Languages in LA

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.

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.

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.

I found out where the homeless of West Hollywood hang out. But first, some background. Having finished decorating my new apartment, I sat down to assess my expenditures and nearly fainted. I decided, as an act of contrition for my Visa abuse, that I would declare today the “Don’t Spend a Penny Day.”

 I vowed I would not spend a single cent today. Not even a dollar cheeseburger from the McDonald’s drive-thru. Not even a bottle of tonic water to go with my gin. Nothing.

 By 1pm I was going through withdrawal, so I decided to do what I would have done 20 years ago: go to the public library.

 
Here I found them: the most motley collection of discarded people ever to fall asleep at a table. This is the West Hollywood library, people! A block from Robertson! Across from the Pacific Design Center!

The doors were smudged black with fingerprints, the tables too… a wan looking speciman of a man was on one of the computers. He typed for a moment, picked his nose, and then typed again. I decided I didn’t need to use the computer.

 I picked out a book on the Roman Empire and sat gingerly down. Not wanting to touch the table, I turned the pages with a daintiness utterly foreign to my character. After 20 minutes, I’d had enough. As I left, I saw a filthy plastic bin with a sign that read DONATIONS held on with aged, peeling tape.

This is where the unwanted go: unwanted books, and unwanted people. Those with money are over at Starbucks with their laptops. I’ve seen med students there. Didn’t it used to be, long ago, that the homeless hung out in diners and the scholarly went to the library?

Every once in a while, I see something that just puts a smile on my face. It’s rare that I see something like that, however, at the intersection of Hollywood and Virgil. That’s a rather rundown part of LA, the seedier part of Los Feliz, and that particular intersection is a monster. Three major streets come together, and if you are not in the lane you want to be in, you are not going where you want to go. The people you see shuffling along the sidewalk in this area usually either move you to pity or to check that your door is locked.

I mean, it’s not hell, but it’s not pretty.

Today, however, I sat at the stoplight and stared up at the long, long, long red light, only to see that there was a weird black shape in the red of the light. It seemed at first that the light was perhaps cracked, or somehow damaged, because only part of the red shone through.

Then the black shape moved and I realized that a bird had settled down into the metal frame around the red light and was contentedly surveying the intersection from its cozy perch. I had to smile. No way could that bird realize he was in the one place that every eye was fixed, that he was not just in a stoplight, he was in the spotlight. He was the focus of our undivided attention.

And if he had known, would it have stroked his little birdie ego to know we were all smiling up at him? I bet it would. He’d be like the guy in the airport sitting under the clock. He doesn’t know why all the women keep glancing his way, but he knows they’re looking.

Oh my, I have arrived. I feel so posh: I just got my first West Hollywood West Residents’ Association (WHWRA) Newsletter, thus certifying that I am indeed a denizen of West Hollywood West. Yes, they say west twice. I guess it’s because I’m at the western-most cusp. I’m so close to Beverly Hills I could throw a stone and hit it, but of course I would never, because they have their own stones over there and probably don’t want ours mingling in.

Anyway. It’s a very nice newsletter, printed in full color on stiff, smooth white paper. The president of WHWRA is Steven Golightly. Yes, really. I thought that was a made-up name when Holly Golightly appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but apparently it’s a real live name! There’s a cut-out section if I want to join the Resident’s Association and pay dues.

I just might do it. I usually bridle at the very word “dues” because … well… it usually isn’t due. I don’t, for instance, feel I owe anything to the faculty association at my school, that irritating bunch who try to squeeze $25 out of me every year so they can buy flowers for every teacher who has a baby. If it were going to provide birth control instead, I might be tempted.
 

But for the WHWRA, I just might cough it up, if only for the chance to someday meet a man I can call President Golightly. My God, that’s priceless. And look! On page 2 it says that the WHWRA will soon have full-fledged 501©(3) tax status, so the dues will be tax deductible! Could it be? Have I found a little Galt’s Gulch of fiscal conservatives in West Hollywood? Shivers are running down my spine. I wonder if they’ll accept a personal check.

I had another “what is that language doing here” moment today. I went to the 99 cent store near Western because let’s face it, I can barely afford my new apartment. But I’ll live on Ramen noodle soup if that’s what it takes to stay near Doheny, so off I went to the 99 cent store to shop for cheap stuff.

I entered the store and behind me, I heard the unmistakable sounds of French. I studied French for 5 years, which means I can understand words like jamais and toujours, and little else because the French speak too fast for me.

I turned to see three sleek, well-dressed tourists entering the store. Now what on earth were French people doing in the dollar store? I am not accustomed to hearing French in the dollar store. It comes to me, yet again, that in LA I am accustomed to hearing many languages… but they tend to crop up in certain places.

At the discount stores, I hear Spanish, Armenian, and Chinese. At the expensive restaurants, I hear British, Australian, French, and German. As for Russian, well, you never know where that’ll crop up. But hearing French in the dollar store penetrated the static that foreign languages have become.

It was as startling as hearing Chinese spoken at Chin-Chins. I have never heard Chinese spoken at an upscale Chinese restaurants. It’s the one place I can usually count on hearing nothing but English. Apparently, if Asians get a craving for Asian food, they just go home and wok it up.

But anyway, I’m still trying to figure out what French tourists were doing in the dollar store. They most have gotten lost on the way to Chateau Marmont.