Self Portrait as L.A.
Written by Eva Iris
I was on Vermont avenue in Los Feliz, playing hookey for the day. Sitting at Figaro’s Bistro, drinking a Cafe au Lait. I was admiring the hills, where all the big and shiny houses sit. How nice it must be, to be high among the clouds, I was thinking to myself.
Just beyond me, at the street corner, was a homeless man. His hairless head was pink from the beating sun. He stood still, stoic, his face as unmoved as the concrete beneath him. He was holding a sign, one word printed boldly in black sharpie ink. HELP! it said, the cardboard furling at the edges, as if even it had gotten tired of waiting.
He was watching the cars go by; the Mercedes, and the BMWs, the occasional Cybertruck. We all used to gasp when we saw those Cyber Trucks, but now they have faded into the humdrum familiarity of the trafficked lanes. Now, they are just like the boutiques and the coffee shops that used to delight us, luring us into standing in lines that wrapped around curbs. Where have they gone?
One of the cars rolls down its window, and a dainty hand holds out a dollar bill. The man takes it, without saying a word. He smiles and nods his head.
A dollar. What good does a dollar do in this city? A dollar can’t get you an hour at a parking meter. It can’t afford you the standard 8 dollar coffee or an 18 dollar car wash, a simple luxury that has become a high hanging fruit. But the man tucks it away in his pocket, smiles, and waits a little longer. I sip my own 8 dollar coffee, and relish in the fact that I am invisible. Sometimes, it’s a good thing to be invisible here.
This exchange, stunningly sad, reminded me of L.A. at its most surreal. There is a memory I often come back to, so mythologized in my mind that I am not sure if it is fact or fiction anymore. It was an evening during the pandemic, when one of the only opportunities for fun was cruising around the city, risking airborne death to let the windows down.
I looked up at the towering buildings, which could withstand the apocalypse, and saw Paris Hilton waving from a balcony. All of us down on the ground were marveling. There was a goddess before our eyes, in Jimmy Choos and a Chanel suit. We were on the Walk of Fame, but the stars weren’t below our feet. They were walking beside us, inhabiting a different dimension.
There is a juxtaposition bred in L.A. that is unlike anything I have ever seen. Mansions which cast shadows on the shacks they share the street with. Blazing fires in the so-called City of Angels.
Your barista might’ve been a series regular on an old television show, who is now struggling to pay the rent. Once an everything, and now a nothing.
But we are all in L.A, though we aren’t quite in it together.
Yes, there are the rich and the poor, the lucky and the broken. Some of us burn, and some of us remain intact.
And yet, we all share one thing.
No, it isn’t that we’re all angels.
It’s that we’re all dreamers.
If we weren’t, we would have fled by now.
Because every day, L.A. gives me a dollar. Not quite enough to keep me thriving, but just enough for me to stay.
A golden-hour sunset, in a hue you can only see from this zip code.
A plunge into the Pacific, freezing and alive, but reminding me that I still have skin.
A hike through the forests of Griffith, a coyote at my tail who doesn’t bite.
A vintage jean jacket at a flea market, the denim that still remembers its past life.
A poem or a song that is so beautiful I’m convinced she, L.A., wrote it just for me.
And that’s the trick of this city; it bruises you and heals you.
It feeds you just enough light to keep you chasing it.
It makes you believe the dream is still just around the corner, even when you’re watching it from a sidewalk, sipping an eight-dollar coffee, and pretending not to see the man with the sign.
