familiar faces in an unfamiliar city

My wife Jaime grew up in Burien Washington, a small town just southwest of Seattle.  It’s the kind of place that they modeled Dawson’s Creek after.  Even now eight years after it went off the air, people still act like they are on that show.  I dislike Burien with the snobbish attitude of someone who spent the first fourteen years of their life in farm country.

I can fully admit that my distain for Burien is completely irrational.  The reason I hate going there is because every visit is never complete without Jaime exclaiming in a bar, or a store, or just walking down the street,

“I went to high school with that person.”

We would be sitting at a table in a restaurant and after a few minutes Jaime will disengage from our conversation and her gaze will drift over my shoulder.  Though I already know the answer I ask anyway.

“Did you go to high school with that person?”

She will shift in her chair to get a better view and reply,

“Yeah.  I did.”

There is one bar in particular that I have sworn off completely, not because it’s not a good or fun place to hang out, but because every night it is like one big high school reunion.

This might all have to do with a tinge of jealousy.  I am not in close contact with hardly anyone from High school and even fewer from junior high or elementary.  In the eight years that Jaime and I have been together, she has met maybe five people from my past.  When passing through my home town I will often point someone out I went to high school with but hardly even know.  Jaime on the other hand has had the same best friends since elementary school.  They are unusually close and could make anyone wish that they had friendships like their.

College was a difficult time for many in Burien, as they were forced to build friendships outside of their hometown.  Jaime was the first to date someone who they didn’t go to school with, and in return I was treated like an intruding alien.

When we moved to Los Angeles I expected these run-ins to end.  With the exception of two college friends, we knew no one.  I assumed that it was up to us to make new friends who we could run into.  At least those were my expectations.

Within the first week while walking down the street in our neighborhood, we ran into Joy, a college acquaintance who graduated the year before us.  We spotted Yolanda, another college acquaintance driving in a car behind us on Sunset boulevard.  Jaime and I stared inquisitively at a girl in the bank trying to determine if she went to our college as well.  It turns out she did.  An actual college friend worked as a buyer for Intelligensia coffee.

It seems that Cornish College alumni and drop outs were crawling all over LA popping out of cracks in walls and loose plumbing knobs, like the sugar ants who eventually infested my apartment.  Eventually the question changed to, “Did we go to college with that person?”

There would be similar incidents over the next three years, at restaurants, stores, and street corners.  At one point Jaime and I spent days trying to figure out how we knew a woman we’d spotted jogging past the Silverlake dog park.  Her face was so familiar that I could actually hear her voice and vaguely recall interactions we’d had.  Ultimately it was decided that she worked in the admissions office at Cornish.  We accepted this as truth until a week or so later when we sat down to breakfast at the Mustard Seed (our favorite breakfast spot in Los Feliz) where we realized that she was our waitress.

Gradually we made friends with locals as we became locals ourselves and the sea of faces became more familiar.  Friends moved to the city and friends visited, we would discuss people we knew mutually who’d crossed our paths and the strange incidents surrounding the likely hood of those run ins occurring in LA.

On a Saturday in September, a month before we moved back to Seattle, Jamie attended a Law School forum at the Biltmore hotel.  I went with her, mainly to hold stuff while she discussed the law programs with the various school representatives.  If there was ever a place that I expected not to see anyone we knew, this would have been it.

While waiting in line to meet with a prelaw advisor Jaime glanced over at a nearby booth, I could feel her gaze rise over my shoulder and she went silent.  

“I think I know that girl.  I think we went to high school together.”  I laughed realizing how long it had been since I’d heard her say that.  “I think that’s Lisa.”  She continued.

I assumed that Jaime was mistaken, that she was taking this game way too far.  She continued to analyze the girl for a time before determining that;

“Yes, it is definitely Lisa.”

We got out of line and skeptically walked up to her.  There was a pause for a moment of recognition before her face lit up and she smiled.  I couldn’t believe it.  1,100 miles from Burien and Jaime still managed to find someone she went to school with.

I realize now that nowhere is safe.  In any city, of any country, at any moment Jaime’s gaze could rise above my shoulder and become fixed on someone.  I will refuse to say anything and soon she will adjust in her seat and exclaim,

“I went to high school with that person.”

1,100 miles

last signs of beauty until you drive out of LA

It’s 1,100 miles from Seattle to Los Angeles and the directions are fairly simple.

-Get on 1-5 drive south for 1,100 miles

-Take Los Feliz blvd exit.

These deceptively simply directions can make the trip look shorter than feel longer.

The day after we returned from Los Angeles with a new lease I celebrated my 24th birthday.  Looking back on it now I can’t believe that my parents didn’t try to stop us from going.  At the time 24 seemed incredibly old I thought that having lived on my own for the last three years that I was prepared to live 1,100 miles from all my family and take on any of the challenges life could throw at me.  The 27 year old me could tell some stories that would scare the shit out of me.

The count down was on, we had one month to get our affairs in order before we left Washington what we thought was for good. I began taking boxes home from work and we started packing up our life which was akin to weeding a garden which had been growing untamed for three years.  Those weeds had grown deep roots and we had had to dig deep to get them up, then instead of throwing those weeds in the compost we packed them up into boxes.  A lot of boxes.

I have a problem with keeping things, I wouldn’t call myself a hoarder but I’m definitely one step below, I keep meaningful receipts, tickets to old baseball games and theater performances, bags from items I have bought as well as their tags.  Theses things all got packed up into boxes along with two full sets of silverware, three electric shavers, five boxes labeled keepsakes, and two boxes of unbuilt IKEA furniture.  When all was said and done we packed a 17 foot U-Haul to the brim and still managed to fill our car.  We even had a garage sale and were still over flowing with stuff.

Days away from our moving date and we were mostly packed.  Halloween was on Monday (our moving day) the Saturday before was my older brothers wedding.  It was enjoyable and afforded us the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to family before we were headed out.  I expected the goodbyes to feel bittersweet but they didn’t, they mostly just mad me excited for the future.  I know Jaime and I didn’t share the same feelings about this as me, I knew that as excited as she was to finally be leaving it was hard for her and I was anticipating many nights in LA where she would lay in bed with debilitating grief for her distant friends and family.

The night before we moved we slept in my parents basement on their fold out couch, a 17 foot U-Haul with a dolly hitched to the back and our car strapped in sat outside on the street containing every thing we owned.  The following morning we woke up at 5am, it was still dark outside and we forced a sedative down our cats throat.  We said goodbye to our parents and loaded up into the cab of the truck and as we started down I-5 the tears started for Jaime, big wet sad tears like little children cry when they are genuinely sad.

Then somewhere around Enchanted Village (about 15 miles down the road) our cat lost her fucking mind.  She whaled as if she was being jabbed with a hot poker and clawed at her carrier door so hard I thought she might rip her claws out.  We stopped the car to try and settle her down but she wouldn’t.  I couldn’t get her to relax or at the very least to be quiet, in turn I didn’t know what to do... we’d been away from home for 20 minutes and I already didn’t know what to do.  It hit me like an incoming tidal wave that I was jobless and homeless and all I wanted in that moment was to turn the truck around and unpack everything back into our apartment.  But somehow, don’t ask me how because I really don’t know the cat calmed down and we were able to get her into her carried, soon I calmed down too.

* * *

If you’ve made the drive from Seattle to LA there are three landscapes you experience.  The first is Washington/Oregon, full of small run down towns resting at the edge of an evergreen filled forrest, blue-green rivers slicing through them like they were cut by an unsteady knife.  The drive is easy the views are enjoyable and things seem to move by quickly, before I knew it we were stopping for lunch at a Taco Time in Eugene Oregon (those of you from Washington should note that the Taco Times in Oregon are not the same).

The second landscape begins in southern Oregon and continues down through the Siskiyous in northern California.  Giant snow capped mountains, rolling hills of fir trees.  Deep fjords with black glassy water and Mt. Shasta sitting like a big grandmother looking over her grandchildren.  This part of the drive you don’t want to end, there is so much to look at and be in awe of it takes everything inside me not to stop the car there and say, “I’ve gone far enough.”

We stopped right in the middle of this for the night in Redding California, a city which as far as I can tell contains a Motel 6 and a Super 8.  I’ve stayed in both and on this particular occasion we stayed in the Super 8.  Laying on that bed in the room watching Mythbusters for the first time, all the fear from earlier was far behind me and for a brief evening I didn’t have any worries or fears or stresses about anything.  Navigating a new city, finding a job and balancing a very tight budget would all come later but for me on that evening I watched superhero myths get busted in a giddy excited state.

The third landscape is mind numbing in its simplicity.  Mile after mile after mile after mile of brown flat nothing.  One could become a connoisseur of these little truck stop towns and billboards urging you to “stop at Auntie Ethels, Next two exits.”

The blandness of this drive stretches time out, sign post seem to go backwards and you feel like you’ll never get to your destination.  This doesn’t change until the Golden State Freeway splits off and you take the Hollywood freeway all the way right into the heart of LA LA land.  Right into the heart of our new home.  1,100 miles later we pull up in front of our building.