Category: Van Nuys and the Valley

Speaking of God at Fashion Square.

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Zaaz
Zaaz

Up on the second floor, a muscular, middle-aged salesman with high Charles Bronson cheekbones and slicked back hair stood in his Zaaz exercise shop waiting for customers who would get on a machine, plunk down two grand and vibrate their bodies into athletic form.

His name was Eddie. He was born, Italian-American in East Cleveland, OH. I met him many months ago and we stopped again to speak today at Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks.

I may have been walking around the mall in a catatonic state of Zyrtec. Tired, not going anywhere in particular, I had just browsed Apple laptops, tried on Hugo Boss jackets and was gliding on the second level of the mall like a cloudy whisper of oceanic fog.

Empty, adrift, morose, I was swimming in circles, unmoored from the sea of purpose and ready to be hooked by Zaaz.

Eddie noticed my dourness and asked how things were going. And then he spoke of his own spiritual self-affirmations, his belief in the Lord Savior Jesus Christ, of good things ahead. And he asked me what I believed in.

I told him I was born and raised a Jew, Bar Mitzvahed but not a believer. So he stepped up on the machine, an exercise pulpit palpitating with electric vibrations, and from above he spoke down to me, a congregant, about my heritage, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, Joseph and Mary and God. He talked of shalom, and peace, and evil in the world, his formidable biceps holding tight to the handles and shaking with impulse and motion.

Still moving on the whole body vibration machine, he revealed his own doubts, his down days when he had no money, his deflated acting career. He spoke of his intimacy with Jesus, the touch of God, the God who had once been a man and died on the cross to save the world and return it reborn.

He got off the machine. And stood down on the marble floor, feet planted firmly, looking at me, man-to-man, eye-to-eye as a mall choo-choo train chugged and whistled past.

He then wrapped up his short sermon with a quote from Proverbs 2:7:

“He will keep the salvation of the righteous, and protect them that walk in simplicity.”

We shook hands in earnest. And I walked from J Christ to J Crew in search of my next ministrations.

A Community Meeting.

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Dan Stroncak
Dan Stroncak

IMG_4596

Derek Waleko

Cat White, Andy Hurvitz, Dan Stroncak

Not often is Van Nuys convinced it is a community, but last night, about 40 of us pretended it was, and gathered in the Columbus Avenue School to hear LAPD’s Senior Lead Office Vince DiMauro talk about the crimes that are a trademark of our district: prostitution, gangs, tagging, noise, and vacant properties.

Two political candidates for the special City Council District #6 Election (May 21, 2013) showed up: Derek Waleko and Dan Stroncak.

We were in a well-ordered academic hall, which I had last seen at my elementary school, Lincoln Hall in Lincolnwood, IL some four decades ago.

An upright piano, lunch tables stacked into the walls like Murphy beds, a state and a national flag on either side of the stage, a cop speaking kindly to attentive citizens, present among us were these venerable elements of American civic life and values.

And then Donna from the Mary Magdalene Foundation got up to present her plea for the prostitute as victim, which set off some incendiary cerebral explosion in one of the candidates, who found her characterization of whore as human indefensible. His outburst provoked some other outbursts, but the uproar lasted only briefly, and back into good manners we went.

Middle-aged and older women provided, as they usually do, the moral backbone of the meeting. Voices, articulate, erudite, educated, spoke of grating and gross indecencies in the hood: thumping boom-box music parties, tagging, pot smoking derelicts, trash, litter, burglaries. Looking around at the room, at some of the carefully lip-sticked pale faces, nice tailored burgundy jackets and lovely little pink cardigans, one temporarily forgot that outside these school doors life was grosser, poorer and coarser.

Some of the attendees last night came out and admitted to being long-time residents of Van Nuys. One man moved here in 1958, others had been here since 1965, 1973, 1979. They had stayed here, lived and loved it, every bit as much as Sandra Tsing-Loh hated it. And it was those lovers of Van Nuys who go to community meetings. And dare to imagine that life can lawful and orderly, clean and respectful, decent and courageous.

Optimism, inserted into despondency, can be revolutionary.

Noah Gillet

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Noah Gillet by Here in Van Nuys
Noah Gillet, a photo by Here in Van Nuys on Flickr.

Actor Noah Gillet
in Van Nuys, CA

photo by Andy Hurvitz

The Hollywood Advisor.

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Entrance. by Here in Van Nuys
Entrance., a photo by Here in Van Nuys on Flickr.

The Hollywood Advisor called yesterday as he usually does, four times a year, from his car, stuck in traffic, on the 101.

I am on his speaker phone and he, I imagine, is exiting at Cahuenga trying to merge into traffic, as he tells me the latest promising development on the next show that he might sell.

He is a font of upbeat news, always pushing forward, always going to the next meeting, always sure that the suits will green light his latest pilot.

He tells me there is a job I would be perfect for on the next show that hasn’t been sold. My talents and my interests would fit in just right. The last person he told that to was hired, turned out to be a disaster and they are no longer speaking.

The Hollywood Advisor, eager to get me going, into paying work, productively outputting something prosperous, told me I should do a travel blog of the San Fernando Valley because he knows some American women in Italy who write about Tuscany and he thinks it can be done for Reseda too.

He is a smart guy, quick as a whip, always ready with a pitch, and a self-taught expert on fine dining, child rearing, network broadcasting, international travel, women and their needs, investment strategies, elder care and where to find to find the best food truck on Abbot Kinney.

I have no pitch to sell, just a vaguely formed idea about a cinema verite web series on the characters who live on Hamlin Street in Van Nuys.

In the past few months I’ve read “How to Be Gay”, “Hemingway’s Boat”, “Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg” and “Touched With Fire” about manic depression and artists. I write a blog, I take photographs, I wander the San Fernando Valley and ride the train down to Silver Lake always recording, in words and images, what I see.

What have these books done for me? They expanded my mind and left me penniless.

The Hollywood Advisor advises that he doesn’t know who would buy my Hamlin St. show should it ever be produced. He has to run. He is late for a meeting. We will talk again sometime in late summer.

Red Scare at Bevmo

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Down the street there is a place where they are stocking beer and wine on shelves, checking people out, entering telephone numbers and emails into the database, loading boxes off trucks, unpacking and unloading shipments of spirits, and other liquors.

(Sounds like entry-level work except this company is as competitive and selective as Yale University)

They wear red jackets and they pass out red cards to customers and when you come here on some afternoons there is an extremely loud and jovial fat man making jokes and entertaining himself at the register, thrilled at his own wit and eager to laugh it up for everyone.

(Seems crass but the crowds love him)

A few times a year the wine goes on sale and you can buy two bottles for the price of one plus five cents.

On Fridays it gets crazy here when the customers who shop here get off work. They pour in like madmen and run like hell to get to the cold beer and warm tequila.

I had once worked in retail and I vowed to not work in it again. That was at Ralph Lauren in New York, at the flagship store, back in the early 90s, where I waited on such nobodies as Tom Selleck, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Montgomery, four of the five of whom are now dead, but hardly forgotten.

Ralph Lauren and his brother Jerry would come in and chat me up and ask me about business. Mrs. Auchincloss, Mrs. Scribner, Mrs. Radziwill, Mr. Bernie Madoff, Ms. Michelle Klier, all my billionaires, all my customers, all were satisfied.

I’m not bragging. Just telling it the way it was.

So now I live in Van Nuys. I’m not young. I think I can work in a big box beverage store, so I fill out the 30-minute online job application.

Bevmo2

Bevmo3

Bevmo4

And there is one, big, fat, irritating part where they ask you multiple choice questions and ask you to check each one such as:

When I work I:
1. talk cheerfully to people I meet
2. speak to people in a direct and candid manner

Don’t both seem admirable? Isn’t cheerfulness as important as candor?

Which attitude best describes you at work:
1. positive
2. careful

If a customer comes in and asks me a question about wine I will try to be positive, but I sure will be careful when loading glass bottles of beer.

Bevmo7

Bevmo8 Assess

Bevmo Assess9

These are just a few of the hundred multiple-choice questions that are used by Bevmo to separate the wheat from the chaff or perhaps the wheat from the hops. The application is tedious and time-consuming.

Days later, I call Olivia, the Van Nuys Bevmo Store Manager to ask her if she has received my online application.

“Hmm…what’s your last name? Ok. Here it is. Oh I’m sorry. You are a RED. I’m not allowed to proceed to interview you. YELLOWS and GREENS are good. You can take it again if you like. Looks like you did not pass the multiple choice assessment questions.”

She offers no explanation.

I have merely been defeated by a color, stopped by stoplight as unknowable as God herself.

Bevmo, Bevmo, Bevmo…..

You are continuing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red baiting. Only now the reds are applying for work.

And they won’t get hired until they turn green.

Boston.

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Youth, athleticism, joy, freedom; the thrill of running and competing, a multi-ethnic spectacle participated in by all ages, by men and women, going by, past the great buildings of old Boston, the Trinity Church and the Old South Church and the magnificent front of McKim, Mead and White’s BPL; down Boylston Street, hearts beating, blood pumping, legs moving; eyes, hearts, brains in the tens of thousands, taking it all in, the wonderment of urbanity and the ancient tradition of the marathon, transported to modernity, in the Athens of America.

And then death and dismemberment in a garbage can.

Smoke and darkness, blood and limbs, broken glass and fallen people and screams of horror.

In tears, with heavy hearts, we mourn this senseless act of violence.