Languages in LA

I am trying to learn the lingo of the Hollywood screenwriting community. Quickly. Before I embarrass myself again. My first red-faced moment was a year ago, when I told my apartment manager I was writing a screenplay. She said I should talk to my downstairs neighbor, who already had an agent.

I summoned my nerve and asked my neighbor if he had any advice for me. Instantly he asked, “Is your script in final draft?”

I thought he meant Are you on your final draft, i.e., Is it done? I nodded.

He offered to look at it. “But this is in Microsoft Word!” He said.

Yes, it was. So? Ah, my first blunder. Final Draft is formatting software. Later, listening to him chuckle to his writing partner on the phone, “She thought Final Draft meant…” I vowed to learn more.

Since then I’ve picked up a few terms. “Pitch” is when you try to dazzle someone with a 30 second rendition of your story. Specifically, trying to dazzle someone who might be induced to give you money.

Now comes “hip-pocketed.” My first script has found itself an independent producer, and for a year he and I have milled about, trying to dazzle a studio who might be induced to give us money. However, most of them want “attachments”. That is, a director or well-known actor who has promised to participate… once we have the money.

I finally found a director at the L.A. Film Festival. My neighbor is now advising me that since I don’t have an agent, the director’s agent will represent me if it actually gets as far as money being involved (rather than the current flurry of emails and occasional meetings over coffee.) Should we get to this point, my temporary representation by the director’s agent is known as “hip-pocketing.”

“Oh, don’t worry, he’ll hip-pocket you for this project.” Who ever would have thought this is a good thing? I’m glad I learned that in advance, so I don’t huff “I beg your pardon?!” when he offers to put me in his pocket.

I learned a new way to say “drunk” today! My new landlady, who was born in Cuba but raised in West Hollywood, was telling me the amusing story of her elderly mother partying on a cruise. She said, “Oh, she was just piped! Just piped! I said Ma, you’re not used to rum, you’re gonna get piped, and she was!”

This was a new one for me. I’ve heard of people being wasted, blasted, smashed, crocked, blitzed, and snockered, but never piped.

I asked her whether that was slang specific to this area and she paused to think it over. “Well, that’s what we said in high school, and I went to school here, so…” Of course, that was back in the 80s. Not to give her age away or anything. But I’m operating now on the assumption that “piped” is a local West Hollywood thing.

Now I’m trying to figure it out: why piped? At first I thought piped as in music. That’s my Navy background at work. When the Commanding Officer came aboard the ship every morning, the bo’sun would pipe them aboard, that is, give a long blast on the bo’sun’s whistle and announced over the 1MC, “USS Emory S. Land, arriving.”

But now that I look at the other slang terms for “drunk,” I’m struck—pun intended—by how violent they are. Smashed! Blitzed! Wasted! Now I’m thinking piped like: hit over the head by a lead pipe. Because that’s kind of what it feels like. Well, the next day, anyway.

So, having figured that out to my satisfaction, I now must solve the mystery of how the East Coast “anyhoo” caught on here in Hollywood. Because she says that too, and I am fairly certain it’s about as native to California as hummus.

Some of my students are budding thuglets with La Vida Loca faux-tattoos inked onto their hands — it’s three blue dots in a triangle at the juncture between the thumb and forefinger. One of these kids got stabbed last year in Echo Park. (That scar on his shoulder will win him female attention and sympathy for years to come. Chicks dig scars.)

So amid that bleak landscape, refreshing moments are precious. Here’s what I mean: amid my usual crop of wild, disinterested adolescents, there are the rare wonders, children who washed up on our shore God-knows-how. Two years ago it was a tall, blond Russian boy with wit and remarkable cultural knowledge. Gordy once watched three boys playing and needling each other as I struggled, exasperated, to get them to just once pay attention to the lesson. Finally he turned to me and said wryly in thickly-accented English, “The Three Stooges.” That was a refreshing moment.

Another was a girl from Bolivia whom I sat down in front of a computer and directed to write a summary of the book we had just read. She was the (very) quiet type, so I sort of wandered off and forgot about her for the better part of an hour. When I came back, she silently presented me with 9 pages… nine pages… of methodical, exact details from the novel. Single spaced. I am still certain that she is from Mars.

My most recent refreshing moment was yesterday. My little bespectacled girl from India came into the room and bounded up to me with a tiny white rose bud she had picked from a bush as she passed. “Here,” she said with a gallant flourish, “a white rose for a white lady!” This is just precious; she can’t know that “white lady” is not usually a term of endearment. Particularly in Los Angeles. I think I shall have to press that rosebud in my Complete Works of Jane Austen book. It’s just too cute.

Since I live right behind the Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood (where the Mothership will dock), I sometimes meet young recruits armed with clipboards. Apparently, one of the initial requirements is to pester the local citizenry to submit to an audit.

An audit consists of asking the same question about 40 times (literally) to see if you will crack. If you crack, I suspect it’s meant to prove to the recruit that those who have not been cleansed of… whatever… or have low tolerance for weird, repetitive tasks. Thus one day, when I was out walking my cat, I was approached by a diffident but determined young thetanist who wanted to audit me.

I was on my third gin & tonic, so I said “Sure.”

She asked me to close my eyes (I did, and nearly lost my balance). Then she said to open my eyes and find “a brand new world.” Humoring her, I looked around, pointed at an apartment across the street, and said, “I’ve never seen in that window before. That’s a brand new world in there.”

She said carefully, “Thank you. Now I ask you to close your eyes again. Thank you. Now open them up and find a brand… new… world.” This went on for about 20 minutes. I looked around and noticed a bird’s nest in a street sign. A leaf blowing into a gutter. An ant colony circling a rose bush. On and on and on. I am positive she was waiting for me to crack. I was too drunk to crack, so finally she thanked me and went away.

Now I’m left wondering… did Katie Holmes have to go through that? Surely I’d have noticed Katie Holmes wandering around with a clipboard in my neighborhood.

Hmm.

Depends on how many gin & tonics I’d had.

When I grew up in Michigan, we drank pop. Whether it was Pepsi, Coke, or 7-Up, it was pop, as in “Wanna pop?” Soda was a difficult transition for me when I left Michigan 22 years ago. But my little sister, who has recently joined me in L.A., had already begun transitioning from pop to soda some years ago. I wondered, why would a Michigander - still in Michigan - start calling it soda?

I’m a denizen of a political website, and we have our own lingo. I was reading a story online this morning about the rising rate of violent crime in London, titled “Britons Fear Rise of the Yob.” Of course, we all began asking the same question: what’s a yob? British lurkers came out of the woodwork to tell us: it’s a young thug.

“Ah,” we said, “a yute”. This is our term for young thug. It stems from a cynical awareness that newspaper stories written by those with secret sympathies for the perceived underdog have a tendency to characterize marauding vandals as “disadvantaged youth” (now imagine some hairy, smirking thug telling a police officer in a heavy Brooklyn accent, “It ain’t my fawlt officuh, I’ma disadvantaged yute.”).

But such lingo as “yute” is specific to my online community. It’s not geographical. I am wondering if soon geographical linguistic communities will be, if not replaced, at least matched by cyber linguistic communities. I certainly talk more to my online fellow denizens than I do to the neighbors. After all, neighbors move. Online is often more stable. And my little sister is a true MySpace freak. Is that where she picked up soda?

The day may be coming when, rather than hear an accent and ask “Where are you from?” we might hear a word and wonder, “what’s your URL?”.

No experience so far symbolizes Los Angeles more to me than an incident which occurred shortly after I relocated here. My car had died on arrival, so I settled in Hollywood and used public transportation for three months. Most days I just met schizophrenics who had found Jesus, but one day I saw an incident.

An elderly woman with a walker was struggling onto the bus on the corner of Sunset and LaBrea. When she finally reached the top of the steps, the driver looked down and saw, to his horror, that she had slashed the thin skin of her leg against something and blood was running down freely. The woman looked down and saw the blood. Feeble already, she began to shake and speak agitatedly… in Armenian. The bus driver, who was African-American, helped her to a seat but could not communicate with her. He went to his radio for help.

We waited for an ambulance. There were only eight other people on the bus, and none of us spoke Armenian. After a moment, a young Mexican man came, knelt down in front of her, and offered his bandanna to wrap around her leg. He didn’t speak Armenian, she didn’t speak Spanish, and the hovering bus driver didn’t speak either language. But with gestures they communicated, and the driver moved the walker aside while the Mexican passenger bound the Armenian woman’s leg with his bandanna. She patted his arm gratefully and thanked him in words he couldn’t understand, but in tones we all could.

Eventually we were all transferred to another bus, leaving the Armenian lady with the arriving paramedics. That was it. It wasn’t terribly dramatic. But it was touching, and when I think of L.A., I don’t think of the chi-chi cafes of Sunset Plaza, or the airy, shallow denizens of the entertainment industry. I think of that day on the bus.