This is a piece that originally appeared October 26, 1997, in the LA Times Sunday Magazine.
I no longer live in LA. I’m no longer married. The LA Times no longer has a Sunday magazine, nor does St. Basil’s have a daily 5 pm Mass. And as the collective human heart breaks for the devastation in LA, the piece seems as timely now as it ever was.
COPA DE ORO
The newscasters here focus on the rats in the palm trees, the model-murdering photographers, the houses sliding into the sea, but there is so much they don’t say about L.A. They don’t say that the names of the purple flowers alone make a kind of poem: jacaranda, sea lavender, lilies-of-the-Nile; lobelia, heliotrope, blue-eyed grass. They don’t talk about white stucco walls curtained with bougainvillea the color of lit rubies or the sound of eucalyptus leaves, rustling like the skirts of ball gowns, in a Santa Ana wind.
They leave out so much, especially when they talk about neighborhoods like mine. When Tim and I first moved to town, we didn’t know the Eastside from the Westside, the Valley from the South Bay. Culver City, where we first rented that boxy house with the camellias, had a few decent features–the Cuban restaurant Versailles, which served mouth-watering roast pork and garlic chicken; the tiny, tongue-in-cheek Museum of Jurassic Technology–but we never quite warmed to the blocks of bland suburban streets, the “shopping centers” that hadn’t changed since the Kennedy administration. Even worse, it was on the Westside, the core of which was Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Bel-Air; manicured, sterile, money in all its most depressing manifestations: Missoni, Niketown, Rodeo Drive.
It took us two years to get the lay of the land and as soon as we did, we moved to the Eastside: shabbier, funkier, more mixed, supposedly hipper. Silverlake, for instance, was cutting edge and arty, Hollywood was runaways and punk rock, West Hollywood was designer gay. No matter which way you cut it, however, Koreatown, where we moved, was not hip at all. Four miles west of downtown, it was filled with cut-rate massage parlors, pool halls, Mexican bakeries, Thai noodle joints, street vendors and people from all over the world who had not even the remotest grasp of such modern innovations as doorbells, sane driving or anti-littering laws.
K-town is infested with gangs, teeming with street vendors and overrun with children. People play soccer in the middle of the street, pour used motor oil down the storm drains, deal drugs. Under cover of night, a locust-like swarm of crack addicts, the mentally ill, the criminally inclined, spray paint graffitti on streetlight standards, strip cars of headlights, radios, antennas, seats, shoot off their guns when they get bored.
The newscasters are glad to tell that story, but they never tell the human tidbits that make it interesting. Though this is the city’s Korean commercial center, for example, most of my neighbors are Latino, and they are the most fun-loving folks imaginable. They set up makeshift bazaars on the sidewalk. They haul out a couple of tables and sell carpet sweepers, swamp coolers, telephones. They hang used clothing displays from security fences, and sell tools and tamales from the shade. They have Saturday night block parties that start, with a high-powered boombox and a few cases of beer, at two in the afternoon.
The children eat candy and ice cream and throw the wrappers in the street. One day I come across a horde of them writing on the front steps of our apartment building with hunks of colored chalk.
“Children, children!” I exclaim. “This is private property you’re defacing!”
They are pretty sure this is a joke, but for a few uncertain seconds, twenty brown eyes bore into mine and ten small mouths fall silent. Just then, the Aguilar Produce truck pulls up, blasting “The Entertainer” from its tinny loudspeakers. Jorge, a ragamuffin in shorts and a Dodgers cap who sometimes helps carry my groceries, executes a little bump-and-grind. I shimmy back. He swivels his hips and, with one hand, pretends he is rolling a lariat.
Next thing I know we are on the sidewalk holding our arms up like prizefighters and doing a modified version of the hula. The others surround us, hooting and clapping, until the truck pulls away, taking our music with it.
As I drive off, Jorge and his friends swarm back, chalk in hand, over the steps.
The newscasters make it sound as if nobody walks in Los Angeles–it’s too dangerous, too smoggy, too inconvenient–but this is not true. I walk almost every day. From Hobart and 9th, I walk north to Melrose, east to Vermont, south to Pico. I walk past the grand old apartment buildings: the Gaylord, the Talmadge, the Ancelle. They have slate roofs, scrollwork around the windows, friezes of Egyptian mummies around the top story. They survived white flight, then black flight and now they have blue banners slung across the corners that say in large block letters: Se Renta–$295.00. They are built close to the street. One basement wafts the fresh smell of laundry. The next emits the reek of a chicken coop.
From wheeled carts women sell elote–ears of corn dipped in an industrial-size plastic jar of mayonnaise–and men sell paletas, the Mexican version of Popsicles. Every yard, no matter how unkempt, has an hibiscus growing in it. The blooms are banana yellow or lipstick red, frilly as can-can skirts.
The building to the north of ours is filled with Korean families. We see them coming and going because our windows face their porch and the doors to their apartments.One morning the cat wakes me at 4. I turn on the light in the kitchen, feed her, and, in my nightgown, stare absently out the window. The door across the way opens and a man in a zippered jacket comes out. His balding hair is combed back wet and his shoulders are slumped with fatigue. He pauses at the top step, takes out a cigarette from his jacket pocket and strikes a match.
The flare illuminates his face and I see he is about my age. He looks over and our eyes meet. Afraid I have embarrassed or startled him, I am careful to keep my own face vacant. I expect him to turn stonily away. Instead, he smiles broadly and waves, his fingers gripping the cigarette. Its tip glitters like a tiny star.
Sometimes I drive the half mile to Hancock Park, where the rich people live, and walk from Norton to Highland, or up and down the wide, shady boulevards between 3rd and 6th: Irving, Plymouth, Rossmore, Muirfield. If the Mexican gardeners have just finished cutting the grass, the air smells like patchouli.
The houses have wide, emerald-green, perfectly-landscaped lawns, but there are never any people on them. In fact, besides the Westec security people who patrol in little white cars, there are hardly any people anywhere. There are only the big, elegant silent houses and the sprinklers spraying water on the flowers nobody seems to ever look at or play among or pick.
Perhaps the point is not that where I live is dangerous, but that nowhere else is safe either. Perhaps the point is not that some of us will steal and some of us will agonize over whether it is stealing to have more than we need when so many others have nothing. Perhaps the point is to realize that we are connected to one another so closely that everything we do and say and think radiates out, in some unimaginably mysterious way, to the whole world.
Back in my own neighborhood, I walk the half-mile to St. Basil’s on Wilshire for five o’clock Mass. When I come out, it is getting dark. Between the columns of buildings and the rows of swaying palm trees silhouetted in the dusk, the sun is setting in a blaze of gold. I walk south on Harvard, hedged with red bottlebrush, and turn right on 8th. They are turning on the neon signs in the sushi joints, the billiard halls, the clubs that advertise happy hours. They are turning on the neon signs that glow from the rooves of the grand old apartment buildings.
I head south and walk past one of them. Here, too, the lights are coming on. Each window is a frame, like a television set tuned to a different channel: a woman stands at an ironing board, a shirtless man shaves, children eat dinner. The air is heavy with the perfume of frying oil and chiles, onions, meat.
I am almost home now. My car is parked near the curb, the hood and spare tire chained down against thieves. There are dog droppings on the mangy strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. There is litter–flyers for cheap auto insurance, an empty box of Cheez-Its, cardboard Big Gulp cups.
And up the street, in the midst of the crime, the filth, the decay, a bunch of girls are shouting and laughing. They have tied together pieces of the kind of white elastic that holds up pajama bottoms and stretched it around saplings and stakes. They are playing Chinese jump rope, and the knowledge that life is everlasting swells within me.
That is the real reason I continue to live here, because my neighbors give me faith that when we have finished shooting and starving and aborting each other, when there is nothing left to drink or snort or smoke or inject, when we have paved it all over and used it all up and nuked what’s left to kingdom come, out of the smoking rubble will rise a woman pushing a baby stroller, a man tinkering with an engine, a geranium growing on a windowsill in an old tin can.
I walk up my steps. Through the wrought-iron gate lies the courtyard with its box hedges and calla lilies and moth-eaten roses. From the standard of a carriage lamp, bamboo chimes clack delicately, like the bones of children. Our apartment is on the right hand side, in the back, upstairs. A light shines in the window. I walk toward it.
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