Languages in LA

It’s taken me two years to get used to this one. My students say it all the time. It seems to mean “Wow, I’m an idiot, aren’t I? Ha ha ha!” I base this on the situations in which “Oh yeah, huh?” crops up in my classroom.

 
Situation 1. (This happens about six times a day.)

Student: Miss, it’s hot in here!! I’m hot, can’t you turn on the air conditioning?

 Me: No. I am blue with cold. Look at my goosebumps. Feel the icy, corpselike grasp of my numb and deadened fingers. I can see my breath. We are not turning on the air conditioning.

 Student: But MISS!! I’m HOT!!

 Me: Yes, you are hot. You are wearing a contraband black shirt with Tupac Shakur’s face on it, which you are covering up with a white shirt to conceal the fact that you are not in proper uniform. Over those two shirts you have your collared uniform shirt. Over that you have a blue zip-up hoodie. Over that you have a denim jacket with your little gangster tagging name spraypainted on the back so that everyone who sees you knows that you are the little monster who vandalized the side of the library last weekend. You are wearing five layers of clothing. Of course you are hot. Why don’t you take off your jacket and hoodie?

 Student: …Oh yeah, huh?

Situation 2: This happens about 20 times a day.
 

Student: MISS!!!!! I can’t find my pencil!!

 Me: On the floor behind you.

 Student: Oh yeah, huh?

Kids this age baffle me, but I am happy they have stumbled upon a phrase that they manifestly will need to employ many, many times over the next couple years, before they leave this brain-addled stage of life and blossom into real people.

Back in June I was at a cafe on Doheny, and I got talking to this paparazzi. He was very interesting looking, mohawk and piercings, cute face. Eventually we got into a pretty in-depth conversation about culture, language, and education, because he was born in Afghanistan, raised in England, and then came here to America.

And he was charming. I don’t mean lay-it-on-thick, shmoozy charm, either. I mean “intelligent conversation, thoughtful observances” charm.  If I remember correctly, he had a Master’s Degree in something like International Relations or something… from England. But he came here and found that he could make a great deal of money this way, so he did. He supports his parents entirely, from what he said. They still live in England. But he does visit Afghanistan too, and he says it’s awesome and the people are great.

 
Anyway, when I left, he walked me to my car, hugged me, gave me his phone number and told me to call him sometime. Well, I didn’t call him, because handsome, well-educated, articulate, exotic, charming young men driving expensive silver convertibles are nothing but trouble.

But last night my two best friends were talking about how Britney Spears is now sleeping with some paparazzi and he’s like her boyfriend now… and Whoa! It’s him! Adnan! The same guy! I couldn’t believe it, I said, “Hold on, THIS guy?” and showed them the picture I took of him that day. (I had my camera because I was apartment hunting.) But anyway. Isn’t that funny??

Poor Adnan. I should have called him, and saved him from Britney.  Heh.

 
Here’s his picture. Ain’t he cute? Let me tell you, I did learn one thing about photogs that day: they hate having their picture taken.

Well, maybe not only in Los Angeles, but I’ve never seen such things anywhere else. While driving to Downey for another of those dreary required professional development seminars (which never seem to develop anything in me but a hatred for driving on the interstates) I encountered more big city weirdness.

It’s the layout of the place that gives me those culture-shock moments. In Los Angeles, you can get culture-shock three miles from home. I was heading east and passed an exit sign informing me that the upcoming neighborhood was named the Byzantine-Latino Quarter. The very thought is byzantine, and as I was struggling to mentally accommodate this new flavor—new to me, anyway— the next sign informed me that I was also approaching a Hebrew college.

Yes, of course. Where else would you put a Hebrew college but near the Byzantine-Latino quarter??

I took a different route home and ended up on the southern part of Western … a description which only now strikes me as amusing because what I saw on south Western was so distracting it prevented me from mulling over it. I believe I was in the Korean section of Los Angeles because I couldn’t read any of the signs. They were all in Korean.

All except one was in Korean, that is. The post office I passed was in English. It was the Nat King Cole Post Office. In Koreatown. Yes, of course, where else would you put the Nat King Cole post office but in Koreatown?? That’s Los Angeles for you. If there’s ever a Jackie Chan library they’ll probably put it in Little Ethiopia, near where the Sino-Aztec shopping center would have to be built. It’s a small world, after all.

New York is the city that never sleeps, but Los Angeles is not. In the cold sunrise of a Saturday morning, Los Angeles is getting her beauty sleep. She has cucumber slices over her eyes and is soaking her cuticles. Even most of the lawnboys seem to vanish during the weekend, having combed her palm trees and lotioned her terraces from Monday to Friday. 

It has rained recently, which always washes the smog away for a few days, and the celebrity homes in the Hollywood Hills can be seen clearly in the morning light, sitting white and angular against the blue-tinted hillside. Blue skies always add a backdrop of comfortable cheer and wholesomeness to any scene. Even the black rocks of the Viper Room look tidy, and it sleeps off its hangover as the sun comes up. Whiskey a-Go-Go has gone night-night.

 
West Hollywood in particular has elements that would like to appear bohemian, or at least a touch jaded, like Freemason Abbey, but it’s hard to look jaded when all the furniture matches. It’s hard to look bohemian when the streets are so clean.

 
(I just got my first parking ticket this Friday for blocking the street-sweepers, so I’m a little bitter at the moment.)

 
The streets are nearly empty. The Writers’ Guild has put down their picket signs for now. The tourists who will crowd Hollywood Blvd in an hour or two are just getting up from their good night’s sleep, and checking that their digital camera batteries are charged. The little black-clad punk-rockers have left the Troubador and the Roxy, and returned to their suburbs.

 
Los Angeles is asleep. And if I didn’t have three galloping cats who wanted me up at 5:30 this morning, I would be too.

I guess this is officially a model-word now. After Tyra Banks appropriated it for America’s Next Top Anorexic, it seemed like every photoshoot featured at least one “fierce” photo of a girl narrowing her eyes. Bad enough, yes.

But now, on Sunset Blvd, is an Ambercrombie & Fitch billboard featuring a naked, headless male torso placed before a rather tame but uninhabited landscape that looks vaguely like summer in Alaska. Next to the torso is the word “Fierce.”

What it is that’s fierce on that billboard, I’m not sure. We can’t see the guy’s eyes so we don’t know if he’s got them narrowed threateningly or not. The landscape certainly isn’t fierce; the mountain is the lowest, most gentle-sloped shape you can offer and still call it a mountain. And unless you have some sort of phobic reaction to pine trees, it’s simply not that alarming.

But it says Fierce, nonetheless.

This perfectly serviceable word is on its way to an ignominious end, and it’s a pity because it’s a very specific and descriptive word. It’s more dangerous than simply wild, more refined than savage… but if it keeps getting applied to people who live on diet pills and have no discernable function in the world but displaying clothing and demonstrating the most elegant way to exit a limo, the word in is trouble.

It’s already difficult to use the word without irony, and soon even those who despoiled it will shy away from it as it becomes a cliché. It’s headed for the same scrapeheap as nice. Maybe they’ll team up and a new saying will emerge: “Oh I love those boots! They’re nice and fierce!” (Which will mean spike-heels and any construction featuring leather or feather.) Word death isn’t pretty, is it?

One down side of living in Hollywood is that old friends and relatives from back East who have never taken the slightest interest in you before suddenly develop a longing to visit you. In other words, they want a free place to stay while taking the Universal Cities tour and scoping out celebrities at Chateau Marmont. Avoiding the sudden attentions of such types has required an adherence to a certain Spartan type of living arrangements.

 
For instance: never rent an apartment with an extra bedroom or every relative you have will come slinking forth with wistful hints at how miserable they are in the snow and cold of their dying factory town. If they evince a preference for sofas anyway, be warned: anyone who is willing to take over your sofa for a few weeks may indeed be willing to take it for a year or two.

 
My second line of defense has been the lack of a television set. I am proudly anti-TV. This saves me money in cable bills, yes, but the real advantage is watching the teenage children of my relatives and friends waver in their applications for visits. When even that grew less of a deterrent, I canceled my internet and became a denizen of Coffee Bean.

 
But a new danger lurks. Gameboys, iPods, and various electronic toys have enabled people to build a bubble of personal enjoyment around them that may allow them to camp on couches in insular apartments for months to come. Thus I am preparing to embark on my next move, which I hope will checkmate any further encroachments: I’m buying kerosene lamps and a cooler. If one more relative other than my mom even sends me a hopeful sounding Christmas card, I’m cutting off the electricity.

Now that I live right across the street from all the posh folks, I like to take walks on their side of Doheny. I see some interesting things in Beverly Hills.

 
-A precariously thin woman approached me. Her clothing was young and trendy, her blonde hair shining in a bouncy, stylish cut. She was skeletally thin, wore designer sunglasses and had pouty lips. As she grew closer, I could see that she was about 60 years of age.

-An older, white gentleman was mowing a lawn. I haven’t seen a white person mowing a lawn since I moved here, and nearly stopped in my tracks. Could it be that all the pro-immigration voices are wrong, and California would not fall into disrepair and chaos without a steady stream of low-paid workers from Mexico? I should have taken a picture of him.

-If Beverly Hills has a signature flower, it’s the white rose. They grow everywhere. It’s like Ireland, only smaller. I wonder if they were on sale at Bristol Farms one year and everyone rushed out to get them. They do smell nice.

-Unfortunately, the white roses do not cover the smell of fertilizer. This is the polite word for the stuff that all the Bevites are having spread in a thin, odorous layer over their lawns. This stuff was scooped up as the cow walked away and has undergone very little alteration, from what I can smell, before being spread delicately across the lawns in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America.  Someone very trendy must have done it first, because it now has the ubiquity of a full-fledged fad, like wearing fur-lined boots in perfectly clement weather.

If there is one fashion trend that began in the gutter and then started digging, it’s these jogging pants girls wear with writing on the buttocks. I still recoil at wearing a t-shirt with writing on it, because I don’t want strangers staring at my chest. When girls started appearing on the scene with JUICY written across their butt cheeks, I nearly fainted. Especially as one of the first places I saw it was across the behinds of several of my 12 year old students.

“Miss, it’s just the brand name!” The girls assured me sweetly. Uh huh.

After JUICY came PINK, which was no improvement. Really, it wouldn’t matter what was written. Words on the butt make people look at the butt, and men’s eyes have never needed help finding girls’ butts.

Truly, whoever came up with this idea should go straight to hell. Encouraging teenage girls to walk around with slogans of any nature on their butts is bad enough, but JUICY and PINK? Why be so coy? Why not just put “Sodomize me!” on your butt? Maybe with a little target underneath?

Bad as this was, time turns it uglier. Yesterday on my walk up Doheny, I saw a woman with thin, clinging white jogging pants on, across whose butt was written 2002. Apparently now you can tell people when you graduated college, using your butt.

But this was not the problem. The problem was, this is 2007, and she had apparently put on about 7 lbs a year since graduating. I’ll let you do the math.

Don’t get me wrong, my butt’s no better. That’s why I’m out on long walks. That’s also why there is nothing written on my butt.

Is it me or do Californians build houses like they make salads at a salad bar? My favorite walk through Beverly Hills brings me down several streets where the houses begin to aspire to mansion status, although it is still a suburb. They are well-kept and spacious, and it’s a lovely street, but there is something jarring about the houses.

 
There are several elements that recur in house after house, and each house seems to have at least three of them, none of which, as far as I can tell, actually go together.

 
If I were to make a composite house that represents this neighborhood, I’d do it thusly: The fence surrounding the house would be comprised of white painted wrought iron, intricately worked. Very intricate, with curls and coils. The gate, indeed, should look like a big Irish doily.

 
Behind the big Irish doily, the house would sit grandly under a Spanish tiled roof, with big, bright shutters at the windows that should suggest an air rather Flemish. The walkway should be surrounded with Moroccan tile.

 
The front door… and this is absolutely essential… should bespeak a clear Greco-Roman influence, with flattened pillars implanted on either side, and a piece overhead that looks like the roof of a temple.

 
Finally, the house should be banked in roses like a cozy English cottage, while palm trees rise on either side. In other words, they are big and grand, but horrid, a hodge-podge of styles tossed on a plate and smothered in sauce, a pizza of clashing cultures and pointless features. They may be large, may be rich, may be well-appointed and comfortable, but I find them utterly tasteless.

 
Although, of course, if someone gave me one for free, I’d take it. Then I’d build a pagoda in the front. Just for fun!

I was at the corner of Sunset and Bronson when I saw him driving the car in the lane to my right. I don’t remember what kind of car, something small and dark and not very expensive. What I remember is him. He looked to be about 20, and had long, dark blond hair gathered loosely at the nape, with artistic strands falling forward along his jawline.

His neck was long, his face was pale and thin with dramatic cheekbones and large, deep set eyes. But what struck me was how dreamy and far away was the look in those eyes. I immediately decided that he was a musician and a poet, and he did indeed seem to be lost in the music that was audible from his speakers. He wasn’t unusually handsome; slender, pale young men are a dime a dozen in any college town. It was that absent, introspective gaze that threw me.

 
As he pulled away, I saw his license plate was Arizona, not California, and suddenly I felt an ah-ha! in my throat. Of course he was not yet a denizen of Los Angeles. I noticed him not because he was particularly striking, but because he did not have that L.A. look.

 
The L.A. look is alert, intent… the cool, scanning readiness of a hungry cat. Those are the people who are here for a reason, and are ever on the lookout for someone who can help them, someone to pitch their idea to, their script, their music, their talent. Their eyes assess you in a flash when you pass them by. This boy didn’t have that look yet.

 
But if he’s a musician, and he’s here, he’ll soon develop it, thus losing the one thing that, to me anyway, made him unique.