into the vehicle. I was covered head to toe in black soot. I went to a lumberyard. I bought 2 x 4s and brought them back to the basement. I built up the wood and called a cement company to come out. They poured the cement into the form and we built a platform for a new boiler. I did the work of not only the demolition but the reconstruction. Then I got home at midnight.
The next week, your Uncle’s partner Vito (?) said they had fired two guys in the company because I was doing their work. They were ready to give me a twenty-five cent an hour raise because I was doing the work of three men. Vito said he wanted to give me a two-dollar an hour increase but “your brother-in-law” said only twenty-five cents.
That’s why I never worked for your Uncle,” he said.
There was no bitterness in Paul. Recounting his tale of how he had, essentially, been screwed out of a good, solid living by his wife’s brother did not irk him.
These are his versions of events. The people he names are long dead and the stories cannot be investigated or proven. But his recounting of something unfair was expressed magnanimously and justly, without rancor or anger.
He was satisfied with his life. He told me he was going to turn on the air-conditioning and said to help myself to some cold water in the refrigerator out in the garage.
I remarked that you never know your own strength until you are tested by some life event.
She had come and lived here, in our house, ten years ago, a shy, thin, smart and curious girl of 20.
She lived in the front bedroom and seemed to spend her days studying, sitting on the bed, hunched over her laptop, emerging at night to sit down and eat dinner with us, and then going back in her room to study more.
On Monday morning, she began her week early and walked to the new Orange Line bus and went to classes at Valley College. She earned money tutoring and working in the computer lab. She made friends with other immigrant students, a girl and boy from Russia, a nursing student from Thailand.
Our tenant never complained about school, or money or fatigue.
After two years at Valley College, she walked in the house one day, and said, almost imperceptibly, that she had been awarded a full scholarship to UCLA, one that would eventually pay for graduate school, should she choose to go.
She graduated, with honors, in microbiology. But unsure of her next move, she worked at a software company in Westwood, where she eventually rose to oversee the marketing department, again spending her long days quietly concentrating on the computer, and focusing her fast brain on the logistics of statistics.
Outside of work, she was dating another graduate from UCLA, whom she eventually moved in with. He applied to graduate school, and they both moved to Boston so he could study there. But her LA company kept her on, and she regularly commuted back and forth from her Westwood office back to her Brighton apartment near Boston University.
He graduated and the couple moved back to Santa Monica. She applied to graduate school at UCLA and was accepted to an MBA program. He began work at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and at a private clinic near their apartment.
And yesterday afternoon, the first cool, cloudy day in several months, we met only the young lady in Westwood and later drove to Koreatown for lunch. And after we finished our meal, we got back in the car. She sat in the back seat and announced quietly she had broken up with her boyfriend of seven years.
She recounted her version of the story in cool, calm, measured tones. Emotion rationed and mostly banished, she had already moved out of her apartment and into new student housing near UCLA.
And so we pulled up to her new home in the gated complex. And she got out, thin and stylish, in a short white lacy dress, and walked into the dark courtyard, a single woman.
Something in me hurt as I watched her go inside, something that went back many years to Chicago where my grandmother lived alone in her apartment in West Rogers Park and I had felt compassion and sorrow for that lone woman in her own room.
The young woman in 2015, going back into her apartment alone, and my grandmother in 1975, were not the same.
It was only my mind- emotional and dark and contemplative and perceptive and interpretive- mixing past and present.
Here was another immigrant making their way in life, in a strange country, and succeeding, in education and work; a person who had less advantages than me, but one who possessed courage and hardihood.
I felt protective again as I did when she first came here in 2005. And I thought, driving home under the gray clouds through the Sepulveda Pass, that Louise Hurvitz, now in heaven, might want to hear this news.
Sometime over the last few weeks, an exhaustion and demoralization with social media sunk into me.
The Blog, the Twitter, the Facebook, the Instagram.
All of it.
A long time coming.
I have an urge to destroy it all.
I’ve already come off of Instagram, a feeling akin to an alcoholic quitting drinking. I no longer look at other people’s bodies, trips to Capri, or bearded hikers standing on railroad tracks in Washington State. I have no more desire to like and no more desire to have someone like me.
The blog I created in 2006, “Here in Van Nuys” has opened up some new avenues for me, in people I’ve met, in others who shared my interest in urban exploration, history, photography and the architecture of Van Nuys, the San Fernando Valley and beyond.
But my secret motivation for writing and photographing, to get discovered and enriched, and motivated and respected, and financed and hired, well much of that never happened.
Instead, the tired and poor, the lost and the aimless, those searching for some place to put their hopes in Van Nuys, without having money or vision, those are the ones who glommed on. There was no knock on the door by developers, or architects, or the Mayor. Nobody thought Van Nuys worthier because of my writing, or maybe they did, but it lead, not to a new community, but back to another blog post.
Occasionally, a notable person popped up in email. In 2010, playwright Jon Robin Baitz, sent me a nice message, signing it “Robbie”. We met for coffee, and he said he would stay in touch, and we never spoke again.
There must be a reason why I write and photograph and why I created “Here in Van Nuys”, but to the fast, shallow, clickable, dumbed down virtual world, that answer always ends in clicks and celebrities.
Recent disappointments are small but telling.
I photographed a guy and thought they were some of my best photos ever. He put them on his Instagram, with his 9,000 followers and less than 10 people liked my photos.
On Linkedin, another website whose purpose is mysterious, a comedian/actor/performer/writer/huckster named Rich R—— connected with me. I never met him before. He said he was looking for projects. I contacted him and he said, “I’m lookin’ at your IMDB dude and I don’t see nothin’ since 2006. I mean people have bad luck, but I’m like what have you done lately?” He later added, “I’m involved in several projects, including one in the low millions, and some other things on Vine, so if I have time I’ll look at yours.” Apparently, he believes INDB is factual and accurate. Just as Instagram is the truth.
A friend who lives in Encino told me of a nearby home renting for $8,500 a month. It was just rented by a 19-year-old white punky kid, a “social media influencer” who has two million followers and attained some recent notoriety for forcing his underage girlfriend to have sex with him on camera.
I cite these stories as evidence that human life, and human beings are sucked in by an imaginary world, a make-believe life, that sometimes pays, but also, much more, destroys and devalues.
The longer I walk in the virtual world, the more I feel it as a kind of imposter and identity thief who steals my thoughts, my reality and my existence and plays it out as a funhouse game.
Taking myself off of it, one step at a time, seems the next logical, lifesaving step.
When she was alive, before she was sick, my late mother Louise (1933-2014) was asked by her older sister, Millie (1924- ), to come visit Chicagoland.
My mom, who had moved from Illinois to New Jersey, and now (reluctantly) California, did not want to come to Lincolnwood where her sister had moved into an assisted living facility.
My mother imagined that the weight and sadness of going back to the town where she had spent most of her life would be an arduous and morbid visit.
In August 2014, Louise went into her final weeks of life, her body ravaged by lung and bone cancer. She drifted in and out of consciousness. And cried out, only one word, over and over again: “Millie! Millie! Millie!”
Instead, the visitor who came from California to see Aunt Millie last week was me.
I was on a trip visiting three cities where I had once lived: Boston, New York and Chicago.
And when I landed at O’Hare, I rented a car, and drove east on the Kennedy and exited at Nagle. I had GPS, but it was redundant.
Hungry, I stopped at a restaurant stand advertising “pop” and hot dog and fries for $4.99.
I was in Chicago. A man in the booth in front of me had tattoos on his arms: “Bears” and “Chicago”.
The homely brick houses, the steel storm windows, the oversized green light poles, the neat stores, the spotless streets, this was my city.
But it felt strange. It was foreign. After all, I had moved out of here in 1979.
Lincolnwood Place, where Millie lives, is part of a remade industrial section of the village. It is next to a diagonally placed shopping mall with a Carson Pirie Scott and other stores, surrounded by mounds of watered and cut grass, acres of parking, and shaded by many trees.
It’s mediocre and modern with a plastic surface of prairie style. They once had trains and factories here, but that was long ago.
Across McCormick, the North Shore Sanitary Canal is now disguised by parkland with bike trails, trees, and further north, a sculpture garden incongruously placed near the sewage waters.
When I was young, an enormous, high, circular, green, natural gas tank, banded by red and white rectangular paint, stood near Pratt and the canal, looming over the flat lands like Godzilla. I imagined it was full of toilet water and feces that drained into the sewage canal.
I feared falling into that canal. I dreamed of it sometimes.
Maybe I had once heard a scary story.
Louise and Jimmy (1974)
In the early 1970s, one late afternoon, my mom was driving her convertible Delta 88 across the Touhy Avenue Bridge that crossed the canal, when my brother Jimmy jumped out of the open roofed car at a red light and ran down to the canal with my mother in chase.
There were always dramas like that in my family, so even last week, seeing my 91-year-old Aunt, living in the assisted living facility, right near the canal, I thought of those nightmares of shit and polluted water and the hideous gas tank, and my retarded and laughing brother as he ran down to the banks of the canal, terrifying my mother, but eventually getting caught, and dragged by his curly hair back up to the Oldsmobile.
Life was like that then. My mother worked hard at being a mother.
Louise loomed large, as she did for 52 years of my life, still haunting me in dreams, still imploring me to keep trying, to keep going, as if my life were meaningful because I was alive for her sake.
A cousin, a cynical and jaded cousin, who I adore, once called my mother “the injured party”. Meaning that my mother always assumed the injured role, wearing, with weary bitterness, a fatigue and an anger, pushed into martyrdom and meanness, her reaction to her position taking care of a retarded child and an epileptic husband.
She was always telling me how she was in labor for 19 hours before I was born, and that she would have become a famous soap opera writer if not for the fact that she chose to raise me and my brothers instead of working for the man, Bill Bell, who created “The Young and the Restless”. She knew him when she worked at WBBM-TV in the late 1950s and early 60s.
Some mothers will tell non-mothers, as parents tell non-parents, that all the hard work, all the suffering, all the sacrifice, means something. They will tell you, a childless man, that you are selfish, that your joy, earned without children, is meaningless. Those days of screaming, yelling, haranguing, they must mean something, as they once meant something to my mother who spent many days and hours throwing a whiffle ball back and forth with my retarded brother.
There were some mothers, back then, in Lincolnwood, who rode to the tennis court in their Cadillacs, who played cards, who had maids who cleaned their houses, and men who drove to The Corner Store on Cicero to get milk and ice cream and cigarettes. There were some mothers, back then, who vacationed in the Bahamas and Acapulco, whose kids came back tanned and freckled, just in time for the cold Chicago winter. And there were mothers who went out to eat, instead of cooking dinner every night. There were mothers who shopped at Old Orchard, who played golf at the club, who got their hair colored at Water Tower Place.
But my mother was not one of those mothers. And she let us know that she was better for not taking care of herself in pampering and luxury.
She ran up and down the stairs with loads of laundry.
And sometimes, at night, later, every single night, she drank vodka and grapefruit juice and smoked True Greens down in the basement with her friends Eve and Eli as the Fifth Dimension played.
But who remembers the mother who cared? Her ashes, her inconceivable death, sit in my garage, on a shelf in Van Nuys.
Aunt Millie is still funny, wise, and lovely. And living in an apartment where her paintings, books and photographs are basically the same ones she had when she lived in Glencoe in the 1960s and 70s. She never throws anything away.
She was so elated and thrilled to see me. And I felt the same way about her. After all, we both represent living embodiments of beloved dead people. She is the sister of the only mother I have. And the daughter of my favorite grandmother of all time: Bertha Lurie.
I had expected, from family reports, that Millie was “losing it”. But instead, her sagacity and intellect, even dimmed somewhat, outshone those of us who live in that bookless, vocabulary starved world of text messages, Instagram and Facebook.
91-years-old. Born 1924. Five years before The Great Depression. Seventeen years before Pearl Harbor. Thirty-nine years before Kennedy died. She was up and alive and breathing and living in Chicago when Al Capone was killing and Hitler was still in prison in Munich.
On Wednesday, I went to have lunch with two women who were old friends of my mom’s from the University of Illinois and Sigma Phi Epsilon: Judy Mamet and Jane Sherman.
I drove down to Lake Shore Drive, and exited Montrose, and found myself at Jane Sherman’s apartment. This was the same building, Imperial Towers, where she had lived in the 1960s and as a child I always drove past it thinking of her and that twin-towered, concrete and glass edifice tiled with aquatic, gray marine patterns. I later found out that Jane and her husband had only moved back here last year, in 2014.
I was truly in déjà vu land.
And more so when I parked on Hutchinson Street; a historic district full of Prairie Style homes.
Before I picked up Jane (what a“Mad Men” name!) I walked around the houses, shooting architectural photos.
As I looked through my lens at one property, a pillowy bottomed young woman in nylon shorts, walking two dogs, yelled out at me, “I do not give you permission to shoot photos of me!”
She came out of nowhere, and screamed it. And I told her I had no intention of shooting photos of her.
Later on, I was down the street still photographing houses, when she walked past, an enormous pink cased Samsung phone in her hand, filming me as she walked her dogs.
Imperial Towers and Hutchinson St.
I was in that familiar land of the crazy Chicago woman, the kind of female who was all around me growing up, like the neighbor who used to spit on our lawn when she drove up at night because she hated my parents.
But the other kind of Chicago woman, nearly rational, always romantic, the kind who still calls herself a girl at 80, dresses up for lunch, perfect hair and make-up, and orders a martini at 12:30pm, those were the two ladies who took me out to Gibson’s on Rush Street.
Judy and Jane had a purpose for bringing me here. My parents had first met here when this spot was a nightclub, Mister Kelly’s.
After lunch, we went inside, and looked at the old photographs on the wall of the former space. Glamorous, elegant, and legendary, it’s where you went to hear jazz, where you went to impress a date, it’s where you went to go out and have a grand time.
And somehow, in 1958, that is where my parents first found each other. And that’s how I got here. And that’s where I went back to when I went back to Chicago last week.
Under dark, glassy, reflective, translucent, stormy, gray, inky blue clouds Van Nuys awoke today.
Victory, where quiet houses sit next to six lanes of traffic.
Here in Van Nuys 
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