Native State A Memoir

1 The memory has the luster of a dream. In it, I stand holding my father's hand on a mountain at dusk. Beyond and below in every direction stretches the sparkling city where we've newly arrived: Los Angeles. Domed Griffith Park Observatory rises above us. My dad wears wing-tipped shoes, a handsome silk suit. The outline of his upturned magisterial jaw far above mine is backlit by the dying sky. Nearby sits a brand new blue Buick Roadmaster, in which my mother, dressed in a tweed suit, is doing her lipstick in the car mirror. Dad's arm, sweeping upwards, seems to cradle the sunshot heavens as if they are a spray of flowers, embracing multitudes. Looking up into that oracular bowl of sky and clouds and emergent stars, which in memory is either the planetarium ceiling or the sky itself, clutching in my four-year-old fist a tiny crate of candy oranges to send to relatives back East, I sense heaven and earth to be conspirators, deeply in league about the excellent nature of things--as in the music-drenched climax of some feature-length cartoon. Violet tints of dusk merging into dark. Spotlights scanning the foothills from below. Planes buzzing beyond. Smell of orange blossoms, sage. From some radio, "See the pyramids along the Nile . . ." Then, a crack of lightning. Suddenly it begins to rain. People run for their cars. "Mary Helen!" "Mom!" She isn't in the Buick. I notice an empty bottle of Gordon's gin on the seat. Drenched, we run around the parking lot calling for her. "Senor." A man has found her, off the asphalt, a few feet down the mountain slope. "Philip, my nylons," she calls up from the little ravine by the observatory where she'd fallen. Legs splayed, skirt up, garter belt showing, one black high heel pointed to the roiling sky. Fresh red lipstick smeared, confusion sketched across her eyes. I look up and see my father's face, burning with rage. This earthly paradise is infested . . . 2 Welcome Home, Stranger The tan, featureless halls of LAX funnel passengers toward passport control. An orange-haired woman in a shortsleeved blue shirt inserts my passport into a machine and waits for the computer entry to pop up. She embosses a fresh stamp over the blue, red and black collage of wanderings. "Welcome home," she says, smiling. "Next!" I lug my shoulder satchel past suitcases tumbling onto aluminum carousels, feeling a little like a piece of luggage myself: tagged with overlapping destinations, waiting to be grabbed by its rightful owner. A customs officer takes my declaration form, searches my eyes. "Has anyone you don't know given you mail or packages to deliver?" "What was the purpose of your visit to Mexico?" I exit the terminal into tepid, sea-level air at dusk. In the taxi line I dredge my Mexico keys from my pocket and drop them into my shoulder bag, replacing them with the ones to the little cottage in Venice. In a parallel gesture I reach in my wallet and replace peso bills with greenbacks. The bicultural switcheroo: I can do it blindfolded. From the back of the cab running north on Sepulveda Boulevard, I look up into the silver belly of a departing jet, close my eyes against the shattering roar, feel the wind shudder the cab. Strange, how it's always the same. The closer I get to home the more displaced I feel. The call had come only hours after I'd arrived back in Mexico. Nell's weary voice: "Your father fell again." Abruptly the 1,500-mile trip began to play itself in reverse. I hurried back up Calle Flor in the soft, mile-high evening air, along the darkening cobbled streets, past the parish church. At Viajes Vert'z, Malinda was just closing up but in deference to my emergencia turned the computer back on and snagged an Aeromexico cancellation the next afternoon out ofCohan, Tony is the author of 'Native State A Memoir', published 2003 under ISBN 9780767910200 and ISBN 0767910206.