The first anniversary of her death will be on September 1st.
In the year since my mother died, I have experienced days of grief that just came over me, an intense sadness: unshakeable, persistent and gripping.
And then, inexplicably, the darkness leaves and I’m set back into temporary equilibrium. I no longer cry easily and my laughing is real.
But the fragile happiness goes away again, and then the days of moodiness, anger, sadness, loneliness, self-destructive thoughts and a yearning to have someone hold and comfort me, comes back.
These are those days: these late August days.
Since I was a kid I’ve always hated August.
I hated its hotness and its humidity. I hated its interminable thirty-one days of family beach vacations. I hated coming back to “reality”, to school and to work. I hated August holding us in its grip of tall corn and short tempers, melted ice cream and burning asphalt. August is the threat of impending hurricane, school, and work held back by the ruse of calendar.
There is really nobody close to reach out to.
The advice, always, is to just get busy with something. If you had a full-time job, if you had kids, you wouldn’t be in this state-of-mind.
I think of that stinging indictment delivered by a friend in Chicago: “You’ve chosen a selfish life.” How selfish to feel.
So I go to MacLeod Ale and have a few beers and talk to people I know, not about anything deep, just something human and non-virtual.
I hire a model and take photos and think I’m taking great photos. He puts them on his Instagram and I put them on mine. And then he takes my photos off his Instagram. And I close down mine.
There is no solace or satisfaction in art when you go online. What seems great to you is crap if it doesn’t garner 8,000 likes.
There is a mighty fine job interview with some super smart people and the opportunity to work on something interesting. It pays well, it’s nearby, it might turn out to be stimulating.
So I go in for the job meeting and then I wait for an answer.
And I must stop myself from imagining the rejection, even though that is what happens most of the time.
This morning I wake up and see a gruesome news story about the killing of a news reporter and her photographer, the wounding of another woman, and the pursuit and eventual death of the suspect.
It is just another morning of murder in America, refreshed every single day by the shooting of some other strangers in some other states.
I follow the story of the news crew killings on Twitter. They reveal the identity of the killer. Then he posts his POV video on Facebook and I watch it.
What kind of madness is this?
Is social media making people ill?
We are all enraged by something. The ubiquitious gun and smart phone make our most bestial and primitive urges possible. We can act, produce and distribute our own unspeakable fantasies for the world’s consumption and entertainment.
In this new epoch of human life we are all Gods stage managed by the Devil.
I decide the cure is to lessen my place in the virtual world. I will delete something, I will stop doing something online, I will take my eyes and thoughts out of the Internet.
When you are in mourning, they say there is no time- table for recovery. You imagine that the hour will arrive where grief, a monster of no particular form, shall scatter and take with it remnants of memory, love, and attachment.
You go through the day, in motions: working, cleaning, driving, shopping, cooking, and watching television.
You drink a beer or two and feel something elating, calming, relaxing and pleasurable.
And when the beer wears off, you are deep in touch again with something you tried to forget. And you cry and cry but there is nobody to pick you up and hug you.
You are alone, facing something final.
You are in a grieving mood.
Awaiting redemption and answers and the return of normal life.
How I thought of that city, which I left before I became an adult, was cloaked and colored under the family who brought me up there and who soaked their biases into my head.
That Chicago, more specifically Lincolnwood, became a suffocating, judgmental, intolerant and petty landscape of cruelty, snobbery, and competitiveness in which I, and my family, were on the receiving, and losing end.
In light of the present, where I know of the real atrocities around the world, the things that happened back then in Lincolnwood were small and fleeting and insignificant.
But they still stung me. And have stayed with me.
A few months ago, I did one of my Facebook searches for people I once knew in Lincolnwood.
One infamous and notorious name came up. To protect the guilty I will call him Arthur Knox.
A blue-eyed, athletic, deviously charming and good-looking kid, he was the child of a Highway Construction Foreman who washed his Black 1963 Fleetwood Cadillac on the driveway every Sunday.
Arthur ran faster than everyone. In his bedroom he hung posters and pennants of his favorite heroes from the Black Hawks to the Cubs. In school, he was the captain of any team in gym class.
By contrast, my own disinterest in sports grew as I was pushed into Little League. I hated standing in the hot, humid sun waiting in center field for someone to hit a ball out to me.
I also had not a single interest in any Chicago sports team: a fatal flaw in The Windy City.
Instead, I read from my 1960 World Book Encyclopedia while Arthur Knox and other boys set up ball games on the street and played football on nearby lawns.
Gradually, my lack of interest in sports worried and angered my mother. She may have perceived a dark funnel cloud of homosexuality on the horizon.
Arthur Knox bullied me on the bus. He called me “the world’s suckiest athlete.” I went home and told my mother about it. She replied, “I don’t even know what that word suck means. Forget about it!”
At the bus stop, Arthur taunted me and another girl with dog shit on a stick. On another day, he rode after me on his bike, with his pal Keating, tackling me near the Devon Avenue Bridge and beating me up in the dirt. Nothing had provoked it. He just felt like it.
Was I shot? No. Was I bloodied? No. The scale of violence was mild, but my rage was deep. Arthur was terrifying. He had to be avoided but he ruled over the street.
40 years later, he was a “Life Coach” and a father, married, and had competed in a triathlon in which he apparently almost lost his life, later revived by paramedics. He went on to tell his resurrection story on a nationally broadcast program.
On Facebook, the accolades of praise for Arthur Knox poured in. “World’s Best Father”, “The Man who Taught Me What it Means to be a Man”, “The Greatest Friend Anyone Could Have.” Arthur had posts against bullying, posts about gratitude, posts about love, family and life.
His life of conformity to alpha male values was vindicated. Competitive in sports and business, he basked in praise. Millions knew his outer accomplishments. Only I remembered his temper and violence.
And the popular kids, the ones who I used to call “The Snob Club”, they were all his friends on Facebook. And the virtual world of 2015 was as alive with sycophants as the real one of 1975.
Why bring up the story of Arthur Knox? He is nobody important. He just seemed important back then. And some think he’s important today.
On my recent trip to Chicago, one sunny late July afternoon, I went down to Montrose Harbor.
Everything was in primary colors.
The day was glorious and the setting magnificent: the blue sky and the white clouds, the enormous grassy lawn park, the yachts and the boats moored at their port, the skyline in the distance, the red lighthouse and white sailboats, the bleached rocks on the shore and turquoise tinted Lake Michigan.
A tall, tanned young man in board shorts was hoisting a sailboat off its trailer and attempting to attach it to a steel armed lift that he would use to crank and lower it into the lake. I asked him what he was doing. He asked me if I would help him.
Alex Jan, Montrose Harbor, Chicago, IL 7/29/15
I jumped in and directed him as he steered the boat on wheels and hooked it onto the crane. We pushed, pulled, and guided the vessel into the water.
After we were done he told me he worked at Mariano’s in the western suburbs. “Dude, I’m a butcher!” And on his day off, he eagerly came down to work at the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club at Montrose Harbor. Sun burned butcher on the dock on his day off….
He picked up a cold can of Colt 45 and drank it. He thanked me for helping him and asked me if I had to use a bathroom or anything. I said yes, and he let me go into the clubhouse facilities.
We said goodbye and I told him I would put his photo up on Instagram.
Something about that day seemed intrinsically Chicagoan: friendly, un-menacing, bonding, open- hearted, fun, casual, and unaffected.
Maybe there are people and moments like that in Los Angeles, but they are often colored by ulterior motives, either sexual or vocational.
Am I being too generous to Chicago? Is there anything truly odd or notable about that day on Montrose Harbor?
Is it logical to bestow attributes on someone just because of where they live?
At lunch, Judy Mamet, lifelong Chicagoan for eight decades, said her city is often “judgmental.”
She was speaking to me, an Angelino, who often hears that everything is “cool”. On the West Coast we hide our indifference by calling it toleration.
Maybe what I remember most about Chicago was its judgments.
I think of that stern Lutheran neighbor in the knee socks who walked her girls to church every Sunday. She came to say good-bye when were moving out and told my Mom that she was glad my retarded brother had been institutionalized because she pitied watching Jimmy and my mom played catch. My mother later said she wanted to throw acid in her face.
I think of Mrs. Libman, my 6th Grade teacher who taught the subject I could never learn: math. I grew to dislike her.
One day, my friend and I rode our bikes in front of her house, yelling out “Mrs. Libman! Mrs. Libman!” She came out of the side door and yelled at us. Later on my friend apologized to her. But I never did. Then my Mom and I bumped into Mrs. Libman at Marshall Field & Co. at Old Orchard. “Howard Kenneth apologized to me but your son never did,” she said. “I’m sorry Mrs. Libman,” I said.
Think about how un-criminal our behavior was. Yet it was scandalous. And that old Chicago standard of judgment still haunts my morality.
And those small lives predicated on big morality, they seem to still thrive in the Windy City, those people who have never left there, who exist in the mental and geographical landscape of the Middle West where you cut your lawn because your neighbors would look down on you if you didn’t. And you go to work everyday because if you didn’t you would not only starve but be banished out of the family of normality and acceptance.
Embarrassment and shame, the cabal of middle-aged moms and dads who enforce good behavior, the presumption that there is a right and a wrong, the correctness and goodness of the white race, the idea that life goes off the rails because of moral defects, these are deep in the DNA of Chicago and the Middle-West. Pope John Paul II and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have called Chicago “The Most American of Cities.”
They said it patriotically. I quote it ironically.
Proudly, Chicagoans will show off their lakefront, their new parks, their “architecture” and their feats of engineering and artistry. But what they are also saying is that their city is who they are. And that is why, when a Chicagoan is told that his city is racist, or a murder capitol or not as good as New York, he reacts with anger and hurt. You are hurting the Chicagoan to speak against Chicago.
And that is what makes it unlike any city in America. The city and the man in it are the same.
I walked along Gilmore this morning, a varied street one block north of Victory, and found old bungalows, church gardens, crappy apartments and neatly tended ones; along with a shoe repair shop, new Chinese food and a Mid-Century pharmacy.
Gilmore is an old street. A sidewalk was paved in 1929, but the road goes back further than that.
It was part of old Van Nuys, near town, school and church.
In the obliterating 1950s-70s, many old houses were torn down and replaced with rentable apartments, way before the revived fashion for “Mission.” If Gilmore had been preserved as only homes, it might look like today like a neighborhood of Pasadena.
Guns, gangs, crime.
One might understand a small shopkeeper viewing the aforementioned with fear or suspicion.
A Photographer?
Yes it is the photographer, with a camera slung around his neck, who gets the nasty stares and the unwanted questions.
At the colorful Kovacs Pharmacy, a pharmacist came out, confronted me and wanted to know why I was shooting photos.
She asked for my card. I had none. I told her I was a photographer.
She went back inside.
Does one need to have an answer for taking a photo? Would you ever dream of walking up to a stranger- talking on the phone- and asking who they were calling? Would you walk up to a driver stopped at a light and ask, “Why are you driving?”
At 14417, next door to Kovacs, time stands still as faded light illuminates a garage set way back in the yard, the kind of house and garden that once dotted this street.
At Sylmar Avenue, the Van Nuys Elementary School is still handsome and historic, roofed in red tiles and painted in warm tan.
The infamous spray marker of the Barrio Van Nuys (BVN) marks a fence outside of a bungalow court across from the school.
The Central Lutheran Church, whose white and red brick façade on Victory at Tyrone seems sad and neglected, has a surprisingly vigorous and lush group of edible gardens spreading over at least a half acre or more of land. Very well-tended and green, the vegetables and plants propagate magnificently in fertile soil alongside wooden stakes and raised beds. It looks like a future bumper crop. Its gentle greenery stands in stark contrast to next door car repair and vacant parking lots.
When people talk about the revival of Van Nuys, of making the community better, they might start by visiting a street like Gilmore. Narrow and walkable, tree-shaded and neighborly, it has a variety of both individuals and institutions who are already contributing positive change to this district. They are feeding the homeless, educating the children, planting organic gardens and making Van Nuys come to life in the most unexpected and surprising places.
Yesterday, I went downtown. I took my camera. And I drove, in my meandering way, locally, hunting for light and shadow.
I left Van Nuys and went through Griffith Park and picked up Glendale Blvd where it emerges in Silver Lake and runs down into Echo Park.
Near Effie Street, I stopped. And I saw dark clouds hover over the silver skyline, glass glistening coldly.
I parked where dozens of people sleep on the sidewalk next to a storage building and the street ends at steep, ugly concrete stairs. Climbing the steps, I stood near the metal rails and looked towards our downtown draped under an impending storm.
Yesterday, Sunday, a strange light and gentle gloom came in and out, an alternating atmosphere of rain and cold windy gray.
Thoughtlessly happy Los Angeles wore an unfamiliar face. The city everyone thinks they know once again confounded me.
I drove on to my destination at 4th and Main.
Downtown, at the art loft, a show at 2A Gallery was closing. The works were those painted by my friend Tam Warner’s father, Orien Lowell Greenough. He died, poor, in 2008. He was a liberal who hated war. His creations on canvas satirized, in depth, the hypocrisy and brutality of the killers and statesmen who run this world. His time had Stalin, Hitler, and Khrushchev.
We have ISIS and Putin, Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram.
The men who put on the show, Clay and Calvin, and their 2A Gallery, had recently come into my friend’s life, nurturing, elevating and sanctifying the late painter and his work. His daughter, after a run of mistreatment by another gallery, was grateful for their care and love.
It seemed as if Orien Lowell Greenough and his work were again going to find recognition in Los Angeles, full validation that had eluded him when he was alive, the story of so many artists, and writers.
And then Calvin and Clay confirmed that they were not only closing the show, but closing out their life in Los Angeles. They would be packing up and moving to McComb, Mississippi to live in a more affordable area. They would leave in 30 days, and drive 4 days across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, eventually arriving in The Magnolia State, where the flag still flies the colors of The Confederacy.
Everyone was sad. But none more so than my friend, who had made a connection with the newly departing angels who had came out of nowhere to champion undervalued Orien Lowell Greenough.
Tomorrow, there may be money in art, but today you need to eat. Like the dead artist, the living gallery was squashed by the bottom line.
The truth is that they could not afford to live in Los Angeles any more. Or perhaps the truth is that they chose not to live in Los Angeles because home was somewhere else. Truth is subjective- so the artist claims.
Their departure is a loss to this city.
And when I left the loft, calmed by two evaporating beers, I drove in the dark rain through dystopian concrete canyons. I lost my way downtown, and found that my usual entrance onto the 101 was closed. I had to make a detour, a rerouting of my way home, that took me down old Temple Street, and over to Rampart, where I found a wet and slow, hidden and unfamiliar way to get onto the freeway and back home.
Yesterday, between the rains, after the air had been washed, the skies were radiant. And enormous cumulus clouds towered above, bottoms gray, tops white. The sun came and went. Streets of dark shadows ended in blinding light.
I walked in the wind up Sepulveda, north of Vanowen, and went left along Hart Street.
This is a neat neighborhood of mostly well-kept houses on generous lots. It is not rich here, but the general feeling seems contented. There are no sidewalks but lots of walkers.
Near Sepulveda, at 15322 Hart, there is a burned-out house with a lovely second floor balcony and no trespassing signs on a gate; secluded and romantic, it awaits rebirth from ruin.
At 15439 Hart, someone is selling a 1970 (?) Yellow Ford pickup truck.
15521 Hart (built 1952) is a white house with blue awnings. Though it faces south, into the hot sun, there are no shades trees in front.
Firmament Avenue is the last street in this neighborhood east of the 405 freeway. Large houses and empty lots, well kept estates, battered weed infested places, townhouses and bungalows, all are found on the block between Hart and Sherman Way.
These are the kind of typically Californian streets that make people from other states uneasy. They mix danger with intoxicating beauty, ruin next to richness. Is this a good or a bad place? In this area an old lady might come outside and offer you apple pie… or aim a gun at your head.
7110 Firmament could be a location in a 1940s Van Nuys movie with its roadside mailbox, cyclone fence, picket gate and wood houses set way back behind mature trees and overgrown ivy.
Next door, at 7128 Firmament, a brown stucco house with a red tile roof and white balustrade bedecked wall is carefree and liberal with its architectural elements. They are seemingly picked out of air and dropped onto a large lot hidden behind black screened fences and decorative lanterns. A Nury Martinez election placard is planted near the driveway.
Up at 15549 Sherman Way, Helen Towers (built 1972) is a large, 93-unit apartment building with a pool and lots of parking set on an acre and a half property right next to the on-ramp for the Northbound 405. Strangely bucolic, it seems well kept, if a bit dated.
At the Starbucks (15355 Sherman Way) a man ignited himself in burning flames last week and later died. I stopped off there for iced green tea. There were no signs of death, only life, and frozen faces glued to phone and screen.
My walk back home took me past the Royal [6920] Sepulveda Apartments, a “K” shaped, two-story complex frivolous in design, far from royal. Built in 1961, the 92-unit complex seems sex-soaked and secretive, untethered from anything around it, a floating, decadent motel of licentious and libidinous acts. Surrounded by parking, for quick escapes and quick arrivals, behind its closed drapes lie transient guests.
Here in Van Nuys 
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