My parents got divorced when I was 8. My mother moved out of our house in Bell Gardens, which was less than a block away from the LA River to a house in Bell, on the other side of the LA River, but again only about a block away from the river. So the river channel connected the two halves of my family and the concrete riverbed was the closest path back and forth. There were no parks close to my houses so the riverbed was the only real open space and served as the neighborhood playground for me and my older brother.
Everything happened in the river channel. We played baseball, frisbee, and learned to throw boomerangs (where else would one be able to do that?). Sometimes we just would hang out under the Clara Street bridge. My brother and his friends learned about drugs under that bridge and I heard stories about them discovering the effects of sniffing glue, leading to other drugs that had strange and harmless enough sounding nicknames such as bennies, dexies, and goof balls. I remember the afternoon one of his friends had a bad trip and committed suicide by jumping off the bridge into the channel.
But there were also happy memories. Every time after a big rain (which seemed more common in my childhood than now) my friends and I would expectantly run to the river channel to see what kind of detritus had washed down stream from who knows where. Sometimes we would recover soccer balls, beach balls, or some other bonanza of poorly stowed toys that had originated in Commerce or Vernon. Other times we would just marvel and wonder how there could be so much water sometimes and so little at others. Oh, the water. Oh oh the water.
My original childhood home was eventually leveled and they put up a parking lot for the Bicycle Hotel and Casino. No, Bell Gardens was not paradise. But every year around my birthday I take my son back to Bell Gardens to revisit the places where my childhood memories were forged. Our first stop is usually that makeshift playground in the river channel where my son and I throw the frisbee for a while and I am taken back to those formative times once more. Some things don't change. Kids just need a little space and their imagination does the rest...
