Chapter Sixteen
At the Americana
There was a time, I’m told, a few decades before I was born, when Los Angeles was proud to be a sprawling network of interconnected suburbs, a small nation of bedrooms and over-chlorinated pools. And the occasional piano bar, which today would play karaoke from a computer. General Motors had successfully rid the streets of those communist streetcar contraptions, and freewheeling V-8s as big as boats with rag tops sailed the endless freeways.
When I had time on my hands, as I almost always did between scams and misadventures, I got into the history of L.A. And as with any topic I toyed with for very long, I’d collected a junkyard full of facts for which I had no earthly use.
The notion of neighborhood, never strongly rooted, went bye-bye as the last trol
