Beverly Hills Knee

 Some people get Tennis Elbow, and some get Swimmer’s Ear, but I have Beverly Hills Knee.

I was sharing a single bedroom in a small ranch house next to the I-405 in Venice Beach. My portion of the rent was $450.00 a month. Although I had a vehicle, it took longer for me to brave freeway traffic to my job in Beverly Hills in my car than it took for me to bicycle along the famous Santa Monica Beach and up through the ritzy city blocks of Wilshire Blvd. 

The view was better by bike, and being able to zoom past infamous locations seen on screen throughout my childhood was one of the only positives of being exiled from Oregon. 

When you’re in your 20’s you have no limits to what you can physically do. I was not into sports, but I did love cycling and rollerblading and at that point in my life I was lean, tan and strong. So rather than sit in traffic, unlike the vast population in Los Angeles, I often chose to commute by bike to work. This was about 2 years after losing 90 pounds, and I was still determined to keep the pounds off by living as actively in my daily life as possible but the drivers in LA had absolute hostility and sometimes a smidge of homicidal spite for any cyclist in the way of their black Mercedes Benz.

Despite the unfriendly environment, I didn’t wear a helmet. I didn’t have reflective gear. I did not use any lights even while biking at night through areas that were so rough the White Castle employees were behind plexiglass. I wore short skirts that went well above the knee and carried only a purse slung over my shoulder while I streaked past powder blue lifeguard stations, the amusement park on the pier and breezed by all the ultra-high end businesses I would never be able to afford to patronize. I felt like a clever ghost in the machine of wealth who had found a way to move freely between the barricades of status and celebrity to somehow exist amongst them, unseen and unnecessary but breathing their same rare air.

One particular afternoon I was upon arrival, cycling north up Wilshire towards Whole Foods where I worked the closing shift at the seafood counter. At the traffic intersection, I crossed over via the crosswalk when I had the pedestrian light, when a truck in the other direction made a right turn into the crosswalk that I was cycling through. It struck me on my right leg and knocked me off my bike onto the asphalt. The person who hit me did the right thing by stopping and asking if I needed medical attention. But because I was more embarrassed about my skirt flying up when I fell, I shooed him away and declined help, only collecting the business card of the Fire Safety company that employed him and flitting off as quickly as possible.

I was not thinking clearly- I was stunned by the impact and also didn’t want to be late for work and I was also uninsured so I did not want to go for any ambulance rides. I just needed to pick up my bike, which was not damaged at all, and carry on. 

It wasn’t until I’d put on my hairnet and white smock that I started shaking uncontrollably. One of my cohorts behind the meat counter, Peter, told the manager I was pretty shaken up and they both encouraged me to just clock out and go to the emergency room. Peter was given permission to drop me off at the illustrious Cedars Sinai in Beverly Hills and promised to come pick me up after his closing shift around midnight. 

I was placed in my own medical bay with a curtain and a TV blaring CNN news. It did not seem like the hospital of the stars; it looked fairly standard for the place that took in Kanye after his accident, Courtney Love and Dave Gahan’s overdoses, and Martin Lawrence’s mental breakdown. Elizabeth Taylor got her radiation treatment there, and Bob Barker died on the table somewhere in the building I was checked into. It was another checked box in my Hollywood Celebrity tour, after Santa Monica Beach and hiking up to the Hollywood sign on the hill, this was another stop in the glamorous city of sin.

The nurse put a warm blanket on me, gave some over the counter pain meds and a technician wheeled in a mobile X-ray cart and took images of my right knee, which was bruised and scraped, as were parts of my hands and my left elbow. I was still not feeling the effect of an impact on the frame- the soreness all over would happen tomorrow, the nurse told me. I was in a daze, and was somehow able to walk out of the ER with a knee brace and the actual images of my knee, which was not broken. Just the cartilage was torn, and not badly enough to require surgery. 

Peter returned after closing out the meat department with my bicycle in the back of his Toyota hatchback. I hadn’t interacted with him much until the last few weeks because his English didn’t seem very good and he was quieter than anyone else at the meat and seafood counter. But he had been quietly watching me the entire summer from the far end of the display case, and had witnessed one of the other employees in the meat department put his hands on me in a quick attempt to grope me at the time clock where he thought nobody would see. 

Peter told the manager what he saw. Within hours Moose, the offending employee, was fired, and I felt really guilty about it because we had been friends and I didn’t feel threatened, just uncomfortable. Also, I felt terrible because he was a tall, giant Black man living in a halfway house on release from incarceration and had it hard enough as it was. I would not have wanted him to be fired but there's no question that in Beverly Hills, even a charmer like Moose, who all the repeat shoppers loved, was easily categorized as a threat and was also easily discarded. 

When Moose was dismissed, of course Peter made himself a little more friendly with me, as it would be just him and me closing out the meat and seafood counters as part of the closing shift. He was shy, slight, and pale with blue eyes and straw blonde hair- a very stereotypical looking Polish immigrant roughly my age who was looking for a better life than his small village in post-Soviet Europe. He nodded whenever I spoke to him, but I wasn't sure how much he understood. Moose usually stationed himself next to me and the doorway so with him gone, Peter was able to talk to me in a manner that was more quiet and suited to his nature, not having to talk over the boisterous and now unemployed Moose.

So it was natural that when I came in to work the closing shift looking white as a sheet, discombobulated and shivering Peter noticed right away and said something to the manager. I didn't see it as a tattle- he was friendly with the manager on the basis of them both being first generation immigrants in LA- the manager was Turkish, and a decent guy. Like many others in LA, the immigrant population were hustlers for their collective dream of living in the promised land of America. I identified with their experience as aliens in LA because although I was American, I was also raised in a culturally different society. One that was closed to outsiders and had a different set of values, seemingly, than everyone else. I didn’t belong anywhere.

In LA, if you didn't inherit money or real estate and just showed up there to work, you quickly realized that housing is completely unaffordable for the standard unskilled laborer on a full-time wage.  A resident can't get anywhere unless they have a car. I did attempt the public transit system once and only once, and I remember being the only Gringa on the bus and being late for work that day. It was still faster to bike anywhere in LA than it was to drive and I have given up wondering why more people in LA aren't on their bikes- they have sunny weather year round but prefer to use their status symbols for transportation, at all costs.

Peter's hustle was working the closing shift at Whole Foods, and then working the front desk overnight at a nice hotel not far from the store and then sleeping for a few hours in the mornings before doing it all again. That's why he had dark circles under his eyes and seemed bleary some days. In working 70+ hours a week, Peter was able to pay for his own tiny studio apartment in a bland two story stucco unit on a dirty typical iron-gate lined LA neighborhood off Olympic Blvd. Barely.

I came to find this out while we chatted as he drove me back to my own mess in Venice. I told him about what had gotten me to LA and how I was not really in a safe place and was preparing to return to start a new life with my child in Portland. He heard my story and it made him even more protective, even if he couldn’t convey it in broken English. From the perspective of another person who was all alone in a giant metropolis and from a strange land, he saw that I was dangerously vulnerable even when I didn't want to see myself that way. 

We both knew that if we disappeared, no family was coming to look for us, and we couldn't just simply go home when things got scary.  

Immigrants and refugees are a hardy type of human, and they are also incredibly kind and generous specifically because they also likely had to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive at some point, and would like to be able to offer that in return. Peter and I were both in our own sparse, tiny lifeboats bobbing up and down in turbulent waters far away from everything we knew and we held hands in the storm for a brief period of time.

The accident occurred just as I was about to transfer to the Whole Foods in the Pearl District in Portland. I had been living in Portland for 5 years until my sentencing and exile the previous March and I wanted to go back to what I considered to be my home. Not Utah.  In the weeks before being hit in a crosswalk, I had managed to convince the Multnomah County DA office to change the terms of my probation so that I could return to Portland to finish out the sentence where I could be with my son. I had agreed to do so only if I would submit to a higher standard of probation than I had originally agreed to as part of my plea, which had included agreeing to leave Oregon for 2 years. I was granted a return to Oregon if I was on Supervised Probation. Their reasoning was because my son's father- the "victim" in their case, had made so many allegations about me being violent, deranged, dangerous and threatening, the probation office wanted to watch me more closely.  I got into the whole situation because of his hyperbolic claims in the first place, and they were still reverberating months later because we were still legally married.  This circumstance was deemed as having a high potential for me to re-offend. I think that if I had not spent the better part of 2002 thousands of miles away from him, I very well might have been badgered into re-offending, which is what my husband wanted. 

 I had time alone, no money, no home, no family, no child, no rescue, no support to figure out where I was going to go after burning my entire life to the ground in Portland in one day.  During my time in LA, my son's father had agreed to get the paperwork together and push the divorce through. But any time I asked about the status, he deferred and had some story for why he didn't have the paperwork ready. He had even tried to convince me to stay married, but live separately. This was the Jehovah's Witness cult coming through yet again. He was so afraid of divorce that he had to destroy me rather than allow me to divorce him, and he was still holding the keys in the marriage.

Even after everything with the physical fight, the arrest and my unambiguous message for the last 2 years that I wanted a divorce, I wanted to leave, I didn't love him and I needed to be free, this man was still arguing with me, and trying everything to slow walk my emancipation. Having taken my child from me, slandered me to family and friends in ways that destroyed relationships and bankrupt me into homelessness was punishment for a wayward wife, not grounds for divorce- he still wanted to stay married. 

So the other reason I was returning to Portland was to figure out how to divorce him and get some kind of custodial rights established, as he was not responsible enough, even on his best days, to take care of a 5 year old on a full-time basis. I knew that I was returning to another giant battle, but this time I had a solid job with health insurance and a shot at getting to have my son back with me in some way. 

I had spent 7 months away from my boy- only getting one week with him in August. He was growing so fast and he really needed his mom to come back and help him brush his teeth and get to school on time, which was something his father had proven repeatedly unable to consistently do in that period of time when he was fully in charge of Oscar.  His father had threatened to take Oscar from me if I left him, but after he accomplished that, he started complaining over the phone to me about how hard it was to be a parent, while I was barely surviving and homeless in LA. His attitude began to turn even more menacing as he began talking about how I had victimized him so much for making him have to shoulder the responsibility of a small child all by himself while also not letting me have any custody of Oscar. 

Never mind the fact that he was sitting at home full-time on an unemployment claim he'd been able to extend repeatedly to avoid having to get a job. He was also having a great time exploring the local Burning Man crowd while marketing himself as a cool single dad. He had co-opted the friendships I had made, and told them all that I'd abandoned my child and ran off to be a druggie in LA. 

All good liars know to take a kernel of truth and then plant false narratives around it. Truthfully, if any of my friends or family had offered me a safe place to stay with my son, some protection from my ex,  and maybe a little financial help getting on my feet by myself, I would not have found myself where I was, marooned and isolated hundreds of miles away. There were so many people who saw what he was doing, and few stepped up for any meaningful help because my husband had a way of verbally pummeling anyone who tried until they didn't know what to think. It shouldn't be a mystery why I sought escape with strangers who my husband couldn't get to and manipulate.  

7 months was long enough for him to prove what kind of parent he really was. When Oscar had visited me, I saw his filthy teeth, unkempt hair and outgrown dirty clothes that I had bought him before I was exiled. No matter how much he coached Oscar to lie about his home circumstances, I knew well enough what it was like to be taken care of by that unemployable idiot. 

My return to Portland had also upset Bob- as he really believed the story he'd used to trick me into coming here to get away from my husband in LA would work forever. I was tired of being manipulated and lied to by charlatans and takers- this Bob fooled me just like my husband had, and I was the sucker left holding all the responsibility while both of them continue operating in a fantasy. Because of this friction at the Venice room we shared, I had been trying not to be there at all. I had paid up the last of my rent and was just waiting out the clock before I could load up my car and U-Haul it back to Oregon. 

Telling any part of this to a co-worker is daunting, but I did manage to explain enough of it to Peter for him to understand the precarious position I was living in at this moment in time. He unloaded my bike in the driveway of my room in Venice and reluctantly left me there. 

So in the last days of my exile in LA, I had a sore knee and some extra pain to carry around for just a bit longer. One of my customers was an heiress who knew a lawyer who could help me with the cost of the ER visit, as my insurance wasn't valid at the time of the accident. I think she paid the legal fee, which worked out to be meager, as the company that was responsible simply paid the bill after I proved in Portland that my right lateral knee meniscus was torn as a result of being hit by their truck in a crosswalk. I’m so grateful to her- I wish I remembered her name because she was able to take that burden off me so I could focus more on the impeding legal battle that was lying ahead of me like a giant stupid but armed ogre at a bridge crossing. 

Peter had allowed me to recuperate for a few days before offering me an alternative to staying another night at the Venice house. So for a week or so, instead of biking or driving with a sore knee, Peter drove me to work so I could complete my 2 weeks and he would take me to his hotel job after work and put me in one of the empty rooms to sleep. When he finished his shift, he took me to his tiny apartment and let me use his shower and cook myself a baked potato while he slept. It was a secret thing he was doing for me. Bob didn't know where I was, neither did our co-workers. It was done out of kindness and because although Peter didn't have much, he did have something I really needed at the time: safety.

Is there any mystery as to why I have learned to trust strangers over family? My big giant Mormon family knew where I was, knew what I was up against and were content sitting in a circle talking about what a tragedy I was rather than pool resources to help me get out of danger. 

Some people get injuries from sports and I think it's such a privilege to get your scars that way. Comfortable people with expensive gear doing their best to win some score letting hubris outpace their respect for gravity get injured as an inconvenience and are able to get fixed up to go on doing the same thing until they develop repetitive injuries from enjoying their leisure sports with such frequency that doctors have names for the voluntary damage. 

The pain I have in my knee 24 years later was not earned on a vacation down a slope or at an all-inclusive resort or even while on the job. It was earned while falling down every ladder rung on my dogged climb out of the depths of Zion.