The Morgantowner: Griffith Park

I often have dreams about trying to go home. I lived in Los Angeles for more than twenty-five years, in eight different apartments. I sometimes dream about standing on Wilshire Boulevard, trying to figure out where my current apartment is and how to get there. One time, I dreamed that I moved back to Baltimore and I was working in the kind of men's clothing factory my father used to own. I was unhappy with the work and the cold weather, and decided to go back to Los Angeles, to the sun and palm trees.

Joe moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1980 with friends from college. He lived in Berkeley for a time before settling in San Francisco about the time I moved to Los Angeles from Miami in 1984. He wanted to go back to visit his long-time friends. We were last there three years ago for a week each in Southern and Northern California. I came back from that trip with a sinus infection that lasted a month.

I've had a rough year. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer last summer, and my thyroid gland was removed in November. My sister died in March, in Maryland, after an illness of only a few days. Then in April, I fell of my bicycle and need eleven stitches in my leg, and glue and surgical tape for a wound on my arm. I've been riding a bike since I was five, and the idea that it might be too dangerous, along with everything else, depressed me. I've had trouble with my left knee for some time, and the sports doctor from WVU Medicine figured out that it was a torn meniscus. I met with the surgeon, but I needed permission from both my cardiologist and general practitioner before they could proceed with the operation. I didn't get those before the trip. I'll have the surgery August 9.

We finally agreed to two days of travel, and six days apiece in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Joe had a schedule. We would see one group for lunch and one for dinner every day. I could schedule Los Angeles, and he would schedule San Francisco. He wanted all this written out before we left. Joe wanted to throw diet-consciousness to the wind. I didn't want to gain a lot of weight, or have my bad leg swell, which has happened before.

Nothing went wrong with the travel times, only that the facial recognition equipment at the airports didn't recognize me, or it didn't match my driver's license. Everything was hard from the drive to Pittsburgh airport, to picking up the rental car in Los Angeles, to being at San Francisco airport for the trip home at an early hour, to walking through the airports. I did all the driving in Los Angeles, about 300 miles in six days, trying to figure out which lane merged onto the freeway I wanted.

We saw many of my friends, long-time buddies some going back to the 1980s. We don't have that in Morgantown. It's not anyone's fault; we just didn't get here until 2012. We walked around the Silver Lake neighborhood, where we stayed, with my friend Gregg, who took us to a Persian restaurant near our motel, ate Italian food and visited a bookstore in Los Feliz with Stephen and Thomas, had dinner at a fancy fish place in Santa Monica with Jay and his friend Dr. David. We were supposed to have lunch the first day with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife Tracy, but Lisa texted Joe that she had to officiate the funeral for Martin Krieger that morning.at the old Jewish cemetery in East Los Angeles. I knew Martin. He was 80, and used to come to the monthly Saturday morning service at Beth Chayim Chadashim, where Lisa was the rabbi and Joe and I first met and were married. Martin came with a little boy he had adopted. So we went to the funeral, and saw David, the little boy, who is now thirty-eight years old, and well over six feet tall. Steve and Steve were there, the couple that used to run the minyan (and might still). A few other BCC people were there. Joe and I asked Lisa to track down the graves of other BCC people I knew. Ginger Jacobs, an ally of the LGBT community, was buried near Martin, and we wandered around in sunny, 90 degree weather to find the graves of Fred Shuldiner and Sol Halfon, long-time friends who died in the 1990s, Fred of HIV-related disease at 49, and Sol of heart failure in his mid-60s. We found Sue Terry's niche in the wall inside a building. She died not long after we left. She was always joining things at temple: the Israeli dance group, the choir and whatever else was around. She wasn't good at any of it, but she was always upbeat and enthusiastic. She met my sister once and told me Robin was "hot." We left the cemetery, and I suggested we go to El Pollo Loco, a chain Mexican chicken place, and a favorite of mine back in the day. We found a branch near the cemetery. I had a white meat quarter chicken, rice, beans and a corn tortilla with a Diet Coke. On the way back to the motel, I saw Garfield High School, my favorite place to substitute my last few years in LA School District.

Friday night, BCC was having a dinner out at a restaurant before services. Our friends Jonathan and George, just back from a train trip across Canada, met us at the temple, and we walked a few blocks to the restaurant. I didn't know many of the people; there has been a lot of change since we left in 2010.

There is a new clergy at BCC, Rabbi Jillian Cameron and soloist Rebecca Mirsky. I thought they both did a fine job with the service. The people who used to never miss a Friday night were mostly not there. There were about twenty people on Zoom. My friend Sylvia was in town from St. Louis. We became friends on the temple Israel trip in 2007 (I think). Don, who I met early in my time at temple, around 1987, came in from Burlingame near San Francisco. Lisa and Tracy were there and my long-time pal, Gordon. I looked at the memorial board, copper plaques put up in memory of the deceased. I was shocked at how many of the names were familiar to me: men who died of complications of AIDS, women who died of cancer, which seemed to be an epidemic at the same time men were dying of AIDS, and even the names of parents of my friends, who used to come to temple sometimes. There was a plaque I had put up for my mother, who visited once, and created quite a stir among the older men. You would have thought Elizabeth Taylor herself had walked in.

We had lunch with Rabbi Deborah Goldmann and her husband Eyal in Hawthorne, a formerly working class suburb where The Beach Boys grew up in the 1940s and 50s. Eyal is a college professor, and Deborah is moving away from the rabbinate to a teaching career. Joe was always close to them, and I like them a lot. Their baby daughter, now in middle school, was there with a friend, all dyed hair and piercings. We had fun with them.

We headed across town to Altadena to my friends Jim and Michelle. Jim and I were like Matt Groening's Akbar and Jeff, brothers or lovers, whichever offends you more. We were neither. He unexpectedly fell in love with Michelle Huneven, a novelist and food critic, and they have a compound out above Pasadena, complete with chickens. We talked like it was old times and Michelle made us a scrumptious dinner. I own copies of all of her novels.

We had lunch one day at a vegetarian restaurant with Les and Richard, a long-time couple. Les and I attended the Jewish genealogy conference in Washington together in 2003.

We were free one afternoon, and did some luxury shopping at the Beverly Center, near Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but in Los Angeles. We visited Bloomingdale's, Banana Republic, and Michael Kors, and bought expensive stuff at "end of season" sales. The clerks actually talked to us. I asked one woman if she was Russian or Armenian, because I heard an accent. She said "I'm from Persia. Do you know people from Persia?" I do, actually. I didn't ask if she was Jewish, but I know Jewish people from there don't say "Iran." There was a beautiful young woman at one of the stores who asked where I was from. When I said "Baltimore" she told me she was from there, too. I asked about her high school. It was one that was unfamiliar to me, because it opened long after I had left town.

I guess the peak for me, and the one thing that made me think I could live there again, was the Monday night hike in Griffith Park with Great Outdoors, a gay men's hiking group. Until I had a heart attack in 2003, I did their difficult hike on Thursdays, but once I was able to hike again at all, a year or so later, I stuck to the easier one on Monday. Most of the men on the hike were the same ones from twenty years ago, many of whom were at our wedding in 2008. The route is different now. We used to start at the planetarium and hike to the top, but since Los Angeles made it expensive to park there, they start on a neighborhood street at the bottom of the park and hike halfway up. I wasn't sure I was in shape to do it, but I managed, even with my bum knee. The view of downtown from the park was spectacular, and the weather, of course, was perfect. I thought "This is what I love about Los Angeles." There were 25 men on the hike; 20 of us went to dinner at Fred 62, a restaurant on Vermont Ave, They had set up a long table on their patio and took each person's order on a tablet and were able to give us separate checks.

I saw the trash in the streets, the homeless living in tents along the boulevards and under the freeways. It's disgraceful, given how much money there is in Los Angeles. Still, there is the weather and the strange plants that grow there, and the people I know and the memories. I was ready to leave in 2010, when Joe and I left together, but it was great being back there. It felt home-like.

The morning after the hike, we checked out of our motel, drove to the place to drop off the car, after filling the tank, which was nearly empty, and flew to San Francisco. That will be Part Two this epic narrative.

I have a few L.A. pictures on my phone, but I haven't figured out how to get them up here. If I do figure it out, I'll post them here. You can find most of them if you scroll back through my Facebook feed.

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.