Under a Red Octopus

Resuming a column after a long absence is like trying to have a baby in your 50s. It’s possible but not easy.

You have to go at the thing slowly. The column thing, I mean.

You get off the plane in L.A. after a month in far places, drag your stuff from the luggage carousel, lie your way through customs, catch a cab to the nearest hotel and sign up for a tour.

A tour? Let me explain.

My wife and I had been driving through Europe in a rented car since mid-September, down crooked little alleys and up the kinds of mountainsides where even goats won’t go.

We took roads through the Pyrenees so difficult to traverse that 2,000 years ago Roman generals on the path of conquest said to hell with it and turned back. They said it in lyrical Latin, but meant it no less.

My wife loves these untraveled byways and it does no good for me to explain the reason they are untraveled is because they are twisty, foggy, slippery and probably haunted by werewolves.

That part of the world is famous for cathedrals and demons.

She dismisses danger with a sweep of her hand. “Press on,” she says.

God help me, I married Columbus.

I ended up, of course, loving every mile of it. I wrote the word charming so many times in my travel diary I got sick.

It was undoubtedly hyperglycemia. My body isn’t accustomed to prolonged injections of a positive attitude.

Fortunately, however, we were at Lourdes, where even lepers feel hopeful. My recovery, while unaccompanied by hosannas, was complete.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” my wife said as we headed north toward the unknown, “that there have been 64 miracle cures at Lourdes but only one miracle sickness?”

I love it when she’s incredulous.

Then, suddenly, we were back in L.A., which, when you have been swimming in sweetness, is like clicking your heels together three times and waking up in Cleveland.

We had literally been exploring castles in Spain just a few hours before, and there we were in Inglewood. Trust me when I tell you no one ever applies the term charming to Inglewood.

We desperately needed to be re-acclimated to L.A., to be reintroduced, as it were, to the town that gave more press to Zsa Zsa Gabor’s scuffle with a cop than to Manuel Noriega’s scuffle with a revolution.

Toward that end, we stopped at a Marriott hotel and signed for a four-hour look at Los Angeles on a tour bus loaded with East Indians, Germans, Danes, two Okies and a cluster of Japanese businessmen who took notes the entire trip, no doubt calculating the risk of a buyout bid on Beverly Hills.

Our bus driver was from East Brooklyn, so we got a lot of dats and deres over the PA system, such as, “Youse folks would be interested in dat place dere on the left owned by a Canadian kid named Michael J. Fox.”

We were seeing L.A. through the eyes of Archie Bunker, but that didn’t bother the boys from Tokyo. They just kept on taking notes.

Eddie Murphy’s mansion on a hill got the biggest rise from the Okies. “Man,” one of them said wistfully, “ah bet it’s loaded with groupies.”

“Who knows?” the bus driver said. “Now dose places on da right . . . .”

Next stop, the Fairfax District where a woman with orange hair and black makeup paraded through Farmer’s Market. She wore a cowboy outfit.

“I’m feeling more at home,” I said to my wife.

“I’m still back with the demons,” she said.

I watched the Cowgirl From Hell walk by. “They may have followed us,” I said.

On to Hollywood where Super Evangelist Billy Graham was getting a star on the Walk of Fame. God would like that. I heard a Japanese tourist ask one of the Okies who Billy Graham was.

“A Christian,” the Okie replied.

“Ahhh,” the Japanese said, writing it down.

There were no buildings rich with history on the L.A. tour, unless you count the little gray house once occupied by Grace Kelly. We saw her other place in Monaco, shining like a child’s dream.

There were no castles, cathedrals, Roman ruins or museums dedicated to the old masters; no gondolas, no sidewalk cafes, no cobblestone streets. Just . . . well . . . L.A.

That night, still being tourists, we took a Marriott recommendation and ate at a neo-Mexican place in Venice called Rebecca’s.

The food wasn’t important. The decor was. My wife pointed upward.

We were seated under a giant red-domed octopus made of plastic beads and bathed in light. Its tentacles were amber and gold. It clung to the ceiling like a magic spider.

I ordered a martini and relaxed. Home at last.