I HAD A FORTRESS ONCE IN PARADISE
When my brother was 5 and I was 7, my parents moved us to Paradise. We’d been living in the Los Angeles section known as Glendale. We lived at 521B Allen Avenue. (You never forget your address when you go off to school for the first time, do you?) It was a two-bedroom bungalow apartment. There was a driveway between the two parallel strips of postwar apartment units that opened in the back to a wide asphalt courtyard with a cement block fence at the rear and an incinerator up against that wall.
My brother Tom was always more adventuresome, so he learned how to run along the top of that wall and enjoyed taunting me from the top. He enjoyed it right up until his foot slipped and he ended up with a green fracture of his arm. After the pain was gone and the cast was set, he enjoyed getting everyone he knew or met to sign his cast. Tom strove to enjoy everything he did.
Once the cast was off, he figured out how to further bedevil my mother by inventing the “Bunkbed Launchpad.” This involved safety-pinning a white towel to the shoulders of your pajamas so it hung down in back like a terrycloth version of Superman’s cape. Then, using the flying powers of a white terrycloth towel, we would leap from the top bunk onto the mattress and piled pillows of the “guest bed.” And although we took off many times, I can say for certain that a towel is not a dependable aeronautic device. Indeed, it’s glide path resembles that of a brick.
It was only seven years after the Second World War, and peacetime life in Los Angeles was fraught with
