Slouching Towards Los Angeles by Steffie Nelson

Author:Steffie Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2020-02-03T19:39:53+00:00

A Letter to Joan on

Turning Fifty-Five

By Tracy McMillan

Dear Joan Didion,

I’m writing to you because I have recently become middle-aged. In Los Angeles. I’m not sure precisely when it happened. Not when I turned forty—I know that much. Because that’s when I expected it to happen and I braced myself for an onslaught of oldness feelings, and then the birthday came and went, and then some months came, and went and finally the whole year came and went and still, I felt thirty-five. I will admit I was somewhat disappointed. But I just put on my size twenty-six jeans and went on about my life.

I should also tell you I was not that great of a young person. All young people are confused, and I was no exception—I got married at nineteen to an oil company executive, but went out almost every night with my age-appropriate friends—simultaneously the kind of young person who says yes to the “plastics” job in The Graduate, and the kind of young person like those rappers in a music video, whisking hundred-dollar bills off the top of a stack of hundred-dollar bills into life’s metaphorical club. Not so much because I wanted to be a big spender or get someone to dance for me. More that I didn’t care that much about hundred-dollar bills and all that whisking made me feel like I was doing something. As for my marriage, I truly loved to iron shirts.

I won’t bore you with all the details of the intervening years, but let’s just say no one was surprised when I found myself forty-two years old, living in a one-bedroom apartment, writing television news just enough to pay the rent, with a ten-year-old son, no health insurance, and three amicable divorces. (To my credit, I consider that last thing a legit achievement.) I was not one of those people who came to Los Angeles with a dream—to have a dream supposes you think something transcendent could happen in some realm, even if it’s a realm where you’re sleeping, and I didn’t really think anything transcendent could happen to me anywhere, or ever. I was definitely not yet middle-aged during the One-Bedroom Apartment Years, but nevertheless I had arrived at a point where I was deeply in need of some inspiration.

And money.

Joan, that’s when I discovered you. I mean, really discovered. I had heard of you, of course. But I didn’t know what you were all about. A situation I sort of chalk up to being a Broadcast-Journalism major, instead of an English major—as well as a woman of color. (Two facts which, to my mind anyway, are not unrelated.) I had not yet read The White Album. I did not yet know about ignorant armies jostling in the night. I had not yet seen you standing in front of that Corvette.

And then, one day, I had.

Suddenly I knew why all those English majors had been talking about you all these years. Not just because you were a fatalist, and a beauty, and a teller of truth.

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