In a tense time of academic purges and social media bullying, a newly fired, nearly retired professor from Northwestern University is befriended and taken in by a wealthy young benefactor hungry for a father figure and style muse.
In a tense time of academic purges and social media bullying, a newly fired, nearly retired professor from Northwestern University is befriended and taken in by a wealthy young benefactor hungry for a father figure and style muse.
Note: This story contains a racial term which is considering insulting but is necessary in the telling of this fictional tale. There are also documented historical events which may be painful for some readers.
Sunday, weekend of Labor Day, Professor Steven Goodman walked at dawn down the driveway alongside his small ranch house in West Evanston, IL. He pushed a metal clothes rack, hung with garments, and a “$10” sign, taped on end.
It was the third day of his four-day estate sale.
Items included a cherry wood glass cabinet and six dining room chairs arranged around a Queen Anne table covered in stacked piles of…
On a weekend we started again to go down to Koreatown for food.
Before the pandemic we went all over the city to find great things to eat, places to explore, neighborhoods to walk around.
Now you drive along the Hollywood Freeway and there are piles of garbage up and down the hills, tent encampments, trees set afire, just absolute utter appalling destitution.
At the Western Avenue off ramp, this trash has been like this for perhaps five years, so it pre-dates, by many years, the great excuse of the pandemic.
Last Saturday there were two men drinking beer inside the trash heap.
Yet these two photos show only a glimmer of what else exists, everywhere.
There are tents, campers, cars, RVs, trucks, along more streets in Los Angeles.
And the freeway is a camping zone, a place where hundreds are sleeping.
How can this be?
What state and what city would tolerate this? Nobody benefits from it. Not the poor, not the homeless, not the mentally ill.
“Just wanted to share the great news. We’ve finally taken the plunge! We’re building an ADU, a second house in our backyard.
I’m 61, and you know freelance graphic designer and the wife is on disability so we’ve been thinking how can we make money in our so-called golden years?
Looking out at our backyard, it was always on our minds. Sure, we enjoyed our lime, lemon, fig and avocado trees, and the herb garden. But we looked at our water bill, some $800 a month, and we thought we could do better with a backyard of concrete and rocks, driveway planting bed and a new 640 sf ADU.
My gardener Hector and his son Romeo have worked here for years, (expert tree trimmers too) and I struck a deal with them to design and build the house. They know how to negotiate (especially in Spanish) and they got lumber, concrete, electrical, plumbing, roofing, the whole works, and we are doing it for only $210,000.
We have tenants signed up already. Phish and his girlfriend Charmin and their two pre-school sons, Emo and Fly, are going to move in. Phish is from Philly and is a musician and works as a budsman at the dispensary on Oxnard and Kester. Charmin is cool, very hard working, does adult films too. She wants to run a day care center out of the house and I said that’s fine. I love little kids and it will bring some excitement into our lives. Phish will work during the day and a couple nights a week his band will rehearse in their unit. They drove out here last month from Philly and are living in their car until the ADU is finished, but they’re young and flexible.
This ADU thing is one of the best policy changes to come to LA in years. I know the city will regulate it and make sure that renters pay on time, that there is enough parking for everyone, that utility bills aren’t exorbitant, and that the people who are in the ADU pay their rent on time.
I figure after some 20 years, by the time I’m 81, 240 months from now, I’ll want to sell my house and the ADU that I’m building. 240 months of collecting rent will be just fine, an easy way to knock on the door of my back unit and get some $2100 a month handed to me. I’m sure I’ll have no problems collecting rent, and those people who think I’ll be bothered by noise and lack of privacy and the destruction of my garden are just negative naysayers who don’t understand how to make a buck.”
In my first new short story in three years, “They Didn’t Believe Me,” a progressive politician is unwittingly poisoned with the help of her ambitious assistant in a bizarre plot to upend an election.
A noir satire with sci-fi touches, the tale dramatizes the modern ills of urban America where public virtue signaling is often a screen for ruthless and heartless power brokers.
The story is about a 30-minute read. Let me know what you think.
In the midst of a very bleak and confounding time of depression, pandemic and attempted coup, the Moynihan Train Hall has opened in New York, inside the James Farley Post Office on 8th Avenue, carving out a glass vaulted space for Amtrak, to atone for the destruction, one block east, of the entire old Pennsylvania Station which only lived from 1911-1966.
The ugly toilet of Madison Square Garden, and the underground rats maze of Penn Station are still there, sucking up and spitting out hundreds of thousands of commuters who still must scuttle in and out of Manhattan via the subway and the Long Island Rail Road.
Madison Square Garden Under Construction 1967
By fantastic coincidence, at the same time McKim, Mead and White were building Penn Station, they also designed and constructed the Central Postal Office Building of New York City. It was a logical time in America. If mail went by train, put the post office next to the train station. It made sense.
When the train station was torn down in the early 1960s, this post office, which did not impinge on private revenue, survived. Now it is the very columned home of the new Moynihan Train Hall, and at over a billion dollars, it has gathered praise for introducing late 19thCentury improvements into the horridly barbaric early 21st Century Amtrak system.
What is the architecture like?
Well….. it is big, bright and full of art and signs, including an oversized, identifying name plate: “Moynihan Train Hall.” Buildings of lesser distinction often use signs to shout their individual grace which is otherwise hardly distinguishable.
Its not very artful trusses, travertine and glass could be the train hall for any medium sized city in China or Japan. If it had no sign who would know where it was? It seems to have been designed in a boardroom, with a panel of consultants, designers, architects, and engineers who worked over the design until it finally had the assembly line craftsmanship of a Banana Republic men’s suit.
Banana Republic Suit
For solace and bewitchment, I found some glorious old photographs of the original Penn Station when it was alive, and the stone and the glass and the steel aligned in exquisite, thrilling harmony; here was the penultimate, the grace of classical architecture, the tested and proven proportions of ancient Rome resurrected in Manhattan. It looked as if it would last 1,000 years. But its time was up in 1963.
Then I pulled some old photographs of the destruction of the station, a cheap and shitty time in New York when every mouth carried a cigarette, you drank your lunch, and your girl answered your phone.
The capacity of Americans to believe the best of our nation when facts point opposite is one of our most salient characteristics. Lie, cheat, tear apart, riot, threaten, then pray and watch CNN and hope the sun rises tomorrow. The bulldozer trumps the sculptor, the highway rams through the park, the baby in the womb becomes the addict on the street. And we think it all inevitable. But it isn’t. It is our own doing. Collectively. Like the tear down of a great and noble edifice.
When you see the magnificence of the old station, you again see this nation at its best. But is the old Penn Station who were really were?
Or are we, at our heart, a self-destructive project which seeks to destroy those systems, values, traditions, projects and edifices which bring us joy, contentment, fulfillment and freedom?
Even at the darkest time of the year, when the light echoes the mood, Van Nuys soldiers on.
Along unpaved Columbus Avenue, where old large properties await their transformation into many boxed houses, the blithe disregard for the larger good, for neighborly niceties, is evident.
For isn’t this the representation of freedom at its finest, to do what you want, to behave as you feel, to self-destructively ruin you and your surroundings as you sit on vacant land waiting for its value to increase?
Somebody is landlord here, and somebody is absent, and in his place the trash, the overgrown weeds, the toxic cans and poisons leak out, and it is all thought normal, just the way it’s done and has always been done.
For nothing really matters except how you can exploit, make profit, take for yourself, and destroy while you can.
Short Stories by Andrew B. Hurvitz
Here in Van Nuys 
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