ISSUE 11 | WINTER 2011
HOME IS WHERE THE WART IS Donna Miscolta National City, CA. Nickname: Nasty City. Notable place names within the city: El Toilet Park, Las Panties Pool, Stinkin’ Acres. My hometown is a wart on the map, a giant canker sore to the naked eye. Or so the purveyors of these nicknames would have you believe. And who are they, these tellers of tales, spreaders of potty-themed tags and obnoxious aliases? Certainly there are those beyond the city limits, who hold their noses as they speed past on the freeway, south to the bars in Tijuana or north to the marinas of San Diego, who lock their car doors and slump in their seats if they happen to take the wrong exit and find themselves cruising among the homies. Later, safe in their own hood, they swagger with the boast that they have been to Nasty City and lived to tell about it. But it’s us too, those like me who once lived there and those who live there still who utter those nicknames with a reckless, nose-thumbing sticks-and-stones mentality. And yet, who among us has not at one time or another answered the question So where’re you from? with those two words that signal legitimacy: San Diego. Because who after all has heard of National City? And if they’ve heard of National City, what exactly have they heard? But forget hearsay. Let’s consider the facts.
History Our house was on U Avenue, twenty-one alphabetically named blocks from the western edge of the city. A new development in the mid-sixties, the neighborhood was a repetitive alignment of look-alike homes: single-story, L-shaped, bumpy with stucco in dispassionate, middle-of-the-road tones − gray, beige, brown, an occasional watery yellow. Our house was the mirror image of our neighbors’. We could go in each other’s homes and know exactly which drawer in the kitchen contained the knives and which the Saran Wrap, where to find the linen, where to pee. Except for the cement slab of patio, our backyard remained a dusty, rocky rectangle. A drainage ditch ran the length of it. The far side of the ditch sloped upward and defied planting; even the ubiquitous ice plant with its persistent roots, the ecological nuisance of the region, failed to thrive there. On the near side of the ditch, my father sank the legs of a swing set into the sandy soil and we dug troughs with our toes as we swung, spinning dust into the air, into our hair, mouths and lungs. My parents planted and did their best to nurture a lawn in the disobliging earth in the 35