second & third instance: sunset & vine, dogs, prostitutes…

my passport

my family came to the united states in 1974, when I was seven and my brother was six. we grew up in hollywood, CA. that was some fun. instead of attending school my friends and I ditched vine street elementary and walked the handful of blocks up to hollywood boulevard to watch movies for .50 cents. I saw ‘star wars’ over forty times and nearly flunked the 4^th grade as a result. we’d sit with our backs to the wall of the cinerama dome on sunset and watch the prostitutes get picked up, and whenever one did we cheered our heads off ’til they cursed at us and flipped us off which only made us cheer more. one of them tried to spit in our direction across the hood of a john’s car once but the spit ended up landing on the hood, lacking the requisite trajectory and psi to clear the car, which resulted in the john extricating himself and engaging in an argument in the middle of sunset about the spit on his hood that hadn’t been there but a moment before when all he’d wanted was sex with this poor, angry woman. this went on for a while, as I recall, with the john pointing at the spit and the woman pointing at us. at which point we ran.

alrighty then! lest this turn into some insufferable bullshit confessional memoirish nightmare – because the world needs another one of those like it needs another offshore oilrig to fucking explode – I’m now going to skip past several years because, well, frankly, they really sucked. suffice to say that the old man turned out to be a bit of a dick, the moms took off, he took it and everything else out on us, and the end result was my brother and I grew up either terrorized when he was around and angry when he wasn’t. there were consequences, let’s say.

our first dogs! we’re 11 and 10 here, I think. that’s me on the left with shasha and my brother on the right with shiela. brothers and sisters. but we weren’t ready. we weren’t the people they deserved yet, and so they didn’t have the life they should’ve had. there were moments, sure, but with the old man being what he was, it was mostly terror and sadness.

we just weren’t ready yet. we lived under his roof, for one thing, being still children, and we weren’t aware yet that we had the option to grow up to be something other than what we saw. they eventually died of cancer and heartbreak within a month of each other before I left for school. that was a mercy, that they weren’t left utterly defenseless. and even though I know I loved them, I also know that love was deeply flawed, that I didn’t really know what it was or what it meant yet, not really. and yet, still, they gave in return exponentially to what they received. because they were dogs.