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Koreatown
Tuesday, April 4 2000
It was another day at work. I showed up sort of early, at 8:30am, wanting to send out some work-related emails I'd neglected to send last night before leaving, and you wouldn't believe the joy I felt to find the place nearly as dark as a tomb. You have to understand, at my last job, most employees were expected to arrive at 8am and stay past 7pm. I'm realizing now that a company like that could never exist in the greater Los Angeles area. This city, this land of musicians, actors, script writers, models and restaurant staff, is where the term "day job" was invented!
While I was off at work, Kim was giving her dakini apprentice Diana something of an education. Since Diana is freshly relocated from a life in San Francisco, she has no car. So Kim offered to take her home tonight. In keeping with protocol, I tagged along.
Diana doesn't have her own place; she's staying with a woman in a converted warehouse in Little Tokyo on the southeastern fringe of downtown Los Angeles. It was a nice, big, funky, windowless space, definitely the sort of place I could be happy in if Kim wasn't a factor in my life. The woman who lived there was a plump Native American with a decidedly non-Native American gigglishness. Judging from the things she had in her warehouse home, she seemed pretty cool to me. A good bit more cool, say, than the thin, large-breasted, gushingly naïve Diana.
For some reason, Kim decided to forgo the freeway and drive all the way back home to Santa Monica on Olympic Avenue. I thought this was a ridiculous idea at first, but after I started seeing how diverse Los Angeles could be, you could hear no further complaining from me. We stopped in the middle of Koreatown for, inappropriately enough, Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was the first KFC Kim and I have ever shared. We ate a good bit of it on the way home, and Sophie had some too.
Koreatown was mind-blowing. It was a nonstop parade of Korean shop signs, indeed, whole mini-malls' worth of shop signs, going for blocks and blocks, perhaps miles. Everyone we saw on the street was Korean. There was so much Korean stuff going on in fact that it was easy to forget we were in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And then suddenly it was all over and we were in Beverley Hills. "Ford of Beverley Hills?" I rhetorically asked as we passed a car dealership, "I'll bet they don't get much business! Who wants a Ford in Beverley Hills?" Then we were amid the tall buildings Century City. Finally we arrived in West LA, where we skimmed the eastern surface of Santa Monica all the way south to Corynna and Evan's apartment in Mar Vista.
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