Tag: Danner

For most of my twenties the only parts of Los Angeles I ever really saw were The Smell, the Greyhound Station and the long walk through Skid Row that connected them. I had an uncle that lived with his family in a double wide in San Fernando but that wasn’t really Los Angeles. Toward the end of High School I got to spend a few days with his daughters, my cousins, who were in their early twenties at the time.

Mona had started dating and living with this kind of hippy-ish special effects guy a couple of spaces over. In the center of their trailer a huge table was dominated by a sprawling model of the titular volcano he was building for Dante’s Peak. I’ve never actually seen the film but if I had to guess I’d go with the model ending up destroyed on camera with some kind of dramatic explosion or simulated lava.

It probably wasn’t vinegar and baking soda.

Mona took me around to some youth culture oriented spots around the Valley and maybe into Los Angeles proper. We went to a vintage clothing shop called Aardvark’s Odd Ark where she insisted on buying me a colorful pair of patchwork overalls with the shop’s embroidered logo. I could never quite bring myself to actually wear them. I’d imagine most people with idiosyncratic style have experienced this with their family at some point: the perception of whatever personally curated weirdness you are into as a kind of “anything goes” zaniness.

I think I’d probably wear them now unless they were actually too short for me in which case LaPorsha probably would. I remember seeing them folded up at the bottom of a dresser for decades when I would pass back through my parent’s house but they were never quite the thing to grab. I can think of three distinct possibilities as to where they might have ended up: they got put on the RV that was towed in San Leandro, we sold them during our single drug fueled trip to Buffalo Exchange or they are in a box with my photo albums and father’s beaded shirts that may not even exist.

Anyway by my mid to late twenties I had been exploring more of Los Angeles and spending a lot of time around Hancock Park where LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits were. I’ve always loved museums and used to make trips up in High School just to go to The Museum of Jurassic Technology. I don’t think I actually ended up inside the George C. Page Museum until the year that this story happened. I climbed into the outdoor forest section after hours at least once but my strongest memory of the place comes from the animated orientation video they play.

It shows a mortal struggle between Mastodons, Sabre-toothed Tigers and Dire Wolves that ends with all combatants becoming inundated and sinking into the tar. A vulture on a nearby branch suddenly drops in after them, not like it was pulled down or flew in on purpose – it just falls off the branch.

When I started hanging around Women of Crenshaw I would end up spending a lot of time in the park with a girl I’ll call James. We just played in the park like kids: rolled down the grassy slopes on the sides of the Page Museum, took photos with a life sized sculpture of a Giant Sloth so it looked like it was holding us and mostly spent a lot of time playing in the tar. Besides the main lagoon the reserves of tar underneath the park constantly bubble up through the grass in unexpected places. Maintenance workers cruise the lawns to throw truckloads of gravel over these eruptions but if the tar keeps coming the Park erects little three foot high fences.

I’m not 100% positive on the timing but I think the following incident would have been just before flying to Australia in the Summer of 2008. I was with Lacey and Justin Flowers who would later be in the band CCR Headcleaner. None of us lived in Los Angeles or even Oakland at that point so we were visibly road weary: living in the same clothes, probably drinking a lot and sleeping at random shows and parties. We had stepped over one of the small fences in order to use small twigs to decorate a fresh pair of Desert-Colored Danner boots I was wearing with streaks and spatters of tar.

This attracted the attention of a nearby group of three boys, probably seven to ten years old, and we engaged in the following almost Faustian dialogue:

“How did you get over there?”

I gestured to the three foot high fence, really no more than a single rail of hollow aluminum painted black:

“We stepped over the fence.”

“Are you allowed to be over there?”

“No, that’s a fence. Fence means not allowed.”

“Can we go over there?”

I understand that most people would have just told the kids to go ahead and step over the fence. There wasn’t anything they could damage on the other side of it and there wasn’t enough tar to actually pose a danger to children of their size. Still I felt that there would have been a certain amount of symbolic weight to them doing so and wanted to ensure that they had properly considered all angles before crossing over as it were:

“Well that all depends. You have to decide whether you want to be a person that follows rules or you want to do whatever you want whenever you want.”

A different child than the one that had been acting as spokes-child visibly swelled with bravado at this challenge and declared proudly:

“I want to do whatever I want whenever I want!”

I gestured broadly at my two companions and myself. While I wouldn’t have referred to any of us as haggard there were some absent teeth and the conspicuous road-weary state I have already referred to. We certainly didn’t look like a trio of fresh faced seven to ten year olds. Our lives looked lived in:

“Are you sure? We’ve been doing whatever we want whenever we want for a long time. Does this look like what you want for yourself?”

There was a long beat. The child that had just spoken out in confident certainty was visibly deflated. The trio appeared to be trapped in the throes of what my tabletop gamer friends refer to as “analysis paralysis”. The third child, the one that hadn’t spoken yet, took three large strides away from us and called to his friends:

“Secret huddle!”

They put their heads together and conferred in voices not quite loud enough for us to understand the details of their conversation – as one does in a secret huddle. The decision came quickly: an appeal to outside authority. A mother belonging to some or all of them was just down the path a ways and they pulled her toward us while posing the following question:

“Mom, can we start doing whatever we want whenever we want and step over the fence to play in the tar with them?”

Their mother did not think that it sounded like a very good idea. In fact she thought that it would be a perfect time for them all to leave the park. It seems like it was probably for the best. While I was raised in a somewhat anti-establishment family this particular lifestyle was something that I ultimately had to choose for myself, independent of any parental permission.

After this picturesque encounter a second, somewhat different one transpired that I’m not sure adds anything of value to the story. Regardless I am powerless to the bugbear of accuracy and must relate the details. We attracted the attention of another mother and child: this time it was a three or four year old and the mother was the one to become interested. She was one of those free spirited arty type moms:

“Ooh look! They’re putting tar on his shoes! Do you want to put some tar on your shoes?”

The child appeared to crave normalcy and conformity. The idea of using tar to decorate his shoes, I think they were orange Crocs, was so disturbing to him that he loudly burst into tears. He pulled his mother’s hand in an attempt to get as far away from the troubling prospect as possible. The mother was cartoonishly oblivious:

“How about our car? Would you like that, tar on the car?”

The child would not have liked that. He started crying even louder and pulling her hand even harder until they passed out of earshot and eyeshot and presumably out of the park. Maybe this was all a sort of complex game they played together but his anguish certainly seemed genuine from where I was standing. The tar dried onto the boots and for as long as I had them they looked great.

I haven’t worked with tar again but if anybody reading this lives in Los Angeles it’s a great way to “jazz” up boots, jackets, backpacks or anything made out of a sturdy light colored textile that doesn’t have to be laundered.

I wouldn’t put it on a car.