My Grandmother 

Lives In Los Angeles

            by Emma Schain

 

My grandmother lives in Los Angeles. More specifically, she lives in Westwood, which is the area that borders and infiltrates into the northwest side of the UCLA campus. When I visit, I am always greeted by the sounds of the freeway. It’s the 405, and you probably know it for its infamous traffic jams, and its tendency to turn a thirty minute commute into three hours of inching along the six lane freeway, surrounded on all sides with Hummers and SUVs, cut off frequently by careless drivers on cell phones with PR people, and all the while smelling the diesel-scented air coming in through the air conditioning vents. The 405 is the worst freeway in the world, and the sounds are always heard from the patio of my grandmother’s house. It is a constant mechanical windy sound, and it makes me feel like there is a tarmac somewhere among the green ferns and rosebushes in her backyard.

My grandmother’s house is typically sixties, typically L.A, typically L.A. grandmotherly. That house, with its white tile patio, ferns and the wind rushes coming from somewhere behind the eucalyptus trees, was my first, and for a long time, only impression of Los Angeles. Or all of Southern California, for that matter. For the first sixteen years of my life, I associated Southern California with shrimp cocktail and classical music and silk cushions, with harrowed arguments between my grandmother and her husband, Joel, over which museum to attend and whether or not to take the prized Mercedes or just stick with the Acura, a car not as luxurious, but still one that had leather seats. My impressions were, for the most part, positive. Venice Beach was enchanting, as was Santa Monica, and I was won over by the malls and my grandmother’s willingness to pull out the credit card whenever we were within ten miles of a Gap, or in the earlier years, a Gap Kids. And so whenever my family and I would take the trip down to visit Grandma Joan and Joel, a trip that usually took place in the summertime and lasted the short while of a long weekend, I would look forward to it with excited expectations of fancy meals in dim lighting and cable TV after dessert.

But there came a point in my own existence when I realizde that life in So Cal wasn’t just about sunny beaches and shopping for jeans. It was about tanning in string bikinis on sunny beaches and shopping for jeans that cost more than a day at Disneyland. My hips don’t lie, but they don’t tan, either. My one Southern California tanning experience took place on Venice Beach, when two of my friends and I donned bikinis and lay in the sun, watching the surfers ride waves and the airplanes with car dealership advertisements hustle through the sky. This was the same trip to Venice Beach in which I made the fateful mistake of wearing a terry-cloth mini-skirt, and spent the entire afternoon without the use of my hands, because they were too busy desperately pinning my skirt to my legs. In a moment that I relented, my skirt blew up and exposed everything just as I was walking by a tattoo parlor and the cluster of tattooed and pierced up guys who laughed and hollered, bruising my pride. By the end of the day, my face was red from humiliation, but my back was even worse. I had one large white strip running down my back where the string of my bikini previously lay, and it parted a red sea. In two days, the red sea was blistered and peel-y, and I wasn’t feeling any warmer toward Southern California.

The thing about So Cal is that it’s become like the high school that I never had, complete with stratified hierarchy of popularity that tends to situate the skinny blondes at the top and the rest under them in submissive states of insecurities. Southern California has a way of doing that to people. It instills self-doubt, followed by a couple shots of inadequacies and a big slew of bitterness. Honestly, it’s hard knowing that I don’t fit into the southern half of my home state. In fourth grade I had to make a wire hanger project about the great state of California, and at ten years old I felt safe in the Golden state, knowing that I could call everything within it, from the sandy beaches to the rocky beaches, from the deserts to the mountains, my home. California was like my own nuclear family, but now that Southern California has shown it’s true colors, it’s like I have just discovered that one parent doesn’t love me as much as the other one. And Central California is the sibling or something.

The stereotypes that encompass the geographical region is not unfair; while the high school drama of “The OC” is the most extreme portrayal of those clean suburban communities, it is the emulation of the lifestyle by those who idolize Mischa Barton, Rachel Bilson, and Adam Brody that just gets old. You can only shop at Hollister so often, right? Wrong. Because for every Hollister there is an American Eagle, and for every American Eagle there is a Pacific Sunwear. All clothing stores that dress the best in the So Cal business, and all clothing store that answer to the mothership, the Queen Bee, the Joan Rivers, the biggest and the best in the business of Southern Californiafying. Abercrombie and Fitch, or as it is otherwise known as, “that store with porn on the walls and techno,” is the nightmare that haunts me in my dreams. Or did. Until they named a pair of jeans after me and so I went and tried them on and they fit really nicely and it’s so hard to find jeans that fit really well and have my name inscribed on a tag in the fly so I bought them. I know, I know, it was the hypocritical thing to do, but I haven’t given in again since, but I paid seventy bucks for them and I’m not going to just stop wearing them now for the sake of good ethics or morals or anything. Plus, it’s always funny to see my name inscribed onto a little tag in nice cursive script whenever I go pee.

The thing is, I may wear Abercrombie jeans to Berkeley High School, where most of the girls are too busy checking out who has the new straight-legged Levis to realize that the stitching on my ass is a dead giveaway that I crossed enemy lines, but I would never wear them in Southern California. Not to get into my personal life, or anything, but not only have I crossed enemy lines at the San Francisco mall, but I’ve been around their kind in their natural habitat. It’s those shaggy haired guys and very blonde girls who, if they have curly hair, fry it between two hot plates every morning to get it straight, and if they have straight hair, do the same to get it straighter. Therein lies my education on the real So Cal.

But I can’t rag on So Cal too much. For one thing, it’s got some things going for it. I like American Apparel, and that was started in So Cal. Some good music comes out of Southern California. West Hollywood is cool. And as much as I complain about my peers from down below, those shaggy-haired guys are ridiculously hotter than what we’ve got going on up here. Even the more attractive ones pale in comparison (literally) to the crop that’s being cultivated along L.A. beaches. The retaliation to this statement is, of course, that the girls of So Cal are prettier, too. An undying truth? Perhaps. Well, really, yeah. So Cal has prettier people in general. In So Cal, it is easy to find the guys that I lust over, the guys that I will stare at just beyond the point of awkwardness. But it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to realize that there is just no point, because to every one of me, there are hundreds of perfectly pedicured princesses standing in line, ready to jostle each other to get to that one skinny thing with the tan skin and claim him as there own. I am reminded of this fact every time I attempt to make my skin a shade darker, just a shade, and my cruel Irish ancestors mock me as I turn red, while the Italian that’s supposedly in me just sits back and does nothing.

It is not just because of my own insecurities that I don’t like Southern California. It may seem that I have issues of my own that are further brought to light by the unforgiving culture, but my discontent extends beyond simply my own trivial, self-centered woes. The following is a list of specific reasons why my dislike is justified, with no mention of my own personal distresses, most of which are just residue left over from the three years of hell and chronicled self-hatred that was middle school.

1)      SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DOESN’T HAVE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. YOU DUMBASSES! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

2)      The rap scene down there has gone downhill since the nineties, and the crown has since been taken over by those of the Bay Area rap scene. One time, in Southern California, someone spelled “hyphy” H-Y-P-H-E.

3)      There is a severe lack of fog. I say no to skin cancer, thanks.

4)      The Dodgers.

5)      The Angels.

6)      The Lakers.

7)      USC. (Who, by the way, should play the University of South Carolina someday. The Trojans versus the Gamecocks, or just “cocks.” Go Cocks!)

8)      They don’t say “hella.”

It should at this point be obvious why I could never go there for school, why I will spend the rest of my days in places other than the southern half of my home state. And yet, I’m sure that I will get my dosage of So Cal when I watch “The Fabulous Life” on VH1 or when I visit my grandmother and the 405. So don’t worry, Southern California. You will always hold a special place in my heart.