32951347933_4e75ae4bd8_b

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/amusements-among-dead/"></div>I’m in the Mountain View Mausoleum with Elise, my 17-year-old daughter, and 50 other people who are also having the <a href="https://unboundproductions.org/">Wicked Lit</a> experience — an ongoing Halloween theatrical series I’ve been addicted to for many years.
It is weirdly delicious to see a well-executed performance of W. W. Jacobs’s Monkey’s Paw  in the bowels of a mausoleum on a chilly October evening. Even more delicious is that the Mountain View Mausoleum is located on Calaveras street, a word that translates from Spanish as “human skull.”
As a child I had an unhealthy attraction to the supernatural. Once, while waiting for my mom at Boy’s market on Crenshaw, I picked up an Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology and the first line of the first story began, “Don’t put this book down.  I’m watching you and I have a gun pointed at you. You can’t see me but if you put the book down you’re dead.”
I panicked, as a 10-year-old would do.  After finishing with the story I was certain my mother wouldn’t buy the book, the one requirement for me to stay alive.  I expected to die until I forgot that I was supposed to die.
My mother never considered that her interest in horror and the macabre might not be the best thing for me. I was just drawn to the grim and grotesque and my mother was my enabler. She took me to the Centinela Drive-In to see Night of the Living Dead. Throughout the movie, I kept looking, straining to see through the darkness for ravenous zombies lurching towards me.
I managed to survive that night, but some years later my mother decided that we should stand in line at the Egyptian theater for hours to see The Exorcist. The film opens with the eerie sound of bees and a shot of the demon Pazuzu. I was terrified. This black dude sitting next to us screams “Fuck this!” and bails out of the crowded theater. I desperately wanted to follow him, bolt the hell out of there, but my mother wouldn’t have tolerated any of that silliness. Luckily, nothing else in the profane and vomit-spewing film was as frightening as that broken field run for safety and sanity.
The high mark of horror for me was the literary deliciousness of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker’s Victorian restraint made for compelling sexual reverberations and graveyard dread that no movie could express.  I was so lost in the novel that I put a rosary above my bed and garlic salt below it.
The “fellas” — friends of my older brothers — who would come over to our house and drink Mickey Big Mouths and smoke massive amounts of weed often opined about life. They discussed the white man, the Vietnam War, and occasionally H.P. Lovecraft.  These guys, though buzzed most of the time, were worldly and well-read. They talked about the mind-blasting merits of Lovecraft’s horror. But they all also called out his disturbing opinions about black folks and the fear of female genitalia. When I read Lovecraft it scared the shit out of me because everything the fellas said about his race hatred was absolutely right.
I kept that in mind as Elise and I walked about the Mountain View Mausoleum, the gothic plays resolving themselves, and I felt almost light hearted. The horror stories that terrorized me as a child now seemed reassuring. What provokes my sleepless nights now is unease about a white nationalist president and his tiki-torch carrying supporters. I can only hope that my fears and worries of what an unbalanced Commander-In-Chief might do will become like the horror stories of my childhood: grim amusement for an evening’s pleasure.
<h5><a href="http://WICKED LIT: THE CHIMES &amp; THE CORPSE 10th Annual Wicked Lit Production Final two weeks! NOW – November 10, 2018 Mountain View Mausoleum">Wicked Lit: The Chimes &amp; The Corpse by Unbound Productions is running at the Mountain View Mausoleum through November 10.</a></h5>
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Amusements Among the Dead

tervalon-gold

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/in-memoriam/adventures-life-food-jgold/"></div>I knew you since high school, hanging in your 
Mom’s library at Dorsey
We both kicked it on Hollywood corners 
Saw the black dude with curlers and shower cap 
Miming to opera records, and them freaks 
And those bookstores
Remember a lifetime later you started calling 
Me your young friend though I was 2 years older 
And we started to roll through your LA and I learned 
You ate everything.
We were at another place where Hollywood agents ate. 
And the salmon mousse tasted weird 
salt that wouldn’t dissolve, you said it was fine 
Until you tried it and said, don’t eat it 
That’s not salt, it’s glass; the jar had imploded
Damn…so weird and on the way home you made 
That right on La Cienega and the police pulled us 
Over and you had those expired tags and went all Falstaff 
On those rollers and one touched his gun and 
Then they towed the truck and we were stuck. 
Under a freeway overpass at midnight in a gangster hood 
Until Laurie rescued us.
Remember that time I was on the phone with Jinghuan in China 
You noticed police behind us 
Expired tags no thing at all 
Until they ordered me out the truck at gun point handcuffed 
Us both on Beverly Blvd, I politely suggested 
That your were a famous food writer, you whispered 
Don’t bother they won’t listen 
Finally they realized that you weren’t an escaped 
Felon who shot at cops and they let us go to 
That seafood joint
Remember those tasteless fat olives that were really water-bugs 
And that cold fresh blood soup?
Remember those not so great crickets and that 
Mescal bar at 4am in Guadalajara where we LA writers 
enjoyed Tapatío generosity
Remember the Rose Parade at Sumi’s, and that frigid horizontal rain, 
Our brood riding in the truck bed to and fro and there we ate cinnamon 
Rolls while Elise and Leon broke into a break dance then home for 
Black-eyed peas to celebrate the New Year
Remember Santa Barbara where Jinghuan and 
I were to be married and you were the best man and 
Signed your name where hers was supposed to be and 
The justice of the peace thought we were getting hitched
Remember awards and books 
And travels and endless brilliant meals at your 
House.
Remember the travails and happiness of 
Family and friends.
Remember that you belong to Los Angeles to us All 
In your singular herculean generosity 
We remember it All and we will remember you. 
As we look at Los Angeles and ourselves through Gold eyes.
And I remember the truth: I never ate better than at your house.
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Adventures in Life and Food With JGold

litfest-pasadena

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/litfest-pasadena-got-rolling/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jervey-tervalon">Jervey Tervalon</a>, Literary Director of LitFest Pasadena
<a href="http://litfestpasadena.org/">LitFest Pasadena</a> came into being because I used to go to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference when it was fun by the late Oakley Hall, my former professor in UC Irvine’s MFA program. As a writer it was what I looked forward to more than almost anything else in my literary life. Oakley started Squaw Valley Writers Conference, I was told, because he wanted to see his writer friends and this was a good way of doing it. That sense of community was genuine and cathartic. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/litfest-pasadena-got-rolling/#more-4116" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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How LitFest Pasadena Got Rolling

What You Know Good

<h4>Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six&nbsp;books including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is&nbsp;Monster’s Chef.</h4>

Jervey Tervalon

Chester, the Filmmaker

Life Lessons for a Young Writer

New Pants

A Good Man with a Very Wet Brain

Mama Passed but Nobody Died as Far as I Know

Jervey Tervalon was born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, and got his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine. He is the author of six&nbsp;books including Understanding This, for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club’s New Voices Award. Currently he is the Executive Director of “Literature for Life,” an educational advocacy organization, and Creative Director of The Pasadena LitFest. His latest novel is&nbsp;Monster’s Chef.