Vernon Merritt III/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Where have you gone
The girl who passed by
Where have you gone?
I think of you all the time
She walked along the road,
50 years ago
I was a boy,
inside a shop,
looking out a window,
at her.
It was spring
I think
The sun was still faint
I remember
The breeze brought a chill
But not for you
Life was about to begin
For me
Where have you gone
The girl that I knew?
Where have you gone?
The seasons and dreams?
Her hair was blonde
and blew in the wind
She was young
And free
And alive
And unreal
She was a vision
I still hold
An ideal
Kept fresh
In my heart
Her legs were long,
her skirt was short,
she went past me and smiled,
I ran outside
But she was gone
only the scent of roses remained
the scent she wore
it soon went away
So where have you gone?
The girl who passed by
You were to me
the essence of free
you were the girl
I wanted to see
you were the one,
Where have you gone?
Tell me please.
If you know.
Where have you gone?
-Andrew B. Hurvitz
Poème en français
Où es tu allé
La fille qui est passée
Où es tu allé?
je pense à toi tout le temps
Elle a marché le long de la route,
il y a 50 ans
J'étais un garçon,
à l'intérieur d'un magasin,
regardant par la fenêtre,
chez elle.
C'était le printemps
je pense
Le soleil était encore faible
Je me souviens
La brise a apporté un froid
Mais pas pour toi
La vie allait commencer
Pour moi
Où es tu allé
La fille que je connaissais?
Où es tu allé?
Les saisons et les rêves?
Ses cheveux étaient blonds
et soufflé dans le vent
Elle était jeune
Et libre
Et vivant
Et irréel
Elle était une vision
Je tiens toujours
Un idéal
Conservé frais
Dans mon coeur
Ses jambes étaient longues,
sa jupe était courte,
elle est passée devant moi et a souri,
J'ai couru dehors
Mais elle était partie
seul le parfum des roses est resté
l'odeur qu'elle portait
il est bientôt parti
Alors où es-tu parti?
La fille qui est passée
Tu étais pour moi
l'essence de libre
tu étais la fille
je voulais voir
Vous étiez le seul,
Où es tu allé?
Dis-moi s'il te plaît.
Si tu sais.
Où es tu allé?
¿Dónde has ido?
Dónde has ido
La chica que pasó por
¿Dónde has ido?
pienso en ti todo el tiempo
Ella caminó a lo largo del camino,
Hace 50 años
Yo era un chico,
dentro de una tienda,
mirando por una ventana,
a ella.
Era primavera
creo
El sol todavía estaba débil
recuerdo
La brisa trajo un escalofrío
Pero no para ti
La vida estaba por comenzar
Para mi
Dónde has ido
La chica que yo conocía?
¿Dónde has ido?
Las estaciones y los sueños?
Su cabello era rubio
y sopló en el viento
Ella era joven
Y gratis
Y vivo
E irreal
Ella era una visión
Todavía sostengo
Un ideal
Mantenido fresco
En mi corazón
Sus piernas eran largas,
su falda era corta,
ella pasó junto a mí y sonrió,
Corrí afuera
Pero ella se había ido
solo el aroma de rosas permaneció
el aroma que ella usaba
pronto se fue
Entonces, ¿dónde has ido?
La chica que pasó por
Tú eras para mí
la esencia de la libertad
tú eras la niña
quería ver
Tú eras el único
¿Dónde has ido?
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.
Yesterday, I went down to photograph Darren, a friend in the Marina who just took a new apartment on Tahiti Way, one with water and boat views.
Sunday.
In the Marina.
I had been here many Sundays before.
When my Mom was alive, before cancer, still walking and living at 4337 Admiralty Way, I often pushed my visits to Sunday. I went down there, just as I did yesterday, and took her shopping, to get her car washed, into Target. We might stop at Ralph’s, pick up food, and I would broil pork chops, open a bottle of red wine, and watch “Mad Men” with her.
When it came time for me to leave, around 10, she would get up, stooped over, stand near the door and implore me to “please, please call me when you get home.”
And when I drove along the 90, up onto the 405, and passed those long stretches of green signs with fabled names; Washington, National, Santa Monica, Wilshire, Sunset; and descended, in speed or crawl, on that wide highway, back into the Valley, my goal was to always make it out of my car alive, without incident, to get back home and call up my mother and tell her I was home safe.
The winds were strong, the light was glittering, the cirrus clouds blew, the bent palms bowed.
Yesterday at 3, as I crossed Tahiti Way at Via Marina, I was back in melancholy, heavy-hearted, traversing the places I had spent the year last walking, pushing a wheelchair.
Three weeks before she died, I took her on a water taxi that navigated the man-made fingers of the harbor.
That day, her mouth hung open, oxygen starved. She was wrapped in blankets, her eyes were watery, she could hardly see.
The boat had turned up Basin B, along Tahiti Way.
This week is Thanksgiving, a day sacred and special, and the first where I have no mother or father.
I thought of that last night when I left the apartment on Tahiti Way and walked in the winds past places where flat screens and lights and laughter poured out of open sliding doors, a California night.
52 years ago, in Park Ridge, IL, a 28-year-old woman labored in Lutheran General Hospital for 20 hours and gave birth to me.
Yesterday, we were together again, at 8:30am, inside UCLA Medical in Santa Monica, CA to hear the news that her cancer had spread from lung to bone and most likely would kill her within months.
There were tears in the office, and treatment talked of but not promised, because there was not much that could be done to arrest and blockade a disfiguring and painful disease. Aggressive killing cells, moving fast, were taking over every bodily pathway and steering this woman, my mother, into death.
Back at the apartment, I called 90-year-old Aunt Millie, my mother’s sister in Chicago, to tell her a grave prognosis. Simultaneously, we burst out crying, she wailing that her little sister was not supposed to die before her.
Later on, in the sun, I sat with my mother in the open door of her apartment, by her knee, as she spoke of her disbelief. I told her I didn’t want to see her in any pain, that if she had to die, it should be quickly.
To wish your mother to die faster seems obscene, blasphemous, selfish.
But every choice pondered, in treatment or without, lead into the same dead end: 2 months, 4 months, 8 months…
A vulture phoned later, a cousin who traffics in crystals and angelic communications. He spoke, like an infomercial, of “amazing” cures down in Mexico, and “unbelievable” results.
Topped in yarmulke and baptized in mysticism, he droned on in monologue, flavoring his pitch with prestige (“Harvard” and “M.I.T”), cliche and promise (“Think outside the box” and “alternative treatment”). Gross and unrelenting in salesmanship and insanity, the voice of this bearded charlatan claimed godlike knowledge that might save a dying person.
But the huckster claiming the miracle cure has no power over us.
Our immediate family was inoculated in skepticism, disbelieving in the afterlife, doubtful of religious fervor, resigned to believe that death is death and without merit except in its extinction of pain.
Dreams of heaven were not on my mind, only the distant past.
I saw again the Super 8 movies taken by my father as my mother pushed a stroller around Indian Boundry Park in Chicago in early Spring, her black hair and skirt blowing in the March winds. I saw days spent with my younger mother in love, the warm breath of life, memory, kisses, spaghetti sauce cooking on the stove, the days spent on the porch watching the rain pour down on Birchwood Drive; I also recalled the explorations into old neighborhoods, the angry fights, the dramas and battles over bad report cards, the shame when I came out and my eventual acceptance and her grudging respect, the fierce warrior who always thought my best days were still to come; she with her inexhaustible conversations and inability to stay silent long, how can her voice go away! How can my mute words replace life itself, extinguished cruelly and helplessly by the biological necessity of dying?
2/19/14: a dark day, an unforgettable birthday. It ended, as many days in Los Angeles do, eating sushi. Me, my brother, my sister-in-law and my 7-year-old nephew went out to dinner, drank sake and split raw fish rolls. And I blew out a single candle on top of vanilla ice cream and fried bananas as the entire restaurant sang Happy Birthday.
All day long the sun beat down and broiled the city, blinding and exhausting it. You were either at the beach or in your house, air-conditioned. Napping was involuntary.
They were lighting off explosives all weekend here in Van Nuys, late into the night. I imagined a city all around me, of thousands of illegal aliens, doing illegal things, joyfully and recklessly.
Around 7 pm, the sun settled down, the temperatures cooled, and after a dinner of fried salmon and cold tomatoes with red onions, I put on my sandals, walked out into the dusk and found myself on Kittridge Street.
West of Kester, east of Sepulveda, there are a few neat blocks of solid, mid 20th-century houses, still well-kept and outwardly honorable. Lawns are trimmed, eaves are painted, and there are few broken down properties.
Too poor for renovation, too wealthy for destruction, these houses were not torn down and mansionized by investors, as one sees on many pockmarked neighborhoods in Sherman Oaks.
Instead, this tidy and sturdy pocket of bourgeois respectability, in the heart of Van Nuys, is sandwiched between Sepulveda’s whore show and Kester’s impoverished subculture.
At 15126 Kittridge, a pistachio green and vanilla trimed house, with vaulted ceilings, open carport, and welcoming courtyard, is for sale for only $315,000 or $190 a square foot.
Two friendly guys were working on a 1979 BMW, next door, when I approached the house. They told me to walk right into the courtyard and around the back.
First impressions: clean, solid, bright.
There was a private, enclosed, elegant front entrance under angled eaves.
Around the side yard, an old steel pole clothes-line was planted into the concrete, just outside the kitchen door. A green plastic chair, nearby, marked a place where a tired woman, no doubt, had rested, chores done, after she had pinned damp cotton clothes to dry in the eternal Southland sun.
There were leftover forms from the last century all around: a TV antenna, a backyard patio in zig-zag concrete pattern, and a tall drum shaded lamp in the side window.
And sliced into the stucco walls: high clerestory windows, everywhere, bringing light into the living room and into every bedroom; bedrooms where people, from Sputnik days to iPhone times, had slept, slept for 55 years, in suburban solitude, through war, riots, assassinations, movie premieres, and freeway pile-ups.
It was quiet here, peaceful, lovely. It was nothing fancy, just something inherently American and naively optimistic in design and intention.
Somewhere in America, long ago, people had built with confidence and care, incorporating the latest Space Age designs, but encasing them in tradition, in family, in expectation, that life could be orderly, well run and peaceful.
But the people of 15126 Kittridge had moved out of here, some time ago, so it was a preserved family house without a present day family, a mute museum of life, of time past and lost forever, and thus without love or conflict, laughter or pain.
Perhaps only the electric lamp on a timer and weekly visits from the gardener kept this home alive.
As I walked away from 15126 Kittridge, the sky dimmed, the moon came out.
And I heard the voice of Jo Stafford, sung to the words and music of Irving Berlin:
You keep coming back like a song
A song that keeps saying, remember
The sweet used-to-be
That was once you and me
Keeps coming back like an old melody
The perfume of roses in May
Returns to my room in December
From out of the past where forgotten things belong
For a few days, last week, I reprised a role I had once played, three decades ago, in the city of Boston.
Some friends of mine, residents of Los Angeles, will soon relocate near Boston University and one of them will enter graduate school and study physical therapy.
Thanks to a very generous cousin in Cambridge, who opened up her home and heart, we three had a place to stay, in an old neighborhood north of Harvard University, where old frame houses, brick colonials and crooked streets are intersected by Irish taverns, old firehouses, new bakeries and shabby gas stations.
I love Boston as much as I despise Los Angeles, so I eagerly jumped on the chance to bring them around to the places I had last lived in when Ron and Nancy were in the White House.
Fulfilling President Reagan’s fondest dreams, the wealthy and powerful are even more so today, and well-endowed, luxury-priced Boston University (tuition:$39,000), once a homely, forlorn and gray place along the streetcar tracks, is now full of edifying and prestigious piles of brick colleges, ornate lampposts, decorative sculptures, landscaped meridians, cobblestone sidewalks and a frenetic energy of the young, stressed and indebted.
The sun shone every day of our visit, in a weird evocation of the city we were in exile from. Spring was evident in the flowering dogwoods, crocuses and tulips and on the tinted green lawn of the Public Garden. A season earned by those who had worked through a cruel and harsh winter. A spring deserved and appreciated, as spring should be. The scarcity of something wonderful is wonderful to behold.
And there was the new, gleaming Kenmore Square, which I remembered as the ass end of the Back Bay, where broken beer bottles, Sunday morning pee-in-the-alley, and angry musicians once held court. It was now a sanitized and Disneyfied collection of luxury hotels, smart restaurants; and a ridiculously oversized twin-peaked, mansard-roofed building suited for a studio back lot.
In my old Boston days, I had always walked and dreamed and wandered along Commonwealth Avenue, under the trees and past the statues of great dead men. And my favorite was William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, whose quote I memorized to fire up my own integrity:
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
He was fighting against the national evil of slavery, and this writer was only speaking up, pathetically, in defense of his own sexuality. Perhaps that is not entirely true, but when I walked there 30 years ago, I did so in the shadows, without self-knowledge, trapped in a dream and a nightmare of unfulfilled carnality.
Transcendentalism. Unitarianism. John F. Kennedy.
Paul Revere. Honey Fitz. Marky Mark. The Late George Apley.
Henry Cabot Lodge. Ted Kennedy.
Faneuil Hall. Samuel Adams. The North End. The Public Garden. The T.
Copley Square. Brookline. Charles River. Myles Standish Hall.
Concord and Lexington. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
Isabella Stewart Gardner. Emily Dickinson. John Silber. Nick DeWolf.
Thirty years ago, and three days ago, my mind’s awhirl with what I saw and what I learned and who I might become. Thirty years have passed. But they have not diminished my passion for the people, places and philosophy of the Bay State.
Boston was the first moment, at 18, when my conscious mind came into existence.
And I felt it again, last week, that I belonged to Boston, in its fervor and trembling intellect, in its profundity and promise, and I know that I have barely scratched the surface of my own potential when I return to the place where youth crashed into adulthood and I picked up the pieces…. sculpting life anew.
Here in Van Nuys 
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