For the first 18 years of my life I lived in the same neighborhood of Los Angeles. I still live in that same neighborhood, but only during school breaks. While other areas of LA are celebrated across the country and around the globe as famous places for celebrity sightings, nightclubbing, recreating, and even just being gay, my neighborhood is unfamous--yes, unfamous, not infamous--for being so dull that TV location scouts think it can pass for neighborhoods in any part of the country except for Los Angeles. I say unfamous as opposed to infamous, because infamous things, like Hitler for example, are at least recognizable. He may have been a mass-murdering bastard, but show someone a picture of ol' Adolph and even an idiot can tell you who he is. But no, my neighborhood is the so bland in contrast to the rest of LA that I have witnessed it pass for Princeton, small town USA, and Orange County (among other places), and even Angelenos themselves are none the wiser.
Even celebrities who are new to LA (and theoretically should not know any better) avoid our neighborhood like the plague, running away from our moderately sized houses and our proximity to what they perceive as the ghetto, and instead bring their trendsetting to places like Malibu, Brentwood, or (for the extreme hippies among them) Santa Monica. No, these calm, residential hills in which we live are largely neglected, and we in this small town-like area of Los Angeles have nothing to be proud of here, nothing to rally behind except for our rather lonely and pathetic-looking hot dog stand sandwiched between a fire station and a gas station.
Well, I tell a lie. We do in fact have something besides hot dogs to rally behind, a celebrity to call one of our own: Ray Bradbury.
Maybe I've just been hanging around with the wrong people in this neighborhood (i.e. weirdos), but the Ray Bradbury Card is something that people from this area play at any given opportunity with an awe-inspiring lack of shame. We are so desperate for a celebrity of our own that we whip out the name of a nonagenarian who wrote a book that some of us were forced to read in high school and that some of us have never even heard of. I think the problem is that, being a part of LA, we feel somewhat inadequate. Even bumblefucks like Shawnee Oklahoma have hometown heroes like Brad Pitt to brag about, but we in this sleepy quarter of LA are reduced to bragging about "Fahrenheit 451," a title that nowadays people are more likely to accidentally pronounce "Fahrenheit 9/11."
I think the worst part out of our pathetic boasts is that we don't even know what the man looks like. I mean, to be fair, most of the country was pretty much unaware that he hasn't died yet (but we in this neighborhood knew that Ray's still kickin'!), and he had pretty much dropped off the radar until a recent LA Times article talked about how he was, in fact, still alive and living in this neighborhood. Okay, the article wasn't just about how he hadn't died yet, it was actually on the fact that he had turned 90 and the city was celebrating. Let me tell you, tongues were a-wagging here in my neck of the woods. I think the last time my neighbors and I talked so much about current affairs was that one time a few years back when a couple of Muslims flew some planes into office buildings in New York and a bunch of people died. Maybe you heard about that.
But anyway, my point is that people don't even know what authors look like. I for one can only identify JK Rowling, Dave Barry and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Unfortunately Laura Ingalls Wilder is dead (and so, barring zombie uprisings, I will not run into her on the street), and the only reason I could pick Dave Barry out of the crowd is that he rather shamelessly plasters all of his books with images of himself. But maybe not everyone is so incapable of recognizing authors. I will admit, I have a problem with recognizing people. It's not so bad as some people I've read about in the news, who cannot and will never be able to recognize members of their own family, but I will say that sometimes I mentally double check with myself if the woman I'm about to flag down from across the crowded room is, in fact, my mother and not a woman who, to anyone else, looks nothing like her. Most of the time I like to avoid any confusion when meeting up with friends by arriving at the meeting location well in advance and become completely engrossed in a book. Then the burden is on the friend to look for me and identify me. I used to think I was one brilliant and sneaky bitch until a friend found me, pulled the book away from my eyes, and said, "You seriously can't recognize THIS?"....Which he, yes, he, followed with a booty drop.
My cousin is new to the neighborhood, and after hearing the local legend of Ray Bradbury (We tell it around campfires: "Some say there's a man.....and some say he penned a story....but no one knows for sure. They call him....RAY BRADBURY"), she started screaming with a level of excitement usually reserved for Beatles concerts. She's from a tiny town in the deserts of Southern California, and so even extras from Disney Channel Original Movies count as celebrities in her book. I don't say that because I look down on her, but rather because I envy her. I wish I weren't so jaded and that my childhood memories didn't involve jokingly calling someone Frodo and finding out it's actually the guy who played Spiderman, or trying to drop little papers into Arnold Schwarzenegger's hair from my lighting booth. (For the record, I had a clear shot but I never hit the target. But his Secret Service detail didn't seem to notice.)
As part of her excitement my cousin pondered whether or not she should go to his house and get his autograph. She wondered if this was too pushy, asking for an autograph, and I wondered if it weren't too pushy to go to a neighbor's house, period, regardless of celebrity status. I guess that's what differentiates small town girls and city girls. While my cousins regales us with tales of time spent dropping by neighbors' houses in her small town, I can count on one hand the number of houses I've been in in my neighborhood. You might think that my family is just particularly cold, but in my defense the few neighbors that I did know would back us up on our philosophy of not randomly stopping by other peoples' houses. My best friend and I lived across the street from each other, and not once did we show up at the other's house without first calling.
I remember one Halloween when a few of us neighborhood kids were trick-or-treating together, we stopped at this one house. "The Perfect American Family" lived there. The dad very traditionally went to work and played baseball with the son over the weekend, while the mom stayed at home and baked cookies (organic ones, this being LA) and puttered around their garden. On the weekends they would go for family walks with their two young children and their great big shaggy dog and laughed like people straight out of an anti-drug PSA as they washed their car on their front lawn. The Perfect American Family with 2.1 children. My point is that they were quite obviously a normal enough family, something straight out of the Midwestern farmlands rather than LA. Anyway, we went trick-or-treating, and when we got to their house they offered us homemade Rice Krispie Treats (who bakes for trick-or-treaters???) and they even invited us inside. While my cousin and her friends probably would have thought nothing of strolling right into this house of unfamiliar neighbors, me and the kids from my hood stared at these people as if the two of them had just unzipped their pants and whipped out five penises each. This was so long ago that I can't quite remember if we ran away screaming in terror or backed away in petrified silence. All I know is that, to us, a taboo had been violated.
To her credit, my cousin is quick to adapt to life in LA and she stated that maybe she'd downgrade her stalking to simply going for strolls near Ray Bradbury's house in the hope of bumping into him. But as I have already ranted about, none of us know what he looks like. Disappointed only for a brief moment, my cousin then cheerily suggested asking any man who looks about 90 whether he's Ray Bradbury. I think the problem here though is the fact that, from what I've noticed, the power of suggestion is all too powerful when it comes to old people. My grandma is still relatively with it, thank G-d, but even with her I sometimes unintentionally get her to say (falsely) that she has already eaten lunch or that she has spoken with my brother that morning, simply by asking whether she has. So if we are to just start asking random old men in my neighborhood whether they are Ray Bradbury, don't act surprised if more than one person says yes. Suddenly our neighborhood park would turn into a modern remake of Spartacus.
In conclusion, I'd like to play the Ray Bradbury Card. Not only did I live in the same neighborhood as him, but I spent the first five years of my life on the same street. Take that, Shawnee Oklahoma.
