Long Beach is not Los Angeles. The suburb, if you can call that California's seventh-largest city, is geographically close to the City of Angels but emotionally distant. The hometown of Snoop Dogg and Billie Jean King, a group of Long Beach Polytechnic High graduates with quite disparate abilities, is culturally its own.
As such, growing up in LBC meant that trips to Los Angeles were an occasion, the kind of packing-the-car event normally associated with a road trip: Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays that could have been spent in the city. exploring the still impressive Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad or the cliffs of Malibu.
When I was a kid, Los Angeles felt far from me: I had great memories there, but my heart was in Long Beach.
I went north to go to college, to UC Santa Barbara. UCLA had put me on the waitlist and the prospect of going to USC hurt my wallet just thinking about it. Halfway through my fourth year in Santa Barbara, I met Becca.
Introduced by our mutual friends, she was introduced to me as “tall and blonde, with curly hair,” a historically winning phenotype for me, even if that mention of “blonde” was an elaborate brunette charade. We got along pretty quickly.
He was brilliant, the kind of smart person who had the answer to every question. Gorgeous, the kind of beauty that looks as good in a ripped Carhartt jacket and Dr. Martens as it does in a party dress. And she was caring, the kind of person who would answer your phone call in the middle of a hurricane.
Becca was from Salt Lake City and hadn't spent much time in Los Angeles. Perhaps, ironically, we had this in common. However, I was his interlocutor for local information about the city.
Once I graduated, she spent time with me in Long Beach. My charade, like his wealth of information about Los Angeles, was doomed from the start, being exposed during a particularly brutal freeway traffic attack. Sitting at the bottleneck where the 10 freeway meets the 405, Becca asked me if I had been to the Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. With the glare of the taillights illuminating my obvious negative response, he insisted we go.
So off we went, with Becca expertly navigating the streets she was supposed to already know. The last bookstore was more interesting to him for its vinyl collection than for its volume of volumes. She examined the grotesque album covers while I investigated the independent art studios upstairs. We reconnected for a kitschy Instagram movie under the store's book arch.
The experience made me realize that I had a lot to learn about Los Angeles from this girl from Utah.
He returned to Salt Lake City after finishing school at UC Santa Barbara and we started dating long distance. Every month, Becca visited me in Long Beach and, like clockwork, took me to Los Angeles. It got to the point where she was my tour guide to the city I grew up next to.
On one outing, we packed a couple poke bowls and headed to the Hollywood Bowl to see Weezer and Alanis Morissette. When the song “Beverly Hills” from the former came on, my mind wandered to what life would be like if I actually lived in Beverly Hills and was “rolling like a celebrity.” In my visions of the future, Becca was with me.
Another outing took us into the bowels of the popular Melrose Trading Post. Flanked by expensive band t-shirts and twentysomethings who somehow managed to look like the same kind of hipster, we hunted for bargains. I bought a briefcase with everything, for 20 dollars, for my shiny new job in Santa Monica. Money well spent. Becca inevitably ended up with a vintage sweater with the university's logo. “I'm going to cut it back,” he would announce later. (What's a flea market purchase without a good amount of stomach?)
Becca showed me a side of Los Angeles that I had never explored.
But the distance took its toll on our relationship. I felt the pressure of my new job, working long hours and sitting in traffic every day through an entire James Cameron movie. She, for her part, was adjusting to life at home in Utah, looking for a job and with no near-future plans to move to Los Angeles. Conversations about our relationship reared their ugly heads.
Perhaps we had both run our course. There's actually a limit to how long a relationship can last when its participants are 700 miles apart. We began to argue more frequently, sometimes it seemed like it was just for the sake of it. She planned a trip to Los Angeles to evaluate how our relationship would move forward.
I picked her up at Los Angeles International Airport and we headed to Santa Monica. Dinner consisted of handmade sushi, good cocktails, and lots of first-person statements. Then I made my first decision in Los Angeles in our relationship. We walked to the Santa Monica Pier.
As with many clichés, there is something comfortable about an oceanfront boardwalk. The sounds of laser guns from the nearby gallery join the predictable arch of the Ferris wheel in something that feels somewhere between nostalgic and therapeutic. Unfortunately, I underestimated the difficulty of the rigged three-point shootout in basketball, and she similarly misjudged her stomach's ability to recover after we got on a roller coaster that spun irresponsibly at high speed. We walked along the pier, watching people go by, then I took his hand in mine.
Amidst the chaos of screaming children, ringing doorbells, and flashing neon lights, we felt a level of certainty, a kind of quiet calm that I hadn't felt before.
At that moment we were never so sure.
The author is a freelance writer and media professional living in Long Beach. His byline appeared in Business Insider, Yahoo! and other publications.
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