The Morgantowner: Los Angeles- August 2016

We are on a plane from Los Angeles to Washington, likely about to miss our connection to Pittsburgh tonight. We’ve seen lots of friends, eaten most of our meals at restaurants, gone hiking twice in Griffith Park, been to an evening of Israeli dancing, and worshipped at two nights of services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I met in 2005 and were married in 2008, now in a new building.

The people at the places I used to go are pretty much the same people who were there six years ago when we left, and mostly, they are doing the same things. Some people we wanted to see were on vacation, others, those who wanted their lives to be different, left town for better opportunities in the hinterlands between the Rockies and the Appalachians, much as Joe and I did. Other friends died in the years we’ve been gone, and I feel some guilt about not attending their funerals, not mourning them properly.

It took me a few days to get used to checking the traffic report, not the weather report, before going out. Every day we were there was warm and sunny, the temperature changing by what part of town we were in: cooler by the ocean, warmer in the valleys.

Maybe it is because we stayed near Beverly Hills that I noticed how many tourists were out and how few of them spoke English. Griffith Park, too, the province of gay men out looking for sex in the eighties, was now full of French, German, Chinese and Japanese tourists snapping pictures of the Hollywood sign. Years ago, the back roads in the park were closed to traffic, and there was a disastrous fire sometime between 2007 and 2009, years blending together in my mind. The only help to my memory is which of the eight apartments I lived in when something happened during my twenty-five years in Los Angeles.

We had breakfast yesterday morning at Brooklyn Bagels, on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, then went shopping on that street for gifts for our catsitter in Morgantown and for Reva, my dance partner, who lent us a bedroom and bathroom for all but the first night of our stay. Beverly Hills is what I call “Mythological Los Angeles.” The people are all thin and beautiful, everyone drives a Porsche, Lamborghini or an exotic BMW you haven’t seen before. The women wear gorgeous clothes, jewelry and shoes, and the men are muscular with clear, unlined faces and perfect hair. Celebrities line the streets daring you to look at them, or smiling at you in the hope you will recognize them. We saw 82-year-old Larry King at Brooklyn Bagels and scores of glamorous people and cars.

All of our friends who own homes say they could not afford to buy their homes now. And those with jobs spoke of companies trimming their health-care benefits. These are problems across the country, but particularly in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Homeowners are secure. For renters, it’s more difficult, even though there is rent control in Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

The more “real “ Los Angeles is the Spanish-speaking and African-American town, where people work in restaurants or at the airport, and kids go to public school. The people who teach in those schools also struggle to maintain some semblance of a middle-class life.

Our friends are outrageous by the standards of Middle America. One, from an Orthodox Jewish family in Toronto, works hard, then goes out dancing every night of the week. Our gay friends from Great Outdoors, the hiking group, reminded us of how stiff and careful we’ve become in public.

Despite all these complaints, I am comfortable in Los Angeles. It seems home-like to me. Being Jewish is certainly not an issue, slightly darker than Northern European is the norm, gay is not a big deal. And of course, our friends. We have made friends in Morgantown, but they don’t go back decades.

I loved being out with my people, soaking up unhealthy amounts of sunshine, mingling with Orthodox Jews, spiritual and mostly more open gay people. We ate twice at The Farmers’ Market, a collection of restaurants outdoors in the Fairfax District. I used to eat lunch there every Tuesday when I lived nearby. Years later,t he same Armenian women work at Moishe’s, a stand with Lebanese- Armenian food, despite the Yiddish name. We also ate at the Brazilian barbecue, a place so good that I dream about the fried plantains. Speaking of dreams, I often spend my sleeping hours somewhere along Wilshire Boulevard, between downtown and the ocean, looking for my apartment and not remembering where it is. We drove much of Wilshire Boulevard last night, from Koreatown to Beverly Hills.

Maybe that is what Los Angeles is to me now, a dream. Hollywood and Beverly Hills are that to lots of people, but I’ve been there and done that. I don’t imagine us going back there to live, nor are we likely to live in that other dream city, San Francisco. I hope we can get back to California again. Until that time, we have remade our lives, like so many other refugees, in a new place, in our case, Morgantown.