STAINS ON THE STREET

 Below is the best opening to an essay about walking and cities that I’ve read in a long time.  

It’s titled ‘Key to the City’ and is in the spring 2022 issue of the Los Angles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.  (I’ve got a piece in there too should you be interested in such things.). 

 

This is Lisa Teasley: 

 

This is the opening of her piece:

 

 

“Walking the streets of Los Angeles, wandering determined, puts me more intimately in touch with the map than driving ever could. It makes plain where my identity shifts in the city, reveals the infinite ways to read and reread place. 

“I was born in this city and raised in Baldwin Hills since midway through second grade, after the family spent a six-and-a-half-year interval in Durham, North Carolina. I went from racing turtles and hiking in woods lit by fireflies to banana-seat biking the Dons — as all of Baldwin Hills’s street names begin — where many Black TV, film, and music stars lived long before the recent influx of white residents. I was not walking the neighborhood streets until after a family friend’s 18-year-old kid tried to rape me when I was 13 and babysitting his kid sister. A month or so afterward, he died doing a motorcycle trick in front of his house, which was the scene of the crime. I then walked past to see how I would feel — and if the street itself might describe the terror of him crawling through the window, grabbing his sister, and locking her in her room, and then dragging me into his. I wondered if I would feel proud of how hard I fought for the hour and got away, or if because he was now dead it might feel like it never happened.  There was blood on the street. I was shocked to see the stain and wondered how many days of rain it would take to wash away the evidence of his existence.’ 

 

That’s damn good.  And there’s much more to come but you’ll have to find it for yourself.

 

And just to prove how well-connected I used to be in LA, here’s a very, very low res pic of me and Lisa waiting to read at a Black Clock event at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.  Looks like we were having fun: