West Indies

According to some official-looking maps on some official- looking websites, I live in Hillcrest. This is a problem for me. I drove 3000 miles to live in North Park. And when I found a small house no more than a hundred yards due north of Balboa Park, I planted my flag and happily signed what passes for a lease in these parts. Warning signs began appearing shortly thereafter. For a while, I ignored what the natives were telling me. It was not until a frantic Wikipedia search put me on the wrong side of the Florida Canyon that I realized that, like Columbus, I had run aground on the wrong piece of land.

This would not be a problem had I merely “moved.” It’s easy to move a few miles down the street or to a different neighborhood. Nobody is going to mistake it for an epic feat of self-assertion. You don’t even need a reason. When your friends ask why you are moving, you can tell them, “I don’t like the shrubs” or “The windows are too square.

But I didn’t move to North Park, I migrated. There is a difference. At some point you cross the threshold from moving to migrating. It’s hard to say where the threshold lies...some- where around the eighth Taco Bell meal or the fifteenth rest-stop cigarette break or the fortieth lap through the radio dial. And you realize — as you see Kansas disappearing in the rear view mirror, framed by all the boxes of stuff you can’t live without — that you are going to need a good reason for this.

North Park gave me a reason. It offered the next act in my hastily written life. I left Florida an economic refugee, a frustrated artist. And North Park, which I knew from past visits to San Diego, is the place where disaffected transplants go.

That’s not to say it’s some kind of clichéd cosmopolitan melting pot. It’s not a mash-up of other neighborhoods or a mash-up of other cities. It’s the place for people who got stuck but have too much pride to admit they’re okay with that. It’s the home of small-business owners who look forward to finally turning a profit next month. It’s the refuge of those who have grown tired of apologizing when asked, “What do you do?” but still do it out of habit.

North Park isn’t the neighborhood that tourists visit, it’s the neigh- borhood where spiritual tourists live. In a region defined by a sunny and carefree attitude, North Park has a hundred- thousand chips on its shoulder. It has enough grime to be authentic, enough crime to be intriguing, enough bars to be intoxicating, enough coffee shops to be fast, enough streets named after states to be laughable, enough streets named after numbers to be rational, enough neon to be fake, enough hardship to be real, enough unemployed writers to be overnarrated, enough fresh blood to be rewritten. And it has hustlers...lots of hustlers. Enough to feel like home to somebody whose parting shot to his family was, “I’ll figure it out when I get there.”

North Park announces itself with a sign...a wonderfully tacky, neon sign. Its glowing Art Deco style belies the fact that it, like so many others in the neighborhood, is a recent arrival. Self- consciously, it stands in tribute to the North Park signs of bygone eras. Those past signs hung from streetcar wires, welcoming travelers from the East. But the streetcars stopped running and the travelers abandoned the old route long ago. The new sign, without its audience, is like a dying star in a galaxy of desperate explorers — less magnificent than it must have once seemed, yet still exerting an intense gravitational pull on people who don’t have backup plans. That’s what makes it so fabu- lous. Like the people it represents, it has enough energy and nos- talgia to say in the same breath, “Look at what I am” and “Look at what I used to be.”

North Park has a name that asks rhe- torical questions to your faraway friends. Ques- tions such as, “My city has a park, does yours?” and “My city has a park that is so big that neighborhoods are named by their location relative to it. Does yours?”

It has rough edges and smooth talkers. On Idaho Street it has a man who — as he was leaving a woman’s apartment at 2:30 pm on a weekday afternoon — stopped his 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue in front of her balcony, rolled down the window, and cranked up Tyrone Davis’s “Are You Serious?” Thanks to him, it also has a six- or seven-year-old boy who, after seeing his mother being serenaded, now knows how to tell a woman that love songs have been written about the way he feels for her.

Like any good American, suburbia is in my blood. Growing up in the swampy part of Florida, my ears are calibrated to the sound of nighttime insects. The difference between my hot and cold moods is the ten degrees the temperature drops in the backyard when the sun goes down. The precise amount of space I need to think is the distance between the 1950s-era houses in my old river-adjacent, 1950s-era subdivision. Insects, backyards, space between houses — these are not things you find easily in San Diego. They are tales from the Old World, fables I use to strike awe in the natives. They are features that went dormant in North Park long ago.

But if you go back far enough, you’ll find them. Go back...before the time when North Park represented the outskirts of the city (and, thus, was suburban in a shallow sense of the word). Before the first ill-advised lemon tree was planted in its dry soil. Before San Diego was stolen from the Mexicans. Before North America was “discovered.” Before Pangaea. Keep going back... until you reach Pan-suburbia, when all the earth’s land fit together in a perfectly sprawling mass of homogenized splendor. That is where North Park began. Only with time’s relentless nudging did this land- locked neighborhood evolve from its natural suburban design into a slightly more restless, slightly less spacious, slightly less insect- populated form of terra firma. Soon after, there was a traffic jam on University

One of the good things about migrating is that the land you encounter no longer has history until you assign one to it. Columbus understood this intuitively, long before there were French postmodernists and colonial- studies professors to blame him for it. And so, given such creative license, I could make North Park’s story my own. I had only to take ownership of its history, to wind its origins into my origins, to declare its narrative the subject of my pen.

This is no small thing. Ownership provides spiritual comfort for me, as it does for all true suburbanites. It is, for lack of a better term, our religion. It silences our questions of purpose and provides us with a moral code. In possession, we find our sacrament, taken in homage to the suburban earth. Of course, possession rarely appears in such transcendent form. More often, it masks itself in profane garb, like shopping (which, conveniently enough, North Park has, too). But just as it is ownership that calls us to leave our houses on Sundays and flock to the mall, it is ownership that allows us to feel like we are in control of the land, to know that we will not be swallowed by the city’s canyons, to feel safe in the assumption that we will make it from Monday to Friday without losing control of our lives. And North Park is, for all its proximity to the grand and noisy, a neighborhood that can be owned with little effort.

It can be owned because ownership is the organizing principle of the suburbs, and North Park is a restless version of the suburbs. North Park evolved accord- ing to the suburban blueprint. It is easy to forget this — there does seem to be a lot of hustle and bustle and milling about. But the pencil marks remain, and at nighttime, when all things can be seen more clearly for what they were, you can make out the initial sketch. Like the ocean seven miles west, the suburban sea sprawls out relentlessly. It consumes North Park as it consumes every community from here to the horizon. All you need is for the people to get out of the way long enough for you to see it.

Once you see it, the service begins. North Park holds nightly com- munion for those who seek ownership, for the spiritually inclined among us. I, for one, am pious. I have driven its potholed streets at night, when the porch lights of the Craftsman homes on Pershing lit my pilgrimage like luminarias guiding me to Midnight Mass. I have crisscrossed North Park Way at hours so late left turns are de facto legal on any street. I have stood on my roof and watched the streetlamps flicker, mirrored by the blinking lights of los suburbios mexicanos. I have learned which of its impeccably straight roads will give me a mountain backdrop and which will dead-end me into Balboa Park. This is how I discovered it. This is how I translated its odd sounds and gestures, its strange dances and foreign customs. This is how I found within its soul my own suburban religion. These are the terms through which I fell in love with it. This is how I came to own North Park.

A few days ago, I was sitting in a nondescript strip mall bar — the calling card of subur- bia. A new acquaintance, with whom I had just finished sharing a pint of the cheapest tolerable beer, asked me, “You were free to choose anywhere to live, and you chose San Diego. Did you have a second choice?”

Perhaps it was more of a comment than a question. But I made up an answer anyway, because it’s good to appear fully adult in one’s preparations. (This is why Columbus, jerk that he was, wouldn’t admit that the land he bumped into was not the East Indies.) The real answer, of course, is “no.” I didn’t have a city-in-waiting as my second choice.

Because the truth is, I chose a neighborhood, not a city. And the truth is, if I were capable of formulating a Plan B, I never would have made it there.