How Cities Get Into Your DNA

We change as we move through them

Photo through Pixabay - by noelsch

I came to Los Angeles in 1972. Well, it was more of an exodus, actually. Leaving Brooklyn in a rush - no one chasing me, just my fears and aspirations.

Slid quietly into Redondo Beach. In the summer. With soft ocean winds blowing. Warm sands. Sandwiches with 3 inches of sprouts on multi-grain bread. WTF!

I was the proverbial fish out of water. The New Yorker walking fast and going nowhere quickly and willing everyone around me to move out of my way - so I could get to where I wasn’t going.

Then it started. The slow inexorable creep. The absorption through the pores as the wind drove the smog. And the smog drove the city and the city reached its long gritty arms around me and held me too tight.

I resisted. I was a New Yorker. I would always be a New Yorker. Sunshine and warm days and beautiful women everywhere, phew! I needed pastrami on rye. Hot dogs from Nathans. Cold weather for Chrissakes.

I needed resurrection and redemption. I needed love.

LA. The City of Angels. Hollywood. Different names, the same place. The same pulsing dry heat that sucks the moisture from the heartaches you came with and promised a new life. Not a better one. No one could promise better. But new for sure. Just let it happen.

I tried. I walked the city. I worked. Sweat-stained shirts and aching feet and buses that ran every fucking hour and a half. LA was cars and I didn’t have one.

LA was fast, compared to Phoenix or Cincinnati. Slow and too diffused compared to Brooklyn. Too much space. Not enough physical pressure bearing down on you. Forming you, like limestone or diamonds.

It just lets you be. I didn’t need that. I didn’t want laissez-faire. I needed guidance. Mentoring.

Someone with a stick or a kind word - or both, as long as I could hear them.

LA was too friendly. Too accommodating. Too dreamy as in people driving through Beverly Hills and Belair, looking at the pretty homes. The boulevards of broken dreams. The possibilities.

They were there. Behind the high trimmed hedges, wrought iron gates and guard shacks at the studios.

I dreamt. Couldn’t help it. It was in the air. The movies. The money. The chauffeur-driven limousines haul the masses to openings and galas and concerts in the hills.

I breathed it all in. Long deep gulps. Coughing in the end - it was too much all at once.

So, I left.

I went far away. To another country. To another time. England was ancient. It was history in every brick and stone. It was knights and Lords and cobbled streets and green rolling hills filled with sheep.

With stone walls outlining the meadows, creating tapestries one could view from space.

The air was cool. It was moist. It was filled with ancient songs and words long since dead. Of memories shattered into such tiny pieces that I inhaled them. Felt them embedded in my cells. Making me one of them.

I laughed in English. And cried in English and felt empowered and beaten down and commiserated with the shadows of ancient Abbeys crumbling in the countryside. With their High Streets and shops older than America.

I moved through these streets at night, as I did in Brooklyn like I did in LA, and felt the inexorable push against my sensibilities. The capturing of my soul or some distant part of it.

I was becoming, all over again.

So, I left.

And soon saw the City by the Bay through the airplane windows. The Golden Gate bridge sparkled in the morning dew. The hills. The people. The cable cars clanged and climbed and reached for the sky.

Tourists and musicians. Cameras flashed and strangers eyed other strangers as I tried to fit in.

To reinvent. To breathe the air uniquely San Francisco.

Cities are cities wherever you go. They smell different. They look different - larger, taller, more spread out. But they are the same. They house you and hold you and push you and tell you things will be alright, even when they won’t.

They lie, but for all the right reasons. They aren’t alive but they feel like they are. Your friend. Your lover. Your cover when you need to hide.

And still, I resisted - but less than before. A New Yorker was loyal. A New Yorker was resilient. They didn’t cry - they wailed and lamented and lashed out, fighting for acceptance.

Fighting to be different, and I was. All the way until I wasn’t.

And then it happened.

The air, maybe. The soft breeze from the bay cooling the aching heart. The old hippies trekking through Haight Ashbury on a Saturday morning. Not sure, but it happened.

Redemption, not so much. Resurrection, who could tell.

But love, yes.

It came in the morning. A mist over the hills near Coit Tower. Down California Street. The Embarcadero - and city hall.

Into my bed, into my heart, into the still-aching memories of empty days and lonely nights. It had arrived.

And so, we left.

Back to LA. Back to the City of Angels, older, perhaps wiser. Perhaps better paved.

The smog gone. The cars multiplied like bacteria. Covering the streets, the hills, and the boulevards with lights on every corner. with traffic creeping slowly through the veins and arteries of the city. Pulsing. Moving. Threatening to take over.

Disappearing then. Becoming a backdrop, like in the movies. There but not there. Real looking but just a façade for the tourists and the documentaries.

LA is special. It’s vast. From ocean to deserts to mountains covered in green and brown shrubs that bake and ignite, sending all of us scurrying from our homes.

It’s like every city. It’s like no city. It’s endless and comforting and distant like a lover who has had enough.

But back in the morning. Willing if not happy. Ardent but not for the same reasons you are.

LA is not New York. Is not San Francisco. Is not England.

It’s fine dust getting everywhere. It’s the hum of people moving. Of trucks bringing and taking. Of dreams rising and falling.

A city older than some, younger than many, and still learning. Still watching. Accepting and rejecting for no apparent reason. Humbling those who don’t pay attention, aiding those that care.

Fifty years ago, I left in a hurry. Remained away from the place where my DNA was strongest. Where my memories remained fresh. Where my heart beats differently.

Cities get into our DNA and change us. Turn our dreams into houses and families and gardens with too many gazebos and weeds wriggling through the cracks. Changing our tastes, our clothing, and our cars as we ramble down the freeways singing different songs but with the same voice.

Pixabay photo - by Maxx Girr