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.

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.

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?

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.

Someone actually said this in my hearing the other day, and without the slightest trace of irony or playfulness. She just said it like a normal person would say “Great!”

 
It was at the Coffee Bean on Robertson, where I had been hanging out like a seal on a rock because their internet was free. I was standing in line, having just ordered my mocha latte, and to my left was a young woman not of this world. She had apparently just stepped off of a billboard, and was still all shiny from the finishing touches of the hairdresser, make-up artist, and artificial suntan spray-on technician who hover just off camera.

 She was wearing black spandex leggings, because she could, having the butt and legs of a 12 year old boy. Said leggings and legs were tucked into black suede boots with heels so pointed and high they looked like spikes. Under her perfectly tanned skin, her breasts sat on her ribs like two plastic bowls on a xylophone.

 
Her hair was bouncy at the crown,  fluffy at the forehead, tendrilly at the neck, a cascade down her back, thick as a horse’s tail and blonde as some lisping clothesrack in a salon could make it. Her lips were pouty and her sunglasses were expensive.

 
The Coffee Bean barrister, obviously recognizing her, cooed, “How have you BEEEEEN???”

 
“Fantabulous!” She replied, her perfect white teeth flashing, her perfect French manicure touching the counter.  “I was at a party last night, and I had SO much fun…”

 
So that’s what fantabulous looks like, I thought, walking away. No wonder I just say “Fine.”

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.

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.

Little Armenia has their own web page, littlearmenia.com, a truly complete guide to Armenian restaurants, services, churches, etc in Hollywood, Los Feliz, Glendale, Burbank, and Weho. (Weho is West Hollywood, our me-too response to New York’s Soho district.)

Armenians are an interesting bunch for a mid-western white girl like myself. I peer at them often with fascination. This is a group that is in no danger whatsoever of forgetting their culture. Armenian students who cannot remember times tables can still recite every detail of the Armenian genocide. Let me tell you, they know when, where, who, how many, everything. There are Armenian rap songs about it, which they listen to and get fired up about every year around the anniversary of the event.

This in and of itself is not necessarily unique, many of my Hispanic students also show a marked preference for and loyalty to the country of their parents’ birth, and consider American culture of secondary importance. But Armenians, from what I have seen so far, are holding on to their culture without evincing hostility to American culture, which is not always the case with other nationalities.

When the protests erupted last year against pending anti-immigration laws, the latent hostility and frustration in the Hispanic population was manifest. My Mexican students were chanting Si Se Puede!! and waving Mexican flags and yelling “Viva la Raza!” (the sort of chant that only dark-skinned minorities are allowed to utter.) My Armenian students looked on with mild curiosity.

I don’t know if Armenian culture simply has no ax to grind with America, or if they feel compatible with white capitalist culture. But for whatever reason, Armenian-Americans are the benign face of multi-culturalism, where diversity means cool ethnic restaurants and traditional dances in exotic costumes. I confess, I like the Armenian vibe. It’s not threatening. I’m sure this means I’m a bourgeois pig.

Oh well.

That’s meant to be a pun on lingua franca, but because I don’t speak a bit of Latin, I probably just said something risque about monks by accident. Oh well. A lingua franca is  a common language used by people who might not speak one another’s tongue. I hear it  in my classrooms, when my Thai girls speak in halting English to my Urdu-speaker, because it’s the only mutual code they can access.

 
But what I’m pondering today is something I’ve noticed in my continued window-shopping for the perfect West Hollywood apartment. There are areas in Los Angeles that are veritable enclaves of non-English speakers. In particular, I’m finding a lot of Russian and Armenian neighborhoods where, even as I poke around the courtyards of units-for-rent, I hear conversations through open windows and in little backyards that are conducted entirely in another language.

 
I remember dating a Russian fellow from New York who showed me entire areas of the Bronx where three generations have come to adulthood speaking only Russian. They stay in their neighborhood, and they have everything they need. There is no pressing reason to learn English.

 
I feel sure that Los Angeles offers similar enclaves, but I notice that on all the answering machines I’ve encountered so far in my quest to view apartments, the messages are always in English. Heavily-accented English, perhaps, but English.

 
This is encouraging. It suggests an openness to let others into the enclave. I mean, if one were interested in making sure the 800 block of such-n-such street stays Russian, there is no simpler (legal) way to screen apartment applicants than to leave a message in Russian to scare off outsiders. But so far, no one seems to be doing it… not in West Hollywood, anyway. And little things like that mean a lot to me.