California Roll

By Trevor Dallas

Was having sushi at my favorite counter in the Belvedere District. The chef was making a roll that, with Japanese wit, was absurdly fat and called Vegetarian. “What are people eating in Tokyo?” I asked him. He had returned recently from a trip. “You know what it is?” he asked. “California roll.” The new wave of Japanese tourists had taken California rolls home, and they’d become a trend. I understood. I’ve eaten my fair share of California rolls. There is comfort in crab-a-like. It’s a fishy cheese wiz. As I ate I thought about Tokyo seven-seaters serving California rolls, inside out, to discerning trendsetters imagining an America as distant from metaphysical reality as the Tokyo I conjured at that moment over my mackerel slice, lemon juice, and pencil shaving of scallion. The California roll, so legend has it, was born in the seventies by an itinerant sushi chef in L.A. The Buddhist monk Atisha, who by greatly simplifying Buddhist teachings into a number of pithy and memorable sayings, was able to persuade the rowdy and licentious Tibetans, previously unmoved by the subtleties of Buddhist philosophy, to the eightfold path. Similarly, the California roll, with its haddock pasteurized and nori wrapper hidden, began the great conversion of the North Americans toward sushi. The result, as was the case with Tibet, was mixed. On the one hand, credible sushi counters, similar to the one I sat at, abounded. On the other, it paved the way for veggie rolls – the chublike obscenity, certain to offend carnivore and herbivore alike, being carted off before me. North America. California. California roll. I thought: there is California roll, the food, and there is California roll, the vehicular maneuver. I’d been thinking a lot about California rolls, motor vehicle department, recently. After driving for a while in Rome, it dawned on me that impressionistic driving was not the product of an anarchic and possibly disordered mind; rather, it was something aesthetic. The Department of Motor Vehicles articulates “rules of the road,” which is dogma cloaked in the rhetoric of engineering: maximal flow, scales of efficiency, and minimization of deleterious contact. In practice, this optimization becomes nothing more than directives for policing. As they constrict the road for enforcement’s sake, they strip driving down to computational language. So much is lost. Consider the California roll: the driver approaches the stop sign. As she decelerates, she considers her next vector, a ninety-degree turn to the right. At that moment in her steady deceleration when she has both reached the beginning of her rotation and ascertained that her new path is free from interference, she begins to both turn and to accelerate, preferably at a rate directly inversely proportional to that with which she has decelerated toward the intersection. When perfectly executed, it is a thing of beauty and economy.

I first learned the California roll, I think, from Peyton Collingsworth’s mother. Peyton had beautiful hair and green eyes. She had a long and articulated scar that ran on the interior of her patella. It was the result of a deep dig at volleyball that led to collision with a hidden sprinkler head. The sprinklers were round and burnished brass then. Scars were frowned on at that time and place – as were any physical imperfections on girls as beautiful as Peyton. She displayed hers proudly. It made her more beautiful still. Her family lived in the Polo Grounds. Her father was an insurance executive. Mrs. Collingsworth – Pamela – drove her automatic transmission car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Whether it was from fear, ignorance, or a special economy, I don’t know. I never drove with her but I heard the stories from Peyton and her friends. Peyton had a regular Vedic assemblage of stories – I called it the Peyton Canon. In one, her mother was forever California rolling one stop sign or another in the Polo Grounds and forever being pulled over by one of the village police, in their menacing black-and-white cruisers. They always gave Mrs. Collingsworth a ticket, as much as she pleaded, as much as she flirted, as pretty as she looked, probably as old then as I am now. They gave her a ticket every time.

I thought of Peyton Collingsworth last weekend while cleaning out a box of old belongings. A hairpin fell from the folded cardboard flaps at the bottom. It wasn’t a bobby pin, stiff, with one side undulating and the other flat. It was open, slender, and U-shaped, gently wavy along both legs. It was pliant. Peyton would come to my house unexpectedly late at night and tap on the same window that was left cracked open for the barn cat. I’d go around to the garden door and let her in. She’d spend fifteen minutes or thirty, lying with me in my bed and talking. She wasn’t much of a kisser; neither was she one for getting out of her clothes. She liked to talk. On her way from one place to another, she always had a story – something from the evolving canon – to share. We would lie in the dark in my bed, arm in arm, and she would tell me. Every morning after she visited I would find a hairpin or two in my bed. Oh, the nostalgia – how did it get so far away so quickly, the ship under sail from the dock, the brown Mercedes sedan rolling around the corner and accelerating – down a road that no longer exists – away? Kenko writes of the love lost: “The things that they used have no heart, yet remain unchanged throughout the long, long years. A melancholy reflection.”

Nicole Belle, Untitled, 2007, FOUND Gallery, Los Angeles