The first thing he did when we entered our home on Sunny Slope Drive—an all-American haven in the middle of what felt and looked like the ghetto—was to move her ashes into the backyard. He placed the urn under a lemon tree in hopes she would not come back to taunt him in his sleep again.
My brother, Timoteo, and I explored the new grounds. It was a spacious house with a front yard dominated by a colossal oak and a backyard with lemon and orange trees—a residual taste of the many years in which the entire Valley was nothing but orange groves and farms. It featured hardwood floors, large windows, a sun-filled studio for my father’s work, and a kitchen that fascinated us from the start. Not only did we have a vintage soda fountain but our sink came equipped with something we had never seen in Italy, something we did not know could exist—a garbage disposal. It allowed us to dump and grind leftovers in the sink without having to empty our plates in the trash can first. Where the food went and who was responsible for it ultimately, we had no idea and did not care. Timoteo and I imagined a food cemetery for liquefied burgers and fries that created a foul, toxic hummus people were warned to stay away from. If pet cemeteries existed—we heard there was a famous one just a few miles from our house—why wouldn’t Americans think about having cholesterol graves too?
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My father’s first important entry point into American life involved the purchase of a huge, white 1962 Cadillac convertible he bought at the Pasadena antique car mall—a suburban warehouse filled with classic American cars from the fifties and sixties. He loaded us into the car and drove triumphantly along Van Nuys Boulevard with the top down. In the early 1900s Van Nuys and the southeastern part of the San Fernando Valley, with their “preserved Western landscapes,” had been the perfect neighborhoods for movie shoots, he explained.
“Stars lived here, right here! They strolled down Van Nuys Boulevard like it was Rodeo Drive. Our neighborhood was hipper than Hollywood. Did you know even Marilyn Monroe went to Van Nuys High in 1941?”
“Exactly. In 1941. Now it’s just homeless people, prostitutes, and 99 Cent stores!” I complained to him while he parked in front of a head shop where he wanted to buy a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt he’d seen a few days earlier.
I took the presence of all those head shops and tiendas baratas by our house as a bad omen. How could my father become rich and famous if he surrounded himself with cheapness? It wasn’t just our neighborhood; the whole Valley was disconsolate—a pale, discount imitation of the grandeur that existed on the other side of the hills. The actors who lived here were B-rated stars or grown child actors who got in trouble with the law. Corey Feldman, my favorite Goonie, got caught with heroin and Todd Bridges, the elder brother from Diff’rent Strokes, whom every Italian child from the eighties adored, had been arrested for trying to kill his drug dealer when he was high. Down the street from our house lived Desmond. He was on TV and had a comedy show called Desmond. His wife was a former Miss Virginia. His mother had been a department-store cashier but now lived with him and took care of the house. His sister worked as his personal assistant. We were told he was not as friendly in person as he was on TV and that he carried loaded guns. From the street you could see parts of his house: a cement garden, a pool surrounded by mildewed deck chairs, a collapsed faux-antique lamppost. Two guard dogs rushed forward barking when you approached the iron fence. One had a transparent eye. Those were the kinds of celebrities who lived in the Valley. Even their dogs were defective.
I started adding these facts to my list of bad omens. The signs that we were in the wrong city at the wrong time were unignorable. We were surrounded by them. My father’s dream on the airplane, the echoes of the riots, the smell of ash and dirt and anger in the air, the failed celebrities. Within the first two weeks of living in Van Nuys we received an array of bad news: our trunks from Italy had gotten lost and our cat, Mao, died under a car in front of the driveway. Timoteo had fallen off his bicycle on a winding road during a day trip to the Mojave Desert and split open his knee. We had to give the hospital fake names and Social Security numbers because we didn’t have insurance. One day we received a phone call from a company in Palm Springs. The guy on the phone knew my father’s name and kept congratulating him on having won a brand-new car. We got dizzy with excitement. What a country. People just got on the phone with you and gave you things. We drove out to Palm Springs convinced we’d be heading home with a brand-new car but ended up spending the day in a lecture hall with a bunch of gullible families like ours, eating stale muffins, and listening to real estate agents on microphones who tried to sell us vacation condos. If we did our part, they promised they’d do theirs and we’d be eligible to win a car. “Eligible!” my grandmother screamed at my father. “That’s the key word you failed to understand! You didn’t win a car, you were eligible to win one. You and the four hundred idiots in this room.” We all drove home and never talked about it again. The oracles were speaking clearly to us: Go back to your country now. Do not try to figure out how to conquer the golden sun of California, for it is ungraspable. But my father would not budge, blinded as he was by the promise of something better. “And cheaper!” he screamed. “LA is much, much cheaper than Rome. There are department stores where clothes, real clothes, important, brand-name clothes cost a quarter of what they do in Italy.”
Suddenly we belonged to those canyons with mountain lions yowling in the night; we belonged to Pick ’n Save, the discount store where all our new plates and cutlery came from; we belonged to the 405 freeway that roared incessantly in our ears like a huge hair dryer. We belonged. It was decided.
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Back on the shark-infested Malibu beach, my naked parents and topless grandmother now read out loud from the LA Weekly classified ads.
“Canoga Park!”
“No, not the Valley section. Go to the other side,” my father instructed Serena.
“West Hollywood?” my grandmother proposed.
“Mmm, what about Bel Air?” Serena replied.