Above the Street Life

 

On the Street: New York

 

Taxi!

 

Wilshire & El Camino

 

Wilshire and Rodeo

 

405 Never Sleeps

 

Here Comes Summer

By day, the 110 freeway through downtown Los Angeles is a wasteland of ripped off bumpers and lost license plates.  The asphalt is cracked and broken, the storm drains clogged with bird shit and dirt, the sloped sides leading to the street level littered with dead weeds, trash and cigarette butts.  The light from the sun ricochets of skyscraper glass and superheats the car.  It is an ugly, ugly thoroughfare stoked with traffic and noise and heat and people trying to get to work or get home from work or get on with their lives.

 By night, however, the area is transformed, as long as you keep looking up.  The skyscrapers bejewel the night sky and the air from the ocean wraps the towers in misty high clouds and brings a freshness to the city.  It is as close as L.A. gets to a sparkling metropolis.  It is almost enough to make us forget the day-to-day detritus and the arc of human misery playing out on the streets below, on Skid Row just a few blocks to the south, and under the overpasses where the homeless toss and turn in restless sleep.

Los Angeles is not beautiful in its decadence like New York or Paris.  It lacks the pulsing life of the mind so common in the east or in Europe.  It is a city of facades, each one good for a few years until it is torn down for some other build-up of an already broken dream.  But there are moments of possibility, moments of slight-of-hand beauty if you look.

So it was one recent night-ride through Los Angeles on the edge of another summer.

Riding the 158

Every morning for the four years of high school, I would catch the 158 bus south down Woodman Avenue and every evening, I’d reverse the process and take it northbound back home.  Compared to the way my world is now, with maintenance, insurance, and traffic, the bus ride was cheaper.  Of course, if someone had asked me then, economy would not have mattered.  I was miserable.  First, I had to walk several blocks in the cold morning or blazing heat to the bus stop; then, I could pile my books and belongings on the seat next to me in the vain hope that the bus would not become too crowded and I would be forced to share a seat with some stranger.  On the way home, the kids from the public junior high school invaded the entire space, shouting and screaming, and even though I was older than most of them, they still intimidated me with their noise and obnoxious behavior.

I’d like to say I used my time wisely on those mornings and evenings, but I did not.  Mostly, I stared out the window, people-watching.  Many of them, like me, were simply following through on their daily routines, and therefore, I saw many of them every day in the same spot, as if frozen in an almost-still photograph.  I watched them and made up histories and stories for them.  The old lady who wobbled down the sidewalk from the supermarket carrying the ingredients for her evening meal.  The two gangbangers out on the stoop of an apartment building staring menacingly at the traffic.  The old duplex where my uncle and aunt used to live before they decamped for Palmdale.  The tiny music store that tempted me, once, to get off the bus early and go inside.  Sheet music, a few instruments, a lot of dust, so I mustered courage and asked the proprietor if he ever needed some help.  No, no, he muttered, he did not make enough money to hire anyone, and he was, in fact, selling the place if I knew any buyers.

As much as I tried to escape taking the bus, I always seemed to wind up back in my seat.  For a while, a co-worker from a job I picked up at a travel agency to pay my tuition used to drop me off on her way home, but she couldn’t do it with any regularity, so back to the 158 for me.  A classmate would pick me up some mornings as he drove by, but our schedules never seemed to match up properly to make it a regular occurrence.  The best time was when my father would lend me his truck.  Ahh, the freedom of one’s own car.  But those times were few and far between.

Once, on a hot May afternoon, I walked home from the school after playing in the band for graduation.  The trip that normally took about 20 minutes on the bus took more than two hours on foot.  And even though the neighborhood is dangerous now but not so much then, I still encountered some scary people on the trek home.  Their stories were clear in the glare of their eyes; no need for me to fictionalize them at all.  They were real life scary.  I also set a dangerous precedent by walking the route.  My mother decided if I could walk it once, I could do it more often when she didn’t want to drive down to pick me up.  The bus stopped running about eight o’clock in the evening, so when I was at band practice until ten at night, she was always tempted to tell me to walk home, although that would have meant a midnight arrival.  In the end, common sense and the fear of looking like a bad parent kept me safe and sound in the passenger seat of my family station wagon on those late nights.

In the era of the ‘80s, my era, the band Missing Persons had a song entitled “Walking in L.A.,” the main idea being that no one walks in L.A.  It is also true that no one takes public transportation in L.A. unless there is no other choice.  L.A. is a car city, and to be without wheels means walking the streets which are filled with cars but light on pedestrians, especially in the suburbs where I grew up.  In a place where you might be the only one walking down the street through neighborhoods of tract homes, you became a target for bullying and random acts of violence.  At one house on my route to and from the bus stop, the teenagers threw rocks, bottles and anything else they could find at me.  I did not know them, nor did I ever have any encounter with them previously.  It was simply a crime of opportunity.  Often when standing at the stop, people would throw things from their cars at me, or shout out obscenities and threats.  I often tried to figure out why this kept happening.  Was it something in the way I looked?  Did I stand in such a way as to invite violence?

What I’ve learned from being a bus rider, a walker, a bicyclist, a car commuter, is that Los Angeles is a hard city to travel in, and one best be careful on the streets.  Walking in New York has its own pitfalls and dangers, but there are lots of people walking, and there are cabs and subways, and people have options.  Here in Los Angeles, one either has a car, or one is at an extreme disadvantage.  Traffic is so bad that buses are often late or don’t show at all.  They are crowded and smelly.  Currently, there is a class action suit in progress originating with the bus operators who feel they were poisoned by the pesticide sprayed in the buses to ward off cockroaches and bed bugs.  One wonders if the daily passengers, the ones without options, should be part of that lawsuit.

Every day, a staff member at the college where I work walks two miles uphill in the morning and downhill in the evening to catch her bus.  I see her, walking through the mist and again, in the dusky twilight.  I’ve often stopped to offer her a ride, which she only occasionally accepts.  The most grueling part of her journey must be the uphill climb in the morning, as the campus sits on a hilltop.  In the heat of summer, I don’t know how she does it.  And she is not alone: there are many others making the uphill trek, domestics climbing to their jobs cleaning multi-million dollar homes.

We are a city of isolates, of loners, of people in their bubbles all moving toward something.  We are in our cars with satellite radio and entertainment systems.  As we pass one another, we see cartoons playing silently in the minivan next to us, or the man gesticulating wildly and talking to invisible people, utilizing his hands-free cell phone built into his car.  In a city where no one walks and only the desperate take public transportation, we try to build barriers to ward off the Other.  We avoid interaction because it threatens our equilibrium.  We surrender to the imaginary world where we control our own destiny because we have a car.  I drive, therefore I am.  But what I learned riding the 158 on Woodman Avenue for four years of high school is that even in a crowd, we are alone.  We do not control our destiny, nor the time it takes to reach our destination.  Regardless of how we arrive, we are the citizens of a constipated city in desperate need of some relief.

If I Take the Wings of Dawn

for Laura Michaelian (1922-2013)

Earlier this week, while stuck in gridlocked traffic on Sepulveda Boulevard through the pass here on the west side of Los Angeles, a young deer, a buck with forked horns, ambled out of the brush on the side of the road and walked up to the passenger window of my car.  He stared at me intently for several moments, maybe even a minute, and clearly in my head I heard his voice:  “What are you doing with your life?”

Before you accuse me of driving under the influence, or question how I knew it was the deer’s voice, let me just say in my defense that although I was listening on the radio to the predictions of400,000 Ebola cases by the end of January and the report of how tumbleweeds have taken over whole neighborhoods in my drought-plagued city, I was not hysterical or even close to falling over the edge into insanity.  The only thing I can say is that the deer gave voice to a question that has been running around in my dreams for months now:  “What are you doing with your life?”

My problem is, I keep waiting for something.  A sign, a hint, a door left opened.  Is that wrong?  I mean, there has to be more to existence here in my fiftieth year than sitting in two hours of traffic each day only to fall into bed every night wondering exactly what I accomplished that day, or worse, what will I accomplish tomorrow, or next month, or in the years ahead?  What does it really mean if you feel as if every part of your life is a wrong turn off the existential highway?  I think of the phrase, “in the weeds.”  Is it normal to feel, on every level, in every situation, that I am “in the weeds?”  It is not just that I am entangled in the details and complexities of my life; those details and complexities are things I never thought I’d be entangled in, much less have to take ownership for, but here we are.  I own the wrong life.  However, I can hear a literal Greek chorus of wise men from Plato to William Michaelian tell me that there is no “right” or “wrong” life.  There is just life.  Live it, and quit your belly-aching.  (Okay, that last line sounded more like my mother from Kentucky.)

We live in moments, crystal drops of time that fall and shatter and wash away to become fragments of memory.  From dust we were created and to dust we shall return.  It is so difficult, so heartbreakingly frustrating, so profoundly vast and empty, to contemplate the fact that the world will go on, quite efficiently, without us.

I remember a religious studies professor I had as an undergraduate, the same man who married my wife and me in his church 27 years ago.  He told us once that as he was driving home one evening, he came to a stop by the side of the road with the premonition that he would die soon, and almost everyone on earth would not care.  Outside of his family and a few friends, his death would escape notice.  No tributes. No public monuments.  No lasting work—a great novel or philosophical treatise—to leave behind.  Just a quiet slipping away into the dusk.  Very few of us are Shakespeare.  Our reputations will not transcend the end of our earthly bodies.  We die twice, once at our deaths, and then again when everyone alive who remembers us dies.  How do we live in such a world?  My teacher broke down and sobbed in his car, and this from a Congregationalist minister not given to highly emotional outbursts or bouts of narcissism.  His was a stoic, New England persona, and a deeply serious man trying to express something dark and disturbing:  the absence of being in the world.

Although mortal, I am trying with every fiber of my being not to be.  How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?  We live well, with good works and intentions.  We create art and beauty, we celebrate truth, we extend a hand, we listen, we meditate, we hold close those we love.  We get up each morning and wind the clock of existence, day after day, so that time does not run out on us.  But it will.  It always does.  Time flies, and then there is darkness.  But still, we try to hang on to the light.

The deer by the side of Sepulveda Boulevard looked deep into my eyes for what seemed like an eternity, a plasma pause in the universe of light.  Then he snorted and broke the spell.  He shook his head from side to side, turned, and ambled away.  I watched him pass the other cars behind me, stopping for a moment to look at each driver.  I guess he still had not found the answer he was looking for.

The Flood

Photo courtesy of NBC Los Angeles

Tuesday afternoon, we saw what can happen when one hundred year old infrastructure collapses.  A water main ruptured north of the UCLA campus sending 20 million gallons of precious, drought-year water cascading south to flood the campus and cause damage that is still being tallied.  The website BuzzFeed put together a nice graphic showing just how much water was lost in comparison to typical household usage.  Suffice to say, 20 million gallons represents approximately four percent of total water usage for the city on any given day, according to the DWP.  And this comes in the middle of a drought year where cities and local communities in California are enacting new laws to make it a criminal offense to water a lawn or wash down a driveway.

This break is only one in a series of water main ruptures and sinkholes that have plagued the city water system over the last few years as aging pipes and mains begin to fail.  The funds necessary to replace this infrastructure across the city would total millions of dollars and would result in losses in revenue as well as major problems for commuters as whole streets are torn up to reach the failing pipes.  However, to wait for crippling collapses like Tuesday’s fiasco is to court certain disaster.  UCLA announced late in the week that several buildings and athletic fields suffered major damage resulting in millions of dollars in repairs.

With the 405 project in the Sepulveda Pass still in progress, the closing of Sunset Boulevard for repairs made traveling to the west side of the city from the valley a challenge.  This only highlights another problem:  even if the city can find the funding to replace aging infrastructure, the time involved in completing the projects means traffic problems for commuters, noise issues for residents in the areas, and interruption of city services.  The 405 project to widen the freeway and replace aging bridges has gone on for so long that it is questionable whether it has been worth all the trouble and inconvenience for a simple one lane addition.

In the valley, the east-west streets in Studio City have been torn up for some time now.  Often to come west, traffic must go as far north as Chandler Boulevard to cut over.  These areas are filled with driving hazards like steel plates covering trenches, sharp objects that can puncture tires, and heavy equipment that presents obstructions that prevent drivers from seeing oncoming traffic and pedestrians.

The reality of living in the city is that things must be maintained and refurbished, especially in the case of roads and highways.  Los Angeles faces two challenges:  one, finding the funds to repair the aging infrastructure to avoid disasters like the Sunset Boulevard water main break; two, finding a way to complete these projects expeditiously so that people can get to work and school on time in their daily commutes.  Public transportation has improved in the last few years, but we are a long way from buses and subways being the preferred mode for getting around the city.

In L.A., we always seem one slim margin away from disaster.  I shudder to think what would happen here if our water became undrinkable, as it did in Toledo, Ohio this weekend.  We talk a lot about being prepared for emergencies.  We hold drills several times a year for earthquakes and other natural disasters.  Yet, when the brush fire breaks out, the street ruptures under pressure from broken water mains and natural gas leaks, or civil unrest boils over into the streets, our city is paralyzed.  As our streets and freeways face never-ending congestion, these issues will only become more prominent and dangerous.

The issue Tuesday with shutting down the leak more quickly had to do with increasing pressure on other aging mains in the area risking further ruptures.  This is unacceptable.  If it means repealing Proposition 13, the property tax initiative signed into law in 1978, so be it.  That measure is often cited when we are faced with libraries closing, schools being underfunded, and infrastructure collapsing.  Tuesday, we watched 20 million gallons bleed away into the streets and ultimately into the storm drains, lost to us in this drought year, and it seems with global climate change, the drought may be with us a long time, maybe even permanently.  Somehow, things have to change.