The Old Magic Gas

There used to be a gas station at the bottom of the hill called Magic Gas. It looked like the kind of place you would see in the desert. Or in a mirage. Or maybe I imagined that it was like that because of the name. But it was stark in the way those other things are, rectangular and plain and lonesome. Nowadays the word magic is over-used in a feelgood way, but back then when I first moved into that neighborhood, it felt like something else. I had just moved there with my three kids and I was an outsider and on my own. To me Echo Park was like the old west, wild and undiscovered, and the area around Magic Gas was the main little dirt road town. You tied up your horse to the hitching post before going to the saloon, and tipped your hat to strangers when you passed, keeping your hand on your holster just in case. In truth the street was paved, but chickens did run loose for a while and Chango, not a saloon but a coffee shop, was on the corner. I don’t like to say it was a gang neighborhood because it was mainly families, kids, women, people who rode the bus every day to their jobs, but there were gangs too, and violence, and helicopters that hovered in the sky once a week. Next to Chango was El Batey (say El Ba- tay, said the sign), a family store run by Evelia who knew your kid’s names and always let you pay next time if you didn’t have enough. There was a vintage store and a hair salon and even if you never went to either place, you still knew the people who worked there. At night the street was quiet except for a couple times a week when Chango locked the door and held 12-step meetings. I never knew that’s what was going on until years later I met a few people who had been to those meetings and we realized we had probably crossed paths. Strange how that happens. You live life in one direction, but you understand it in the opposite.  I walked by those meetings more than once, deep in my own world, while each of them sat inside, deep in theirs. Sometimes it seems like there’s a map in place, or a narrator somewhere saying, “And one day this person here will meet that person there and something beautiful will happen. But not today.”

2.

I don’t know where I first met Elise but she was someone I’d see all the time. We were both moms and that meant we should have been allies, but I always found her impenetrable, a little odd. Possibly the feeling was mutual. She reminded me of a Russian clown, serious and hard and weary, like a philosopher or heart surgeon. Whenever she appeared she’d just start talking from where she left off the last time. She was French but not Parisian French, she was Zola French, dirt in her fists, spit in disgust French. You felt like if you ever connected with her, it would be for life, honor and liberté toujours!

Once I saw her at a community party. The community center was basically a yard with a garage and twinkly lights laced across the patio, but it was pretty and a lot of people had shown up to raise money for a friend who had been in a bad accident and needed some help. I was sitting with a 12-year-old named Bianca and we were making cards out of paper and paints and other crafty things. Elise appeared and picked up scissors and started cutting out silhouettes, like a string of paper dolls, spinning the paper around this way and that and stopping and starting from different angles. She was an artist, a painter, and things like that came easily to her. While she cut, she talked about her recent divorce and then, conspiratorially to me but without lowering her voice, about how she was aching to have sex. She was very specific and detailed. Bianca and I shared a side-eyed glance. There really was nothing we could do but listen. “This is what I want,” she shrugged, “but I know there’s no man who can give me all that,” she paused focusing on cutting, “I’ve come to accept less.” From there she began talking about the recent death of her best friend from childhood, how they had met when they were 7 and she gave the table of contents version of their friendship, ending with, “It may have been suicide.” She was really broaching all the topics, no sense of how any of it was hitting, but Bianca and I were rapt. Then she got quiet and focused on the snipping scissors. We were all quiet together, the muffled sound of a David Bowie song coming from the back studio. I looked up and Elise was crying, still cutting but crying, “My mother is dying,” she said. And then barely audible, “Ma mere.” She laid the paper cut-out on the table and rose to leave as suddenly as she had arrived. I called after her but she was gone. I turned back to Bianca who was unrolling the cut-out like a scripture. We stared at it together, amazed, the forms taking on clearer shapes as we figured out what they were: two people choking each other their mouths in scream, a shapely woman with her leg up on a chair, two little girls holding hands, a pregnant woman in profile followed by a coffin. Between each figure were two hearts. We looked at our own cards with glitter and glue and with the quiet wisdom of a 12 -year-old girl, that meant so much more than what it said, Bianca whispered, “Oh well.”

3.

I think sometimes about Charlie Chaplin who once lived in this neighborhood. I like to imagine him walking through the hills as the Tramp, jaunty and guileless and up to something. The same hills I walk with friends. Chaplin once said of his childhood, “I was hardly aware of a crisis because we lived in a continual crisis; and being a boy, I dismissed our troubles with gracious forgetfulness.” And I think of those early years I first lived in Echo Park in the same way, not that I was in crisis, but with three kids on my own and no child support, it always felt like a version of one. Before Chaplin there was a large religious sect, Spiritualists, who believed that spirits lived and walked among us, and after Chaplin there were Latino farmers and their families. Then Dodgers Stadium. Then me. Then Teslas and $18 mangos and million dollar homes. What is remembered as time flies ahead, what is staved off?

Magic Gas is a Chevron now, owned by Bilal and his family. There is a thick glass window by the register and lights and mirrors in the back. Bilal once came outside and stood with me while I pumped my gas because two homeless guys were screaming at each other just a few yards away, and we were bonded, our relationship raised from polite smiles to full conversations about the new taco stand and the Lakers. A few days ago I stopped to get some gas and Bilal wasn’t there, even after I called out Hello?, so I went to the back for a drink, in my own world, overwhelmed by something horrific I just heard on the radio. I walked up to the glass and waited and then peered left where I saw Bilal down on the floor praying, his toes, forehead and palms on the ground. I backed away and waited. My bad. I wanted to give him privacy, but I also wanted to stare, to absorb that kind of devotion and love and discipline, to believe that somehow, even on the floor of a gas station in Echo Park, God was listening.