Day 23: Disneyland!
Early the next day we launched for Disneyland. It seemed premature. We were still shocked from the road but Kent said the weekend would be impossible and to go now. So we did.
One really should buy tickets ahead of time at discount, online, to save a bunch and avoid the first long line. And of course one should go in the offseason. It was hot and crowded.
We immediately knew it would be a death-march military type experience and we prepared for it as best we could. We brought water and big hats. We should’ve paid the $15 for the spray-fan. It was $170 to get in, though.
We did some cute rides. An hour wait for each little ride. We got more serious about keeping fed and watered when we almost had a total collapse early on. We thought for sure we’d see ambulances or worse as the day went on. They must have special doors or scoops to take dead and violent people away without anyone noticing because everything went fine with the scary, tattooed crowd all day. Or maybe Americans are so used to mobs and lack of natural life-support that they can be cheerful when around fantasy no matter what the real conditions.
We adults love 2 of the rides in particular. They’ll likely be no surprise: Pirates of the Caribbean, and Peter Pan. Just wonderful. To me they represent ideal cities and ways of life. Yeah, it’s true. They’ve inspired me. And did so again equally as much. I would love to live in a city like them. Boston? New Orleans? Sounds close enough. Bangkok? Oooh! I love narrow ways, old places, and rough’n’tumble. I suspect the Indy Jones ride is cool: but too much line. The Jungle Cruise was great, no wait. M was collapsing into a heedless mess when I quickly bought a lunch and she was made right again. She didn’t know she was so close to breakdown. It’s hard to notice an emergency until you’re in it sometimes.
Tonight is our 10th anniversary and K&J take us out to dinner at our most favorite restaurant, just down the hill from them: Musso-Frank Grill on Hollywood Blvd. Now that’s a restaurant. It’s kinda fancy but not so much, it’s more oldfashioned. Everyone there knows them and everyone there has been working there about 50 years it looks like. But I’ve been going there 20 years and it seemed like that then, too. It’s Bogart and Faulkner’s old hangout. Hasn’t changed. (Micky Rooney using the payphone out back has been my only sighting.) They serve great sweetbreads and jellied consumme. An oldfashioned alacarte menu with oldfashioned items. Murals on walls. Waiters in red, bar-tenders with green sleeve holders. I didn’t mind the cigar smoke from years gone by but that fat-cat affect is gone now. We go to the front of the line and get the best table and the best waiter will kill any other who tries to get us. There is a pecking order and it’s kinda cool to be with folks who have put in their 40 years of being a customer to be in the right place.
He’s showed me some pretty neat things. My first meal in LA when I spent my first summer working there in ’82 was at a hectic noisy stall in Little Tokyo. We sat on stools and had big steaming bowls of seafood stew and udon with the whole market scene buzzing around us. A neat change of pace from a youth in Michigan. Then we went out and bought me a new wardrobe. (And it was suggested that I not wear shorts or tennies in town.) The deal was that I’d come visit after work and take care of their garden in exchange. Fair trade indeed.
I remember years later coming to LA and working for a summer from their patio, calling bookstores with their big ol’ black rotary phone, selling tons of books with the flowers overhead, typing thick letters to friends back home on my old manual down in the spare bedroom below the house, then all of us going out for dinner.
Kent is retired now and says he’s not doing much of anything at all. He was a public defender for years, longer than anyone in recollection. The decades of partying and being assaulted by our world catch up one way or another.
