Meeting my West Coast family

Standing in front of the lemon tree with Louie LaRocca in Camarillo, California.

My family is painfully small. I’ve always been a little envious when I meet one of those huge families, where kids and elders and everyone in between are all sitting at long tables together on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My father had one brother who cut ties with the entire family and never had any kids. My mother also had one brother who was an alcoholic and died of liver failure. He also didn’t have any kids. So there went any aunt, uncle, or cousin. Then moving down the generations, I have an older brother, younger sister, and one niece who’s grown up now. That’s pretty much it: Mom, Dad, Abby, Bradd, Lex.

So to learn more about this mysterious arm of the LaRocca family that lives on the West Coast was one of the greatest experiences of my time on the road. A few of my paternal grandfather’s siblings moved out to the LA area decades ago and settled there. It started with his brother Louie, who, after being stationed in Florida in the military many years ago, returned home to a Pittsburgh winter and decided, “I’ve had enough of this!” (Pittsburgh weather is notoriously gloomy. You’ll notice that the people living there actually have a unique complexion, a sort of pasty greenish blue). Other siblings followed, and now there are generations of LaRoccas (and LaMarcas) who grew up at the beach.

I wish I’d have had time to meet all of them, but Louie and his wife MJ, who live in Camarillo in Ventura County, were closest to my route and open for a visit. My dad had told Louie of my travels and passed along his number to me, so I just called him up one morning while I was in LA, which honestly was a little awkward, and we arranged to meet him at his home.

I took my time driving up the coast—visiting Topanga Canyon and a crazy vintage shop there (part vintage, part Burning Man costume outlet), then explored Malibu and drove around the mountains and through a huge gorge. I stopped at Point Dume to hang out at the beach, where the water was even colder and the waves wilder than they were in Santa Monica. There was no way I could swim, but I soaked in the sun and salty sea air.

Then I hung a right and passed by farm fields and orchards, mountains in the distance, heading for Camarillo.

Louie greeted me with a big hug at the door and welcomed me inside, introducing me to his wife as we all made our way to the living room. We spent a good hour just talking about the family. This was Louie Jr., the son of my grandpa’s brother Louie. Louie Sr. was a concert pianist and my dad’s favorite uncle. My dad has played piano all his life, too, but not professionally, and he idolized Louie, who passed away a few years ago. I’d heard stories about Louie Sr. for years from my dad, but I never got to meet him.

Louie and MJ dug out some folders and albums of family stuff—old photos, handwritten pages that Louie Sr. had dictated to family about his life before he died, tons of handwritten sheet music he’d composed. He was always at the piano, they told me. It was always, “Shh! Wait a minute!” as he was working, playing a few notes and scribbling away his notations, then attending to whoever needed him. I sifted through the pages, immersing myself in the family history that felt so close to my heart.

I grew up listening to my dad play the piano. To this day, when I visit him in Pittsburgh, he sits in front of his keyboard at least once and says, “I've been working on some stuff. Listen to this,” playing various excerpts of pieces for me, as I sit on his couch.

I also grew up watching baseball with my dad. I learned about every facet of the game, every detail, while sitting in our “lucky seats” when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, rooting for the Bucs. I went to games at Three Rivers Stadium, before it was demolished to build a new one, and avidly took score and kept track of every hit, run, and error on the paper scorecards they’d hand out. When I was 8 or so, I started playing softball, and for a few years, Dad coached my team. I played every position, apart from catcher, and lived and breathed the game. I love watching it, to this day—whether it’s the Pirates or, dare I say, Orioles (when I lived in Baltimore) or even the Frederick Keys. It’s in my blood.

Turns out, Louie loves baseball, too. He grew up playing it and, at 66 years old, still plays in a softball league in California (he showed me photos of him in uniform—batting, running, posing for a group shot with the team). That night in Camarillo, after I made a bowl of soup and MJ went to bed, Louie and I sat on the couch and watched a game of baseball together. I rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers, of course. How could I not? I never would’ve rooted for them growing up (they’re in the National League with the Pirates), but I was in California, they weren’t playing Pittsburgh, and I was sitting with my West Coast family.

It’s hard to convey the closeness I felt to Louie, watching that game. He truly felt like family—his demeanor and his expressions, and he just looked like a LaRocca. I felt as if I were sitting next to an alternate version of my dad.

He told me stories about growing up at the beach in LA, how he’d be late to his first class at school because he was out surfing. I couldn’t even fathom it. I listened intently to every bit of life history he gave, all so foreign to my East Coast life but tied together by blood. He also talked about a couple times when his father sent him to Pittsburgh as a kid to hang out with my dad and uncle and grandparents. He adored my grandfather but not Pittsburgh. Who would want to be in Pittsburgh with all the pasty whites when you could be with your friends all summer at the Pacific Ocean?

After the game, I slept a good, solid sleep in his daughter’s old bedroom (they raised both kids in that house), then wandered into the living room the next morning, where they were running fans and complaining about the heat.

“It’s stifling!” Louie said.

“Yeh, it’s so humid today,” MJ added, turning to me. “It’s to normally like this.”

They took me out into their back yard to see all the fruit trees they were growing—a lemon tree, avocado, oranges, figs. I checked the weather gauge outside, reading around 70 percent humidity and about 80 degrees. It felt like a perfect Maryland spring day to me.

“This used to be the most temperate climate in the world,” MJ told me. “It would only vary about 20 degrees when we moved here 30 years ago. Now it’s this extreme heat.”

I couldn’t stop marveling at all the fruit growing in the yard and the huge succulent garden that Louie tended to. I stood by the big lemon tree and just gazed at it.

“This is just incredible,” I gushed.

“We always tell people if they want lemons to come take them from us,” MJ said. “I mean, what do you do with them all?!”

“I would eat them every day!” I told her.

“Really?” Louie asked.

“Yes!”

With that, MJ brought out a little plastic grocery bag and filled it with lemons plucked from the tree, plus one peach, and handed it to me to take on the road with me. It was truly one of the greatest gifts of my travels.

“Thank you so much," I told them. "I’m going to drink fresh lemon water every morning now."

I thought about sending one to my dad, but I didn’t know how well it would travel. A photo would have to suffice. It made him very happy.

From sea to shining sea

Santa Monica Pier

Heather said her apartment in East Hollywood is in the hood, but I was so excited to be in LA, it might as well have been a penthouse. You could see the Hollywood sign out her kitchen window.

I threw down my bags in her living room and sat on her futon to decompress from the drive for a few minutes and learn about her life over the past 15 years. We’d met each other while working at our college library, and, it turns out, she went on to become a librarian. Tourist that I am, I got so caught up in the Hollywood hype, I forgot that there’s a whole city of people living here who actually run the city.

She sat on her bed and smoked a bowl.

“I saw so many billboards and signs about weed, driving here,” I said, chuckling under my breath. “‘Cannabis delivers!’ It’s funny to see that when you’re coming from a state where it’s not legal. You just forget that it’s legal in other places.”

“Super legal,” she said, exhaling. “So what do you want to do? You wanna go out?”

Once I’d sufficiently rested—i.e., not really, but probably 15 minutes later—we went out. We walked through East Hollywood streets, stopping at a food truck to get pork tacos from a guy who had been carving a roasting pig all day long for lines of customers. Then we jumped on the metro to get to West Hollywood tourism country, where the streets are all lit up down the Avenue of the Stars. I saw the grand entrance of the Academy Awards building and, out front, people setting up for a Quentin Tarantino film premiere the next day, coincidentally titled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” We walked for hours, until our feet hurt and we both had to piss (it’s surprisingly impossible to find a public bathroom in LA).

That night, I climbed up to the roof of her apartment building to smoke a rolled cigarette of tobacco and mugwort and took in the view of the city skyline, watching lines of headlights flow down I-10.

The next morning, she left for work, and I left to venture out to see the city in the daylight. I drove up the winding Mulholland Drive, thinking of the David Lynch film and film in general (it’s hard not to in LA), and took a hike at Runyon Canyon, where you’re likely to run into movie stars. This is what people had told me, but I didn’t recognize anyone famous walking dogs or jogging. I did, however, see the iconic Hollywood sign across the way in Hollywood Hills and later drove toward it, checking out the houses there. I visited coffee shops and vintage shops, soaked in all the buzzing creativity, sat in LA traffic, and finally landed at the beach—the Pacific Ocean. It felt good.

I changed into a bathing suit in a tight bathroom on the beach (tricky, but not impossible) and then headed toward the water, putting down my towel and bag and getting in. The water was colder than the Atlantic but refreshing. The waves were rough—too rough to swim. A few people were surfing. The surf was green and brown with seaweed. I came back to lie on my towel, occasionally looking to my right to see Santa Monica Pier, loud with fun with movement and life—a ferris wheel and rollercoaster and games and food, crowds of people. Behind me, the city. Ahead, the endless sea. I did it. I made it. Not that there was any goal in mind, but there was certainly something satisfying about having swam in the Atlantic just a month prior.

I stayed there for hours, getting in and out of the water, calling a friend from back home who lived there one summer when he was younger, and eventually, I packed up my bag and took a walk along the pier as the sun sank lower in the sky. The beach was closing. My parking spot was expiring. As I headed back to Heather’s apartment, all I could think was, LA is the greatest city in America.

Joshua Tree: Within and without

Ocotillo rising into the air, waxy creosote bushes, brown fields of massive chollas with pale-yellow, puffy spikes, and, of course, Joshua trees, all dotting the land and multi-layered, carved mountains of Joshua Tree National Park.

The desert is expansive. It expands you. It’s as if your soul has more space to fill … and so fills it—widening, stretching, spreading itself open.

I can’t imagine that anyone could drive through a place as wide and vast as the Mojave Desert and not feel a shift in consciousness. What a gift.

The rain smells different. The creosote.

The wind sounds different, like it’s swirling around high up in the sky somewhere, higher than the birds.

Even music sounds different in the desert. Take Flume’s “Wall Fuck,” for instance. In the past, I’d thought that the electronic instrumental represented frustration, being up against a wall with no way out. When I hear it out West, it sounds hot—a body pressed against someone, up against a wall, fucking.

This shift in perspective reminded me of one of my favorite Kerouac quotes: “It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void.”

I feel like something shifts on a cellular level when I get out West, like my DNA is restructuring itself into a different version of Lauren LaRocca, opening up channels hitherto untapped. It all left me wondering who I’ll be if I ever return to the East Coast. Will “Wall Fuck” once again represent me banging my head against the proverbial cubicle? Or will I take these shifts in awareness with me?