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By Eva Recinos
Abandoned furniture marks my daily walk to the bus stop — coffee tables with missing legs; a mattress with a piece of paper on it that reads “NO, bed bugs.” A warning to anyone who might want to drag it home.
A black leather couch bakes in the sun. The ghost of someone’s imprint remains; teeth marks on half a sandwich, a rotting relic.
These, the only indications of chaos on a block that goes quiet after dark. I often lie in bed and marvel at the silence. There’s no buzz of helicopter blades, no laughter or clink of bottles from people outside, no drivers racing by with the music so loud they set off the alarms of parked cars. My childhood neighborhood, 14 or so miles away, lingers over me — a blueprint projected onto this new apartment, superimposed over its walls.
*
Stereotypes and fears about my childhood neighborhood abound, even outside of Los Angeles. In a San Diego cafe, I sit sipping tea and reading while a family eats at a table nearby. They chat about what areas of L.A. they plan to visit.
“Don’t go to Compton,” one of them says. “And don’t go to East L.A.? Or where is that? South Central L.A.? The southern area of L.A.”
The area where my family has lived for the past 29 years. South Central Los Angeles is rife with history. To me, it’s every crisp bite I’ve take into the tang of sour cream and saltiness of cheese layered on top of the elote we just bought from the man who walked by with his roving food stand. It’s the smell of the panaderia on Sunday, the rustling of the paper bag as I peek inside to choose my favorite piece of bread. It’s the sound of drums in Leimert Park.
The part of the city that people say to avoid is the only home I’ve ever known. Against exceptional odds, Black and Brown people raise their families here.
I pack up my things and leave the café, not wanting to hear more about what other people have to say about where I grew up.
*
People seem happy when I tell them that my boyfriend and I are relocating to Glendale next, but they warn me to keep an eye out for one thing: the erratic drivers. I don’t understand the concern. Drivers in L.A. thrive on lawlessness on the road, all zig zags and lead feet on the gas pedal. Pedestrians know their safety doesn’t come first.
An Uber driver tells me, “I never walk with my kids in Glendale.”
Another says, “I had a passenger who was a tow truck driver, and he said they have a lot of business on this side of town.”
These are the stories we tell before we even get to a place.
*
On a sunny weekend afternoon, I cross the street at an intersection with no light — just a painted crosswalk, a mere suggestion that most drivers ignore – and a car lurches towards me. I wait for it to register my presence and crawl to a semi-stop before screeching off again. But it doesn’t stop, and it’s coming faster than I expected. I brace myself for impact. I dig my feet into the ground and put my palm out just as the driver brakes.
The middle crease of my hand plants itself right in the center of the car’s hood. The driver screams, her windows still up. I walk away, shaken. My palm hurts for the next couple of days. I wonder what would’ve happened if she didn’t stop in time. When I was younger, I’d sometimes imagine I would die by getting shot, either by a stray bullet or a purposeful one because I looked at someone the wrong way in our neighborhood.
I’m shaken by the encounter with the car, suddenly aware of my mortality, no matter where I might live.
*
My mom once threw herself over my car seat as bullets whizzed past while my dad was driving. When I took the bus with her as a pre-teen, fights sometimes erupted inside.
I grew up hearing about gang initiations and street muggings, warnings against walking in the street. I only walked in the daytime. Once, a man pulled up to the sidewalk trying to convince me to get in his car, but instead just handed me his CD after I politely declined. Another time, a woman screamed “Hey!” behind me, and my shoulders tensed instinctively; she told me that my skirt was stuck inside my tights.
During a walk to the library, a man gently picked up a butterfly off the ground, placed it in his hand, and talked to us about its beauty. My mom and I took it as a sign from my father who died that year.
You never know who you might encounter on the city’s streets.
My partner asks me to take a stroll late one night in Glendale and I scoff. We don’t do that where I grew up. He says he walks around our new neighborhood at night all the time, often after I’m asleep. I reluctantly walk with him, instinctively scanning the street for danger and watching the shadows behind us. But nothing happens.
*
Except one day, there’s a stabbing in neighboring Pasadena, close to where my mom works. I start noticing more spray painted phrases on the sidewalks outside my apartment. The storage space above our assigned parking spot — inside a gated parking lot — is broken into, some of our belongings stolen.
In the middle of the night, a man yells loudly, his voice ripping through my heavy layer of sleep. My heart pounds against my throat as I open my eyes. For a moment, I don’t feel safe anymore. Home, and this new neighborhood, don’t seem all that far apart anymore. The two threaten to overlap, like the blue and red of anaglyph 3D colors coming together to show a new, vivid image.
*
Four of the yellow trumpet flower trees on our block have bloomed. Shocks of yellow against the gray of the concrete. Eventually they wither up and fall to the ground, husks of their ebullient selves in full bloom.
I take photographs of these trees on our block just like I snap portraits of the woozy palm trees in South Central L.A.
Nature doesn’t realize how we separate things. We construct those borders ourselves.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her essays have been featured in Catapult, Electric Literature, Remezcla and more. She was recently a finalist in the Blood Orange Review 2020 Creative Nonfiction contest and the Center for Women Writers 2020 International Literary Awards (Nonfiction). She is less than five feet tall.