And it'll be hotter than hell!
We’re all damaged goods, to some degree. There’s a spectrum, of course, and we range from my cousin Katie’s pristine vehicles to my 2002 RAV4 with one original door to whatever poor choice my sister made (she can’t help it don’t be mean).
Today I will tell a story about damage.
About shelter.
About curiosity.
About the Valley.
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There are two kinds of bogeymen that haunt our childhood. There is the amorphous fear of the unknown, the beings lurking in closets and under beds. The innocence of childhood is believing that anything, let alone a supernatural being, would spend any significant amount of time in the hoarder’s hovel of a child’s room. No one wants to watch you pee the bed, Brayden.
The other bogeyman is the one that is taught. Implicitly, explicitly, eh, both can be equally effective. Children have no frames of reference. To their simple minds, parents are petulant gods drunk with both love and power. Infallible, omnipotent, to be respected, but above all things, to be obeyed.
We learn what to value, what to discard, what to appreciate, and what to fear, from our parents.
That is why seeing your own parents show vulnerability, indecision or defeat can be so jarring. It’s like worshipping Zeus and then finding out that Mt Olympus is really kinda of a shortstack when it comes to mountains, or like learning that Whitney Houston was, in fact, a crackhead all the way back to the Bodyguard (i know right?!). Foundational fissures in your worldview.
When I was a child, there was a convergence of these shocks to my impressionable mind. When fear was lapping at the door of my mother’s house, she conjured a bogeyman. This was a wonderful distraction! Instead of analyzing and dismantling the negative motivator at its root, we instead focused solely on the potential punishment of the consequences of the worst case scenario and a lovely new fear was born! We used this new fear (iNovoFear 2.3) as a motivator to move on with our lives (just with more fear).
(This way of problem solving was very healthy and came to serve my interests very well during my two stints in rehab and years of substance abuse, but I’m better now kthx)
Thankfully, that problem avoidance strategy allowed me to block out the vast majority of the pain of childhood. So most of those bogeyman are relegated to my subconscious mind, which is the best I can do. There’s one that’s left though. A multipurpose bogeyman. It inspired fear aplenty, a menagerie of apprehension more diverse than a democratic president’s cabinet.
Fear of change.
Fear of discomfort.
Fear of shame.
Fear of people.
Fear of personal failure.
My mother conjured these fears nearly the same way every time.
“If XYZ happens, we’ll have to move to a small apartment in the Valley and it’ll be hotter than hell!”
Sometimes it was divorce-related, sometimes it was politics-related, sometimes it was about grown-up things I wouldn’t understand, sometimes it was about things I did understand but didn’t want to, sometimes it was just really fucking hot outside and we thought about how much more fucking miserable it would be in Tarzana.
Tarzana.
Tarzana!
Vomit.
From an early age, I learned, explicitly, that the Valley is the place you go to when something serious has gone wrong in your life. You move to the Valley because of a personal failure or defect of character, and you must live there in penitence and grovel at the feet of the Westside until such date as you are permitted to return, if ever.
The Valley is a bitumen wasteland whose negative inertia will drag you down like the fake wooly mammoth at the La Brea tar pits. There will be no fun. There will be no joy. There will be no parks. Or plants.
There will only be Outback Steakhouse and 1970s apartments with dusty shag carpet and loud dysfunctional air conditioning that blocks your only window leaving you in sweltering, damp darkness and all you can do is sit inside on your shitty couch reading the shitty magazine you stole from your shitty dentist that last time you went six years ago, or watch shitty TV from a rusty satellite covered in shit from a dumb lost seagull who doesn’t want to be there either while the chained pitbulls next door bark into the void.
Your identity will falter and you’ll be wearing sweatpants to Chuk E. Cheese for the fourth time this month and you’ll probably be so drunk on smog and heat that you’ll laugh with your missing teeth and tribal tattoos and then wheeze out, “At least it’s not Palmdale,” while you squint to block your bloodshot eyes from yet another day under the tyranny of the San Fernando sun.
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My adult mind fills in the details, but it’s my childhood that informs the sentiment. To my younger self, the Valley was a symbol of exile, but not fancy exile like the Dalai Lama, definitely a mark of a sinful soul.
As such, I avoided the Valley like anyone would have avoided me as a teenager: aggressively and accepting only minimal contact. When someone said “The Galleria?”, I said, “Busy” or “Bye!” or just nothing at all and walked away.
“I’m not going to be one of those people who pretends that it’s ok to go to that hellish stripmall timewarp.”