June 9

Here we are, awaiting the arrival of 700 marines in Los Angeles. The National Guard is already here (illegally and without state approval), and it seems all but inevitable that martial law will be declared, maybe this weekend during the protests, maybe before. There are reports of ICE at Home Depots, at warehouses, in metro stations. Every five minutes there’s another report on social media: unmarked vans whizzing down Wilton toward Santa Monica, officers lurking around Le Conte middle school, agents waiting outside graduation in Huntington Park.

There’s an eerie quiet, no sirens or helicopters where I am. But there are whispers at the doctor’s office and serious conversations in my kids’ classrooms. I guess it’s anticipation. So far, the protests have been mostly peaceful (minus the murdered Waymos), the response less so (an arrested union leader, a reporter hit with rubber bullets, a protester stomped on by police on horseback). And we all know that it’s all going according to plan, the summer slide into fascism.

I got a targeted ad on Instagram from a scammy Canadian citizenship company. It was in terrible taste and also kind of funny: You think the people who stuck it out through the strikes and the fires aren’t fully committed to this place, cuin.ca? Thanks for asking, but we’ll cuin.hell. Whenever people leave LA I feel a bitter sting (oh, okay, enjoy), and now my distaste for commentary from people who moved away before the shit hit the fan has intensified. “Here’s the thing you gotta know about LA…” “Okay, for context, I lived in LA for ten years…” Thank you, but shuuuuuut upppppp. Those of us who remain (or had to leave because they were displaced by, like, FIRE and not “ugh, traffic” or “ugh, pee smell”) have shared such a unique tasting menu of awful things, one after another, grinding us into little nubs. Our auras have got to be radioactive at this point. But we’re still Angelenos, bitches!

And while it never rains in southern California, when it rains, it pours. So:

I unsubscribed my dad from this newsletter on April 25, four days after he died. Everything I ever wrote — from my elementary school essays to my published fiction and stupid haiku, my Tumblr posts and never-submitted-anywhere draft of a novel (he hated it!) — he read, and he replied to every single LA Weather. For some reason, although I have kept it together pretty well over the past month and a half, the idea of not getting a response from him was (is) tough. I didn’t want his card to be charged for his paid subscription, because it was too upsetting to think about how much he had invested in my writing over the years — emotionally, financially, sometimes in a way that made me feel crushed under his expectations, other times in a way that buoyed me completely.

He was a great dad.

The first two things I understood about my father when I was growing up was that he was the son of a book printer and that he’d grown up very poor, at one point living in the projects in an apartment secured through some kind of connection to the Irish mafia. These facts were repeated often, coupled with a deal: he would buy me any book I wanted, and as long as I was old enough to read it, I was old enough to read it. So I tore through horrible, graphic tales of childhood abuse and lobotomies, and Stephen King, and zoological textbooks, and racy garbage, and my bookshelf was always overstuffed, and I never borrowed them from the library because owning things was a luxury that my dad could afford to give me. I could bring my books in the bath and not worry about being dinged or judged if their pages curled or stuck together from the bathwater.

A few years ago my dad mentioned that he’d been reading books on screens. I think he was referring to his iPad. He loved his iPad as much as a boomer dad could. He said that it was great because books took up so much space. I could not believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. I thought of all of my crispy, bloated paperbacks — okay, plus some hardcovers — sitting in the bedroom I lived in when I was in my parent’s house. I think I had a strong reaction to this. I think it was an exchange, similar to one we had about him purchasing an Apple watch. Tacky tech. He used to use a personalized notepad in a leather holder. That was classy. That belonged to a tactile time where everything seemed like it was only going to get better and better.

What I would really have liked is for my father to have not needed an Apple watch to monitor his vitals or alert anyone to his falls, and for him to have many decades worth of bookshelves to fill, and for him to receive this newsletter and reply “I wondered when you’d get back to writing these.” I would like to dump on my dad about how, on top of the fascist takeover, there are so many fruit flies in my house, and how wouldn’t it be funny if the thing that made me cry wasn’t the ICE agents apprehending parents at their children’s graduation or the fires or him being dead, but the fact that I found fruit flies on my toothbrush. I would like to tell my dad, “Peter said the flies on my toothbrush made him think about the urban legend that someone ate Taco Bell and there were bug eggs in it, and then the bug eggs hatched inside their cheek,” and then my dad would say, “Oh-kay. Well, I’m going to go have a whisky.”

My dad used to sign off, sometimes, with “Be good.” I never really knew if he meant it prescriptively, a throwback to telling me to behave, or if he was wishing me well, or to stick to my guns in some way, or a combination of all of those things. But right after he died, I took a walk down Los Feliz boulevard, untouched for now by fires, fragrant with every kind of flower, my healthy and relatively young body carrying me along the sidewalk, lungs pumping clean(ish) air in and out effortlessly, skin without worrisome moles, no aches in my hips, heart beating. I could go on, isn’t that wonderful? It was exhilarating and not at all sad to think of my dad then, because I thought, oh so that’s what he meant by “be good.” So I will.

— Tess