From Maui To Inglewood (2011)

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            For the past two years I have been living in Inglewood California on the same street one apartment complex over from the one I lived in at the age of three.  I live here with my youngest daughter Viva. Out of all my children she is the one that is most attached to being with me and has been very patient with what appears to the rest of my family as an odd transgression. 

            “From Maui to Inglewood?”

            “Why?” my eldest daughter asked on one visit, as we drove a long La Brea and stopped to let a woman cross the street. 

            “What is she wearing on her head?” Kailea asked me.

             “It’s a weave,” I said.

              “It’s a wig, and a bad one.”  She exclaimed wrinkling her nose.

            I have gotten used to the fake hair, and the fact that it looks fake.  I have even tried a partial weave myself but found I had no patience for the hours required to keep it up. It was the equivalent of having a pet, not a cat, but a weimereiner.  There is a long list of things that one is suppose to do when having a weave, of which I did very little of, never mind the fact that I work out regularly.  Most black women who enjoy the weave will let their bodies go for fabulous hair and sex is an activity, I hear, that must take place carefully, or sometimes not at all if one’s hair is freshly done.  I dated two men of my own race who understood that the hair was it’s own entity, not to be touched, but carefully skirted around.

             “Sorry, I shouldn’t kiss you while you’re brushing your hair, “ one man apologized.  I was struck by his tiptoeing.  Another apologized during love making when in a moment of passion he ran his hand along my hair.  After a while I ditched the oppressive beauty regime, and braided my hair instead just in time for a burgeoning hair revolution.  It seems many other black women are just as fed up and have begun wearing their hair natural.  However, “keep it simple,” has not infiltrated the You Tube vigils depicting natural hair journeys, the Big Chop, and minute measurements of the growth cycle on a month-to-month basis

            My daughter stares quietly out the window at the schlepy looking buildings that have seen better days.  Gaudy attempts at colorful pastel paint jobs only create one heaping monstrosity after another, the architectural face-lifts as creepy as the stretched skin and blowfish, botoxed lips on an anorexic old woman strolling Beverly Hills.  People in this part of town walk the streets in ill-fitting clothes.  Men with pants around their knees, over weight women in tight leopard spandex, spike heels, and enormous cleavage.  We pass gas stations, McDonalds, Popeis, Kentucky fried Chicken, El Pollo Loco, Taco Bell, and giant billboards advertising everything under the sun. Haphazard street signs that slant at odd angles to name streets that have been laid down at various points in time as the town grew give parts of Los Angeles a schizophrenic, cartoonish, Dr. Seuss look.  Freeway over passes wind and twist through the towns carrying an endless train of traffic.  At night the cars are rivers of light in the distance poring from one orifice into another. 

            Mekila, my son, has made various attempts to persuade me to leave LA, at the very least Inglewood.

            “Mom, I know you want to be around other black people and that you lived here when you were a little girl, but you grew up in a different culture.  Culturally you are very different from the people here,” he explains quietly as I stir my coffee with a straw at the convenience shop we are hanging out in, waiting for Viva, my youngest daughter, to finish school that afternoon.

            “Mom, don’t stir your coffee with that,” my son cries out.  I stare down at the thin red, plastic straw between my fingertips.  “It’s plastic,” he says in the same alarmed voice. “There are all kinds of toxic chemicals coming out of that straw.”  I get the same lecture from my son for drinking Pellegrino water, the carbonation, is sure to erode the enamel right off my teeth.  OK, most teenage boys don’t usually care about these kinds of things, but if they had a grandmother like the one my kids have, well…

            “Tell me about your mother,” one of my massage clients, an older woman in her early sixties requests.  I have been massaging she and her husband since I first arrived in LA.  They are wonderful people and my daughter and I have become regular weekly fixtures in their lives.  While I massage, my daughter sits and reads on the sofa.  How do I explain my mom to a woman who regales capitalism, rattles off the vocabulary of Wall Street lingo, and feels that much of what’s wrong with the health care system, and the housing market in this country is the fault of the general public acting irresponsibly, and that if only young people learned how to fill out tax forms, and understand the stock market while in school, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.  It is the private sector, businesses, she says, that is the life-blood of the economy, and when government gets involved, it creates a great quagmire of socialistic quick sand that is rapidly sinking this country.

            Just a few days before this rant from my client my mother was standing with members of the Occupy Wall-Street movement on Maui with grey packing tape stretched across her mouth to represent all of the voiceless people in the wicked corporate machine that runs America.   Mom also carries books on nutrition, Maitreya the Christ, and newspaper clippings about various political events in a brown paper bag where ever she goes.  She leaves long messages on my cell phone, reading to me from newspaper articles about marches, and of late, the occupy movement.  Conversations at social gatherings come to a grinding halt as my mom takes half an hour to read aloud two chapters from a nutritional book to a party of bewildered dinner guests caught in a lecture that they had no idea they would be attending.  All of the children have been read to from a well worn, creased, political comic book on the Gulf war several times while snacking on seaweed, rye crackers and alkaline water blessed by Mother Mary, who’s spirit performs these blessings through the medium of a woman that lives deep in the jungle in a clothing optional community. The children, as youngsters, have had the experience of going to a park with grandma, falling asleep and waking up at the forefront of a thousand person political rally, where grandma was arranging a group picture and then a spirited walk through down town.

            Maybe I moved to LA to experience the normalcy of mainstream culture.

My eldest daughter did not even blink an eyelid at this conversation that took place between a young East Indian woman with an English accent, dressed in brightly colored, flowing, hippy clothes and my mother and stepfather. 

            “I am on my way to Australia to hear my teacher for the last time before he checks out of this world,” she gushes. 

            “Oh, is he dying?” my stepfather asked.

            “No, he died a long time ago.”  My stepfather’s dark brows wrinkled, and he stroked his chin.

            “I meant your teacher, “ he said trying to clear up the misunderstanding.

            “My teacher died a hundred years ago he has been teaching in spirit on another dimension.”

            “But how do you receive his lessons?” My mother wanted to know.  She and my stepfather were very interested, but still a little confused. 

            “He will be channeling through the body of Swami Kukananda.  There are hundreds of us going because next week my teacher will be leaving dimensions connected to planet earth and he will be residing on a different planet.”

            “Ooh, “ all confusion had left the expression of my mom and stepdad and they smiled in understanding.  My daughter, Kailea, listened un-phased.

            Years later while living at my father’s in Inglewood, Kailea visited and practically choked on her food while watching the news. 
            “Today the body of a young woman was found in a dumpster.  It is believed that she is the fourth victim of a serial killer still out at large.”  The serious expression of the anchorwoman’s face changes and becomes more thoughtful.              “Crowds line up at the new micro brewery, where you can sample a variety of creative beers.”  The story continued for a few more seconds and was suddenly replaced by an ad for dish- washer soap.

            “You guys watch this while you’re eating dinner?”  Kailea exclaimed.  She was so shocked that she threw her head back and laughed at the absurdness of trying to digest one’s food while listening to such tragic news as a woman’s body found in a dumpster followed by deep concern for crystal clear glass ware.  Actually my dad and his family watched that stuff. Viva and I were just there. 

            Los Angeles is a relentless grind.  It is a string of towns, many of them only five or eight miles from one another but it takes at least half an hour to get anywhere.  It takes half an hour to move five yards in Santa Monica on fourth-street during the weekend. Everyone works hard here, it doesn’t matter what your job is.  If you are just working to survive, than maybe you have three jobs, and that can afford you a three hundred square foot studio apartment for only $2,000 a month with a housemate and six thousand to move in, parking is on the street, but hey, you’re in a decent neighborhood, no gangs, helicopters, loud domestic violent fight scenes, and you can walk to all the cute shops in Santa Monica and Brentwood.  Attorneys and movie producers work just as hard, ninety hour work weeks.  They live in places like Hollywood Hills, a maze of narrow streets shadowed by towering walls of earth. Gargantuan homes dangle precariously from cliffs that over look a view of the city from wrap around picture windows.  The annual property tax is enough to provide a comfortable lifestyle for a family in the mid west.

            To live in LA is actually to live in your car and at your job.  Making little money while in debt and living here is akin to attempting economic suicide, which is what I have been doing for the past two years. 

            Why did I leave Maui?  I wanted the chance to attend lectures that weren’t about raw food, yoga, the Dali Lama, The Secret, or the latest conspiracy theory.  I wanted to date men that did not come with a whole history from my friends of who they had dated previous to me.  I wanted more out of life than shorts, slippas, a pit bull in the back of a pickup truck, and a surfboard. Every day on Maui was eighty degrees, with trade winds, weddings, and people on honeymoon; it was one placid day after another. It was traveling thirty miles in twenty minutes to walk through half empty malls all the while listening to the strum of an ukulele, so soothing, that I might fall into a coma of boredom.

            In LA I sit in traffic, and get flipped off by the guy who was sitting behind me and lost his temper because I failed to move forward two feet when the space opened up.  I will never see that guy again.  On Maui I might have seen him that same night at a dinner party and it would turn out that we were somehow related through a string of familial connections so complicated that the cast of a Shakespearean play would look as sparse as a haiku in comparison.

            In La I get to date men, and learn what a wreak they are on my own.  There are also all sorts of interesting lectures on politics, and science by prestigious intellectuals, yet I am either too broke or tired from sitting in my car to attend any of them.  I am still at the terrifying stage, where I wonder if enough clients will call me this month to get a massage so I can pay my bills.  I am also still at that hopeful stage that I may succeed in LA after all and have the chance to enjoy my birth town.