A Deep Breath

It just takes a little time. Look a little deeper and things don’t look so bleak. After that rage against the machine yesterday, Plotnik has to admit a few things. One is that although Stiletto’s pure size makes living in it difficult, that same size is what makes its interesting parts interesting. The two huge cities of America, The Big Shmapple and Stiletto City, are world renowned magnets for people from every continent on both hemispheres. There are more Mexicans in Stiletto than any city in the world outside of Mexico City, more Armenians than anywhere except Yerevan, more Uzbeks, more Cambodians, more Persians, more Everybody. And nobody gets along. That’s what makes it such a struggle, but also gives it spice.

Life is hardest for newcomers, but you don’t hear angry Uzbeks on Talk Radio in Stiletto City. It’s angry anglos, men for the most part. They’re pissed off because of foreigners, because of politics, because of people with different color faces or boys who want to marry boys or the rising price of oil, which they blame on environmentalists, or any of a hundred different topics, but what they are all really saying is: “I want things back like they used to be.”

Long ago and far away, Schmeckl and Plottie used to play football in a little Armenian churchyard in Sherman Oaks, on the corner of Nagle and Riverside Drive, with their closest friends, two bothers, whose parents were Armenian immigrants. The brothers lived next door to the church. In the churchyard were towering English walnut trees – you’d have to clear off the walnuts before you dared tackle anyone because you could crack open their heads before you could crack open one of those walnuts. If you weren’t careful you ended up with a hard-to-remove green stain all over your hands and clothes and heard about it from your Mom.

It was a very simple and beautiful church. The fathers wore black robes and beards. If you tossed them the football they’d try to catch it but could never throw it back without the ball ending up twenty feet in the wrong direction. When Plotnik thinks back, he sees everyone smiling.

Yesterday, Plot and Duck went straight to Hell. It turns out that Hell has moved to a mall on that same corner, Fulton and Riverside. Duck had to go into a fabric store to buy foam to repair one of Mummy P’s chairs, so Plotnik walked across the street to look at the old church. It’s still there, in a way, but it has been enlarged greatly and is now an Armenian Congregational Evangelical School. The entire property is surrounded by twenty foot high fences with pointy glass on top.

Why? Who are the Armenians worried about? It can’t be walnut thieves – they chopped those trees down long ago to have room for teaching children about the glorious countryside of Old Armenia and the barbarism of the Turks.

Next door, where Schmeckl and Plottie’s friends once lived on an acre and a half with an enormous truck garden, there is today an entertainment complex of offices, housed in a concrete four story bunker with a name like BFD Group. The BFD Group doesn’t know about the hundreds of tomato plants Plottie’s friend’s Dad used to grow on that very property, perhaps right under their meaningless little desks, where Slim the filthy old gardener once picked a tomato hornworm off a tomato plant and squashed it in front of Plottie’s face. A field of tomatoes in this subsector of Hell would be absolutely inconceivable to the pony tailed minions at BFD Group.

You see? That’s why people scream curses at immigrants and democrats on talk radio. They have to blame somebody. The world that was so easy, with sunshine 360 days a year, with plenty of room to spread out and prosper, where a child like Plottie could be safe to ride his bike, explore and be a kid, to be by himself all day during the Summer without his parents being so terrified of their everyday lives that they felt it necessary to plunk him behind twenty foot fences covered with shattered glass, those days are buried under concrete, under freeways, under shopping centers, under development and more development. When you don’t like things outside you hide inside. People who live today in this city are not even aware how intense and fearful their lives have become.

But it’s not all bad. It just feels that way sometimes, when you’re a little out of tune, when your D string will not wind up to E, like yesterday, when the reality of PD and 5H leaving was starting to sink in. But life is good, y’all. Today was fun. BZ’s here.

While she and Duck and family friend K-Dawg took Mummy P. to a museum, Plot and PD and Belly ate lunch at Homegirl Café in Chinatown, while Plot got Mummy P’s driver-side window fixed on her car. Mummy P's housekeeper suggested to Plottie that he put new tires on that car too and not ask first, because the tires were worn down to the metal inside the tread, and there had been, shall we say, a reluctance to get them changed. The window hadn’t worked in six months. Plot fixed that too.

Mummy P. will be 94 next week and her ears hear randomly. That’s easy to take care of, but not quickly. Everyone is working on it. Tonight, BZ showed her photos on BZ’s computer of her two weeks in Ethiopia. The pictures are sere and beautiful, pastel camels walking across rocky soil in front of eerily misshapen cliffs, tall men with Middle Eastern features and brown skin wearing Western t-shirts, mountains that look like they're made out of mud and mud huts that are hard to pick out from the mountains. Everything is close to the same sandy color, subtle. Mummy P. can’t really make out subtlety in photos any more, so she pronounced the landscape ugly.

But she only said that to Plottie, and he knows what's going on. Tomorrow her eyes will be working better and the ugly will be less so. She’ll see things more clearly. She’ll pick up the beauty. That’s the way it is for all of us. We're getting there. We just need a little time.

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PS -- Yesterday, at the Homegirl Cafe, The Greatest Belly walked through the entire place, greeting each table, making people laugh and swivel around to see her, carrying her My Potty book so strangers could read her a page or two. The girl can work a crowd.