Things I Like About America. Poe Ballantine

days, two motels, and sixteen cups of coffee later, I was sitting in a Tarzana Denny’s with my mom and dad at a little table in the center of the room, eggs down below me, the plump yolks shimmering in a pool of grease, and my mother saying: “We’re glad to have you back.”

      My father, his face a jug of red wine, his dark coiled Greek black hair invaded with gray, beamed at me. He had just come up from San Diego. My mother had recently left him. My father was Wreck Number One, drunk every night, though he had quit drinking for weeks now to try and win her back.

      “Do you have any plans?” my mother said.

      The sun poured down through the windows. I took a drink of my orange juice. “I don’t have any plans.”

      “Are you going to stay around for a while?”

      I picked up my fork and pierced one of the yolks. Two waitresses in tight brown polyester with full trays almost collided. A whole crowd of what looked like church people filed in through the door, and there was nowhere for them to sit. “I don’t know,” I said.

      “Why don’t you eat?”

      “He’s had a long trip,” said my father, taking a sip from his coffee. He watched the sun in the windows, the waitresses, the people standing in line to eat.

      My mother studied me. “You’ll find someone else,” she said. My father rattled the cup in his saucer. My mother changed the subject. “You’d probably like to get some rest,” she said.

      I nodded.

      “If you want to stay for a while, I can get you a job,” she said. My mother was high up in the ranks of a computer company.

      “Maybe I’ll stay for a while,” I said.

      “Good,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She glanced at my father, who beamed.

      I moved into my mother’s guest room in her condo in Tarzana. The next day I started work building dictionary databases for court reporters. It was glorified word processing. I made eighteen thousand dollars that year, exceptionally good money for me.

      I was sober now, my first concentrated campaign against chemical sloth and permanent childhood. Because I was the kind of person who drank to be someone else, I was not eager to form new friendships. As long as I stayed alone I felt I could stay sober. At night, like my mother, I brought work home with me. Anything to keep from falling back into the old hole. My mother stayed late every night at the office. When she finally came home, she liked to go out to dinner. We sat in a restaurant together and had trouble conversing. This was unusual for us; I believe it came from her guilt over leaving my father and my realization that I was exactly like him.

      As a child growing up in San Diego, I had always despised the pervading smog and voracious anonymity of L.A. But living in L.A. wasn’t so bad. It was a great place to be alone. On the weekends I drove to Santa Anita Racetrack, which lies like a polished English cobblestone village under the cool, dry blue shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. Watching the horses fly around a track with money on them was the next best thing to getting high. There was nothing like those chilly winter L.A. mornings, and the crisp sound of your money flushing down the toilet. Occasionally my sister came with me. We were close growing up, good friends. To her misfortune, she respected and imitated me, and by nineteen she had already attended her first A.A. meeting. She was still a heavy drinker and occasional drug user. We were Wreck Numbers Two and Three. My mother had gotten her a job at the computer firm three months before I’d limped in from Niagara Falls. She came with me six or seven times to the track—Hollywood Park when Santa Anita closed—and she never won a race in all the days we went. It takes a special talent to lose beyond any realm of probability, and it became a joke with us.