A Walk Home from the Library
“Can you drop me off at the library? I’ll just walk home from there.”
“Sure,” says my dad. “Yeah, the walk home is nothing compared to what you walk in New York.”
Four John Steinbeck novels and one Ayn Rand book later, I find out how apt a description “nothing” is.
What Manhattan might cram into one little block — 24-hour markets selling carb-free Belgian chocolates, news stands pimping French papers and American porn, building blocks of apartments with heights paralleling rental prices — is nowhere to be seen.
And what were four measly blocks once driven in my recently-sold car stretch into a marathon mile in four-inch stilettos.
I wander through a desert of culture, passing cookie-cutter cottages and bare beer bellies of men in their scraggly lawns and –
“Wooh! Yeah!” shoots out of a monster pick-up truck, speeding on oversized wheels attempting to over-compensate for two other round parts of manhood.
Nobody walks in LA, and I’m a street walker — maybe of the 1940′s French persuasion — in too-tall shoes, pounds of black eyeshadow, a peasant skirt, and a hand-beaded boudoir blouse. I continue on, head held high, rigid spine, I am unshakeable, I –
Should look into renting a car for the summer.
