Jason's Place to Put Internet Things

My phone rang around 8pm. It was my father. They would want to see me. They would be at the hotel and they would want to see me. We had discussed this. We had made plans. We (I) had decided that after a long flight and time change, my mom and dad and Dad’s sister, Cathy, would be too tired to do anything on Thursday night, and that they would check in to the hotel and go to sleep and I would see them Friday morning. It was all supposed to be arranged. I was supposed to be free Thursday night, and having put too much stock into my parents’ ability to follow through on plans, I had made other plans; a drink date. But the phone was ringing, and I knew as soon as I answered it, Dad would say, “We’re at the hotel. Come see us!” 

     I answered the phone.

“We’re at the hotel, come see us!”

And that was that. I hung up with my father, and postponed the drink date. My parents were in town.

At around 9, I pulled into the parking lot of a nearby Mexican joint called ‘Paco’s Tacos’ with my parents and aunt in the car. Later, I would realize ‘Paco’s Taco’s’ was not “a good restaurant in the area,” as Dad had requested from the Spanish-speaking clerk at the hotel, but “the easiest place to give tourists directions to.”

‘Paco’s Taco’s’ was dark, loud, and the menu confusing. There were several large drunken groups seeming to celebrate multiple birthdays, prompting the entire staff of Paco’s to sing/scream its own copyright-friendly variety of “Happy Birthday” twice. Once in English, once in Spanish. My parents were perplexed. “I feel like the Beverly Hillbillies come to town!” my dad exclaimed. He asked Cathy if she remembered ‘Jethrene,’ Jethro’s twin sister that was really just Jethro in a dress, and burst into the theme song. He did this a few times during the trip, sometimes humming the theme, others simply saying “Jethrene!” and smiling to himself.

“Tell him about the baby,” my mom prompted Dad. 

“There was a baby crying next to me the entire flight.”

    “He would stop for maybe five minutes,” Cathy added. “That made it worse, because you’d think he was done, but he’d start right up on again.” She was spinning the menu in her hands, trying to find some vertical orientation that made any sense to her, hoping perhaps after a second or third spin, a sushi or Italian menu would reveal itself. A fifth performance of Happy/Feliz Birthday/Cumpleaños started up again. I texted my canceled date: “Off to a rocky start.”

“Put away your phone,” Dad demanded. “Are we not interesting enough for you?”

I put my phone back in my pocket. “Welcome to town.”

    Dad called me on Friday morning. “We’re right outside.” I walked outside and got in the car and asked to get in the driver’s seat. This was the way we planned it. I had explained to Dad that while I was confident in his ability to drive in LA, I didn’t think he would enjoy it. It would stress him out. “You aren’t on the insurance for the rental car,” he said. “I have to drive.” And there it was.

I was now responsible for navigating my chum father through the shark-infested LA freeways and keep him from getting eaten. First stop: Getty Villa in Malibu. I was in charge of picking the route. Starting in Studio City, that required taking the 101 North to the 405 South, to surface streets, to the Pacific Coast Highway. This information was lost on my father. Every turn had to be forewarned and manically pointed out. “It’s this one! Turn now! This turn here!” I couldn’t simply tell Dad to change lanes and know he would change lanes when he could, when there weren’t other cars oncoming. With Dad too afraid to look away from the car directly in front of him, changing lanes quickly became a family affair, requiring every passenger to check the lane for clearance and frantically shout “Not now!” or “Do it now! Quickly!” When he was able to finally change lanes, Dad did so slowly and purposefully, like a barge pulling underneath an upturned drawbridge. I learned to start my instructions with, ‘You can’t do it now, but you need to change lanes,’ and my mom would begin the arrangements of deciding when the best possible time was that this could be done.

    The 405 was a sight of bewilderment to them. “Where did all these people come from?” and “This traffic is amazing.” Mom had picked up a map at the airport and decided she could find a route without other cars in the way. “Couldn’t we get on Sepul-VEE-da?” Traffic slowed to crawl and Dad was able to get his breath long enough to complain about it.   

   My mom asked if, living in Los Angeles, I had learned any Spanish. “I’ve learned how to say ‘The Angels,’” I quipped. “Why?”

    We got on surface roads, and Cathy started pointing out every fat person she saw, as if personally verifying a theory of hers that ill-dressed fat people can be found anywhere, even in Los Angeles. Her study continued throughout the weekend, and she and Dad decided that for the rest of the trip, they would play Fashion Police, and point out to each other when they saw someone wearing something they thought was ill-advised. Dad chimed in that he thought many people in the immediate area were abusing yoga pants privileges.

After we pulled into our parking space in the garage at the Getty Villa, my dad turned the car off, put his hand over his heart and sighed. “Lawyer, Jesus.” Driving in LA had put him in a state of frantic nervousness, from which he needed a few minutes to come down.

    Getty Villa was not at all crowded, and we were joined  by only a few other small groups and a couple of classes on a school field trip. Walking by a group of kids to look at a koi pond, a second-grader whispered to me, “Vote For Romney”.  I felt sad for the child momentarily; his parents must not have had the heart to tell the poor kid that the election had passed, and his man had lost. It had been six months.

For dinner, there was a Thai place, Jitlada, that I’ve know for months and strongly recommended to visitors. Upon arrival, our party inspected the place skeptically. “Well this is just a hole in the wall.” It was only decided we would actually eat there only after Mom spotted a glowing endorsement from Rachael Ray in the front window. I grabbed a menu from inside while everyone waiting on the front bench for a few friends to arrive.

Saturday morning, we started early and went to the Santa Monica Pier.  We parked on the pier for three bucks an hour and went out in search of breakfast. I noticed a burger shack that was open at 9 a.m. and suggested we find something there. Mom thought we needed to check out the entire pier for a better breakfast before settling on something simple and in front of us. So, hungry, the four of us walked up and down the length of the pier before returning to the burger shack to get breakfast sandwiches.  

After checking out the canals, and Venice Beach, my dad decided that he really wanted to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, as if to punish me for not planning the entire weekend minute by minute.  

Looking at the other tourists at the Ronald Reagan Library, it was clear to me that myself and Cathy would be the only people trying to enjoy it ironically. Many of my jokes fell on deaf, conservative, ears. I overheard the pudgy boy with the shaved head and the collared shirt made from the flag of Texas tell another tourist that he was attending Texas A&M, and I knew that this grown version of Bobby Hill was here in earnest.  

Some of the attractions of the library including designing your own presidential china set, pretending to act out a scene with a young movie star Ronald Reagan, a slim part of the Berlin Wall, and an old Air Force One that was used to fly around Reagan and four other presidents. One of the tour guides on the plane beamed with pride as she informed us that “if a reporter was to fly on Air Force One, he had to buy his own ticket, so it wasn’t paid for by the taxpayer, the way a business should be run.” In the gift shop, i noticed Karl Rove’s biography was on clearance. Surely, I thought, this was a good sign.

After he realized he was driving through the Antiques district, Dad decided now was as good a time as any to learn how to parallel park. “I just can’t do it!” he declared in defeat. 

“Yes you can, now pull up next to this car and put it in reverse.”

“I’m in the way!”

“They’ll drive around, now turn the turn signal on.” With a bit of coaching, Dad pulled into the space flawlessly.

      After perusing the wares at Little Paris Vintage Antiques, Dad declared, “They figured out what everything was worth and added a zero!”

      The next day we went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (or LACMA). The group seemed only mildly interested until we stumbled into the Japanese Art Pavilion. A few years ago, my parents slowly started introducing Asian decor into their house, a vague theme that had slowly spread from Ticonderoga soldiers in the upstairs bathroom to the Japanese cranes in the living room, to the sun room, until what my brother and I referred to as ‘The Asian Wing’ had taken over the house. Japanese cranes mingled with Chinese dragons (my parents didn’t acknowledge the difference between Asian cultures; it’s all Chinese to them). So when we walked into the Japanese Art Pavilion, Mom and Dad would point out thousand-year old artifacts and announce which room of the house the artifacts would look best in. “I’m having me those wooden dogs. Jane, wouldn’t they look great out front?” Dad said, referring to a pair of 13th century Kamakura guardian animal sculptures. 

“They could use refinishing,” Cathy chimed in. 

“Yeah, that’s the first thing I’d do.”