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All For Love by Shauna Somers I demonstrate signs of the old woman I’ll become as I whip my arms in circles, scream at drivers who rev engines as I cross the street. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

All For Love
I walk Los Angeles, where the laying of pavement is an art form. I walk out of necessity: I’ve survived nine car accidents, received eighty-six parking tickets, blown out eight tires hitting curbs, locked my keys inside the car five times—once with the motor running.

I saunter in and out of produce stands on streets inhabited by old Jews who smell like overripe bananas. I walk to see the paprika-tainted roasted chickens, hung by the neck in the window of Haim’s poultry. To hear language: sausage-thick Russian spoken from the appliance repair shop, rolled-up-white-shirt Spanish, vying for work in front of Standard Brands Paint. For the city’s smells: morning scents of pancakes on griddles, eggs frying, toast burning. Evenings of boiling sweet peppered sauces seeped in marjoram, bay leaves, and vermilion-hued wines. I witness other feet: the woman wearing imitation patent leather loafers, dressed in a scratchy chicory-striped suit, snapping twenty-proof stained fingers, skipping to avoid cracks. The sugar-cane thin man with knees like street lamps, exiting the Post Office, chanting, "Why deny you are in a dictatorship when you know you are?"

I walk for community: the liquor store owner who sells me my daily libations—strong cup of breakfast tea, breads with thin crusts, sap-thick jams. "Still walking?" he asks. For the girls who paint nails, pray at short altars, mimic my shifting arms, and giggle in ripples as I pass. The hunched brown-vested man heaping newspaper clippings into his fire-hazard-filled garage—x91341, the Holocaust forever imprinted on his wrist. The ponytailed men drinking lattes curbside at Revival Cafe, reflecting each other in amber jeans, charred T-shirts, hi-tops untied.

I walk to avenge the death of my great-grandfather, Samuel Katz, who fed pigeons each Saturday while walking to Sinai Temple. He was run down by a freshly painted peony-blue Packard. I stalk in outrage: for my grandmother, Lilyan, shattered by a marshmallow-white untuned Toyota. Her canary crinoline dress was ripped at the waist, discolored by blood. "My nails were wet," the gum-chewing driver said.

I demonstrate signs of the old woman I’ll become as I whip my arms in circles, scream at drivers who rev engines as I cross the street. I climb ridges that outline the city, as I rebuke tarnished air-kisses from the rough lips of gardeners in trucks missing mufflers, plumbers behind schedule, men driving Porsches.

I walk in August to inhale pineapple-sweet sweat from flesh. To see waterfall-smooth men as they shoot hoops in schoolyards. To see melted words of love on sidewalks: Tito y Pena . . . Por Vida. I walk in September for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish day of redemption. I claim my sins when I hear the ashen-teared sounds from the Shofar, the ram’s antler being blown like a French horn.

I walk Los Angeles for lost love, memories cemented over, and prayer. This city is my point of reference, my ground, my home.

Profile
Shauna Somers, ever punctual, meets me at King’s Road Café. It’s a Beverly Boulevard coffee house that straddles, in every sense, the line between Hollywood and its hipper neighbor, West Hollywood. The place is trendy, crowded with the surgically augmented, the tattooed, and the beautiful—but it was my choice.

Shauna’s dressed in black except for a snappy-looking pair of lavender Hushpuppies. Sunglasses, white teeth, trim and toned figure, a hint of a tan—she’s still all LA. She doesn’t, however, pause even once to admire herself in the mirrors that line the cafe walls, and she’s not carrying a film script. Odd behavior for these parts. She calmly sips her herbal tea while the rest of us latte drinkers gawk at the three-car pile-up—BMW, Cherokee, and Datsun b210 (we can’t tell who’s at fault)—on the street outside.

Shauna is an original—poet, novelist, writer of short stories and screenplays. She’s also a performance artist and has an M.A. from the USC film school. Traveler, adventuress, feminist foot-soldier, she’s a Valley girl turned la woman who lives healthy and looks you in the eye when you speak. She has more friends than anyone I know. Her best friend is a septuagenarian. Shauna is just thirty. She is the busiest person I know, and the coolest.

—Wooten Lee

Bio

Shauna Somers
Place of residence: Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.
Birthplace: Los Angeles.
Grew up in: Encino.
Day job: Writer.
Education: B.S., University of Southern California. M.A., USC School of Cinema and Television.
Serial publications: Hair. Poetry Revival.
Awards: Millay Colony for the Arts Fellowship. Writer-in-Residence, Vermont Studio Center. Finalist, Adult Screenplay, Austin Film Festival.
Current project: A novel.
Favorite book: Whatever I’m reading.
Belief: Life is vibrant. Take the risks. Live your dreams.
Cravings: Life! Wandering!

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