There And Back Again, And Again, And Again, And Again.

In the Twilight Zone television show, mostly people found themselves locked in a catch 22 of existential crises. You break your glasses in a nuclear winter or your face becomes a pig . . . Lately, I’ve been sitting in traffic, sweating through my clothes, thinking about that concept. Sometimes you get stuck but there is no ironic end or credit roll to unstick you.

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The Mercury Sable I drive to campus every day is the same car I was driving when I started classes in 2010. That was eight years ago and somehow we’re both back together, older and worse for wear. The drive between Culver City where I live and Long Beach should only be a half-hour, but the Mercury can no longer accelerate to highway-competent speed without shaking-up like a shuttle on reentry. I get up an hour and a half early and take the long routes. I go south along the Pacific Coast Highway, and then in-land, through the west side’s inner city corridors, where all the cars have cardboard pieces for windows or two-tone paint jobs but still run better and quieter than the Merc. The Merc’s axles squeals when I slow to a stop. Its engine mount split apart in a collision while I lived in Oregon, so the whole transmission punches forward when I give it gas and rattles. I scare all the freshmen drivers who zip around in their clean energy cars. I see their young faces, full of fear. They should be afraid. I was like them once, young and brave. And then I looked up and I was thirty and still looking for parking.

Imagine the sticky feeling: to both cherish your current experience, and simultaneously yearn to be looking back on it as a memory. While on campus, I am aware of two vivid sensations. One: that I have always wanted to be at University, even in spite of my delay. And two: that I wish the experience had already come and gone. I could have done it eight years ago.

Eight years ago I was not a creative writing major. I was a confused, major of Fine Arts. I’m not even sure why or what I was thinking. If I was thinking at all. I spent equal time pining the loss of my first girlfriend and clumsily flirting with any woman who noticed me pining. I was afraid of conformity but badly sought approval. I was not at the front of my classes, but rather trailing behind.

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On days I park in time to attend my classes, I enjoy them. Somewhere between then and now, I became fond of professors. I sit forward at the edge of my seat and laugh the loudest at their punny English department jokes. A big embarrassing and shocking laugh. The whole room goes quiet after. I don’t even care. I am here for the close-reads. I am here for the synecdoches and the metrical analysis. Even the most mind-numbing lecture is better than turning to rust at a call-center in Klamath Falls. Or pumping gas. Or selling someone else’s knives.

Somewhere in the middle of back to school week, I ride the Mercury screaming and wailing up the PCH again: Up Walgrove into Santa Monica, and I stop in at my old professor’s workshop class. I sit in the back just in time for the beginning of the semester introductions: “What is your name? What are you reading?” A few new faces smile at me. A few old ones nod in acknowledgment. We all looked and sounded so tired, only halfway into that first week. But we all stayed there anyway, listening to one another’s stories. All of us stuck together. And that felt okay. -FM

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Travel: LA’s Luckiest Bars or The Long Goodbye

 

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Irony is that I met her at a bar called ‘The Black Cat’, at the Sunset Junction on the East Side, and that I lost her at a bar called Lucky’s on the West Side. Both establishments invoke some sense of chance, too fitting for the LA dating scene, but maybe that’s just a bar ‘thing’ – to make you feel from the name on the wall, that anything could happen. Since this is a blog, here are reviews on two of LA’s magic rabbit feet.

The Black Cat was her choice. We met late – 9 o’clock. I waited outside – nervous when she rolled up in a white Lyft. We did not recognize each other on the sidewalk but when I followed her inside we laughed about that. The bar is a speakeasy-style with long brass furnishings and tile flooring. No circular flow, instead a long and narrow collection of taps. Alcohol like you might expect, and hipsters like you might expect, but all of it nicer.

“I saw Jon Hamm here,” she suggested toward the lounge seating near the bar’s front. “He watched my bag.” She seemed to me a cynic. Smart and quick and skeptical. So I found the John Hamm sighting charming – a hint at something softer underneath the armor that we both held up for ourselves.

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We ordered whiskeys, I think, but it’s a dim memory. I can report that The Black Cat: its staff, its purse hooks, even its stools amplified our night. The bar’s charm melded into a comfortable blur of propriety around us while we drank, and as we drifted from surface topics to questions or challenges: God, Trump, Spielberg’s legacy and the death of modernism after Joyce. We drifted from alcohol to cigarettes, to other bars, and to other secrets.

She walked me to my car when we were drunk at the end of the night, the two of us laughing at one another. And she took a Lyft ride home. I watched her go, knowing that something important had happened, though I was unsure of what exactly, or for how long.

Black Cat proved to be a happy stroke of chance, but Lucky’s on the west side was a mistake for all parties involved. Lucky’s is a gastro that sits on Culver Boulevard in the scooped out bones of a used-to-be red brick eatery known as Dear John’s, still proudly displaying that marquee as if in reverence. In retrospect, the use of an old marquee over a new bar was another dead albatross I should have heeded.

 

She was exhausted, this time not arriving shiny in a Lyft but arms-crossed and sullen, while we gazed together, bleary-eyed across the bar I’d chosen. Inside it was a shouting match of business types standing at high tables in the room’s dead center. I couldn’t hear her snarking remarks about the din over the sound of it. The staff was almost always missing but friendly when they appeared, and the bar was not long or brass, but only stained wood made to look trendy. We ordered food to pick ourselves up and to fill the silence that loomed over our corner booth. 

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My sandwich reminded me of ‘hot lunch’ from grade school. It was a badly carbonized chicken stuck between two chewy buns. She ordered a burger that I think was just ‘fine’. We washed it all down with margaritas: served wrong – in high stem glasses with borders jagged from so much salt, that glittered on our loaded table like diamonds after we had walked away.

In the parking lot (where it was quiet) the ill-fate found us. We broke apart in a fond way, with tears while she voiced to me her concern for our futures: mine and hers as separate, and disparate things. It was not a long dalliance but long enough to write about.

She did not Lyft away. I drove her home and we slept in her bed together. And that has made the pain of parting all the sweeter for it. -FM

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X Amount of Years.

     My abuelo seemed to me, a big guy with a big nose and a big face, who always dressed in a very distinct way. It was always copper slacks with a white v-neck short sleeve. The ‘v’ always plunged down toward the scar left over from his open-heart surgery. He would terrorize me and my sister with that scar; ask us if we wanted to see it. “No way!” I’d shriek. Up would come that white v-neck, and there, in the center of his nascent pectorals, was the crumpled-up line of scar tissue. He cheated at Monopoly, and lectured me too often. And one Christmas Eve he even told me he was sleeping over in our living room and that he’d brought his gun. He was going to stay up late and kill Santa Claus in the night. My grandfather died from complications in the hospital when I was a teenager. He barely remembered who or where he was before slipping into a coma. He stayed there until my mom made the decision to take him off life support. I can remember watching my mom and uncle sit in the living room staring into space, bleary-eyed after that. They’d drift into stories: bad omens and jokes he’d tell. Shell-shocked.
 
     As I work on my novel and short stories I’ve been thinking about my abuelo lately. I’ve recently been leaning more on my personal experience in my writing. It’s the difference between a good lie and a compelling lie, and my approach to stories is to work and massage the lies until they feel real. That’s the only way I know how to do this thing and it’s definitely something I picked up from my grandfather. This blog and the novel I’m gearing up to finish is the hardest I’ve pushed to express my latin roots. So while I was groping for a blog name, I found myself thinking about those things he would say in Spanish. La historia me absolverá. It means, ‘the story will absolve me’. ButI found out that he was quoting Fidel Castro so I gave that a wide berth. Scorched earth. But when my grandfather, Raphael, use to teach my mom or uncle to parallel park, he would tell them: “Dale dale, el golpe avisa”. That’s funny. That means, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll know when to stop as soon as you feel the hit’. Now that’s something to consider.
 
     So often in life, we have to jump into things head first. We have ‘X’ amount of years of instruction, and then there’s a certain expectation: ‘Now it’s time to go do the thing’. And often the thing we want is beyond the purview of all the instruction we’ve gathered. Marriage, or kids, or leasing a home on the west side. My grandfather saw Fidel Castro take power in Cuba and knew he had to leave before the island’s extreme poverty claimed his children. He had never lived or traveled outside of Cuba. Sometimes we go until the hit. Every day actually. The novel I’m working on concerns itself with these themes.
 
     The novel in question is still a bouncing newborn so I won’t go to deep into detail yet. I will use this blog as a place to shed some light on the research I’ve been doing, equal parts card conjuring, and Fluxus movement performance art. It’s a strange story. I’ll dump writing here regularly, book reviews, travel writing, and I’ll flex some small excerpts here too. But I also want to hear from you. Use the contact button. Let’s have words together.
 
Most of all, thank you for reading.
Fox Mederos