Like most California dreamers, my East Coast dad tried to relocate—and reinvent—himself in the land of red-hot cars and eternal suntans. Too bad we all got burned.
I was 12 the first time I visited California, which as far as I was concerned was twelve years too late. I could barely sit still during the plane ride, thinking of all the girls I was going to have sex with once I became a Californian, the coolness that would drip from my every freckled pore. My father had recently moved to L.A. for the job of his dreams, and now my mom and I were flying out to visit him before returning to Baltimore to pack up the house and bid farewell to our lame eastern selves. I knew from my dad's tickled voice on the phone that something marvelous had happened to him and that it had to do with the money he was making or perhaps the warm ocean breeze ruffling his hair in the pictures he'd sent.
When he picked us up at the airport, I barely recognized him. He was wearing prescription sunglasses, some snazzy titanium numbers that said CARRERA on one lens, and his normally pink face was tanned from all the tennis he'd been playing. He had his shirt undone to the third button. Even his hair looked different: lighter and rakishly askew. He'd always been irresistible to me, but now I found him outright glamorous.
He drove us to the house he'd rented in Rolling Hills, a tony gated community perched above the cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was a beautiful summer day, and you could smell the salt air from the Pacific coming through the window. There was none of that Maryland mugginess that made you drip downstairs in the middle of the night and stick your head in the freezer. My siblings were all older than I was, getting ready to return to their boring eastern colleges, and I felt badly for them that they wouldn't be living out here with me in the land of endless summer.
I don't think I realized how rich we'd become until the moment we pulled up to the entrance of Rolling Hills and the man in the little guardhouse actually tipped his cap. The gate lifted, ushering us into someone's vision of paradise. By "someone's" I guess I mean my father's. There were horse trails and faux hacienda signs and old wagon wheels sitting in people's yards in islands of unmown grass, like the Hollywood back lot for some Waspy New England burg. And yet it was Californian through and through, the ranch-style homes as flat and gargantuan as UFOs. We slowed down to pass a group of horseback riders in skintight pants, and even the manure plopping from their horses seemed expensive to me, better smelling than the dogshit smearing our sidewalk in Baltimore.
Eventually we pulled into the driveway of our house. I got out of the car and was greeted by an enormous bird with a sapphire neck and a tail as long as a surfboard. It peered at me nonchalantly for a minute and then dragged itself into the bushes.
"Was that a peacock?" I asked.
"A wild one," my father said. "They're everywhere around here."
There was pride in his face, a touch of giddiness. He grinned, and I don't remember having seen my father look so happy before. My mom and I couldn't help grinning back. It was like he'd cooked this all up especially for us—the peacocks, the ocean breeze, the rolling-in-it hills. We were Californians now, a part of his dream.
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