landscape

when i was seventeen it seemed my friends had an amazing obsession with tabacco and tabacco products. most of my friends were guys. we all smoked lucky strikes, and though we were cool. they got into pipes and pipe's tabacco. there is a tabacco shop on the corner of ninth and alder in portland, rich's, thats were they went to get their pipe tabacco. the air was rich and dank in rich's. they would pull the stopper off the glass container and flavor of the tabacco was so moist you could smell in your sweat. the guys also kept a supply of moonshine to help clean their pipes. up on the top shelf of their closest, away from prying parent's, they'd pull it down and dare me to smell it.

i don't smoke anymore. i claim that i am not a smoker. but i smoke when drink, and sitting here with a cup of coffee makes me want one, slightly. i think the distinction is important, although to people who have always smoked casually, or never at all, the distiction is non-existant. but when smoking was at one point a large part of your identity, something you defined yourself with, something beyond an addiction, the distiction is important. now when i go out and drink i indulge myself in cigarettes. the more alcohol, the more cigarettes. and in the morning i nurse more than just a parched mouth, and a groggy head, but lungs that are crying out in pain, and a heart in palpitations trying to pump out the poison.

it was a morning like this when i went in for my second tattoo removal, groggy, shakey, and in need of a large breakfast. homeboy industries where i get my removal is in east la, farther east than most people go unless they have a specific reason, across the first street bridge, just east of the five freeway. i remember a breakfast place around the area that i frequented when my boyfriend at the time worked at a theater company in the area, over four years ago. the restaurant was called, soul folks, and served banana walnut pancakes as large as hubcaps. after my removal session, pained, and in need of comfort food i searched out this restaurant. maybe it was the hangover, the sore lungs, or the process of removing a mark from my past, but i was feeling rather nostalgic, and driving through the industrial area of east la, a haze hanging over the city, i fell in love with los angeles a little bit.

soul folks wasn't there, it had been replaced by a mexican restaurant called "ay carambe". i went in and asked the man working the counter if he knew anything about soul folks. he told me it had moved to sixth and imperial, right by the sixth street bridge. while i was on scholarship we shot a spec "got milk" commercial one night underneath the sixth street bridge. it was a night shoot, and to prepare, the night before tara and i rolled and stayed up all night so we could sleep all day and be ready to stay up all night shooting. i knew the area, and i remembered it being deserted and seedy. as i got closer and drove around the bridge, and turned south on imperial and looked for soul folks i realized that there is no way a restaurant would ever survive in this area of gray warehouses and cardboard homes. i had been sent on a wild goose chase. so i didn't get my big pancake, but a nice walk down memory lane. so i drove west, and the streets became more populated, and the buildings more inviting. i drove all the way to vermont and franklin and ate at the house of pies in los feliz, where hipsters sipped coffee, probably nursing hangovers similar to mine, and i thought of all of la's landscapes and their disparity. and i fell in love a little more. if la has offered me anything it has been the opportunity to change. for me to go from a pack a day smoker with a tattoo on her left arm, a skinny dancer shooting commercials underneath the sixth street bridge to whatever i am now. i'm sure it will be easier to define once i've moved away from it, once i've driven farther north and the landscape has changed once again.