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rotten heart of Los Angeles
Thursday, May 10 2001
It's fairly easy to be hip when you live in or near Santa Monica. One only needs to listen to the public radio station KCRW, particularly music shows such as Morning Becomes Eclectic, and pay attention to the music. What one hears is all the latest and greatest stuff, often a full year or more before it materializes on pop or alternative radio. Just appearing on Morning Becomes Eclectic is enough to launch an adult-friendly musician's career. It seems to have worked for Badly Drawn Boy, Coldplay and Thievery Corporation. The latest KCRW discovery is Turin Brakes, a band whom the host reportedly bumped into randomly at this year's South by Southwest Festival in Austin. I wouldn't normally expect to love a band like Turin Brakes, because they're just a little too acoustic and folksy for me, but I'm finding the rhythm and hooks in the music infectious. Furthermore, the lazy howls in the vocals are amazing.
It hasn't been an especially good week for anyone in my workplace. A good fraction of the energy there seems to be devoted to the task of reading tea leaves and divining signs based on body language and poorly-substantiated rumors. "Am I among those who will be laid off on Monday?" "If I'm not one of those lucky ones, how long will this go on?" "If I lose my job on Monday, how bad exactly is the job market?" "How come nobody except recruiters are calling me about my Monster.com resumé?"
For my part, I snuck out of work for a late lunch break at 2pm and biked to the offices of an upscale technical recruitment firm located in the second floor of a tall office building in nearby Westwood. Though I was dressed entirely in black, was shod in nice shoes, and wore a button-up shirt, I felt a little underdressed as I sat waiting semi-nervously in the lobby. Just looking at the rich dark wood of the office doors intimidated me. The recruiter sat with mein a big open office as we went over my resumé and I verbally detailed my skills. When it came to the subject of target salary, he noted that I was looking for $10,000 pay raise. He asked if I knew what the market these days is actually like. "Some people are having to take $15,000 pay cuts," he warned. For some reason the fact that my pay rate has been stagnant for a year didn't seem to enter into his mental calculations. Then, out of nowhere, suddenly everyone in the office started clapping. Some even started cheering. "They do that whenever we place someone," my recruiter explained. "Sometimes it's a little embarrassing," he admitted. Just because he said that I kind of liked his attitude after that. But I don't think I'd be able to handle the gladhandedness of his boss, whom I also met. He was the worst kind of used car salesman. I'm sure he refers to the likes of me with the word "resource" or perhaps even "product."
In the evening, Bathtubgirl was having trouble with her computer, so I decided to lend a hand. I didn't really want to drive the Punch Buggy Rust so early in my ownership, so instead I caught a ride on the Big Blue Bus's 10 line, which connects Santa Monica with downtown Los Angeles via a fast drive down the 10 freeway. I guess I'm stating the obvious here, but nobody in Los Angeles rides the bus except the working poor. I was the only white person on this haul, and the principle language being spoken around me was Spanglish. Most of the people in the bus were Hispanic, though there were also a couple Asian chicks and three or four people of African American ancestry. I suppose most of these people work minimum wage jobs in Santa Monica and live in the low rent parts of downtown Los Angeles, but the ride is so convenient and comfortable that I could see it being used by urban professionals as well, if only they could somehow overcome the stigma.
Looking at the bus route map, it seemed to me that the easiest way to Bathubgirl's new place would be to get off at bus stop on 3rd Street and Pembrook and then walk from there. I had no idea, though, that there's a rather steep ridge called Bunker Hill running right down the middle of downtown Los Angeles blocking access to the part of downtown to the southeast. Interestingly, the spectacular core of downtown Los Angeles, the small part dominated by tall skyscrapers, sits mostly at the top of Bunker Hill.
On second street there is a tunnel beneath Bunker Hill, and that seemed to be the easiest way through. It's a creepy tunnel, with a long arched ceiling punctuated by various brown cracks, imperfections, dirt stalactites made of the effluvia from the roots of the towers above. My intuition tells me that building skyscrapers at the top of steep ridges is a bad idea. I can picture in my mind what would happen if there was an earthquake. Those towers would keel over and take the ridge with them in a colossal ump!
The neighborhood on the southeast side of the ridge is decidedly low rent. People amble around slowly with hunched backs, going somewhere perhaps but just as happy to change plans should opportunity present itself. Poverty is all about living in the moment. The experience of riding on the bus had me feeling nostalgic for the days before I had a house and a doctor job, and for a few moments I was living in the moment as well. So I snapped a few pictures of the towers above.
The towers of Bunker Hill, viewed from the the lowland to the southeast.
The neighborhood deteriorates rapidly as one continues southeastward, but then suddenly there are police cars and orange traffic cones and you realize you've arrived upon a large outdoor movie set. The cabs are New York cabs and there a trucks driving by to spray water on the street. The buildings are maintained in a grungy state and there are no palm trees anywhere in sight. I'd come upon the place billed by the American entertainment industry as New York City. This was precisely kitty-corner across Main and 4th Street from the renovated building housing Bathtubgirl's new operation. Her's was a grand building, with lavish use of marble and a perpetual guard keeping watch at the front door. Bathtubgirl's boyfriend Snow buzzed me in and I went up the stairs to the Bathtubgirl suite on the second floor. Sophie didn't recognize me for a second when I came in the door and she started barking. But then she was happy in a way that seemed to imply that she was kind of mad at me for not coming around more often.
Bathtubgirl's new place seems big, partly because there aren't any walls except those enclosing the bathroom. It's a spacious loft with a commanding view of skid row and beyond. Since there's only one bathroom, webcasts are under the constant threat of the biological needs of those present. I'd be content slipping out onto the roof and pissing out there, but most people aren't like me. The coolest feature of the new apartment is the T1 line and static IP addresses. I could set up a whole complex of websites there if I needed to.
Bathtubgirl's computer was in pretty bad shape. I couldn't really tell what was wrong with it, so I uninstalled a bunch of shitty software. After a few reboots it seemed to be working okay and I considered it fixed, so Bathtubgirl did her webcast. During the entire show she was spammed by someone claiming to be from her IP address and her email address attaching a 16 K binary attachment. The subject lines were all related in some way to the Dr. Susan Block studio and we thought perhaps they were doing some sort of petty denial of service attack to shut down Bathtubgirl's webcast. But it turned out that Bathtubgirl's computer was so badly infected by various viruses that she might well have been launching a denial of service attack against herself (as the email headers implied).
Bathtubgirl and Snow took me home in Snow's old school SUV. On the way from the apartment we were heckled by a black gentleman walking with a stoop making various insulting comments about white people. He started his heckling by asking the black guard at the front why he got down on his knees and called the white man his messiah. Then he followed us to the parking structure, talking in third person about how the white man normally walks around on all fours and smells like a dog when he gets wet. As the man wandered off towards skid row I asked Bathtubgirl if he was a regular and she said she'd never seen him before in her life.
[REDACTED]
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