Los Angeles Forever, Part 1: The 80s (From the Archive)
Tropical fruit, priceless art, and rock stars in the wild
[EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m pausing our usual programming to bring you this piece from the archives, which comes from my personal history with LA. Two of our staff are currently residing there: our Music Editor, and her partner, and our Travel Columnist, and her husband. Currently they are safe, but it’s touch-and-go. We send them love from the whole Womancake staff! I’ve included some places to donate the victims of this vicious fire season below the piece.]
There is no sunlight like California gold. All things are rendered gorgeous in its vivid, viscous rays. As a kid in the 80s, living in my drizzly hometown of Vancouver made it seem like summer was for other people. Touching down in LA felt like landing on another planet, one that was pumped up with freon and hairspray and New Coke, which everybody hated but drank anyway. No one in Vancouver wore sunglasses except while driving at the end of an August day, when the angle of the sun could blind you. In LA everyone’s sunnies were neon: pink or green or yellow. They slapped them on first thing in the morning and didn’t remove them till dark. It took a long time to get used to people hiding their eyes. I was never sure if they were truly interested in connecting, or just killing time until someone cooler floated by.
My Jewish grandparents had a small, Spanish-style house in West Hollywood, full of plants and macrame and weird ceramic tchotchkes. Grandma’s paintings and drawings were hung on the walls. She had taken up art later in life, stuck with it, and eventually, in her 60s, won some state-level awards for her work. Her art crackled with an energy that threw me for a loop. She was friendly and kind to everyone, but opinionated about people and the systems that surround them. She hated Regan and nukes and thought any kind of censorship was evil. She taught me to see beneath the mundane surface of life, and to penetrate cynicism with the ferocious curiosity of an artist.
In the mornings while everyone else was dragging, she and I would meet in the kitchen, where I’d sit at the yellow table and watch cartoons on its tiny black and white TV. She would offer me an orange, larger than life and sticky as hell. She spread thick cream cheese on my bagel and let me pile on the lox, adding a few capers from a secret jar she kept deep in the fridge. Her hands were speckled with brown sunspots, and a few of her fingers were set at strange arthritic angles. But she had elegant posture and a dedicated personal style. When she lifted her coffee cup to her lips it came away fuchsia on the rim. Every morning she would “draw on her face”, eyebrows and blush and always the pink mouth. Her dresser drawer was full of sparkling brooches and earrings, things she’d worn in the 50s and 60s. Each one was mysterious, vibrating with wild freedoms she had known and discarded, and still missed.
Behind the wheel she was a demon, whizzing up the freeway toward the Getty Museum in Pacific Palisades. Her small feet, clad in white leather sandals, barely made a sound on the huge marble floors. But her blue eyes were round and roving, taking in every single thing, and pointing out the best parts of each painting and sculpture. I learned to look for the artist’s intention in their brushstrokes, and to step back and gaze at the canvas, so its larger vision would come clear. She also pointed out people’s reactions to a work of art, how just standing in front of it changed their faces and posture. Sometimes people cried, silently but without shame. The art broke them wide open, and there was nothing for them to fear but closing up again.
Stepping out onto the museum’s sun-dappled terrace with her, gazing at the vast ocean view, made me feel like I was an honored guest on her ship, sailing toward the brightest part of the horizon. She was deeply unhappy in her marriage and could not find a way out, but she always believed I should be free in every direction, unhampered by the family tsuris that was a constant part of my life at home in Canada. When my Grandma died I ran to the beach in Santa Monica, kneeled down at the water’s edge, and threw tears at the waves. I felt her love surge through me, and it has never left, and for that I cannot find words to express my gratitude.
On Sunday afternoons the whole family would go to the Farmer’s Market, which my Grandfather would emphasize was the original, the one he and his pals had been patronizing for more than 40 years. Glamorous Hollywood stars shopped at its stalls for groceries in those days, but they were part of the LA landscape, and not so remarkable. Once in the mid-40s Grandpa glimpsed Mickey Cohen sitting on a bench, eating an ice cream cone with sprinkles on it, scowling at nothing and everything.
Why anyone would choose ice cream when there were so many piles of pineapples, oranges, limes, dates and bananas, made no sense to me. The market was crammed with color and flavor. Smoky smells from the food vendors made me dizzy with lust. Burrito plates came smothered in melty cheese, orange and white, crusting slightly around the edge of the plate. I never ate a spinach salad in LA that didn’t include strawberries. Sandwiches came with sides, a gigantic pickle or a slop of coleslaw, sweet as fruit and twice as messy. In photographs from that time there are always fresh stains on my t-shirts.
Running through the stalls after lunch I discovered a shop that sold tiny blue California license plates with people’s names stamped on them. I found a whole row of “Alicia” and bought one with my allowance money, tucking it into my tube sock. Later that day, walking with my Grandpa down Sunset, the metal plate started to chafe against my ankle, and I bent down to remove it. As I looked up, two men walked out of a building and right toward us. One was blonde like a lion and tan like beach sex, with big white teeth and no shirt beneath his denim vest. The other was skinny and wore his long brown hair in a ponytail, with heavy bangs that hung across his eyes. He wore a ripped t-shirt and leather pants, with a red bandana tied around his thigh. As they passed us, some guys leaned out of a car shouting YOOOO DAVE!! and I had to explain to Grandpa all about Van Halen.
DONATIONS:
“The art broke them wide open.” Yes! What artists do. Your grandmother was a fierce inspiration.
I loved this. And I'm still in love with the city of angels. Blue skies above. 💙 💔