On the Street Where She Lives

I was raised in New Hampshire, where I spent the major part of 38 winters with my back pressed up tight against a fireplace screen. It’s a miracle my body didn’t split open like a grilled hot dog, but I couldn’t get enough of that reassuring warmth. I still can’t. After six years in Los Angeles, I am still overwhelmed with gratitude that I no longer live where summers are fleeting interludes of happiness for which winter is the terrible, inexorable, endless price.

The newscasters here focus on the rats in the palm trees, the drive-by shootings, the houses slipping into the sea, but there is so much they don’t say. They don’t say that the names of the purple flowers alone make a kind of poem: jacaranda, sea lavender, lilies-of-the-Nile. They don’t talk about white stucco walls curtained with bougainvillea or the sound of eucalyptus leaves, rustling like the skirts of ball gowns, in a Santa Ana wind.

They leave out so much of the story, especially when they talk about neighborhoods like mine. I live in Koreatown, which is infested with gangs, teeming with street vendors and overrun with children. For $675 a month, my husband, Tim, and I rent an apartment in a French Norman-styled building that has seen slightly better days. Still, it’s a beautiful space, the nicest place I’ve ever had. It has high ceilings, crown moldings, hardwood floors and hand-painted tile in the bathroom. It has a formal dining room with a chandelier, a living room with a bank of windows from which white gauze curtains billow in the breeze and, leading from it, a balcony that overlooks the courtyard.

The apartment is a haven from the crack addicts, mentally ill and criminally inclined who swarm the streets like locusts. Under cover of night, they strip cars of headlights, radios, antennas, seats. They rip the branches off the ficus trees the city planted next to the sidewalk. One morning, Tim leaves the garage door open for less than a minute and walks around the corner. When he returns, a scrawny woman is running down the alley with his belt sander.

Though this is the city’s Korean commercial center, most of my block is Latino, and I have the most fun-loving neighbors imaginable. They set up makeshift bazaars on the sidewalk. They haul out a couple of tables and sell carpet sweepers, swamp coolers, telephones. They hang used-clothing displays from security fences. They open graffiti-scarred garage doors and sell tools and tamales from the shade. They have Saturday night block parties that start, with a high-powered boombox and a few cases of beer, at 2 in the afternoon.

The children eat candy and ice cream and throw the wrappers in the street. One day I come across a horde of them writing on the front steps of our apartment building with hunks of colored chalk.

“Children, children, children!” I exclaim. “I can’t believe my eyes! This is private property you’re defacing!”

They are pretty sure this is a big joke, but for a few uncertain seconds, 20 brown eyes bore into mine and 10 small mouths fall silent. Just then, the Aguilar Produce truck pulls up, blasting “The Entertainer” from its tinny loudspeakers. Jorge, a ragamuffin in shorts and a Dodgers cap who sometimes helps carry my groceries, executes a little bump-and-grind. I shimmy back. The others surround us, hooting and clapping until the truck pulls away, taking our music with it.

As I drive off, he and his friends swarm back, chalk in hand, over the steps.

The newscasters make it sound as if nobody walks in Los Angeles--it’s too dangerous, too smoggy, too inconvenient--but this is not true. I walk almost every day. From Hobart and 9th, I walk north to Melrose, east to Vermont, south to Pico. I walk past the grand old apartment buildings: the Ellington, the Gaylord, the Ancelle. They have slate roofs, scrollwork around the windows, perhaps a frieze of Egyptian mummies around the top story. They survived white flight, then black flight, and now they have blue banners slung across the corners that say in large block letters: Se Renta--$295. They are built close to the street. One basement wafts the fresh smell of laundry. The next emits the reek of a chicken coop.

From wheeled carts women sell elote--ears of corn dipped in mayonnaise from an industrial-size plastic jar--and men sell paletas, the Mexican version of Popsicles. Every yard, no matter how unkempt, has a hibiscus. The blooms are banana yellow or lipstick red, frilly as can-can skirts.

Vehicles are double and triple parked; the drivers are buying drugs. “How can I be of service?” a man in a Pennzoil T-shirt murmurs. “No thanks,” I say, and keep walking. With the sun on my neck, I walk past a vine of copa de oro--cup of gold--whose trumpet-shaped flowers, pale yellow streaked with purple, are so voluptuous I have to restrain myself from biting them.

The building to the north of ours is filled with Korean families. We see them coming and going because our windows face the porch and the doors to their apartments. The children strap scabbards around their waists, brandish plastic swords and race screaming up and down the porch. The grownups are reserved and guarded. Grandma, my favorite, comes out only rarely. Spare and taciturn, she squats on her haunches, blows jets of smoke from a skinny, hand-rolled cigarette and gazes shrewdly into the middle distance.

One morning, the cat wakes me at 4. I turn on the kitchen light, feed her and stare absently out the window. The door across the way opens and a man in a zippered jacket comes out. He pauses at the top step, takes out a cigarette and strikes a match.

The flare illuminates his face and I see he is about my age. He looks over and our eyes meet. I expect him to turn stonily away. Instead, he smiles broadly and waves, his fingers gripping the cigarette. Its tip glitters like a tiny star.

*

Sometimes I drive the half mile to Hancock Park, where the rich people live, and walk from Norton to Highland, or up and down the wide, shady boulevards between 3rd and 6th: Irving, Plymouth, Rossmore, Muirfield.

The houses have wide, emerald-green, perfectly landscaped lawns, but there are never any people on them. In fact, besides the Westec security people who patrol in little white cars, there are hardly any people anywhere.

I have often wondered why I continue to live in my neighborhood. It is not because I claim to be poor. Part of the reason I moved here is because I made a conscious decision--the kind of decision truly poor people never have the luxury of making--to lower my expenses so I wouldn’t have to work at a job I hated. On the other hand, I am not exactly rich either, and while I am consequently never quite sure who is “us” and who is “them,” perhaps that is not the point.

Perhaps the point is not that where I live is dangerous but that nowhere else is safe, either. Perhaps the point is not that some of us will steal and some of us will agonize over whether it is stealing to have more than we need when so many others have nothing. Perhaps the point is to realize that we are connected to one another so closely that every action, every word, every thought radiates out, in some unimaginably mysterious way, to the whole world.

I walk up to St. Basil’s Catholic Church on Wilshire for 5 o’clock Mass. When I come out, it is getting dark. Between the columns of buildings, the rows of palm trees are silhouetted against the dusk. I walk south on Harvard--along the east side grows a low hedge of red bottlebrush--and turn right on 8th. They are turning on the neon signs in the sushi joints, the billiard halls, the clubs that advertise happy hours. They are turning on the neon signs that glow from the roofs of the grand old apartment buildings.

I head south and walk past one of them. Here, too, the lights are coming on. Each window is a frame, like a television set tuned to a different channel: a woman stands at an ironing board, a shirtless man shaves, children eat dinner. The air is heavy with the perfume of frying oil and chiles, onions, meat.

I am almost home now. My car is parked at the curb, the hood and spare tire chained down against thieves. There are dog droppings on the mangy strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. There is litter--fliers for cheap auto insurance, an empty box of Cheez-Its, paper Big Gulp cups.

And up the street, in the midst of the crime, the filth, the decay, a bunch of girls are shouting and laughing. They have tied together pieces of the kind of white elastic that holds up pajama bottoms and stretched it around saplings and stakes. They are playing Chinese jump rope, and the knowledge that life is everlasting swells within me.

That is the real reason I continue to live here, because my neighbors give me faith that when we have finished shooting and starving and aborting each other, when there is nothing left to drink or snort or smoke or inject, when we have paved it all over and used it all up and nuked what’s left to kingdom come, out of the smoking rubble will rise a woman pushing a baby stroller, a man tinkering with an engine, a geranium growing on a windowsill in an old tin can.

I walk up my steps. Through the gate, blanketed with nasturtiums, lies the courtyard with its box hedges and calla lilies and moth-eaten roses. From the standard of a carriage lamp, bamboo chimes clack delicately, like the bones of children. Our apartment is on the right-hand side, in the back, upstairs. A light shines in the window. I walk toward it.