Whenever you were sick, which you often were—running around in the cool Los Angeles rain with a pair of flip flops and a tank top often led to pneumonia—your father would make you join him in the sauna. A dark wooden coffin that sat by the fluorescent laundry room. A time machine into the sweaty horny enlightened 1970s with dicks and X+X=<3 carved into the cedar. Long before the stroke and the shakes and the depression and the levodopa, your father was the BOSS. You once got him a Hugo Boss hat that you thought was tacky but knew his gaudy Soviet-self would lap up like his first glass of fresh squeezed orange juice post immigration. He wore the hat around the apartment building he managed and lived in but did not own. Tenants would point and laugh, landing somewhere between mockery and respect. On Fridays, he would drink. Invite his crew of misfits over: a pawnshop owner who most definitely owned a gun, a maintenance man who would later spend a night in jail for being wrongfully accused of beating his Ukrainian wife, and a suave womanizer who would soon hit the jackpot, retire in a low-income housing development overlooking the Pacific Ocean. After the sauna, they would take 100-gram shots of vodka chased with pickled mackerel. They would propose marriage to you, comment on your growing body, as you prepared to walk to the nearby mall, a Crystal Geyser plastic bottle filled with vodka tucked into your tiny backpack. They would show you what certain men are like when they have too much of everything or perhaps not enough. “S’Loh-kim Pa-rom,” you would say in Russian before heading out the door. Literally meaning “with light steam.” Figuratively meaning “may you be cleansed by the banya.” Like most things back then, the sauna was not up-to-code. A neglected thing, your father brought back to life. On days when you were sick, you would sit there together in silence; you on the bottom bench, him on the top where the heat was an unbearable 170°. He would pour hot water over dry eucalyptus leaves your mother picked on her daily walks and you would breathe in the healing vapor, coating your sick American lungs. But the room was not as silent as it seemed. The sauna’s ‘70s walls yelled life is a journey not a destination, man, and your father’s hairy body yelled there isn’t much time before I become something else, and your mind yelled you are as much him as you are you.
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Diana Ruzova is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has an MFA in literature and creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Oprah Daily, New York Magazine’s The Cut and other publications. She is currently at work on a memoir about growing up as a post-Soviet Jewish immigrant apartment manager’s daughter in Los Angeles.

Artwork by Marvin Liberman