Languages in LA

Tonight I came home to my new apartment in West Hollywood and pulled up in front of the house to find a man distractedly puttering around his car, which had a flat tire. He’d retrieved the jack from the trunk but it was some newfangled thing with the lug wrench affixed to the jack itself, and one had to perform a series of feats to disentangle it.

I came up to investigate and the thin, dark-haired man with an accent I could not place, gave a chagrined smile and admitted he hadn’t yet figured out how to maneuver this jack. I joined him in trying to peer at the directions, which may as well have been in Swahili.

As we pondered, he said, “This has not been a very good day for me. I came here to Los Angeles to try to find out more about my daughter, who is missing, and now I have a flat tire.” To say it had not been a good day seemed quite an understatement.

I sat and listened to the man talk as he changed his tire. I wished I could offer more than a towel to wipe the grease from his hands, but in the end, it was all I could do as he told me of his four month struggle to keep his daughter’s case alive with the LAPD.

She was 19 and taking classes at San Diego State. Over the summer she came up to LA where she placed an ad on craigslist offering her services as a math tutor. The man who answered, it would later surface, was a known sex offender. Donna Jou trustingly went to his house… and was never seen again.

Her father is holding on as best he can. He left Iran before the revolution to seek a better, safer life in America. Now his heart is broken. For more information, see www.donnajou.com. And teach your children well.

My best friend lives on Doheny. Doheny runs north/south and divides West Hollywood from Beverly Hills. I don’t even know if it’s a street, boulevard, or avenue. It’s Doheny, for God’s sake. Like Cher, it doesn’t need a last name.

 
There are a few streets like that in L.A., streets for which no further designation is needed. Either you know Doheny, Sunset,  Wilshire, La Cienega, and LaBrea, or you are hopelessly foreign and there is no point giving you directions because you’ll just end up in the Valley anyway.

 
It’s funny about the Beverly Hills/West Hollywood thing. Take the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel (you can’t just say The Four Seasons, you have to say the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel, or they’ll send goons after you.) It’s on the West Hollywood side of Doheny, but they call themselves The Four Seasons of Beverly Hills. West Hollywood not being prestigious enough. So you see, Doheny is very important. It separates the wheat from us chaff.

 
It also provides the final test on whether or not an implant to Weho has truly acclimated and become a denizen, rather than just a squatter. The trick is to ask someone to spell Doheny. I was listening to my friend spell it on the phone to her mechanic, and I noticed that she pronounced the O in Doheny as sort of an /ew/ rather than the plain, midwestern /oh/. It’s almost British sounding but is really just further evidence of the spreading, thinning effect of Valley speak that has pollinated all of L.A. since 1980.

 
But with that /ew/ I knew that my friend has become a true denizen of Doheny. This means that in about a month, she’ll go up to that snooty little vacant lot north of the French restaurant Conversation and pay $300 for a Christmas tree. And it’s not even on the Beverly Hills side! Ew my God.