Pearl Mopeds 2014 - Present

Novel / Graphic Autobiography

It’s 2019, I’m Elora Alda-Nash, and I’m here to tell the story of when I was an aspiring writer in Los Angeles. It was four years ago, when Instagram was really new. My handle was @alligatorconsiousness. I used it to post picture of vintage cars. No, I didn’t know anything about fixing them up. There was one mechanic in this family as far as I knew (there are actually five). And that was Uncle Harvey. Harvey owned Pearl Mopeds in Silverlake. He wasn’t a normal person. As Crazy Eddie said, Harvey didn’t have to try to do things, he just moved. Like an icecube melting on a stove top. That’s why I moved here from Edmonds, Washington. To prove I myself had the quality of coolness that Harvey seeped into every piece of shit from the 70s he fixed up at Pearl Mopeds. The more I realized I will always be hopeless with machines, the more I realized I have control (ish) only over one mechanical body. And that is my own body. Which is how, at age 23, I started a romance with Harvey’s old pal, Crazy Eddie, if you can even call it that. And the bookseller by my restaurant, and a drugged-out muralist too. It’s normal white girl early 20s city glamour, except I couldn’t figure out how to make it joyful. Like on TV. So I made it like Bukowski did. I took to the typewriter. I stole it from my great grandpa’s house after he died. That’s how I ended up writing these stories, which can tell you a thing or two about LA. About the Alda Family blood. About how messy it feels trying to live like Bukowski- who is this dirty old man of a writer from the 60s- when you don’t have the heart for it. I swore I’d publish this book though. For the honor of Buskowski, and Me, and now Howard, RIP. My book will have the cover coming off like a Bukowski paperback, in the Cahuenga library, in my truck, or in the room of that Vegan in San Fransisco. None of the males actually mattered. There was just Bukowski then, my patron saint. And there was Crazy Eddie and his Girlfriend Frannie, the literate king and queen of The Hollywood Rose Apartments. Then there was Uncle Harvey. Busting my door down right before I tried to rip myself from this miserable sack of a city by force.

EXCERPT:

Apparently, my Great Grandfather Joann Alda always used to say: I’ve got bad blood. After fifty years of working for a telephone company, they gave him a golden watch for retirement.

On the time told by this watch, I was born. The watch must have stopped ticking after we buried him. I can still see the gravediggers in the small cemetery in Washington State, waiting for our family to leave, so they could cover Great Grandpa’s coffin with dirt.

“He was so proud of that watch,” said Wally, “He always said he felt like he was living on borrowed time.” I can tell that Wally sees the poetry in this sentiment. Wally stopped writing years ago. Coward.

But I too struggle to write, to put all of this material in order. To wrap up Vermont with Hillhurst, Hillhurst with Virgil, Virgil with Melrose, and to create a nice bow with which to present the tale of Pearl Mopeds. I’m stubbing out the cigarette five years later in Los Angeles, but, in theory, the story doesn’t ever have has to end. For example, Crazy Eddie could walk around the corner right now and we could start making out. Then the book returns to the garage, ready for new modifications. That’s the thing with being a part of a family that loves to race – the circuit is never really completed. There will always be a faster engine, a better technique, or a new course to ride.

But I’ll always remember when Eddie crashed. When the Caprice flipped and he said he’d never race again. That was the kind of vigilance I lacked. A sense of when and how to stop. I think Harvey lacked it too, which is why it was hard for him to close the shop.

So, if my book can act as anything, let it act as the place where Pearl Mopeds still exists. Let it act as a place where the borrowed time keeps on being borrowed perpetually. Rents are renewed, engines are lubricated. I still can’t fix a car, but maybe I can relay what I saw.

So now, I’m going to take, very gently, that little surplus of time buried in the earth on my great grandfather’s wrist, and lay this shit the fuck down.