Long Beach is not Los Angeles. The suburb, if that’s something you can call the seventh-largest city in California, is geographically close to the City of Angels but emotionally distant. The hometown of both Snoop Dogg and Billie Jean King — a set of Long Beach Polytechnic High graduates with pretty disparate skill sets — is culturally its own.
As such, growing up in the LBC meant trips into Los Angeles were an occasion, the kind of pack-the-car event that is normally associated with a road trip: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays that might have been spent in the city exploring the still-striking Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad or the cliffs of Malibu.
When I was growing up, L.A. felt far from me: I had great memories there, but my heart was in Long Beach.
I went north for college — to UC Santa Barbara. UCLA had waitlisted me, and the prospect of going to USC hurt my wallet just thinking about it. At the midpoint of my fourth year in Santa Barbara, I met Becca.
Introduced by our mutual friends, she was pitched to me as “tall and blond, with curly hair,” a historically winning phenotype for me, even if that “blond” mention was an elaborate brunette farce). We hit it off pretty quickly.
She was brilliant, the kind of smart that has the answer to every question. Gorgeous, the kind of beautiful that looks as good in a ripped Carhartt jacket and Dr. Martens as in a ballgown. And she was caring, the kind of person who would answer your phone call in a hurricane.
Becca was from Salt Lake City and had not spent much time in Los Angeles. Perhaps ironically, we had this in common. Nonetheless, I was her go-to for local information on the city.
Once I graduated, she spent time with me back in Long Beach. My charade, as her wealth of Los Angeles information, was doomed from the start, exposed during a particularly brutal bout of freeway traffic. Sitting at the bottleneck where the 10 Freeway meets the 405, Becca asked me whether I had been to the Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. With the glow of taillights illuminating my obvious answer in the negative, she insisted that we go.
So off we went, with Becca expertly navigating the streets that I was supposed to have known by now. The Last Bookstore proved more interesting for her in its vinyl collection than in its volume of volumes. She perused grotesque album covers while I investigated the indie art studios upstairs. We reconnected for a kitschy Instagram flick under the store’s arch of books.
The experience made me realize that I had much to learn about Los Angeles from this Utah girl.
She moved back to Salt Lake City after she finished school at UC Santa Barbara and we began dating long-distance. Every month, Becca would visit me in Long Beach, and like clockwork, she would take me into L.A. It got to the point where she was my tour guide to the city that I grew up next to.
On one outing, we packed a couple of poke bowls and headed to the Hollywood Bowl to see Weezer and Alanis Morissette. When the former’s song “Beverly Hills” was played, my mind drifted to what life would look like if I did in fact live in Beverly Hills, and I was “rollin’ like a celebrity.” In my visions of the future, Becca was with me.
Another outing had us deep in the bowels of the popular Melrose Trading Post. Flanked by overpriced band tees and 20-somethings who somehow managed to all look like the same type of hipster, we hunted for bargains. I picked up a briefcase of all things, for 20 bucks, for my shiny new job in Santa Monica. Money well spent. Becca ended up inevitably with some vintage sweater bearing a college logo. “I’m gonna crop it,” she would later announce. (What’s a flea market purchase without a tasteful amount of midriff?)
Becca showed me a side of L.A. that I had never explored.
Maybe the two of us had run our course. There is only so much time realistically that a relationship can last when its participants are 700 miles apart. We began to bicker more frequently, sometimes it felt like just for the sake of it. She planned a trip out to L.A. for us to assess how our relationship would move forward.
I picked her up from Los Angeles International Airport, and we headed to Santa Monica. Dinner was hand-rolled sushi, nice cocktails and a lot of “I” statements. Then I made my first L.A. decision in our relationship. We walked to the Santa Monica Pier.
As with many clichés, there is something comfortable about an oceanfront boardwalk. The sounds of laser guns from the nearby arcade join the predictable arc of the Ferris wheel in something that feels between nostalgic and therapeutic. I woefully underestimated the difficulty of the rigged three-point basketball shootout, and she, likewise, misjudged her stomach’s resilience after we went on an irresponsibly fast rotating roller coaster. We strolled the length of the pier, people-watching, then I took her hand in mine.
Amid the chaos of children screaming, buzzers ringing and neon lights blinking, we felt a level of certainty — a kind of quiet calm that I haven’t felt before.
In that moment, we were never so sure.
The author is a freelance writer and media professional living in Long Beach. His byline has appeared in Business Insider, Yahoo! and other publications.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
