Ask the Dust, part 1, a Romance

Look at that mountain

Look at those trees

Look at that bum over there, man

He's down on his knees

Look at these women

There ain't nothing like 'em nowhere -- Randy Newman, "I Love LA"

Established in 1908, Philippe's The Original is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles. PHOTO:KCS

In 1952, when I was 5-years-old, I fell in love.

We had arrived in California the previous year, having left Seattle where my sister, Mimi, and I were born. We first lived in Alhambra, then Monterey Park. Both towns were a short drive from downtown Los Angeles, whose retailers and restaurants served the surrounding communities.

My father had found employment at the downtown U.S. Post Office so we spent time together in that neighborhood, which is now considered historic. Times have changed. As Bob Dylan says, "A lot of water under the bridge, a lot of other stuff, too." Like gleaming high rises and freeways that will swallow you whole.

Still my memories remain the same, sweet and bitter, a romance that started when my Dad introduced me to a sandwich, which represented a place, time and eventually a history that has lingered in the right side of my brain, where I'm told feelings are stored, for more than 70 years!

Los Angeles, the city of Angels, the home of many towns, the place that defies place and defines a concept. Maybe it's simply the home of the Dodgers, those bums from Brooklyn, or the Lakers, although there are no lakes. A sports town with a famed Coliseum and one of the original NFL teams: the Rams, honored yet more often scorned as the Lambs by their own fans. 

Call it a beacon, a light that attracts dreamers wanting to be stars. The epicenter of the movies, the House of Hollywood: The Studios. Home of The Beach Boys and Good Vibrations, celebrated by musicians who flocked to Los Angeles in the 70s to record hits like California Dreamin', Hotel California and L.A. Woman.

It's a receiving station for foreign immigrants, many from south of the border, and domestic refugees from colder climes like my family, looking for a new start under the sun.

But it's really a desert, isn't it? When the Colorado River dries up, what do you got? In the meantime spread and build, spread and build, ad infinitum. 

There's a flip side to the fantastical L.A. coin, darkly described by mid-century L.A. noir writers like Raymond Chandler, John Cain and James Elroy, author of The Black Dahlia, based on a grisly real-life murder right here in LA River City. 

Author John Fante, according to some L.A.'s greatest literary icon, put it this way in his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust:

"Los Angeles, give me some of you. Los Angeles, come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town."

Boiled down, LA is a contradiction. She's a beautiful woman stripped naked by forces of greed, lust and gratuitous celebrity.

She's Gloria Swanson on the staircase in the movie Sunset Boulevard. She's Kim Kardasian on the runway. She's Faye Dunaway, impregnated by her own father, John Huston, in the movie Chinatown. She's the ill-fated wife of O.J., Nicole Brown Simpson. She is movie starlet-turned-political renegade Jane Fonda.

She's a victim and survivor. That's why I love her. Which is why, on a recent trip to Southern California, I had to visit the site of the most sensuously savory LA experience of my long-ago youth on the corner of N. Alameda and Ord streets, around the corner from Chinatown, a couple of blocks from Union Station. There, sits a sandwich joint called Philippe's The Original.

Is it not the lips and tongue that tastes love first? Add the work-shop romance of a sawdust-covered floor. 

"It's called a French Dip," said my Dad, naming a signature sandwich that helped build a town.

Opened in 1908 by a Frenchman named Philippe Mathieu, Philippe's holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles, and the place where the French Dip sandwich was invented. This latter claim remains arguable, due to a number of different and doubtless apocryphal stories.

In 1951 Mathieu told the LA Times that he dipped a sandwich roll into his beefy broth at the request of a customer. The sandwich eater's reaction was so positive that customers began asking to have their rolls likewise dipped in the juice. Another story explains how Mathieu, not one to waste food, dipped a stale bun into the broth, and hungry customers begged for more. Stale bread being the mother of invention.

From my first taste at Philippe's, I became a French Dip aficionado, a lover of juicy beef, that continued through my college years. Although I never returned to Philippe's, the place remained a delicious, distant memory, a first romance that never faded away. And strange though it is, over those years my personal consumption of beef had diminished to practically nil.

Yet the question remained: would she taste the same today? Would I experience a latent orgasmic sensation? What would it be like to find out? Desire plagued me when I saw on Facebook that Philippe's The Original was still operating in the same location at 1001 N. Alameda St. And the reviews sang like temptations to the soul.

"Amazing!" "Melt in your mouth!" "Indulge in the juicy, savory goodness!" I ignored any negative comments.

Woodcut print entitled Bunker Hill by CP Fels.

Christmas week, Barbara and I drove to Southern California to see our grandson Finn dance in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker presented by Pacific Festival Ballet at the Fred Kavu Theatre in Thousand Oaks. The performance was mesmerizing. We stationed ourselves in Barbara's hometown of Manhattan Beach, to visit family and long-time friends, while visions of Philippe's French Dip danced in my head.

Checking my iPhone, we were based a mere 23 miles from the legendary sandwich shop. "We must go there," I said to my wife, who has very little interest in French Dips. 

Amid our full schedule of walking, browsing and hanging out, I was able to convince her to join me on my date with destiny in the heart of old Los Angeles. She had expressed interest in seeing Angel's Flight, the historic funicular railway on Bunker Hill, based on a woodcut print by Cathy Fels (CP Fels) hanging on our dining room wall at home. 

The print, entitled Bunker Hill, shows a stately Victorian house with a faintly recognized version of L.A.'s iconic City Hall in the background. With imagination, you can see Angel's Flight.

"I've never been to Angels Flight," lamented my spouse. “I want to ride it.”

On the map, Bunker Hill is about one mile from Philippe's in the same historic district. I expected that following a late lunch, we could walk between the two. I was mistaken.

Due to a multitude of freeways that wind like giant snakes around and through the landscape of Los Angeles, intersecting, overpassing and looping from head to tail, a distance of 23 miles could consume 24 hours, if you don't know the off-ramps, toll routes, on-ramps, road codes, fast lanes and/or you go during rush hour. When is it not rush hour? 

Love is an awful plague -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The drive to downtown Los Angeles consumed a little more than one hour. As we drew closer, we were surprised to see numerous shining corporate high rises that neither of us remembered. The 110 Freeway circled to the right. We took the Broadway offramp, featuring several converging lanes -- outbound and inbound -- full of vehicles swimming like hungry koi who, unlike us, seemed to know where to find their next meal. 

Behind the wheel, I felt as though I had died and gone to Hell. Or at least Purgatory. My penance was to change lanes without incident. A few close calls, and we found ourselves in Chinatown. I recalled the final despairing line from the movie penned by screenwriter Robert Towne: "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."

Within a couple of minutes and three white-knuckle trips around the block, we discovered our destination. The sign atop the corner building read, Philippe The Original -- French Dipped Sandwiches. We pulled into the free-parking lot (for customers) in back. I climbed out of our Hyundai Santa Fe, stood erect and inhaled deeply, followed by a long slow exhale. The terror on my wife's face had subsided.

From here it would be all gravy. 

Next installment: The Full Monty experience at Philippe's, riding Angel's Flight and discovering The Last Book Store.