Change is Good

Old Betty, silver hair perfectly coiffed, churns between parking meters on Venice’s Washington Square, where the boulevard dead-ends at the Pier and foot traffic tumbles into Marina del Rey. She alerts the meter maid, LADOT veteran and silver-tongued favorite, Fatima Bahm—F-Bomb—of any overlooked expirations. 

Surrounded by water, sun, and traffic, Old Betty delights on the scent of urgent leisure, its underlying hums of privilege. Like a tunnel boring machine devoted to punishing distracted beach-weekend Angelenos and tourists alike, she plows through crowds eyeing unfed meters to lay at the altar of F-Bomb’s handheld citation device. 

Old Betty has sold me out many a careless Saturday. 

‘Saturn Sally, you better move that below-average-very-unserious-four-door before I get to it,” was F-Bomb’s typical invocation. The heads-up was always welcome even though she wasted no time darting toward my windshield.

She is Washington Square’s Ahab, monomaniacally harpooning fleets of Southland cars. Expired meters task her like a cosmic insult. Betty is her Fedallah. Together, they tasked me.

Marina del Rey, known today as the Silver Strand, a cornucopia of three-million-dollar beach homes and salt-decayed bungalows fringed with the shirtless, unemployed, and unhoused, once boasted a productive oil refinery. In the 1930s, a crowd of towering derricks populated the peninsula yards from the Pacific Ocean, an arranged marriage of geology and profit. Like many West Coast dreams, oil fever bubbled over, and production ceased. 

Six decades later, Los Angeles County deems it too expensive to clean up. Rebrands it a landmark. Pollutants and a ghost of a concrete barrier remain. The abandoned site has become a talking point for tourists and residents alike. To me, it was home.

Old Betty, the living landmark on the corner of Eastwind and Pacific, is one of the city’s unhoused. Known as Queen of the Strand, she has a newfound popularity with locals and tourists who want selfies. #OldBettyAndMe. #BadBitchBetty. The Cow’s End coffee shop offers a drink in her honor—the Caramel Cassandra: 

A Charybdis of expresso,

milk, and caramel, this drink

reminds you, Don’t ignore

Cassandra’s warnings!

$5.75 16 oz. / 7.50 24 oz.

In her late sixties and ready to rat out every parking violation, she invites verbal altercation. None of my midwestern charm could disarm her, especially once she saw me in rollerblades and wrist guards gliding down Speedway toward Buccaneer.

The streets have nautical names, which sing alphabetical heading south—Anchorage to Catamaran to Lighthouse and Voyage. Sailboats and kayaks splash while Korean Air, FedEx, and American Airlines roar a duet of salutations and valedictions from LAX. 

I graduated from tourist to resident in 1998 when my new husband, his West Highland off-white terrier, and I leased a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment on Yawl Street, where the barnacled North Jetty guards the channel. Move-in day and I wore my Change is good T-shirt with a JFK Camelot quote. TJ didn’t appreciate the sentiment even as we funneled into our 1,000 square foot shared-front-patio dream. I had been growing leery of his mood swings, his need for perfection. But we had built our own sort of oil derrick, and it was time to extract a life. 

He was devoted to his dog. Named after L.A.’s famed Astro Burger on Melrose, this walking bathmat was settling into an arthritic old age. The early morning marine layer brought out the silver in Astro’s coat, and the late evening sunsets welcomed his watery eyes into the promise of eternal rest. 14 Yawl’s soundtrack was a cacophony of his jingling metal tags and TJ’s growing disapproval of all things me.

‘You forgot the coupons this morning. Where’s the receipt?’

My heartbeat betrayed any attempt at calm breathing, a new tactic for facing moments like these. I wasn’t sure which was worse, not finding it or handing it over for his deft perusal. 

‘Dammit, dammit, damm…’ He muttered into the office to revise the budget. Yelling from his desk moments later, ‘This is why we can’t go to Big Bear with Dan and Angie. You don’t think.’ He pointed a finger to his left temple, tapping it like a drum.

Recently he had broached the topic of starting a family. Maybe purchasing a home over by the airport. 

I was nauseous at the the idea of raising a child with him, under his burgeoning regime. When I imagined the crappy ranch house off Manchester, it had bars and barrel padlocks. 

A coping tool of late, I fed my obsession with construction projects by researching the world’s most remarkable civil engineering feats. The Hoover Dam, Burj Khalifa, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. In 1988, the year my parents divorced, England sent six tunnel boring machines headlong into the sea toward France. The result was a world-famous portmanteau—the Chunnel. Also 111 acres of excavated spoil, the world’s biggest remainder. 

I understood the shapeless sediment. The granular, orphaned child of a turbulent marriage. I researched hydraulic jacks and the Archimedes screw. The Chunnel is really three tunnels running parallel but not straight, the middle one a smaller service tunnel providing ventilation and emergency access. 

I would never bring a child into this marriage. 

The next morning, TJ and I encountered Old Betty while walking Astro, his disgruntled spirit animal. We passed the defunct bird sanctuary; its wire fences the spare remnant. Astro’s collar was alive and jingling steel omens as usual. 

Betty’s silver grocery cart a medieval shield, and her mouth a leathery scabbard, she saw him and unsheathed.

‘What an ugly excuse for a dog.’ 

Ignoring her, he foisted his fists into his bomber jacket. 

‘Talk about compatibility,’ she cackled.

He had been conditioned to weather such errant badinage having grown up in Manhattan. But this morning his dissatisfaction with me and a dead-end postproduction job ignited him. 

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ he succumbed.

Like an invocation to mythical forces, his words unlocked Old Betty’s fury, years of collecting Cheesecake Factory leftovers outside French-style mansions off Via Dolce. She became a chthonic goddess of vengeance spewing hot tar. The faint suck-and-blow of oil pumpjacks whirled around her head.

‘I curse your mother with cancer,’ she shrieked. 

Then, as if she had completed her life’s mission, she reclined against the cement wall. Old Betty was skilled at cramming herself between large homes on small lots, at playing the neighborhood extra, occasionally going off script. 

‘Cancer,’ she exhaled for emphasis, strands of silver hair slithering atop her ears.

TJ seemed unfazed by the encounter. Later, he prepared for a day of pick-up beach volleyball. I, however, could think of nothing else. 

Nine months later, I saw a job posting for a private all-girls school in North Hollywood; they needed an English teacher as soon as possible. The ad was my portal to a new career, and I was giddy with hope, potential, some semblance of a future. TJ disapproved. Perhaps it was the low pay, perhaps the long hours I’d be away, or maybe it was his growing need for control. He pursed his lips and exhaled through his nostrils while screwing up his brows—his preferred method of intimidation. 

‘You have a grad school loan to pay off,’ TJ argued. ‘Not to mention the parking ticket you just got—sixty fucking dollars!’

‘I was F-Bombed. It happens to the best of us.’

‘Well, it fucked up this month’s spreadsheet. As would a puny teacher’s salary.’

‘The degree was so I could teach at a school like this one. I don’t want to be a writer’s assistant anymore. This is my chance at a career.’

‘The salary is ridiculous. Look at the budget I ran.’ Quicken was his frugal Magic 8 Ball, and every major financial decision was run through its ancient wisdom. Dinner at Cheesecake Factory? Outlook not so good. See Maybe Happy Ending at the Pantages for my birthday? Outlook hazy. 

‘I want to be a teacher.’

‘Well, I want to be an astronaut,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s not happening.’ 

Will this marriage survive? Don’t count on it. 

Then, as if he had completed his week’s task, he churned into the other room and reclined in his secondhand swivel chair. He tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk. 

A one-time drummer whose garage band played the fraternity circuit in Boston, TJ often celebrated his final decrees with nonverbal noise. Typically, I would back out of the makeshift office smaller and more obedient. Drive down to the pier for a Caramel Cassandra to lick whipped cream and my wounds. 

Not this time. I promptly arranged an interview through that school’s secretary the next week. When I met with the head of school, he asked, ‘Why do you want to teach at Holloway Hills?’

‘I want to help young women find their voices—to use them for good.’

‘Anything else?’ he tapped his chest open-handed in approval. 

‘Help them understand the power of words, the responsibility. Teach them discernment, which voices to ignore.’

I got the position, rebranding myself an educator. Change was good.  

In the final weeks of divorce negotiations, TJ was offered an executive producer job with Mark Burnett on his new reality show. He begged me to reconsider, stay with him and make it work. Astro had been euthanized, and he was softened somewhat by grief. 

He had even grown accustomed to my teaching salary but occasionally rubbed it in when months were tight. He refused to attend evening events like the school musical or academic awards night since, in his opinion, his wife was not being duly compensated for her time. There was something pathetic about a twenty-eight-year-old man whose accomplice was a finance management app. 

‘I’ll say no to Mark,’ he bargained.

‘Go! It’s not the moon, but it is your big break.’

‘I can’t fly to Borneo and win you back too. I’ll stay if you promise we can work it out.’

‘Absolutley not. Take the job. It’s everything you’ve been working for,’ I insisted. ‘The marriage is over.’ 

Then, as if I had broken the amniotic white cube free from inside his Quicken 8 Ball, I reclined into newfound agency. I found a crappy studio apartment up the strand and sang my reverse alphabet move from Yawl to Lighthouse. 

TJ’s mother died from liver failure four years after Old Betty’s imprecation. Typical of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer patients, Melanie’s superior mesenteric artery delivered errant cells to the aorta like an inconvenient prophet. Blood stopped tunneling to the channels of her body. Tumor cells escaped treatments, impossible to clean up. Once an impeccably put together woman who could entertain the best of Manhattan’s elite, she had controlled each of her adult children with a staggering lack of empathy, a penchant for financial manipulation, and unattainable standards of perfection. 

The cancer left her body a marshy swamp. 

TJ was nominated eight times for an Emmy, winning three. He has been nominated three times for Producer of the Year, winning twice. He has enough money to keep his accountants busy. 

I’ve been awarded Teacher of the Year twice. I’m known by my vintage messenger bag stuffed with student papers, weighted by Melville, Aeschylus, and Woolf; one hand a BIC 4-color retractable pen and the other my trademark iced Caramel Cassandra. 

My Saturn is now a steel gray Durango. Still paying off grad school, the loan payments remain as consequential to me as a measly parking ticket or forgotten coupon.

Weekend mornings, if I find a pocket of quiet on my front porch, I can hear Old Betty and F-Bomb harassing drivers on Washington Boulevard. Some things never change.

---

CANDICE M. KELSEY (she/her) is a poet and educator living in both L.A. and Georgia. She's developed a taste for life's absurd glow, long skirts, and juicy opera podcasts. She also roasts vegetables like it's a sacred ritual and wears mostly black because her late father-in-law said it's not her color. Somehow her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she woke up one day as the author of 8 books. Candice reads for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal.

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