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.