Girl in a Band Read Online Free

no choice but to turn fearless.
    An old black-and-white photo of a little house is all I have to prove Rochester was my birthplace. Black-and-white matches that city, with its rivers, aqueducts, manufacturing plants, and endless winters. And when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.
    I was five years old when my father was offered a professorship in the UCLA sociology department, and we—my parents, Keller, and I—drove out to Los Angeles in our old station wagon. Once we passed over into the Western states, I remember how excited my mother was to order hash browns at a roadside diner. To her hash browns were a Western thing, a symbol, full of a meaning she couldn’t express.
    When we pulled into Los Angeles, we stayed at some dive called the Seagull Motel, one of probably a thousand look-alike places with the same name along the California coast. This Seagull Motel was in the shadow of a Mormon temple, a huge monolithic structure on top of a hill, surrounded by acres of trimmed, saturated green grass no one was allowed to walk on. Everywhere were sprinkler systems, little metallic gadgets here and there twisting and chugging away at all hours. Nothing was indigenous—not the grass, not the sprinkler water, not any of the people I met. Until I saw the movie Chinatown, I didn’t realize L.A. was, underneath everything, a desert, an expanse of endless burlap. That was my first glimpse of L.A. landscaping.
    I also had no idea that going to California meant a return to my mom’s roots.
    In my family, history showed up in casual remarks. I was in my senior year of high school when my aunt told me that my mother’s family, the Swalls, was one of California’s original families. Pioneers. Settlers. The story went that along with some Japanese business partners, my great-great-grandparents ran a chili pepper farm in Garden Grove, in Orange County. The Swalls even had a ranch in West Hollywood, at Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, on land that’s today all car washes and strip malls and bad stucco. At some point the railroad laid down tracks, slicing the street into Big and Little Santa Monica Boulevards. The ranches are all gone today, of course, but Swall Drive is still there, swishing north and south, a fossil of ancestral DNA.
    I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.” In that respect the Swalls were probably no different from any otherearly California family, staking out a new place, lured there by the gold rush and hitting an ocean wall.
    On the Swall side also was my mother’s father, Keller Eno Coplan, a bank clerk. The story goes that at one point he forged a check belonging to his own in-laws and went to jail. My dad always laughed when he talked about my grandfather, saying things like “He wasn’t dumb, he just had no sense.” Odd, then, and not exactly a blessing, that my parents would name their only son after him. Family tradition, I guess.
    With her husband in jail, my grandmother moved with her five kids, including my mother, who was young at the time, up to Northern California, to be closer to the clan in Modesto. During the Depression my grandmother picked up and moved again, to Colorado this time, where her husband’s family had roots. When her husband wasn’t in jail, he was out roaming the country looking for work. With no money and five kids to feed, she must have put up with a lot.
    The only reason I know this is because my aunt