Los Angeles Forever, Part 2: The 90s (From the Archive)
Shocking weather, death, and tropical plants
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This week I’m pausing our usual programming to bring you some pieces from the archive that come from my personal history in LA. I’ve included donation links for the victims of this catastrophic fire season at the bottom of this piece, please give if you can!]
Life and death are always close, vibrating each other like guitar strings, a song we pretend not to hear until the very end. In January of 1999 I flew from my home in Seattle to LA, to attend a month-long songwriting workshop led by Jackson Browne and Michelle Shocked. The workshop was elite and prestigious, and although I was barely making a living, I couldn’t turn down the invitation. Our small group of songwriters got to work with the mentors once a week for 4 weeks, at ASCAP’s head office on the Sunset Strip. The rest of the time we could do what we wanted. I planned to write, sing, practice and maybe even play an actual LA gig, something I’d never done before.
Some Seattle musicians had moved to LA for record deals, and a few had succeeded, enough to make it seem possible. Here was a chance to try on that future, or at least imagine it from inside the city. I charged the plane ticket on my credit card, which made my gut contract. Fortunately my grandparents’ West Hollywood house was still standing, so I didn’t have to pay for lodging. My Uncle was already there, tending to my grandmother, who was very ill. She’d be glad to see me if she remembered my face.
The workshop was hard and invigorating, but I barely remember it. Within a day of my arrival my beloved Grandma, ravaged by cancer, was transferred to hospice for the very last part of her life. At night I stayed up late in my room, crying to big songs from the radio When everything’s made to be broken/ I just want you to know who I am. My father arrived and we took turns by Grandma’s hospital bedside during the day. She lay prone on her back, eyes closed, alternately shaking and deathly still. I brought my guitar and sang Joni Mitchell songs, softly, in a corner of the room. I wanted to enter her atmosphere like friendly weather, warming her face and hands. She seemed more serene when I played.
In the afternoons, when the doctors came to check on Grandma’s progress, I took long walks in the neighborhood, trying to break in my new emotions. I’d never been so close to someone who was so close to death, and I couldn’t settle into the experience. The weather didn’t help. LA in January was strangely glaring. Even when afternoon shadows lengthened, rabid sunlight threw itself through the streets, painting harsh zebra stripes across every surface. My eyes could not adjust to the contrast, and I nursed a constant headache as I walked and walked.
The Spanish-style houses were pale and squat, crouching behind tropical foliage so lush and gorgeous that it seemed like a dreamscape. Birds of paradise, wily punk peacocks, burst up from raw dirt. Huge aloe plants, sea-green and barbed, raised their thick juicy arms skyward. Palm trees all blurred together at first, but eventually they came clear, each species with its own fronds, jagged or flocked or feathery. Their trunks like dinosaur skin, I couldn’t stop touching it. Sometimes, too often, the yards in front of people’s houses contained bushy flowering shrubs. White oleander, pure poison that can kill you with a single leaf. A question that still haunts me: how did so much of this get planted where children play?
Sometimes at night I combed the streets of West Hollywood, looking for music. I wanted to sit and watch someone else sing, I wanted to be sung to, sweet and slow. But the acoustic revolution sanctified by the Lilith Fair was coming to an end. Musicians were dragging weird technical gear onstage with them, programming fussy little beats that they tried to keep up with as they played. None of it got through to my pain, and I ached as I walked home.
Lying on my narrow bed with the window wide open, in the smell of dewy grass and asphalt and magnolias, I prayed for dreamless sleep to pacify my nerves. Prayer seemed like something that might help Grandma, but it was hard to know what kind might be best. She didn’t pray, didn’t believe in god, and neither did I. But even though I hadn’t spent much time with her in the past decade, her love was god-like to me, and I was losing my personal religion.
The next morning I was startled by a knock on the bedroom door, my father informing me that Grandma had gone in the night. No one needed me for anything, all arrangements had been made. I chewed on a fresh bagel with cream cheese, chasing it with Hansen’s soda. My gut was in no mood, tense and feral. I took a bus to the beach and fell on my knees at the water’s edge, feeling sunburn start ripping down over my skin. Nearby a woman took off her sweatshirt and tied it over the head of her small child, creating a little shelf of shade over his face. I unzipped my jacket and draped it over my head.
Mother ocean. Wave upon wave rushing forward, then suddenly arching back, hushing down until the next surge. Out on the surface little heads bobbed and weaved, each one dunked in its own pleasure. Surfers grabbed one side of the beach, their dogs flopping and barking everywhere. Shirts off, wetsuits dragged across taut brown skin. Boards paddled out, farther and farther, they waited eons for the right moment. You could tell it was coming when they would suddenly pop up, strong but never tense, thrumming with desire for the wave I’m ready, take me! Their faces, on the other side of the ride, looked strangely closed, as if they didn’t want to talk to anyone. Some things are too sacred to share.
Breath by breath, I felt my chest soften and my gut unclench. Up from inside came Jane Siberry’s “The Valley”, a song about loving someone who is leaving. I sang it to myself until tears melted my voice. I felt a wave of my Grandmother’s particular kind of beingness, dove-gray and gentle, but also ferociously loving, approach the threshold of my heart. Using all my singing training, I took a deep breath, pulling her deep inside my lungs, down into my cells. Blood and seawater are always changing, always moving into and around whatever they carry. But she stayed, and I can feel her still.
DONATIONS:
Your piece is a testament to Los Angeles as canvas painted with so many rich lives and experiences as few other cities are. We lose more than buildings in the fire. We lose those visual markers that evoke millions of memories - and in losing that we lose the essence of the city - its history as defined by those who strode its streets.
Such an interesting and gorgeous moment... when we're able to tap into our own "beginingness" and breathe again after big grief.
A mighty rich stew, this piece!