City of Angels and Expressways

Thursday, September 3, 2009

It's always good to wake up laughing.

"Jason! Get up! You on West Coast time now! No more East Coast time!" These words from Uncle Goody pried me from one of the

deepest sleeps of my life and started off our first full day in LA. Tita Josie (to all my fellow non-Filipinos out there, tita means aunt in Tagalog) had kindly taken off work in order to give us a tour of the city that really is, as one person explained to us, more the size of a state. We buckled into her Mercedes and buzzed out to breakfast at a Cuban bakery called Porto's. There's nothing like a little Cuban bread to warm up the stomach for a

day of new sights.

Next Tagalog language lesson: lola = grandma. We headed to Forest Lawn cemetery to visit the grave of Jenny's

lola as it was her birthday on Tuesday. You would think

cemeteries keep pretty open hours during the day, right? Not much would cause such a place to close its gates, or so one would think. Except for Michael Jackson's funeral. The road into Forest Lawn was blocked off with police barricades. We couldn't go see Jenny's lola because the "King of Pop" was being buried somewhere across the lawn from her plot. Los Angeles: city of stars, rising and falling.

Next we drove out to Hollywood Boulevard, where Jenny met up with her old friend Dorothy (she used to dog-sit for Toto), and I happened to bump into my man Samuel Jackson. I tried to get Samuel L to flash` some deuces for my amigos back in Central Square, but he's a pretty serious dude and wouldn't budge. We were about to melt, Wicked-Witch-style, due to the extreme heat, which clocked in right around 100 degrees. So then it was off to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, where I almost convinced Jenny to trade in her engagement ring for 1/10 of a diamond studded parrot we saw in the window of Tiffany & Co. She didn't go for it. Ah, class versus character. Class wins out way too often.

For lunch, we met Uncle Nanding and his son Kel at a Dim Sum restaurant in Chinatown. Again, to all of you who may not have witnessed or shared in the awesome eating habits of the Basa clan, I urge you to find the nearest Basa and go out to Dim Sum (read: buffet on wheels) with her or him. Then, like me, you too can munch on chicken feet and live to tell (or blog) about it. We left Chinatown feeling full and having acquired a special Majong table for Jenny's parents back in Michigan.

Tita Josie's fantastic LA tour continued through downtown and Little Tokyo, where we had some delicious yogurt at a sort of DIY yogurt place called Yogurtland. (Dear Yogurtland: please expand to the Midwest and East Coast ASAP.) Tita Jo wrapped up her whirlwind tour at a massage center in Rosemead. When we walked in, Tita Jo went up to an employee and said "We want men. Three men." The employee, a large Asian man, glanced over her shoulder at me. Sure, I thought, that sounds right; men. I guess we want men. And she was right. These guys weren't messing around. My hombre dug into my back with his forearm like he was trying to

pile drive me into the ground. Is this pain or pleasure? I thought. This is cool, right? I'm still tough and all, aren't I? Masculinity schmasculinity. When all was said and done, we soaked in the relaxed feeling of our muscles having gone to putty, had ourselves some green tea, and drove back to Glendale.

But the night wasn't over yet. We had to cruise out to Las Feliz to meet Laura, one of Jenny's friends from way back in grade school, for dinner. After embarking onto the Los Angeles freeway system (read: a web of seven-lane mania guaranteed to make even the toughest sphincter tingle) without our trusty tour guide from earlier in the day, we promptly got lost. We almost fired George, our GPS. Twenty or so unnecessary miles later, we made it to Laura's place an hour late. But no matter; Laura and her boyfriend were super cool, and they had a game plan already laid out for food. Sushi it was. And let me now (earmuffs, Jenny, if only the earmuffs worked for reading) declare my love for our waitress, a tiny Asian woman whose voice sounded like she had smoked four packs a day for fifty years and then exchanged her vocal chords for the pipes of a computer from 1985. Sexy roll? You want sexy roll? Beautiful. Yes, there really was a sexy roll, yes, of course we ordered it, and yes, you bet your best booty pants it was dead sexy.

Then it was off to Jenny's cousin Amanda's apartment in Culver City, which is further south and closer to the water than where we had been staying in Glendale. The 10 degree drop in temperature was a much-welcome change. Amanda, who was kind enough to put us up for the night, managed to somehow escape any photos (we'll get you tomorrow, Amanda...). Before bed, we toasted glasses of a wine called Irony. We got a kick out of the name. Irony is all about messing with expectations, right? At least, that's what I tell my students in basic literature classes. One of the great things about this trip is that we aren't expecting too much. If anything, we just want to have a good time. With all the good people we keep coming across, that's an easy expectation to meet.