My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White

1. Photograph

1 Photograph this story begins with a photograph. Or, rather, a curious circumstance surrounding the composition of a photograph. I’m looking down now at the black-and-white image in my 1986 high school yearbook, having retrieved the album, encased in its protective plastic jacket, from the uppermost shelf of my most remote back hallway closet in Boca Raton, Florida. It seems strange that the yearbook has managed to stick doggedly with me over the past twenty years, given my cross-continent peregrinations since graduating from Granada Hills High School in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. It’s open at my side, the pages unyellowed, scarcely worse for the wear. Yet here it is! This must mean something. That having achieved a near seamless and deliberate escape from the smog-choked Valley of my childhood, I have clung to this remnant of those faraway days, as I suppose many of us do for all the obvious nostalgic reasons, and for other less explicable reasons—the reasons, perhaps, most worthy of contemplation. “Undefeated in league: leads to city playoffs” the caption reads just below the small photograph, the varsity basketball team photograph at the upper-left corner of the page. There I am. Fourth from the left. An unsmiling, altogether too serious expression on my face. All twelve of us teammates wear the same sober expression, as if we had discussed it beforehand. Okay, nobody smile. This is serious. We’re ballers. But I can’t remember any such orchestration. What I do remember is the photographer instructing us to stand in a curve around the midcourt circle, the school’s seal and motto, “Home of the Highlanders,” emblazoned in white, green, and black on the glossy hardwood before us. The coach and 2 • My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White assistant coach pose paternally at either end. I remember the photographer looking down into the viewfinder of his fancy camera, then looking up at us again, gazing toward us for a moment without saying anything, as if he has noticed something troubling through the lens but isn’t quite sure how to address the problem. Recognizing the photographer’s discomfiture , our graying coach, Bob Johnson, a man as mild as his name, breaks his pose and peers over toward his players, taking us in. “Okay, I think we better mix it up a little over here. This doesn’t look so good,” I can remember him saying, giving audible expression to what was certainly on the poor photographer’s mind. A quick look about and his meaning is clear. The five black players on our squad all stand at one side (I can’t quite remember which side), while the rest of us had congregated together on the other side of our semicircle. Coach is right. It doesn’t look so good. I don’t remember this as a particularly tense or dramatic moment. We all pretty much laughed it off as we mixed up our ranks. It took a mere moment to arrange a satisfactorily integrated tableau. There was some horsing around, some tugging at one another’s arms and jerseys to redistribute the real estate. We looked once again toward the camera, affecting our too serious, earnestly intimidating expressions. The photographer, appeased, snapped the photo and we were done. We headed toward the mildewed locker room to change out of our home game jerseys and green rip-away sweat pants—which seemed fancy and even venerable to me at the time—and into our more comfortable tanks and shorts, threadbare cotton. Time for practice. What a funny coincidence, I remember thinking. That all of us white players and Sam, our tall and talented Thai-American player, gathered together to one side of the frame, while our black teammates gathered together at the other side. There was little, if any, racial strife on our team. Certainly nothing overt. So what a funny coincidence. Still, if it were merely a coincidence, if the occasion were so arbitrary and insignificant, then why do I remember the scene so vividly after all of these years? It must have meant more to me at the time than I remember it having meant, if this makes any sense. Yes, we often know (don’t we?) more than we know that we know. A part of me, that is, must have Photograph • 3 recognized something emblematic in this fleeting...