Ode To Los Angeles, by Arianna Schioldager

The sun is setting and the sky in Los Angeles is push-pop orange.

It is not long before dark, and a man in his early-to-mid thirties, perhaps a once professional, a husband, a father, is begging for change, hunting and gathering in vain within a city built upon vanity.  His head hangs low on the poorly lit corner of Federal Ave at Wilshire Blvd.

He is strikingly well dressed; his clothes are clean, un-tattered and fresh looking.  Crisp khakis and a black polo hang from his still healthy structure.

His handwritten block lettered sign attempts to placate the masses in their cars en route to their own homes.  As the traffic weaves, the racing headlights swerve in and out of lanes.  They ignore that this man no longer has a home to race to.  When they are brought to a halt at the red light, many look down at their laps or stare staunchly ahead, unable to greet this stranger, or look him in the eye.  They are not placated, but rather instead, uncomfortable, ill-at-ease by his new-found state of homelessness.  It is too close to their prosperous homes.

His face, yet unbiased or hardened from years on the street, is the portrait of pain and disbelief.  His eyes are heavy, humiliated and ashamed, and as they look down at the writing upon the cardboard, the anxious knot in his stomach spreads across the grooves in his face.   He glances at the letters six times in a span of forty five seconds, almost as if a prop, something he per chance came across; this isn’t real he thinks, this isn’t happening, a bad script.

He is in agony, new to this profession, and recently bereaved of home and hearth, he longs for his past life, full of family dinners and ATM withdraws.  He would give anything to drive home in traffic and sneak a cigarette on the back porch after a long day at the office.

This is all gone.

He has nowhere to receive mail, nowhere to put food after a trip to the grocery store, nowhere to go to the bathroom in private.

Far across town, on the corner of Franklin Ave at Highland Ave, an elderly woman, kneels in front of the Hollywood United Methodist Church.  She has made a home here, surrounded by amassed plastic bags, which she tucks up under her knees – her makeshift pew.

Although a front banner claims, “All are Welcome,” she refuses to enter, and simply waits with her back to the traffic and her heart to the thick wooden doors.  This is the spot in which she has grown comfortable.

She is resolved, unlike her counterpart on the other side of the city.

He will learn.

During the day she talks to herself, babbling incoherent memories of her first days in Hollywood.  At night when she sleeps, she dreams of the home this city erased.

She has been kneeling here for years, waiting for her savior.  She expects he will come one day, but for now she is loyal to this spot, at peace with that which once made her heart drop into her empty stomach.  She holds no sign.  She does not ask for forgiveness or assistance.  She does not look to appease.  She waits on plastic bags for her own halleluiah.

Lillian, just arriving on Greyhound from Albuquerque, NM is staring out the window, face pressed up against the dirt stained glass.  The bus smells of Fritos and spilled Cactus Cooler.  The woman next to her is smacking on grape flavored Bubble Yum.  The man behind her has splashed baby powder across his body to soak up the sweat of the last few days.  None of that matters anymore.  Lillian is watching the sun set over the orange hills for the first time.

She turns to the woman next to her and says, “I knew I didn’t need a ticket home.”

In some ways she is right.

This is a city where the sun is always shining, where the rain rarely falls, and the streets rarely flood.

But what she doesn’t know is that the color of the sky is the product of pollution.  What she hasn’t yet learned is that when it does rain, the smell of the rising oil and the hot concrete blend together to form a crude musk.

What she doesn’t know is that many travelers have come searching, idealizing promises of fame, of love, of new life, but they are ideals with consequence – dreams unfulfilled and lost without warning.  The new travelers join the ranks of those that have come before.  Those that have come before have lost their homes and the contents in their wallets.

Landmarks, those that appear in famous photographs and across movie screens, are also marked by tales of these faded dreamers.  Peg Entwistle climbed to the top of the H in the Hollywood sign and jumped to her death.  Trumpeter Chet Baker, chasing the elusive comeback and so consumed by addiction, wound up working as a gas station attendant.

Lillian’s bus has pulled into the depot.  Her solo suitcase has been pulled from underneath and placed on the curb.  She eyes it carefully.  She has high hopes she will turn that suitcase into a home.

But what she doesn’t know is that this is a city without direction, even in spite of its proclivity for traffic, the pregnant freeways growing fatter by the day.

This is a desert land, flat and dry, and in a country broken by recession, here too poverty seeps from holes burnt in pockets.  The promise of fame cannot curb the assurance of debt, and now so, more than ever, the lost are scattered across the sprawling pavement.

There is nothing glamorous about this racetrack.  There is nothing desirable about its culturally bankrupt alleyways.  They say that the Hollywood streets are decked in glitter. They say that all that glitters is not gold.

This is a sad city, one without a pulse and a backwards heart.  Everyone learns in time.

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