- nell
- Jul 23, 2023
presumptuous: after joan didion
realistic: after all the twenty-somethings who’ve ever had “the conviction that nothing like this … has ever happened to anyone before” and then wrote something after joan didion
I know when Los Angeles began for me: six months late.
I was on my seventh bus of the day. It should have been the sixth, but that vehicle had just come to an unexpected halt, and the driver had abruptly disembarked after a brief assurance to us, the passengers, that he would be right back. The city was languishing in a heat wave, and at this precise moment, the temperature was about 100 degrees. (Parts of my body particularly coated in sweat: upper lip, underboob, forehead, rear end. Etc.)
It was so hot, and the sun was so fierce, and the buses had been so many and so boisterous that when a different man bounded aboard, inspected the driver’s console, exclaimed “Oh shit!” and then turned to us passengers and said, “You guys are coming to my bus,” I thought, Sure. By this point, I would have followed anyone, certified bus operator or no, who seemed so unfazed by the weather and possessed such exuberant, genial certainty. My path lay in the hands of whatever you want to call it: the divine, the universe, or the LA Department of Transportation. We, the passengers, followed this man like our prophet.
It was on his bus, my seventh bus of the day, that things grew interesting. A new passenger boarded, and I sensed right away that he would be making waves. Sure enough, once we got underway again, he took us all in, turned to the driver, waved his hand in disdain, and announced with great gusto:
“Los Angeles is the most rotten place!”
Rotten has several definitions, literal and figurative, but first and foremost, it means something is suffering from decay. So when I heard what he said, and I thought of the tar pits, of the surges of putrid gas that burble up from the city’s nether regions and ripple the surface of the oily lake beside Wilshire, I thought, That’s one way to call a spade a spade.
The thing that’s funny about all this is I never meant to live here, never nursed a tiny dream of it till it (and I) grew up shiny and strong. I'm not sure if this lack of a full-grown, decades-old dream means I was spared or makes me a sucker, because nevertheless I'm here now, doing something wholly unoriginal: making a go of it in this most rotten of places.
On top of that, I arrived here—with, if not a long-cherished, well-nourished Big Dream, at least a hefty Hope on growth hormones—in a time when there is, officially, no room for Hope at all. As there is, officially, no Business at the moment, due to a number of problems, the source of which is not unlike the organic material breaking down deep in the city’s bowels—rotten.
It is not unreasonable to lean toward this makes me a sucker.
Especially because I have been, for six months, treating it mostly as an accident that I live here now, that it isn’t quite real, just like this place isn’t quite real, and that I am somehow not in and of it. You think you will be unlike everyone else, even as you walk the streets (or perhaps bus them eight times in one day) listening on repeat to “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” as though the song was written, not for every twenty-something who has ever lived, but especially for you, kid.
But you’re not even close to a kid anymore, and this unforgiving city will not open the door for you, will not invite you in. It is busy—it has sludge to dredge, pickets to thwart, and parties to throw, it has heat waves to host and oil to pump (or not to pump, it cannot decide). I heard that the palm trees the city is famous for are in fact dying off, that they don’t actually belong here—were never meant to grow here. Was anything ever so on-the-nose? Yes, if you count my coming here, learning it, and being surprised.
“Los Angeles is the most rotten place!”
To his credit, the driver of the bus did not take the passenger’s bait and entertain debate about the merits and demerits of the city of Los Angeles. The opinionated passenger didn’t offer any additional condemnations of interest, at least not loud enough for the rest of us to hear. Eventually, he disembarked, and in time, so did I.
After this seventh bus ride, I ducked out of the ruthless sun and into the cool sanctuary of the Griffith Observatory planetarium. I had been before, but even so I still felt very much like a tourist today, except I knew I was there, now, looking for something. I knew this something was important, but I didn’t know quite what it was yet, only that I would find it there, high above the hazy city below. After hours in the harsh, hot light of LA, the observatory felt like another place, another time—the hallowed threshold of a pristine elsewhere. A place that held open the door, I thought, painfully earnest, a place that invited you in.
The show was about how we as humans try, have always tried, to understand our place in the cosmos in order to understand ourselves. I watched constellations spin overhead, listened to tall tales of Ptolemy, of Galileo, of Hubble, marveled at the glitter of galaxies signaling the slow but steady onward march of our collective knowledge, and still I didn’t see.
But then, once the stars faded, the narrator approached us with a soft, glowing sphere in his palm. And he gently suggested that when we wonder so deeply what our tiny little place is in a vast, busy, and unforgiving universe, we are, in fact, already home. And I thought, This is another way to call a spade a spade.
Back in the evening sun, I looked down at the city. I didn’t know what it would be to me when and if I ever left it—the Coast, a rough beast, a blood-soaked gown, or just a rotten place—but I happened to be here now, which in fact made it home. There’s no place like that, so I opened the door and invited myself in.
