Dad’s Last Drive

Posted on November 14, 2008

By Scott Tejerian

Ryan Adams’ “Let It Ride” from the Cold Roses album is cranking on “repeat” as I fly down the 10 West, from USC Medical Center to the Angeles Clinic in Brentwood. There’s something sadly optimistic about the song that feels like it’s meant for a road trip to heartbreak. It feels right because my dad is going to die, and the part of me not pissed off is pleased. This is what he deserves. This is his life lesson. I won’t make the same mistakes as him. I will listen to my son. I won’t challenge him on every idea. I will find inspiration and action in his words. But I drive fast anyway, for my mom and my sister, and because I’m not so heartless to let a man die—even if I know it could’ve been prevented if only he had listened to me.

From the look on the doctor’s face, we know the prognosis is grim. Even without the scans of dad’s liver—the ones I’m driving to retrieve—the doctor thinks surgery won’t be an option. He would need at least twenty percent of his liver to be free of the melanoma, and for a man whose liver’s so big he looks pregnant, the chances of that seem unlikely. But I drive fast anyway, knowing my dad is in pain and my family is counting on me.

I’m trying to be at peace with my father. For thirty-two years, I wanted him to listen, but it wasn’t critical until seven years ago when the first itsy bitsy, teeny tiny melanoma popped up on his retina. A check-up at the eye doctor, and congratulations, you have cancer! At twenty-five, it never occurred to me that my parents were mortal. My entire view of life shifted the moment the phone rang and dad said, “It’s nothing to worry about, but…”

A little laser beam took care of that teeny tiny, itsy bitsy melanoma on dad’s right retina. Hooray for modern medicine! Until six months later, when Tiny’s big bad brother showed up. No laser this time. Big bad brother refused to quit until they took dad’s right eye. But who needs two when you still have one?

Life went on. Dad was still walking, talking, laughing, and now he had a new set of lame jokes. His two favorites were covering his good eye and staring straight into the sun. Dad also enjoyed poking the marble with distressingly sharp objects. But beneath his veneer, and the jokes, I knew his new affliction was killing him emotionally. Though family and friends said Dad joked to put those around him at ease, I knew it was the other way around. Vanity had always been a weakness of Dad’s. Growing up in the family clothing store, image was everything. “When you look your best, you do your best” was a family motto. And now, for someone who took so much pride in his appearance, for the first few months after the surgery, he wouldn’t take a photograph unless he was wearing sunglasses. Read more

State of Play

Posted on September 30, 2008

By Christopher Foss

A year of this

and that, and before we know it,

lines streak our faces.

Telling the artfully arranged

mask from the real thing

is no longer the game it once was

for us sojourners veering now

so close to the road’s edge

at every turn. And as we drive on,

the scenery on either side –

forests of recrimination, plains

of derring-do, pre-glacial remnants

of hope – grows opaque, as our attention

is drawn to the vanishing point ahead

Read more

Oops, My Bad

Posted on September 8, 2008

By Katrina Elder

I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Flavio, one of a handful of approved Apple technicians in the area, is very impressed with my two-year-old laptop and reveals to Felipe, my boyfriend, how he looks forward to working on it. He rarely gets the opportunity to work on a MacBook Pro, he says. They chitchat some more in singsong Brazilian Portuguese, then Felipe translates their five minute, very cordial conversation into broken English, which I’ll sum up for you here: Flavio needs to open it up to find out what’s causing the annoying, possibly disastrous, buzzing sound. And, if he needs to order any parts, they’ll likely take three days to arrive from Rio de Janeiro.

I do the math. Best-case scenario, Flavio is excited enough to get to work on my laptop right away. He quickly sorts out which parts need to be replaced, calls Rio on Friday, and everything is placed into an envelope and shipped out to Belo Horizonte on Monday—for an on-time arrival Thursday morning. Flavio replaces the part right away and calls Felipe for a next day pick-up. All told, it’s a one-week turnaround. Hmm…

In a land I like to call Brazil, it would go more like this: Flavio opens my laptop sometime late Friday afternoon. He checks it out as he text-flirts with a ficha he met last night at one of the city’s 12,000 butecos. He looks at his watch. “Shit, it’s Skol time.” He closes up shop for the weekend and heads out to meet his crew. Flavio is in his early twenties, so we all know what that means.

Sometime during the groggy Monday after, he remembers my laptop. He pokes around inside for a while, but realizes he can’t do anything productive through the haze. Around Wednesday, he gets back to it, sorting out the possibly disastrous, but really-she-could-have-waited-to-get-back-to-the-States problem. A parts order is placed. Unfortunately, the only guy who knows anything about MacBook Pros has gone home for the day. Flavio hangs-up, notices he has finally recovered from the weekend, and dials-up his crew to see if they want to get a beer later. Need I go on?

Flippantly, to Felipe, I say “I don’t want to be without my computer for that long. I’ve got work to do, work that requires my computer.” Felipe translates, again. They smile and laugh, and I can tell Felipe has translated the words sans the sentiment. He’s protecting me from my very-American, very-impatient self. Good thing, too, because before I’ve agreed to anything, Flavio has walked out of the computer repair shop and is jaywalking across four lanes of rush hour traffic with my MacBook Pro tucked under his arm like it’s a Trapper Keeper. Read more

The Torturer’s Apprentice

Posted on July 31, 2008

When my sister was five, I was able to convince her the TV remote could turn her off. I was twelve and reeking of adolescence. My sister would make a rookie mistake, a blanket endorsement of the cartoon machine my pre-pubescence was raging against. She would want to watch “Inspector Gadget.” This was troubling on any number of fronts. I was about to become a man and while I might not have known what the soundtrack of my rebellion would be, I was damned if it would be, “Go Gadget Go.” I trained my eyes on edgier fare. Programs such as “Charles in Charge” where passion, fidelity, envy and sloth were pondered in twenty-four minute increments. But then little sis would toddle in, dressed in her pink ballerina tutu, with her button nose and pixie hair and eyes blind with adoration.

“Go Gadget Go!” she’d say, and I’d somehow have to swallow the urge to stuff her headfirst into the toilet.

“I’m watching Charles in Charge,” I said.

I expected a moment of contemplation. She was after all a sentient being, a pinnacle of evolution. She wasn’t chasing cars down the interstate.

But little sis persisted undaunted. There was no forethought, no cause and effect, much the same as the ten or so times she’d leapt headfirst out of her crib, or the mass destruction of private property in the wildcat years that followed. Her reputation as a sort of sugarplum black widow had earned her the nom de guarre, Rebecca the Wrecker.

I had to be tough. It was for her own good. I raised the remote control like a laser, “You know,” I explained with a clean sense of purpose, “these TV remotes have a special button. One where I can turn you off.” The shift in her eyes was instantaneous and she stared at the chunky black remote as though it was a cold steel weapon.

“But you love me?” she said, like it was a question. Read more

Calling From Prison

Posted on March 31, 2008

A few times a week, I get calls from correctional institutions. Wrong numbers mostly, usually at two or three in the morning. My phone resides in the 213 area code, and as those who’ve lived in Los Angeles know, it’s an urban exchange which includes many places: Downtown, Koreatown, Crenshaw, Skid Row and one of the roughest Latin neighborhoods north of San Salvador. Half of the calls are from little drunk men slurring in Spanish, asking for a cab. Half are the steriley recorded voice of a female civil servant, speaking as though it’s the middle of the afternoon, saying, “This is a call from a Los Angeles County correctional institution. Your caller’s name is Isaak.” And then she explains I’ll be charged $3 should I accept the call.

I hang up, because why would I want to be charged three bucks to talk with some dude who I don’t even know? I realize this might appeal to some, and if the thought of being awakened by a mysterious hombre calling from prison stiffly stirs your inner juices, go forth and do what you like.

But me? I’m not looking for the late-night lowdown on the pokey. I’ve never been intrigued by the pokey. I take the word of those who have visited the pokey. Plus, I don’t want to burn the guy’s one call and leave him smoldering over a weekend. I picture him sitting, repeating my number over and over, wrathfully plotting his revenge like Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear.

So I hang up, but each time I wonder. What’s it like on his end? Does he hear me answer, grasp I’m not Bo’s Bail Bonds, and start busting fist-sized holes through the lime green walls at county? Do the police give him a do-over? Have wrong number regulations been properly codified?

A few years ago, I could have explained things to a desk sergeant. How I long for the days when it was so easy! When I might have just yawned, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and explained that someone transposed a digit. That some bail guy was losing his shirt. I could tell a man and be done with it, then go back to sleep. But what does one do when the wheels of justice run thru 1-800-Collect? Do I shout into the vacant air, hope that our call is being recorded? And what do I say? Sucks to be you? What is Miss Manners’ advice for handling automated phone calls from criminals one doesn’t know?

My old number got queries for Rheem Valley Bowl. Kids wanted to know the cost of shoes. Different time, different place.

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A Bend in the Road

Posted on September 30, 2007

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal Paradise trundles off to San Francisco with $50 in his pocket and just about nothing else. The trip is doomed from the start. Sal’s caught flat-footed in a rainstorm, then blows much of his scratch on a bus ticket to Chicago. A bizarre ride on a dynamite truck follows, his clothes are jacked by another hitchhiker, all of this leading to the inevitable destination–back home with tail square between his legs, though at least with seminal lessons learned for his future travels.

When I set out from LA on my own trip this summer, it wasn’t with a predisposition to mirror Kerouac’s trek. But in effect, I hit my own shit storm once I arrived in Lake Tahoe; one that left me just as flat-footed, and like Sal Paradise, prematurely haunted and tired of travel. In my first entry, I alluded to a serious medical condition, one that sapped me of my strength and made me question my very future. I didn’t delve into specifics. Sometimes the past is left behind for good reason. But as my trip moved into gear, I began to notice a resurfacing of many of the same symptoms that have plagued my life in recent years. Extreme exhaustion, an inability to concentrate and mood swings teetering toward depression became a daily exercise. A trip to a new doctor confirmed my worst suspicions. The physical and mental toll of my travels had contributed to a medical relapse.

I suffer from something that is little understood but is becoming increasingly common. It’s caused andropause, and the suffixal similarity to menopause isn’t accidental. Have you ever seen an old man cry? Then you’ve seen what happens when a man gets hormonal. Just as women experience a drastic reduction of hormones as they age, men lose power too. The average man loses roughly 10% of his body’s ability to make testosterone every ten years. Often, a seventy-year old man has less than half what he had when he was twenty. But some of us lose our stash even faster. Chemicals in food, free estrogens in the air, and a surfeit of other ills are exacerbating the problem. Estimates suggest that 20 million men could suffer andropause-like symptoms in the United States within the next twenty years. Read more

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Goodbye Big City

Posted on August 13, 2007

I decided to leave Los Angeles for all of the usual reasons that people leave hell. I had some money in the bank, much of it culled from dawdling debts I had finally seen to getting repaid. I had friends scattered across the country who wrote me short, insistent letters that I should come pay them a visit. They knew about my recent struggles and the strain which they had placed upon me. I’d recently battled a serious illness, of which the details aren’t important, except that it made me feel old and feeble well before my time. At its worst, it sucked the life straight out, forcing me toward indescribable moments when I wondered if I was going to die. But all of that was in the past. I’d taken lately to writing back that visits were starting to seem more plausible. They wrote that they would love to see me, and how was I feeling, and what was I planning to do for work now that I was getting better, and what were the happyhaps in LA? And so on, as it is with friends.

When I answered, they didn’t like my answer. Some responded with “???” While others rebutted with “!!!” Others wrote with awesome candor how they’d thought about my big idea, and though they wished me great success, and truly wanted to be supportive, if they were going to be completely honest, it didn’t make one lick of sense at all.

My friends are kind and decent people. Like patron saints, selflessly giving, they’ve welcomed moi into their lives with a measure of fidelity one rarely sees around these days. They’re like the golden-hearted grandmother who adopts the rangy, three-legged dog. I’m the dog in this analogy. And how do I repay such kindness? I piss on her rugs, and feast on her pillows, and drink from her toilets, and howl-ll at three o’clock in the morning. It’s a mystery why my friends keep me around. I guess to absolve their smallest of sins and assure their easy passage to heaven. Otherwise, it beats the crap out of me. Read more

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