FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

To Live and Die in LA
By Beth Lapides

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I've never felt like such an outsider as I did that morning walking into the happiest place on earth. It wasn't just the black jeans, the black high tops and the black eyeliner I wore. It was the fact that I was alone. No one goes to Disneyland alone. The entire day I only saw one other person who was alone and he had half a dozen cameras he was using to distance himself, framing and distorting his way out of the picture.

I went on the few rides even though I hate rides. But then the lines became even more treacherous than the rides themselves. I would reach the front, the little pod would arrive, the pod that held four. Are you alone, the Disneyland minion would ask. Yes. Then the Disneyland minion would put me in with three strangers or worse, sometimes by myself. For everyone else to see.

The only ride I remember was "It's a Small World." Which was so wrong I couldn't believe that everyone wasn't screaming in horror. All the little robots were exactly the same except they had one little different movement and some little ethnically diverse detail on their costume. As if what was different about people was very very slight. As if we really all were the same, condo-hell dwellers and New York performance artists and S&M enthusiasts. And that the same that we were, was robotic and boring. And that that was good.

I dealt with the pain by eating my way through Disneyland. A tactic perhaps more masochistic than anything Bob and Sherrie had drummed up. I ate fried greasy things and chocolaty sugary things. At one point I thought: I have to balance all this out by eating something healthy. Yes it's always good to fight overeating with more eating. So I was pushing a cafeteria tray with some faux healthy salad thingy on it, when a guy standing behind me struck up a lovely conversation. No one had spoken to me all day and I was grateful. He was telling me about the group of kids he was supervising when we got to the register. The cashier at this register in the happiest place on earth looked at me and then looked at him. He was black by the way. And so were the kids. And then she looked back at me. Concerned. There were two options. One was that a white girl was with this big group of black kids, and the other was that she wasn't. Finally she asked. Are you alone? Horrified. And I said yes, yes I am.

The next day my cousin and her tobacco-selling husband took me to Vasquez rocks where, apparently a lot of Star Trek was shot. The place was beautiful, in a very moonscapey, deserty, in the middle of nowhere kind of way, more scenic than wilderness. Not the kind of place you have to stick together to survive in. So I wandered away from my hosts. I wasn't used to enjoying nature but I was certainly glad not to be in Disneyland, to be somewhere real.

So I went off alone, and climbed up one of the rocks. And then, since nothing extraordinary had happened the way I had come, I decided to go back a different way. And then I lost my footing and was face down on the earth, sliding down to a big drop off and certain death on the rocks below.

I grabbed onto some growing thing. Weeds I think. Clumps not much bigger than my fists. But their roots held. I grabbed on and dug my high tops into the dirt and I clawed my way back up the mountain.

When I got back to solid ground my heart was pounding, my mind racing. Even a New Yorker knows that there has to be some message from the universe in a near-death experience. But what was it? Was it that no matter what became of me, in my moments of truth, it would be my roots that would save me? Did it mean it was dangerous to wander off alone? And if it did mean that, wasn't that the very same message that I should have gotten from Disneyland? But that I had scorned? Because I was too cool to hear a message delivered by grownups in giant cartoon heads? And if choosing to be alone was death-defying what about me and my whole boho chic life, and what about how I knew I would never be like my parents and buckle and fall in love. In that way. What about the fact that you were always alone, no matter what?

And I looked up at the clear blue sky, smelled the dirt still under my fingernails. I longed to tell someone who loved me, in a not-cousin way, that I was alive. That I had survived. Partly through my own will, but partly through the grace of the damp earth and the feisty roots of the well-placed weeds. I stood there more scared than I had been on the ledge. I opened my heart and accepted the fact that I was not in control.

The first morning that I woke up back in my Mulberry St. loft bed, I had the word Sepulveda in my head. Sepulveda, Sepulveda I kept repeating. Like a magic spell I was casting on myself. Or trying to break.

I didn't understand what had happened to me in Los Angeles. If I'd just seen the real world for the first time or if I'd been infected by a treacherous fantasy.

Sepulveda. Sepulveda. I'd been bewitched by the mystery of a city so unknowable that even full sunshine could not illuminate the shadowy noirness lurking in the spaces between palm trees. Between cars in the asphalt parking lots in Anaheim. Between people.

And then I met Greg and we fell in love and we moved to LA and then we moved back to New York and then we moved to LA again. And now I love it. But I have never been back to Disneyland. Or to Vasquez rocks, where I almost died. But was re-born instead.

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