In the Dark

Neon by Michaelangelo Pistoletto

One December night I was in a car being driven through Dogtown, which is a part of Los Angeles where my grandmother lived while the area was still a Jewish retirement community, and where my brother lived later on with his first girlfriend and two big dogs while the area actually was called “Dogtown,” and I said to the relatives I was visiting that I had recently seen the documentary “Dogtown and Z Boys” and what I really wanted to know was, why was it called Dogtown anyway?—because it had “gone to the dogs” or because so many dogs lived there?—and I told Tom how my brother’s dog Leo used run all over Los Angeles searching for my brother while he was at work, often showing up miles and miles away from Dogtown at my parent’s house in Beverly Glen Canyon or at the house of my brother’s girlfriend’s parents in another canyon—having crossed several freeways in the process—and Tom said that his ex-wife was married to the brother of the executive producer of the movie “Dogtown and Z Boys,” who was now the Marketing Director of Vans, and I said that Vans were cool, but Joy grimaced and said that the guy

(you could describe who he was to me in so many different ways, we realized—the uncle of Tom's kids, for example, or my second cousin’s husband’s ex-wife’s current husband’s brother, in another version)

was not someone that she liked very much, and by that time we weren’t even in Dogtown anymore, I noticed as I gazed out at dim outlines of vaguely familiar buildings that passed in the blur of colored neon lights, but were instead—I realized with a sickening jolt—near my old high school, and I said quietly, “This is where Ian lived,” and Joy said, “Where do you think Ian is now? Do you have any idea?” and I said,

“I always assume he’s dead because—I don’t know—between the schizophrenia and the unsafe sex during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and no family to help him—but I lost touch completely because when I moved to Cambridge I got an unlisted phone number because all his middle of the night phone calls in which I figured as the mother of the next Christ child were starting to make me feel unsafe,”

and I told her that the last time anyone had seen James was about 20 years before when he had hitchhiked to my parent’s house on Mother’s Day and he was already homeless at that point—sleeping on the beach on Santa Monica—having been in and out of mental hospitals several times by then—and after talking with him briefly, my parents lied and said that they had to go into town, asking Ian if he wanted a ride, and when they dropped him off in Westwood my father gave Will some money and he stole my father’s jacket from the back of the car, and I said,

“Amy was there, too, that day, and my mother told me she said he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen,” and Joy sighed and said, “Yes,”

and I felt a pang at the thought that I had once had a lover who was so beautiful older women sighed over him, but I had never found him beautiful myself since all I could feel was a crushing weight on my heart that he loved me so much more than I loved him

(and how could it have happened that a boy who later became gay could have loved me that passionately—physically and emotionally—so that even long after I ended our relationship, when I sat across the table from him—a radiantly blond and blue-eyed man—there was still an intense charge—like streaks of colored light shimmering in the night—between us?)

but by then we’d arrived at the Indian restaurant in Brentwood where we were supposed to meet some people for dinner, and I really hadn’t seen very much because it had all been in the dark.

by Nina Zolotow


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