Category: Van Nuys and the Valley

10/23/13

Part of the blessing or curse of travel is coming home to the place you call home; and experiencing it as a foreign country, a strange locale with odd people, bizarre customs and illogical folkways.

I was out of Los Angeles for not a very long time, only 3 1/2 weeks, but it was long enough and far enough and deep enough (in Malaysia, Thailand and Tokyo) to come back here and rediscover the old glaring sunshine, the friendly yet surface friendships, the lost, pretty, young faces, the mediocre food and wide monotonous streets I left behind only on September 19th.

Small interactions, which one might never encounter in Japan, for example, came at me in abrupt banality on my first few days back.

At Chevron, on Burbank and Kester, I was filling up my car when a strange man yelled at me, “Hey, how much you pay per month for your car?” It was none of his business. But it would have been more un-American of me to tell him that. Instead, being friendly, I told him the truth, even though it felt intrusive.

At Starbucks, on Riverside near Pass Avenue, I was writing alone on my laptop. A woman next to me leaned over and asked, “What are you writing?” It was my private creation, my personal space, yet she felt open and relaxed enough to ask me. What if I had been writing a letter of resignation at my law firm? What if I had been creating a mean email to my ex-lover? What if I wanted to be left alone?

At Santa Anita Park, leaving the racetrack last Saturday, I took out my camera and captured the sunlight on the buildings. Crowds were also exiting, including one woman who asked me, out of the blue, “Why are you taking a picture of that building?”

All these small incidents are either invigoratingly wondrous to those who admire the openness of Americans, or perhaps, to non-American sensibilities, they reek of rudeness, an inability to respect the private information and work of others.

Yet, I am through and through an American, exposed in my life through my writings, my photography and my online presence. I’ve gone up to strangers and handed them my business card. I’ve talked and asked and intruded upon friends, families, enemies and strangers.

At coffee today, I met my friend, writer Yassir, who told me about a man he met at Whole Foods who knew the head of a large publishing company and offered to send Yassir’s work over to his well-placed associate. Yassir also spoke of meetings, connections, people in high places, people with money, people in Beverly Hills, Century City and Bel Air who were handling big projects, some projects worth half a billion. And I again was thrust, conversationally, into that world of this city, a place of half-baked people and half-realized ideas, people who have big dreams and big talk, and sometimes convince and sell others on some spectacular imaginary creations. Instant friendships and instant dreams, formed in the checkout line at Whole Foods.

Why, even in unemployment, do we keep believing and buying into the mythology of this city? What do we finally become, after our youth and good looks have dried up, in the year round sunshine, after we pass the point of un-employability, when we finally know that we cannot make a living at the juice bar, behind the counter, in the retail store, driving to the audition, pitching at meetings, texting to a stranger online, what do we do when all the doors are slammed shut and we find intolerable even one more day in the dismally happy city of Los Angeles?

Congress must act immediately to provide billions in funding to take action against Syria. The well-being of the US is in danger. This is the most critical problem facing our nation. We simply have to provide the funds to intervene in Syria, just as we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the American People must be wiling to make sacrifices so that our freedom and way of life can remain triumphant around the world.

Ruin and Redemption

Down the street from me is the neighborhood eyesore, an empty rental house. The simple Spanish tile ranch sits on almost an acre of land. Two back houses are rented out, but the front one has not had a tenant for five years.

At night, the prostitutes, the drinkers, the pot smokers, come here and throw their condoms, beer bottles and “medicinal” pot pill containers on the dried out grass.

Thick, dark, old oak trees provide shade and keep the street shrouded in darkness.

For years we have all complained. The owner was described to me as “white trash”, “crazy”, “indifferent” not communicating. She supposedly lived up in Santa Clarita and allegedly did not care about he neighborhood.

I took a visiting friend for a walk down Hamlin today, and we passed the neglected house. We turned up the dirt path that runs alongside the property and found a middle-aged woman inside a packed garage. Her stuffed old car was parked outside, and she was pouring insecticide into a plastic spray bottle.

She came out and introduced herself as the owner of the old house where nobody rents.

In gracious exhaustion, tired face, pretty blue eyes, weathered skin, she told us she was here in the raging heat, trying to kill weeds and clean up trash.

When I asked her what could be done, she told her tales of woe, so common and so cruel, the modern story of Southern California: unemployed husband, unscrupulous contractors, unpaid rent. She could not afford to hook up the house to electricity or connect it to water or gas. She had $700 in her bank account. She was hanging on, to a property she inherited, in the hope it might provide some security to her.

My friend had also lost his mother, his marriage, and his home in the past few years, no stranger to pain or economic catastrophe. But he saw clearer than the woman did, that her pain was avoidable, that she could sell and get out from under her crushing burden, rather than try and hang on to what was dying in the sun under her cracked feet.

How we live, under delusions and illusions, is the story of mankind. Whether in prayer, in love, or work, we live for the truth of a lie, believing our own imaginary tales and thereby setting up fairy tale endings while creating certain catastrophe.

We walked away from the woman who was much kinder than rumored. And she smiled and thanked us for listening to her story.

Driving through Koreatown last night, on my way to Silver Lake, I came upon an old painted advertisement on the side of a building: “Coke. It’s the real thing.”

The slogan dates back to 1969. The sign is probably the same age.

The crappy, colorful, eclectic, gritty, fanciful city of Los Angeles is indifferent to pain and violence, mesmerized by pleasure and beauty.

It has only one best hour a day, a time when the sun is setting and the hot reds, oranges and yellows burn intensely, the blues and greens are drenched in salivating hues, and all the baked rage cools down.

After the long August day there was a full moon last night.

And it hung over Melrose as I crossed Virgil, turned onto Marathon and accelerated down into a valley of mustard colored crenelated castles, up a hill, past a bearded male jogger on Dillon tugging at his nylon shorts. I stopped at Silver Lake Boulevard waiting for the light to change and continued on Marathon, the white moon still glowing, now hanging in the sky behind an olive-green apartment.

The sun had set when I pulled up to Benton Way,parked curbside downhill, turned the wheels into the curb, and engaged the emergency brake.