On Franklin

The first place I ever lived in L.A. was on Franklin Avenue, right on the border of Thai Town and Los Feliz. The bathroom was baby shower pink, the oven was from 1952, and in the unit across the courtyard lived my mustachioed neighbor, who used to tell me what things were like back when that oven was brand new. 

Every evening I took a walk around the neighborhood, and on those walks it always smelled like pad see ew. The sweet caramel of soy sauce, the char of grilled beef and squid. 

I liked that when people asked where I lived, I could say I live on Franklin Avenue, and in that moment I’d sound a little like Didion, with her big pink house on Franklin and her Coca-Cola for breakfast. 

The world’s shittiest Rite Aid sat on the corner under rows of palms. It was unlike any paradise I had ever seen. For it to feel like paradise, I’d have to cross the Franklin dividing line and ascend the hills, my heels aching and glutes working to hoist me up higher. 

Up there it was easy to pretend you were somewhere else–maybe Italy, Spain, somewhere with rolling Mediterranean hills and the kiss of sea air. Even in this pseudo Europe, you could still smell Thai sausage wafting up to meet you, the lingering scent of stores on Hollywood selling whole fish and dried lime leaves next to shops selling third wave coffee and kouign amann. If the Santa Anas carried the air just right, maybe you’d smell fryer oil sweet with churros and condensed milk, al pastor piled high with pineapple. 

If New York was a city to be seen, then Los Angeles was a city to be smelled. And so even when I was home, looking over the courtyard in my little second story apartment on the Thai Town side of Franklin, I could smell the city and its loose fragments. Aching for it, craving it, ordering jade noodles and boat noodle soup late into the night just to taste what I was smelling. All crackly pork skin and fragrant cilantro perfuming this place that I did not yet know. 

It was a different kind of paradise.

by Nicole Carullo