Pratik : PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN NOVELIST AND EDITOR TOM LUTZ on Coming to LA: Images of the Migrant City

TOM LUTZ

Coming to LA:

Images of the Migrant City

with an assist by

Juan Felipe Herrera

We see the myth long before the reality, and even when we are looking right at the dingy street, we think: Sunset Boulevard. The old-school iconography—palm trees, the Hollywood sign, swimming pools, Rodeo Drive, beautiful children, the Santa Monica Pier—these effigies engulf our perception. As if sprung from our unconscious, images from the other media wash, too—of gangbangers, Charlie Manson, police brutality, the Bling Ring, homeless misery, smog, fiery uprisings, oceans of traffic—bubble up without surcease. When we arrive, those of us from elsewhere, which is most of us, we move through the city with our Gestalt switch twitching: face, vase, face, vase, paradise, hellscape. Mike Davis described this doubleness, in City of Quartz, as “sunshine and noir.”It makes the city, for those of us who alight from afar, both easy and hard to read—not illegible, exactly, but hieroglyphic, a series of signs that we recognize as a language of place, but which we cannot quite, at first, translate. Or like a poem we cannot quite understand—we get the images, we hear them, we see them, we even see what they mean. We just can’t quite put them together.

Last Tuesday, my Lyft driver was from Beirut. He had lived a number of places, including Germany, Miami, New York. He lived near the airport, in an apartment that he split with his business partner, and which was also their office and warehouse. They had a fashion company. He liked Los Angeles—it was his favorite city so far, except for Beirut.

‘I can’t believe you have been to Jordan, but not Lebanon,’ he said. ‘Jordan has nothing! Amman, Aqaba—these are boring cities!’

‘It has Petra,’ I said, the ancient red city carved from the living rock.

‘Yes, but this is one day. Beirut—ah, you can’t believe what a great city Beirut is. Like LA, on the sea….’

‘Do you want to go back?’

‘Some day,’ he said. ‘But to do business there, good business—it is who you know. The wealthy people have all the power. I can never do this in Beirut, be myself. Here, it is true, we are free. I can do my business. It is for me, you know?’

‘It is up to you.’

‘Yes, it is up to me. I can have power.’

My first day in Los Angeles, everywhere I went, people were watching TV. I went to a used furniture store, Wente Brothers on Western, and in the back, four people stood watching a small TV on the manager’s desk: a 40ish black man and his mother, the Israeli manager, and a scrawny white guy of about 50, who maybe worked there. I’d seen people watching TVs through storefront windows all day, peering into the hair salons and other businesses as I walked by, and I wondered, briefly, if this was part of LA culture, that people watched TV in random informal groups as they shopped.

I joined the foursome at the manager’s desk and saw a helicopter image of a white Bronco driving up what the announcer said was the 405. I was beguiled by the way people used definite articles to refer to roads—we never said “take the 80” in Iowa, it was always just “take 80 west”; we never said “go up the 91 past Hartford” it was always “take Interstate 91 into Vermont.” I was searching for a theory to explain it. I never did come up with one.

I had heard about the murders, of course, but there hadn’t yet been an arrest, and pre-Twitter, pre-smartphone, we weren’t all, yet, plugged into a constant media stream, so seeing the Bronco on the screen was the first I knew of the chase, the first I heard that OJ was supposed to turn himself in but instead went on the lam and was being driven by his friend in his white Bronco. All long the 405 people were lined up—they had pulled over to watch, had come to the highway to see him be driven by. We watched them as they watched OJ on his lonely ride.

The mother was originally from Arkansas, the manager from Yerevan, the scrawny guy from Petaluma. We all disagreed about whether OJ was innocent or guilty. We all had opinions. The son said that killing Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman with knives like that was the key piece of evidence.

‘That was no brother,’ he said. ‘Brothers don’t do like that. He’d a just shot her. That’s some Columbian shit.’

His mother looked unhappy about the word.

‘Columbian?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, Columbians like the knives. They like to make a point like that.’ The three other men nodded a little sideways, as if to say, okay, worth considering. His mother nodded straight up and down.

Through those first weeks in the city, it was all people talked about. I rarely met a white person who had any doubt that OJ was the murderer. I never met a black person who thought he was. Most of the immigrants I talked to—from Guatemala, from Cameroon, from Cambodia—weren’t ready to say.

Guillermo goes by G, a nod to the slightly tricky—for Anglos—pronunciation of his name. I have heard him called Guell-erel-mo, as if one unnecessary ‘l’ sound deserved another. His mother lives in Guadalajara again, after raising him and his siblings here in LA and then in Victorville. He talks about life as a non-immigrant immigrant, about Driving While Brown, about the various slights and insults that arrive regularly, come rain or sleet or hail. Most of the time he lives well and feels it is indeed the best revenge, but sometimes it fucking infuriates him, a white-hot flame in his chest...

For Full Story Read Summer/Fall 2021 Issue of Pratik (Links below)

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Tom Lutz is the author of Born Slippy: A Novel, And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life of Travel, and many other books, articles, screenplays, and other work. He is Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside and the founding editor of Los Angeles Review of Books.

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