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By Jack Joseph Smith
Born out of a Hollywood Catholic orphanage. Out of an
unknown past many times since romanticized, I once wrote
a poem that ended with; "nineteen forty one, immediately
young, and Los Angeles was afraid of Japan." But after
four years of childhood so lovely I still see those years
in pieces likened to faded cinimatic colors, my adoptive
traveling salesman father took me from the yellow red flowers
and white washed Beverly Hills walls to where the West-
ern Pennsylvanian Ivy house class saw their images in shinn-
ing black coal and Friday night touchdowns against the river
steel towns.
Yet I would begin to be taken back to the last American
city. From the middle of the nineteen forties into the be-
ginnings of the nineteen fifties, sheer gambling money sent
me toward Los Angeles four times over, which is eight times
across, on stretches of vacation that gave credance
to Lot's wife mostly across route sixty six and route eighty.
The flashy Buicks
and Olsmobiles my father drove were wanders in their own right;
water filled
their back packs were of canvess harnessed across their raditor
livers. Dry iced beer changed two hands out window space through
farmlands, deserts, caverns, passes,
mountains.
Visits were expansive, impossible to take in. My father
was comfortable with the spectrum. Two headed animals,
their owners eyes strange in celebration of their mindless power.