My late father only moved to Los Angeles because of me. I had moved here in September 1981 to seek my adult life. I was mesmerized by the place. It was cleaner than New York. The people were friendly. The drivers were civil and respectful of the pedestrian and of each other vis a vis the rules of the road. The weather was perfect. It was a comparative paradise to the streets of the Bronx, even the nicest streets. And it was the source of the Dream Factory, Hollywood.
My father, like most of our immediate family on both sides of the tree, would have lived and died in the Bronx, and been content. He had enough of travel during World War II and liked his immediate environs. But I was an only child and and slow to individuate, so he came out to live here in an apartment I found for him near Fairfax Avenue, only about 8 months after I came here.
By the time he wrote what follows, probably about 10 years or more after our respective moves, and now over twenty years ago, he had come to positively hate the place he had never liked in the first place Although it could be unbearably hot in New York, and add the humidity, he found the ninety eight here, far more intolerable. The traffic on the FDR drive was at least as impossible and unpleasant, but the traffic here he found incomparable. The buses and trains in New York were graffitti filled, even more than here, where it had not quite caught up. Still, Los Angeles wasn't when he wrote this what I had found when I arrived years before. Even I was beginning to see the damage that the policies of our blue state (before we really used the word with such fervor) leaders were causing in a form of destructive pseudo charity, but I was still able to see the beauty in the place. And I had an otherwise satisfactory life here.
Here was his take:
The City is an illusion. It is a sign, high upon a hill. "Hollywood" proclaims the legendary sign. Tall tufted palm trees, stretching ever upward in search of life giving sustenance, turning ever brown in the face of the merciless sun. Los Angeles is a desert. It is an area not intended for the habitation of civilized man. It is a place for dying, thirsting vegetation, for burros, and tumbleweed.
Today is another unreasonably hot day. Ninety-eight. A broiling sun glares at the moving traffic, from the west. Traffic is bumper to bumper, a solid mass of crawing iron inching past the glorious manicured lawns of the Beverly Hills mansions. In the morning, this same merciless sun flares at the drivers from the East. There is nothing to shade this onerous glare. Occasionally, the flat landscape is interrupted by an illogically placed tall, square building, phallic like, proclaiming the economic macho of an insurance company.
Over the years I have heard of this great climate, the principal reason for our overpopulation.
There is no predictability to California weather. There are months of mornings when a so called marine mist obscures the sunrise. The afternoon that follows is humid and hot. There is the torrential rains, and the overclogged storm drains.
We are building a subway to nowhere. Public transportation is erratic, its buses filthy, it's drivers unkempt, the side doors of the buses reeking of urine. The children scratch their illiteracy into the bus windows with glass cutters and knives. They dare the passengers to object to their creativity.
The sound of traffic never stops. Every artery is viscous with the myriad of corpuscular spaced vehicles. The city is contantly in motion. The air turns brown in resentment, but the clamor is against secondary smoke.
Beggars infest Fairfax. A sympathetic judge has ruled that their aggressive tactics were assured by the Constitution.
Los Angeles is a haven for the new age of accentuated ugliness. The streets are stained with the escaping juices of "Big Gulps" and discarded tacos and burgers. We are reaching the perfect state of equality through mediocrity. Beauty hides her face.
Desperate immigrants crowd the corners waiting for an offer of a job. It is perhaps fifteen years since I ventured into the legendary intersection of Hollywood and Vine, that fairy tale location where generously endowed ingenues only had to sit on a stool in a pharmacy to be discovered.
I made one previous visit, long ago, not to marvel at the squares that cover the sidewalks like gilded linoleum tiles, but to return a defective telephone. As I waited, I had the chance to observe my fellow man. Dress is casual ugly. Some have the aura of buzzards waiting to pounce on an unwary target. The street people, now ambulatory after a night of cramped sleep in a doorway, or on some desolate projecting pier, search round for some useful droppings of the more affluent. This is the place where purportedly dreams are manufactured, where one can find the "Maltese Falcon", jewel encrusted and priceless.
An elderly handicapped man wheels his electric conveyance with madcap verve among the people waiting for the bus. Suddenly, he stops beside me, looks up and says, "In six months you will be riding one of these!"
Rages suffes my being. I am speechless. I want to kill him. But he is gone.
The next day, having deferred to the idea of forgiveness, I am out again.
He was pushing a Ralph's shopping cart filled with his desultory accoutrements. He was tan, open shirted, sandalled and mustached.
Suddenly, he fell, actually, he collapsed in the manner of a body abandoned by the failure of musculature. In so doing he pushed over his cart, and its contents, a motley assortment of plastic bags and rags, followed by a collection of aluminum cans.
A companion came to his aid. He righted the cart, gathered the jetsam and lifted the prostrate figure to his feet.
They did not hold. They collapsed like rubber.
I approached to see if I could help. The most helpless figure raissed his head, supported it with the palm of his hand, and spat out an invective in my direction with a slurred but comprehensible imprecation.
"What d'you want, man?" he shouted, his head wavering in the unsteady hand.
"He is drunk," said his companion, clearly. "He drinks too much."
The companion looked at me not with an apparent sense of penitence for the offensive truculence of his friend. Still I offered him a bill. He refused. He was calm, and gracious, and conscious of the offer to help, but he was asking implicitly to be left alone to deal with another of life's depradations in the pitiless streets of Los Angeles, "La Reina del Cielo", the city of the Queen of Heaven.
Well, Dad's been gone for nearly 14 years and I think even he would be startled about the level of decline in this state and city, accelerated if it were possible to do so, by the nearly two years of mandates for the rule following ordinary resident, but not for pretty much anyone else beyond the middle of the bell curve. Secondary smoke is not ok for cigarettes, but it is the beloved perfume of pot. Graffitti fully wended its way to the West Coast, for a while dwarfing the problem in New York, though now the delights of New York's policies have restored that city to its Koch era ruin. I am not sure he'd any longer find New York to his liking. A friend has said to me about dad's response to the world, the nation and the states of his former residency, were he alive, would be to have a heart attack.
Apropos of nothing, perhaps, as I was writing today, I heard that the trial of Jeffrey Epsteins liberated right hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell, which is beginning, is not accessible to live view, which of course means that whatever is going on is being kept from the public who we are ordinarily told deserves to see everything, and here's a factoid--the prosecutor is the daughter of James Comey.
Don't ask any questions. I'm betting though my father would be sitting down and writing an observation about all of this, were he here, which for his sake I am grateful he is not. This is a very hard time to bear.
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