VLVL2 (10) Your average suburban mom, 194

[Glenn Scheper]

> Am I right to assume that Ventura Boulevard covers a wide social spectrum,
> ie both rich and poor, commercial and residential? If so, the passage
("the
> high-rent side") reminds us that rich and poor don't inhabit different
> worlds. How much social mobility has Ditzah enjoyed?

I know a little of Ventura Blvd, braved the traffic
twice last week, getting commercial quality strings
of C9 Christmas lights at a light bulb store I had
seen near where my wife used to take belly dancing.
(I redirected both sides of the 220V, 20 amps each,
from the spa.--Can't use it in winter in Palmdale.)

Further down the west end, we use to go to a cowboy
style night club and ride the mechanical bull, when
that was a fad. I recognized a distinctive hillside
returning to that building years later, when it had
become "The Mystic Eye", selling candles, eclectic
books, and whispered psychic readings given in back.

In between those ends are every sort of strip mall:
we've shopped for wallpaper and brass water ladies,
overpriced carpets and odd furniture and home gyms;
Dined and danced in an Italian restaurant, dipping
bread in oil and garlic. Long wanted to go to Cafe
Tango, but crowds and jealousies and valet parking
all dissuaded.

When I returned from the Army and resumed living at
home, an overgrown cuckoo in my parents apartment
in Santa Monica, a very quiet seniors life-stifling
beach community where nothing stirs but cold waves;
I got a job in the valley-I was amazed at the heat,
and the life: A threat of bees flying into the car.

And the people had life too! I rented a house with
a co-worker and his friend, to whom the distinction
of addresses north or south of Ventura blvd were an
essential part of their acculturation. A stream of
desirable people came and went, expressing liberal
nonchalence and easy friendship beyond anything I'd
seen; neither could I permit myself to tap into it.

That's the house where one of them, the one I recall
who would bed a different girl every night, had put
up a poster of a radiant sun face painted black. It
seemed to be some deep condemnatory statement to me,
so that I looked up the required current, and skin
resistance, and plugged myself into the outlet. But
then I wasn't very good, or half-hearted at suicide.

I'd bicycle the hills, and look at the pillars and
trim yards -- mansions to me, or mansions in fact.

North of the Blvd, where it looks like God filled
the valley all flat for our building convenience,
are small to huge surburb homes. Flying into Burbank,
it looks like a rich Monopoly board, with blue pools.

There's commerce and light manufacturing distributed
throughout, many a place a vagrant can park his home
for the night. Years later returning from San Jose,
we lived in a trailer park just up from Balboa park,
a basin that is allowed to flood during wet winters.

Years ago Balboa was always alive with roller skaters,
a boon that we really enjoyed. My wife made a skating
friend from the rich south side, a name that might be
recognizable. Their house was just a grander version
of them in the 'burbs, but the garage held his & hers
Harleys, and a maid kept fresh bananas in the kitchen
of their big motor home. They invited us to a private
all-night skating party once. It was probably full of
celebrities if I'd had an eye for that. One recognized
name football player led a conga line around the floor.

Drive eastward, like North Hollywood, it's jam-packed
with apartments. Once, fleeing, I rented an apartment
so low class, a flood of cockroaches crawled over you
while you slept. Rillly gross!

And, about Hollywood, when I still didn't know what I
wanted to be, the Dept of Unemployment sent me that
way for an interview, to some kind of a studio related
operation, and I told the guy, "You don't have any
electronics here of interest to me." And he told me,
"You don't get into this line of work for the electronics.
You get into it to be part of "the scene"."

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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