Sunday, November 3, 2013

Hollywood way.


The drive starts at El Coyote on Beverly where I'd eaten lunch with my mother two decades earlier, though this time it's a Sunday dinner to close the weekend with an often'missed friend and a few others, a surreal turnout so utterly Los Angeles with introductions of names followed by the soap opera they're currently on but I have to leave early for my red'eye flight out of Bob Hope Airport and after one Pacifico and chips with heated salsa I walk out the door of the storied Mexican restaurant that's down the street from my old apartment on Curson with the view of the Hollywood sign from my rooftop and the piece of curb down below where I'd said my last goodbye to my first love, and now I'm now navigating these known streets with a different car, a red Corolla rental rather than my black Prius, up Highland where on my first trip to California my mother bought me my first two comic books at a newsstand, issues of The Punisher and a reprint of Spider-Man's first appearance, outside the Ripley's Museum I went to with my father on our first ever father/son outing and in which he got self'conscious after weighing himself on a giant scale, a solid 260 pounds of vulnerability, and the rental climbs across Cahuenga by the Hollywood Bowl where I first saw Radiohead play back when they were my favorite band and I make a right turn onto Barham Boulevard and pass the Oakwood Apartments that were my first home in California, when I was an eight year'old addition to the swarms of child would'be actors playing in the complex's pools as our mothers laid in deckchairs comparing audition tallies and Disney casting calls, the lettered buildings so close to the Warner Brothers Studios and their massive vertical billboards rotating with the latest movies and syndicated shows and it's after those that Barham which is now Olive veers right before my quick turn left to drive up Hollywood Way where the first street I pass is Riverside which means a left turn would take me to my old apartment, my favorite one growing up, that one I wish we hadn't left, and a right turn would eventually take me past the okay one we lived at after, during high school at Providence which is just two blocks closer along that same street, but tonight I'm not veering, no tonight I'm running out of time and I have to go straight, and it's straight up Hollywood so I can rush back to New York City away from the friends that gave me the best weekend I can remember and one that dwindled too fast and I think for the first time about what it would be like not to go back and never have to say my "I'll be back in a few months" that I cling to like a mantra and this shit usually gets easier if I turn up music but on the radio KROQ is in commercial, so I'm listening to something unfamiliar on Star and thinking of two nights earlier while driving on the 10 when it was my great friend Nicole's voice along the airwaves telling her listeners across the Southland she was going to play Chvrches for her friend Josh who's visiting from New York and ten minutes later announcing "This one's for you, J2" before Lauren Mayberry oh'ed us into "The Mother We Share" as my welcome home but here tonight it's both a band and a DJ's voice I don't know who isn't greeting me but instead letting me know I'm listening to a local showcase called Close To Home and that the time left in the show is awkward because it's not enough for a full song but too long to just talk and ramble so he plays another one by the band I just heard because the short ones, the quick ones, they're their specialty, and I see the lights of the airport already which I don't want to accept because even with everything familiar already behind me I don't want this to ever end and I try prolong it but I realize that it must and that no matter what I can't.