“No one writes, or maybe ever has written as well as Mathews about the local
streets and their navigations,
liberations and traps, as brilliantly
demonstrated in this novel.”

— Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Days Between Stations

“This novel is a particular triumph of storytelling, each installment more acute, more poignant, more revealing than the last, each story crackling with its own distinct energy and intelligence. The characters are jumpy at the margins—volatile, mournful, funny as hell—with the little-known warrens and alleyways of Los Angeles teeming all around them. Mathews is a master, and perhaps contemporary fiction’s best kept secret.”

— Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus

“With Shaky Town Lou Mathews brings a fascinating and unforgettable corner of the real Los Angeles to vivid life, creating an authentic portrait of a time, a place, and a people. This community is no stranger to tragedy and loss, but there is much beauty, hope, and even humor in Mathew’s stories as well. His characters know what it means to endure, to survive. They have their triumphs and their struggles—yet so often in these pages, if we pay close enough attention, they are also showing
us how to live.”

— Skip Horack, author The Other Joseph and The Eden Hunter

“In these interconnected stories and novella, Lou Mathews inhabits an array of consciousnesses with unstinting empathy and shared sorrow. Shaky Town is ultimately an embrace of all the people—the respectable and the outcast, the casualties and the survivors, the sinners and the sinned against—that make up a Los Angeles at once pitiless and tender, horrible and wonderful, located in actuality and personal mythology.”

— Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA

“In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews has written a peerless chronicle of working class Los Angeles, capturing his beloved hometown in all its tragedy and knuckleheaded glory. A former mechanic and East Side street racer, he illuminates daily life with the same kind of grace and authority that Leonard Gardner brought to Fat City. Mathews is the real deal, matching style with soul and reminding us what matters in this life.”

— Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49

In 2005, I took an adult education class that changed my life. At the time, I was working at a plumbing supplies warehouse in Gardena and living in Long Beach. Every Tuesday night I fought my way up the 405 to take a fiction writing class at UCLA taught by a guy named Lou Mathews. When I signed up for the class, I didn't know who Lou was. I didn't know that he had worked as a mechanic for twenty years before getting into the “quality lit game,” as Terry Southern once put it. However, when I read his novel L.A. Breakdown, I felt like I had known him all my life. In his elegiac tale of illegal street racing in the late ’60s, Mathews captured the essence of working-class Southern California in a way I had never seen before. This was the uncompromising work of a native son, an eastside hood who knew the score and seemed intent on writing a love letter to doomed knuckleheads everywhere. In my youth, I had worked for too many years at a gas station, and suddenly all the guys I used to know were showing up as characters on each page. The voices, the texture, the streets at twilight, the distant rumble of custom engines.  He got everything right. Some novels take you away to another world, but Lou's novel did something different. It showed me my world for the very first time and made me believe that my shabby little corner of SoCal contained its own special beauty, if I looked close enough. 

My experience is not unique. Lou Mathews has the gift of making readers feel like the author is talking directly, perhaps even magically, to them. In 1991, when filmmaker Dora Peña was thirteen years old, she walked into the Ed Cody Library in San Antonio and discovered something she didn't even know she was looking for. As she writes:

Lou Mathews did not know it in the late ’80s when he penned his award-winning short story “Crazy Life” that he was writing it for me. He could not have known that his greatest fan would be a little Mexican girl growing up in San Antonio. Dad used to take us to the library and say, “Go, pick some books to take home.” I was into cheesy romance novels, but on this particular day in the library I walked around looking for something different. On the very bottom shelf—only God knows why—I picked up the 1990-1991 Pushcart Prize collection of short stories. Skimming the title page, I flipped over to Lou Mathews’s “Crazy Life”.… The narrator, Dulcie, a teenage girl, opens with the lines, “Chuey called me from the jail. He said it was all a big mistake.” How many times did I read that story? No matter what went wrong in real life, I could always go home to “Crazy Life,” my little gold secret…. 

“Lou taught me how to write. How to listen and observe life so that I could put it down on paper. About ten years later, when I was ready to make my first film out of college, I set on finding Lou to seek the rights to adapt "Crazy Life" into a short film. I called several people listed on the internet with his name, finally leaving a nervous message on his answering machine. He returned my call, and for reasons that I can only understand as fate and the undeniable passion I had for his story, he agreed to option me the rights “for a dollar, payable to the wind.”

Writers throughout Los Angeles can tell stories like this about Lou's spirit and generosity. At UCLA Extension, he has nurtured an entire generation, while quietly publishing in quality lit journals across the country. He is one of the most unique and important voices in Los Angeles, which means, by law, that he has been overlooked by the New York publishing establishment.  Tiger Van Books is here to rectify that.

In Shaky Town, Lou Mathews guides us through one eastside neighborhood in the1980s, bringing together a chorus of voices who speak just as urgently to our present moment. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Pat Barker’s Union Street, Shaky Town is the story of a complicated, conflicted, and disparate range of people bound together by place. His vision is rugged, darkly comic, and infused with a deep love for people on the edges.

Fifteen years ago, when I took that adult education class at UCLA, I could've never predicted all the crazy and wonderful places it would take me, including this moment, right now, penning this introductory letter. I remember the introductory letter Lou sent for that first class. He signed off with the phrase, “Yours for the written word.” This simple and earnest declaration of faith has always stuck with me. In that spirit I'm honored to share the “golden secret” of Shaky Town. 

Yours for the written word,
Jim Gavin

Los Angeles is a city of a thousand villages. Some of the villages are a block square, some sprawl for miles. The boundaries are sometimes those of kinship – you can see more pork-pie hats and name-stitched bowling shirts in Echo Park today than you could when people knew what a pork-pie hat was and there were still bowling alleys in the neighborhood – but mainly the boundaries are drawn by money, race, culture, creed, sexual disposition, age, tolerance, intolerance and even mode of transport. If you are a lowrider, you probably live in East, East L.A., ideally El Sereno.  If you are a bike rider who likes to thump on the fenders of encroaching cars, you probably live on the west side, ideally Mar Vista.

A river runs through it, but until someone takes some dynamite to those concrete banks, there will be no river-side villages with the exception of Frogtown when it floods.

There are villages where 90 years of history can still be seen in one visit. Watts’ Towers, built by an Italian immigrant in the 1930’s is now a nervous African-American Island awash in a Salvadorean diaspora.

Then there are the villages with uncategorizeable demographics, where the lions lie down with the lambs, neighbors with nothing in common but proximity. West Adams is one, where Victorian restoration fanatics live beside chicken wire and plastic tarp specialists. Beachwood Canyon is another odd mix, where millionaire plastics manufacturers and corporate accountants live next to shabby artistes eking out their declining years on reverse mortgages, because they all enjoy a Bohemian ambience that goes back to Aldous Huxley and the days when Huxley urine punch induced mild hallucinogenic highs for the braver visitors.

Then there is Shaky Town, the most unusual of all the villages of Los Angeles. It is the only neighborhood where the poor live on hills.

The earliest residents, after the Chumash fled, were German, then Irish, then Italian. The village lies on the most unpredictable fault in California, the Elysian Park fault line, a hot wire that runs two miles below Dodger stadium. When Chavez Ravine twitches, Shaky Town shakes, and threatens to unhinge, like the kid at the end of the crack-the-whip line.

In the 1920’s and 30’s there were a series of six and seven plus magnitude earthquakes. Houses in Shaky Town were leveled and throughout the decade, aftershocks kept realtors off-balance. Before the quakes, would-be developers called the place “Rolling Hills”. Surviving locals renamed it “Shaking Hills” and then nicknamed it Shaky Town. The nickname stuck. A village grows when the realtors who live there promote their self-interest in the neighborhood. There were no realtors brave enough to live in those jittery hills.

The Irish and Italians who could afford to move on, moved to Eagle Rock or Glendale. Mexican immigrants moved in and stayed. Even when they could afford to move on, they stayed, and the assessed values stayed down, and the taxes stayed low.

The rough boundaries for Shaky Town are San Fernando Road to the West, Fletcher Drive to the north, fanning out to the hills that build to Mount Pico.

Within this scallop-shaped forty acres is a Catholic high school, Saint Patrick’s,  a public high school, Hamilton, a small shopping center, five corner markets, a café, a former malt shop that now sells licuados, where los Tigres del Norte have replaced Pedro Infante, who replaced the Coasters and Del Vikings on the jukebox. There is a Catholic Church, Cristo Rey, whose pastors for forty years were Irish, with impeccable Mexican Spanish accents, succeeded by a Filipino priest whose accent is complained about. There is a storefront Iglesia del Dio on Fletcher Drive between Kelsoe’s Roundup, and its rival tavern, Las Quince Letras. Jamgocian’s Pharmacy remains resolutely Armenian for the fourth generation. There is a grocery and liquor store named Lupe’s, owned now by a Korean named Kim, with a vacant lot where the junkies and winos congregate when they’ve been chased from Coma Park. There is a pallet factory, a junkyard called The Broken Drum whose slogan is, “Can’t be beat.” There are two parks, both named after early Italian settlers. Coma Park, off Eagle Rock Boulevard, is named for a successful but unloved hardware store owner and facist who paid dearly for the land and naming privileges. Peliconi Park, on top of Mount Pico and known only to locals, was named for free after a beloved bookstore owner, watch repairman, and early socialist mayor. 

There is no village government now and even the City of Los Angeles has no representatives here, except for visiting police. There are two self-proclaimed officials. Emiliano Gomez, who has lived in Shaky Town longer than anyone else, has selected himself as mayor, and Pedro “Petrolino” Suárez has anointed himself the Burrito King of Shaky Town, a title that is probably deserved, judging by the ever-present line at his stand, Tio’s Tacos.

There are more than a hundred dogs, fourteen roosters and innumerable hens, who are less vocal and harder to count. Nobody knows how many cats, but a lot, many of them feral. Wildlife abounds – skunks, possums, raccoons, ground squirrels, tree squirrels, rats, mice, gophers, moles, voles, shrews, rabbits, coyotes, and even deer. The last mountain lion sighting was in the 30’s, but bobcats were recorded as late as 1971. Rattlesnakes are seldom heard or seen, except at Peliconi Park, but gopher snakes, king snakes, and blue racers thrive.

There is no local newspaper. Once there were two, edited by Peliconi and Coma. Cristo Rey has a news-letter, but nobody reads it. Both Saint Patrick’s and Hamilton High have student newspapers, but they come out so seldom that the news is never new. But there is chisme, the gossip and stories from the street and collective memories of the people who live here, who work here, who go to school here or just pass through – for pleasure, for mischief, with willful intent, for emergencies or to uphold the law.

A lot of the people who own those stories would prefer that they never got told and would forget those memories if they could, but those are the stories that do get told and the memories that last, because villages are like the younger members of your family, they like the real stories. The older members of your family would always prefer that you write about the good things. “Write about Uncle Ralph,” your mom will say. “He built that upholstery business up from scratch and he was a 32nd order Mason.” But unless Uncle Ralph had a mistress with a wooden leg or he embezzled the funds to start his business, nobody wants to know. Your nieces and nephews and cousins want to hear the story about Uncle Willie, the one who maybe almost got hung by the posse of honest citizens in Boyle Heights for stealing horses and cattle and that champion pig.