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Visitors Welcome

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Sanjiv

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Living a trillion miles away from home, I always look forward to visitors from across the water. They bring so much more than they know. Since I’m not the type to stay in touch, really – I mostly just plough forward with nary a backward glance – it’s a big deal when people I’ve long lost touch with start showing up in LA for one random reason after another. I guess it’s just one of those cities that people visit eventually, and if I’m lucky, they find me on Facebook first. People from college and “high school” as I now call it. People from way back in the days of conkers and fights in the playground.

If there’s something to be said for entering the fifth – Christ, the fifth – decade of life, it’s the catching up after huge, life-changing intervals. To see an old face emerge from the vaults is always a trip, but especially here, in this city of new beginnings, where the past was always supposed to be past. And lately, there’s been a spate of them, a flurry, one a week sometimes. Voices I haven’t heard in 20 or 30 years are getting off planes and meeting me for beers, sailing in from my childhood, my teens, the roaring 20s. You might call it an alignment, or a sign, if you believed in that kind of thing. Me, I’m not sure. But there’s probably wisdom to be sifted here, some gold in the gravel if I just keep shaking the tray. If we’re truly the heroes of our own stories in the Joseph Campbell sense, it’s no small deal to meet the people who can remind you where you came from.

Here’s how it plays out, in my experience.

Someone says, “you haven’t changed”, which is as false as it is true. Faces are studied for their mortal lines and whatever we imagine they reveal. And at some point there is a spike of exhilaration as we simultaneously remember the same exact moment in space-time, back in the mists, a moment that we may be the only people on the planet to remember. Whoever said it was right – we are just an accumulation of memories in the end. Just rooting around in that shed is a joy. Over the last few months I’ve been transported to my years of innocence and mortification through the whole scarring passage of adulthood. And each memory, like a Kleenex, pulls out the next one and then the next. I’m on a bar stool at the Biltmore but I’m flying through time.

The hard part is telling your story. It comes out differently each time. I find that even the simplest questions open up a whole tangle of others. Do I like it here? I don’t know. Will I stay? I have no idea. Isn’t everywhere a reflection of mood at some level? And what am I comparing it to – to a mythical London of memories and mist, a city I saw through eyes that have since changed and changed again?

Besides, this isn’t how LA was meant to turn out – we foreigners come here to remake ourselves, so that one day we can return like Odysseus, bearing treasure. The past is meant to be a place that we visit, not a place that visits us.

But that’s OK. You answer the questions as best you can. Because there’s no lying to these people, not when the chasm is this wide. If you’ve not seen someone for 20 years, and he knows no one you know, and you might never see him again, you accept these people like a gift. You just speak and out it comes. I’ve grappled for meaning at bars before, but seldom like this, with the full of span of my story on the table. Why did things turn out this way, how did I end up here and what do I believe? If you get the chance to ask these questions out loud, take it.

It’s an age thing, partly. A stage thing. Ten years ago, I would have ducked and dodged and spun, but not now. At this point, we’ve all been through the fire in some way. We’ve tasted the honey and the poison, and we’ve become who we’ve become. A professor, an attorney, an architect – someone who might get flown here, or holiday here with the kids, or who might even be thinking to move. I’ve met classmates who’ve had affairs and stalkers and children they don’t see enough; people who’ve made and lost small fortunes, who’ve changed country and career and left it all behind for a woman; people who’ve found themselves on hospital beds, scared, and who’ve walked away from the wreckage, changed forever. All lives are epic. No such thing as an ordinary Joe.

And after a few hours of this, it’s over. Something mundane cuts it short, like last orders or a morning meeting, and just like that we go our separate ways. Only this time, I’m not the same guy as before. I’m no longer just a drifting atom in the wilderness but a continuation of a story that started in England, a place that swirls in my head now, in snapshots and clips I didn’t even know I’d filed away.

So as I pootle down San Vicente in traffic, I’m also screaming down Wimbledon Hill on my red Raleigh bike with pockets full of stolen Cola bottles. I’m nervously approaching the bar at the pub in Dulwich to order a pint of snakebite, praying that he doesn’t ask for proof of age. I’m playing Defender at the chip shop on the way home – 50 pence for three games. I’m using my smart bomb.

So keep visiting, old friends. Forgive my lack of contact all these years. Without a connection to my past, I’d be lost in this desert. Come for the sun and the sand, but shoot me an email when you do and I’ll see you at the bar. It’s my round.

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Softcore and the Mountain Men

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Sanjiv

The woods of Tuolomne

What the fuck am I doing here? I mean seriously. I don’t even know where “here” is, and when you’re where I am, the “here” part is pretty fucking important.

All I can tell you – and all I could tell the rescue services if I could only call them – is that I’m up some bastard hill in the breathless altitude of Tuolomne, just east of Yosemite National Park. I’m totally invisible to the only people that know I’m here, a crew of outdoorsy types who marched off ahead of me a long time ago. They said, “it’s easy, you see how it winds up there, and goes round onto the ledge? Just get up there and you’ll see us.” Then they just went up the mountain at an unconscionable rate of knots and instantly – like snap your fingers – that ledge they were talking about disappeared and everything looked the same. It’s just trees and rocks and bushes in all directions, and all of it is steep as shit.

That was three hours ago – three going on five, going on 127 hours starring James Franco.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this were one of those bald, granite faces where a passing chopper could easily spot a yellow rucksack and a pair of stumpy flailing arms. Only it’s not – this hill is wooded and shaded, full of boulders and ledges and trees. I’m a speck here, lost among bears and snakes and monsters, because that’s what the great outdoors is like – it’s all beasts and death and bully weather. It’s a place where soft magazine hacks from the city may as well come in a brown paper bag with soy sauce and chopsticks and a couple of napkins.

I’ll tell you what I’m doing here. I’m looking for a way down – desperately – but I can’t find one. I tried to keep climbing. I heeded that voice that said, “find the other guys, it’s safer, you’re less likely to get savaged by bears.” But that was the first two hours, or seven. I got scratched up fighting through bushes. I climbed up into cul de sacs, and followed ledges to edges that just fell off and died. And every time I tried to retrace my steps, I ended up somewhere different. It was never quite the same rock or the same tree. I wasn’t going around in a circle so much as a spiral, and I never got back to where I started. Although of course I did.

It’s OK. I wouldn’t say panic has set in just yet. The sun’s still high, there’s plenty of time before darkness descends. And anyway, I’d yell my arse off long before then – that decision’s been made already. I can’t do the full metal scream like Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden (who was never lost in the woods for very long, incidentally), but I’d have a bash.  If it’s scream or death, I’m not going to fuck around. But the trouble with panic is the more you tell yourself to “stay calm” and “stay hydrated” and “watch out for snakes”, the more you sound like you’re panicking.

OK, so breathe a minute. Slow the fuck down Sanj. In fact, that’s good – use your name, it might have a calming effect. Because you knew this was going to happen. You knew the minute you saw the rucksacks.

Here’s how it started: I came out here to do a story about this amazing rock climber called Alex Honnold, and he told me – “dude, we should hang out while I do some press shots with Black Diamond, they’re one of my sponsors. We’re going to spend a couple of days in Yosemite just taking some pictures basically, it’s going to be supermellow. Actually, you probably need to bring a book or something because most of the day, you’re going to be just hanging out while I climb.”

Mellow day in the country? That I can handle. So I brought my little pot pipe, some magazines and a couple of bags of Kettle Chips in case of munchies between meals. I couldn’t wait. The scenery looked gorgeous on the drive up.

But then we met the Black Diamond folks – every one of them in a puffy jacket and proper footwear. And they were on a mission, looking at maps and saying “we’ll go here for this shot and there for that shot” and no mention of a leisurely lunch and a pint along the way either. I watched them pack their rucksacks with sandwiches and trail mix and Gatorade and all kinds of other shit I didn’t have. And they looked at my little laptop bag with its dainty little side pockets and asked politely: “hey you want to borrow a rucksack? Might be easier for the hike.”

What hike? No one mentioned any hike.

“We have to hike to the rock face for Alex to climb. It’s about forty minutes, no big deal.”

I knew right then I was fucked. My gut told me. And you should really go with your instincts in the wild – I should have bailed right there, booked into a B&B, got zonked and ordered a bacon sandwich. Instead, I took their rucksack, and put my laptop bag in it, which made it kind of lopsided. And I pretended that everything was just fine.

The first hike started beautifully. They all set off, trudging quietly up into the woods, and I was marching along with them, trying to crack jokes and make friends. But after three minutes – a full three, mind –  I felt it in my chest, the altitude. I started panting like a hound, just choking for oxygen in this monstrously pure mountain air. And pretty soon, I was lagging badly, like the fat kid on a cross country run – I was the pity case, the liability, the first one to get eaten. Swearing didn’t help, though I gave it my best effort: “fuck me, Jesus fucking Christ, oh my God, aargh…” And they just looked at each other wondering – he’s Esquire’s outdoors guy? Really?

There was this one bit where the snow had hardened on the slope and with every step I took in my smooth-soled Diesels, I just came sliding back down into the dirt. “Fucking bollocks fuck.” Five goes at this and I had to call for help. How did they just walk up this – was it a shoe thing, because if so, did anyone have any shoes maybe? A girl called Sandra turned around: “Just kick your toes into the snow to make a step, then push up.” And it worked. It wasn’t that I had the wrong shoes, it was that I don’t even know the most basic yellow belt techniques of, you know, walking.

I realize now just how poorly I fit in with this crowd. I’m OK to chime in on a debate about whether heinous is pronounced “heenus” or “haynus” (I vote “heenus” because it rhymes with “penis”, as in “that’s a heenus looking penis”). But beyond that, I’m from a different tribe. I hail from a planet of wine tastings and memory foam in the cushy endless summer of LA. This lot are from Utah and Colorado where they ski, snowboard, climb, absail, surf and wrestle, all of it on a diet of Gatorade and bark. They’re tougher than me, the girls included. They’re harder, fitter, stronger. And wilder too. I never heard so much burping and farting – proper growlers as well. And no one mentions it. It’s like that scene in The Nutty Professor, except no one laughs. Maybe farts aren’t funny in the mountains. Maybe farts are a matter of survival.

After that first hike, I played up my weakness to fit in. A classic pipsqueak move – mock yourself, lest you may be mocked. They use a lot of words here that I don’t understand – like “beta”, “cruxing”, “burly” and “rally” – but the one I get is “hardcore”. Outdoors types love a bit of hardcore. So does that make me softcore, I asked? And it stuck. Softcore – that’s your name from now on.

The thing about Softcore, he gets treated like a lady. The photographer, Burr, offered to walk with me on the hikes, setting off a bit earlier so we had a head start and didn’t slow everyone down. Nice guy Burr, even offered to carry my rucksack in the steep parts. He made me feel I was part of the gang, albeit the soft part.

But today, the schedule was just too tight. There wasn’t time to walk me up at a ladylike pace, so they left me behind.  And now I’m stuck, half way up the hill, sitting on a rock, trying not to let the bad thoughts breach the levees. Easier said than done.

Far as I can tell, my options are:

1) Stay put until I hear their voices on the way down, and then start hitting the high notes like this guy.

2) Accept that I may never hear a human voice again, so better to just write a lengthy note to whoever finds what’s left of me after the bears.

3)  Go down to the road. Just do it. At least I can see it from here. Take a deep breath, quiet the terror and complete the mission. Be a man, Softcore, your time has come.

So off I go.

The road is my promised land, my Xanadu, I can’t tell you how beautiful it looks from here. A pristine flatland of tarmac, white lines and freedom, it’s so much more picturesque than all those blah blah mountains and lakes. Nature is an asshole, I’ve decided. It’s all peaks and glory with gentle, duck-down names like Cloud’s Rest and Wizard’s Hammock but the closer you come, the nastier it gets. Nature is granite and rabies and murder. It seduces you with picture postcards, and then feeds you to the worms. I can’t wait to get back to my high crime gang neighborhood in LA. I’ll be safe there.

Wait – is that something? There seems to be a ridge that runs diagonally down towards the tarmac though whether it reaches, it’s hard to tell from here. It’s not the way we came, but so what? In this confusion of trees and rocks, this ridge stands out like a big black arrow pointing off of this mountain and back to civilization. Fuck it, I’m going to try. He who dares, Rodney. And even if it doesn’t work, I’ll at least be visible to emergency services.

But the further I go down this ridge, the hairier it gets. Your eyes tell lies from up high. What looks smooth may be nobbled up close. Gentle slopes turn out to have steep and plunging dips. So when I get to maybe fifty feet from the street, it’s gotten treacherous – the last stretch is slick with water, and my bullshit Diesels aren’t feeling too clever.

So I crouch down and cling to the rock on one side. It’s like I’m clutching a banister with both hands and sliding down slowly, trying to get traction with my feet on the way. But the banister is a sharp Toblerone of wet rock, and my feet can’t always find support. At times, I’m just hanging there by my fingers, heart pounding. And what – only thirty feet from the street? Come on you bastard! Come on!

The home strait is pure drama. I reach for a hold and my backpack swivels around from right to left shoulder, throwing my balance completely. Immediately I feel the strain – this isn’t a position I can hold. So, clinging on with my right hand, I unclip the pack from my waist, switch to my left hand, and then let the thing drop, who knows where. I claw down a few more feet but then it runs slick again, and the ridge just stops. My knuckles are cut open and bleeding at this point, the blood runs down the rock with the water and it’s getting harder and harder to keep hold.

I watch my fingers sliding off.

There are two choices – either just slide off, and hope I don’t pitch back and land on my head. Or jump – push myself off the wall and turn around mid air so that I land on my front and not my back.

It probably looks comical from the road – a little Indian guy clinging desperately to a rock barely fifteen feet up from the street. But to me, it’s epic. When I hit the tarmac, I land true – feet and hands, like a panther, no scuffing, no foul. And the rucksack is reachable, caught in some roadside shrub.

When I get back to the van, about a half mile down the street, I wash my bleeding fingers with water, eat my Kettle Chips and wait till the guys come tramping down the hill at sunset.

Burr’s laughing. “Softcore, what the fuck happened?  You took a piece out of your finger there.”

“These fingers are meant for typing, Burr. I get cut if I pick up a pencil the wrong way.”

I tell them what happened – how I lost my way, got scared, and found myself holding on for dear life. Alex says rock climbers have a word for that: Vision Quest.

“Vision quest is like when you’re out hiking on your own and you don’t know where to go, and you’re tired, you’re cold, you don’t want to be there anymore – you just want to be down. We say, ‘oh, I was vision questing’ – that’s like, ‘I was just kind of guessing my way through on instinct and hoping for the best.’”

Alex has been there, too many times to mention. He’s the best rock climber in the world. His stories are terrifying – hours spent in freezing temperatures, sometimes without even any shoes. But I got a taste of that on this little hill. This hill that, by his standards, is so unspeakably trivial, it’s like a stroll to the 7/11… if he lived right next door to the 7/11.

“Dude, everything’s relative,” he says. “What’s softcore to me is hardcore to you, but it could be the other way around depending on what we’re talking about.”

I doubt it. These are the things that world class athletes say to make the little people feel better. But I know this – my weed survived the tumble. So I’m going to stick to my own version of Vision Quest from now on.

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Hood Heritage and the Heights

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Sanjiv

mural on Pico

I see the guy lope slowly down the street from one end of 4th to the corner house. We’re on a collision path. I’m out on my morning shift, walking the babies, Onion and Cujo, and they‘re especially sprightly, tails up and sniffing. Straight away the guy clocks them. “Hey buddies, wassup?”

The dogs pull towards him, dragging me like a sled. He’s black, tall, forty-five, fifty. Rubbing his eyes like he’s not yet awake. And he makes no eye contact with me. Just crouches down and holds out his hands. “Yeah, you all right. You happy huh? Why not? You get love. I love love.”

Then Pam comes walking up her path in that corner house on 15th. She’s full of noise. “Thing one, thing two! They so cute!” A frizzy redhead with her hair pulled back and her tie dye leggings on, she’s smoking her first Philly. She’s white, but she sounds blacker than Big Momma’s House.  She makes up for her whiteness with blackness.

I let the dogs off the leash and Onion runs towards her. “Thing one! Dogs love me, look,” she says. “Everyone loves the redhead!”

We walk up to her front door and they sit on a little bench, their stoop I guess, looking out over a balding patch of lawn. So where did I get a name like Onion, and are they actual sisters? A little conversation goes by. I tell her that Onion’s the gentle, well behaved one, while Cujo might snap at other dogs.

“But I bet Cujo sticks by you,” she says.

She does. She’s a people dog.

“Like my Jason. He’s my youngest. Oh he’s trouble, don’t get me wrong, but anything happens, he stays close. Loyal. My other one, he got a job and all that, but I don’t know… He busy being busy.”

It’s hard to tell if they’re just friends, or if they were together once, these two. Maybe they tried. This house, she says, blowing smoke in its direction, “it’s been in my family since the 50s. Yeah! I grew up right here on this corner.” She left for a while, to New York for college and to raise her kids, the oldest of whom is… no, you guess. No, higher than that. OK, 26.

And we do that thing where I say “no, impossible!” and she insists and laughs. “Word!”

But she’s back now, she says, to look after her sick father. Back home again. So she knows this hood better than anyone. Ask her anything about Arlington Heights. Go on.

R20s-graffiti-15th-Street

“Oh this place is nice now. Yeah. You shoulda seen it back in the day. We had the helicopters every night, right here on this corner. Oh this whole section here was rough. You know the Crips? They started down on 15th.  Right here on 6th and 15th. They tore that house down now, but it was right there.” She points down the cross street. “Joe knows. You remember those kids?”

The guy nods slowly. “The Simmons house.”

“It was the Simmons family. Yeah. One single mother and 17 kids. And the brothers organized their younger ones to go stealing, because they didn’t have no food. They was robbing everybody except us. They wrote on our walls, but they never robbed us because my daddy used to take a box of food over to them, to help them out. They were big. Real tall and athletic boys. They were like six foot at the age of 12. They got up to 6’7”, like that. Yeah, Watutsies, you know. From Africa. They was real tall. Watutsies. They started the Crips.”

Wikipedia has a different version. A story about Raymond Washington, and Tookie Williams further south of the 10 freeway, but to be fair, there are all kinds of Crips out there. They organize into “sets” like badgers. And in any case, Pam’s in no doubt about this – these were her neighbors. She went to school with them.

“You know that school, the Mount Vernon School up on Washington? That used to be a replica of the old house of George Washington out on the east coast. But shit, it was falling apart. Run down. Derelict. So what they did, they got all the trouble kids from all over LA who were smashing up their schools and damaging the property, and put them there in Mt Vernon: ‘here, you go smash this one up, it’s falling apart anyway.’ I went there. And so did the Simmonses. It was like a school of crime basically. Remember, me and my sister was the only white person in that whole place because me and her we both half white, so that makes one white person right?”

“Please. You black,” says Joe. “You got one drop, you black, that’s how it is.”

That school is no more, though some reminders persist. Like the sign – Mount Vernon – which they preserved, and the street gangs, which is apparently a tradition around these parts. You see their scrawl around the white walls – we call the city on 311, and they send someone around with a pot of paint, and then it happens again.

But if you drew the graph, it would climb from then to now, ever so gently. This is what’s Pam’s telling me. So what if the black gangs have simply made way for Hispanic ones? So what if the school’s now called the Johnnie Cochran school, which sounds even more criminal than Nelson Mandela Estates? OK so Pam has spotted crackheads jittering past her door in the pit of night, but look – the guns don’t go off like they did, the wall scrawl isn’t what it was, and anyway, we’ll take nighttime crackheads over daytime, any time of day.

Besides, look up for a minute. Hood skies are as pretty as anyone’s.

skies above 4th Avenue, Arlington Heights

I moved to these parts from the gayborhood, well, the outer fringes anyway – the Fairfax/Melrose axis of WeHo civility. So it’s hard not to be rattled by these recent ghetto eruptions – the shooting, the sirens, the swarming squad cars. But Pam’s reminding me not to confuse weather with climate. There’s always going to be bursts of weather, but it’s the climate that’s changing for the better. Remember, Arlington Heights burned in the riots, as the rage swelled north from south central. Those days are past now. And if Pam says things have come up since she was a girl, well, I’m taking it. Can’t ask for more than progress.

She looks at the babies, blows them a kiss. “I know we doing all right, just looking at Thing One and Thing Two,” she says. “They the prettiest dogs we had on this street in a long-ass time.”

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Death in the Afternoon

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Sanjiv

Before the killings in Aurora and the ritual handwringing over the “tragedy of gun violence in America”, we had some of our own gun violence right here in Mid-City, Los Angeles. Just down the street, in fact. This wasn’t your sensational mass shooter scenario, there was no theatrical psycho or massive death toll. This was more your mundane, meat and potatoes shooting – one of some 138,403 gun assaults per year, which result in 12,179 homicides. The kind of shooting, in other words, that barely merits a shrug.

ghetto birds

I was at my desk that morning, wasting my life and potential on Facebook – probably some heated political debate with someone I never met. Then I heard the choppers. “Ghetto birds” is what ghetto people call them. I’ll stick to “chopper” – it sounds nice and old school, which is only fitting. One day, in our Orwellian Drone Future, we’ll look back at them the way we regard old cellphones, as quaint and retro, so clunky they’re cute. “Look at how big they were! And they could hardly see anything up there. Can you believe they used to put people in those things?”

The choppers have become a constant presence lately – same time, same place, every night, as though the gangbangers kept to schedule. You even feel them when they’re not here. Only yesterday, I was driving back from the park with the dogs, whizzing along 4th Avenue with the back windows half way down. As we passed the parked cars and the palm trees, I heard the wind whip in thwup-thwup-thwup, with the babies panting over the top, hah-hah-hah, quick and light, and the drone of the leafblowers in the yards. The sky was clear but you could have fooled me.

On this particular day, the choppers were out in force – one, two, three of them circling up there, and in the daytime too, just after lunch. Squad cars started arriving, I counted nine all in all. Some blocked the street at each end, others circled, while a couple parked in the meridian right outside my door. And after a few minutes, the cops got out, opened the trunks of their cars and yanked out the big guns and the Kevlar.

LAPD

“Sir, please go back into your property sir. The street needs to be clear.”

OK, sure whatever. One minute it’s “sir”, next thing you know they’re stamping your face into the asphalt. But it was the way they said it. Bored almost. For all the activity and engines, all the choppers and SWAT gear, there wasn’t much adrenalin in evidence. It was just another sleepy, tranquilized day in the hood. Business as usual. The sirens and lights were all off – the cops weren’t here to kick in doors so much as close off exits for a suspect who is apparently on the run. So there’s no tuck and roll. No “cover me, I’m going in!” These guys just stood there like Lego figures by their Lego cars. And the palm trees swished in the breeze, same as it ever was. Not a soul on the streets, not a peep from the peeps, just another dormant desolate suburb in the west coast wasteland.

After an age of nothing, four of them walked down to the white house on the corner, and climbed over the fence, each one giving the other cover. But that must have been when the K9 did his thing, apprehended the suspect, and everyone could go home. So the cops returned to their cars, forlorn. All dressed up and no one to shoot. They unclipped their SWAT helmets and put their big guns back in the trunk, shrugging and chuckling to each other. Ah well, maybe we’ll get some action next time. Donuts anyone?

“What was all that about?” I ask them.

“Sir, I’m not at liberty to talk about it. The situation is contained, that’s all I can say.”

“You can’t tell me why you closed my street down, pulled out guns and climbed into a neighbor’s front yard?”

“Sir, I believe a report goes out to the media. If you have K-Cal 9, you can see the news report there.”

A perfect Los Angeles response. You want to know what’s happening, go turn on the TV.

As it was I couldn’t find KCAL 9’s story. I’m not convinced they did one. I did however see this on KTLA:

Two dead in running gun battle on Los Angeles street: June 21, 2012

LOS ANGELES (KTLA) — Two people are dead after a gang shootout in broad daylight in the Arlington Heights area. The shooting was reported shortly after noon on Wednesday near the intersection of 6th Avenue and West Pico Boulevard, LAPD spokesman Bruce Borihahn said.

When Wilshire Division patrol officers arrived on the scene in the 1500 block of 6th Avenue and found two people suffering from gunshot wounds. The incident started when a male juvenile was chasing two others down the street and started shooting, witnesses said. “This teenager was pointing his gun at the kids,” bystander Jackie Arredondo told KTLA. “He was just shooting at them.”

Miguel Martinez, 19, and Daniel Regalado, 18, were taken to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where they died soon after. The shooting appears to be gang related, police said.

Authorities used a K9 unit to track down the suspect, and he was located a block from his own home. The suspect will face double homicide charges and will likely be charged as an adult.

How this is a “running gun battle” when only one party has a gun, I can’t say. And “gang related” sounds as meaningless as “drugs” at this point. We’re told to fear things, but are given no information apart from the occasional horror story about nasty Mexicans chopping off heads and so forth. What gangs, what drugs are we talking about, what’s going on here exactly?

The message of this story is that it’s not a story at all. It’s a nuisance, some paperwork to clear off your desk, nothing to see here. The LA Times, normally so assiduous about crime, knocked out all of 109 words on the topic, and buried it on their “This Just In” blog. And even now, two months to the day after that story, there are still no comments. It’s one of those lonely stories out in the Webosphere that no one cares about. And who can blame them? If you know anything about LA it’s that people get shot here. The sun goes up, shit goes down, what else is there to say?

But since this is my street I asked around a bit. My friend Steve is on all these committees, city council stuff, and he knows the local cops – “oh I make it my business.” And Steve said that his guy at the LAPD, some Greek guy with a name that sounds like food poisoning – Gyro Colitis or something – this guy says that the shooter was some Latino kid. And he was – wait for it – thirteen years old.

Thirteen. I know they grow up fast in the hood, but seriously. And they want to charge him as an adult? I did a story in Rio once, about gang violence in the favelas there, and the most feared gang bosses there were kids too, in their teens. But at the same time, we’ve all been thirteen. We’ve all lived through the hormonal onslaught and all the attendant sound and fury. This kid was emotionally in diapers. An infant. He probably was in a gang of some sort, but this talk of gang war just elevates it all – the word “war” ennobles. This could equally have been a simple altercation that turned fatal because in America today, it’s a piece of piss for a kid to get hold of a gun.

In 2nd Amendment America, we must watch out for these infants. They’ll mow you down like grass, they don’t care. To them, it’s Playstation and ketchup. Cops and badasses. It’s cool. No doubt, kids are innocent – they possess that thing which rots – but beside the innocence is savagery. And at that age, our savagery is pure – we are all simply monsters who’ve matured. Had you shown me the button back then as a 13 year old, I would probably have detonated whole villages, and next to this kid, I was a winged cherub, a school swot who wore a tie and carried a satchel and rode his bike.

We fret about child soldiers and KONY, but why cry about Uganda when you have Sixth and 15th, just near Pico, Mid-City? Not South Central but Central Central. Born and raised in the bullseye of LA.

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Vanishing Point On Plymouth and Sixth

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Sanjiv

Here’s a thing that happens: You’re bumbling through your LA day when along the way you look around and notice that you’re the only person in sight. Front and back, left and right, not a soul in the whole wide world. Everyone else just vanished.

My theory is that the city is a minefield of trans-dimensional wormholes which we wander through unwittingly leaving a little pond ripple in reality like Demi Moore in Ghost. On the other side, there are no people. It’s the Marie Celeste, like the Rapture happened when your back was turned, and this is the blue-pill red-pill, balmy post-apocalypse.

So far – and these findings are strictly preliminary – I have discovered 281 of these wormholes across the city. You could have maps of them online, like wi-fi hotspots. They tend to cluster in the rich parts of town, but downtown is riddled with them too, and I’ve found them in grocery stores, even on Melrose on the right night. These glimmers of epic isolation are a feature of this city. Lifelessness is a part of life. And the haters hate it. They say things like, “alienating”, “dead” and “not a real city”. I used to be one of those people.

After, what, ten years and change, I’ve reached that point that adults call “growing up” and kids call “giving up” – the stage where you accept that you can no more change a city than change a person. So now, I try to embrace things as they are. Embrace the isolation, don’t fight it. I know I’ve talked about loneliness before, and this might just sound like Stockholm syndrome – maybe it is. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. But I’ve learned something from these wormholes.

You know how a hot surface sometimes feels cold at first, and vice versa? How each extreme carries something of the character of its opposite? Isolation is like that. When it’s epic, it feels intimate, just you and LA, her breath in your ear, alone together on a postcard summer’s day.

Hancock Park is north of my apartment by a few minutes. Before Beverly Hills was a thing, this was the original money neighborhood, home to Howard Hughes and Nat King Cole. Today, according to Wikipedia, it’s Jason Alexander, Antonio Banderas and Manny Pacquiao. But it’s all academic because you don’t see them, or anyone else. The rich are masters of isolation, their neighborhoods have that hum.

So I walk the dogs there. I head up from Arlington Heights, the storefront churches and pupuserias, to the Olympic fringe of Koreatown, that metastasizing treeless tumor of Koncrete at the heart of LA – what LA lacks in soul, it makes up for with Seoul. And then I turn down Plymouth, through a wormhole or two and find myself in another world. And as soon as I step out of my car onto those wide and perfect verges, I can feel it – that whisper, the sixth sense, the presence of an absence. I’m in.

It’s a dream sequence. All vanishing points and perfection. Every lawn is trimmed and lush, every home as still and pristine as a page of Architectural Digest. Birdsong. The hush of trees. Great clouds of roses billowing up the path to the front doors. The mansions look grand and strong, old money style, but still as pretty as cakes, with moulding like frosting that you can just walk up and scoop off, like Hansel and Gretel. As the sunset picks out its favorites through the trees, turning the walls from butter to gold to vanilla ice cream, they watch me walk past, the shadows playing across their faces.

Forgive me. I’ve become suddenly obsessed with yellow houses, and how they might all be made of cheese. Like this one, look.

Am I dying? I’m reminded of that time when Tony Soprano got shot and as he lay there in his hospital bed, he dreamed he was walking up to this big house, full of the dead, waiting to welcome him. I could do the same today. Just pick a home, walk past those great clouds of roses billowing up the path and push open the front door. Look, there’s my old high school teacher in the study. There are my parents arguing in the kitchen. Why’s my old boss talking to my old girlfriend? They don’t know each other. Why can’t they hear me yelling at them?

After a minute or so, two people emerge from the vanishing point on the horizon. Is this where the spell is broken? They come towards me, a man and woman, both Asian, speaking in a language I can’t place with a repetitive rhythm, like a chant. Closer and closer they come, and I prepare to smile at them, but they avoid my eyes and look away as they pass, never breaking their chant for a moment. A minute later, they are specks in the distance, turning a corner, and then gone forever. What was that incantation? Were they the ones casting the spell?

On the nearest front lawn, a white rabbit watches me, sitting so still, even the dogs haven’t noticed it yet. There are lots of white rabbits around, all of them wild. They just show up on people’s lawns and enchant them.

We’ll be back tomorrow.

Thomas Kinkade

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Sanjiv

The richest painter in the world died yesterday, April 6th, 2012. He was young too – only 54. When you’ve crossed a Rubicon or two, you look at ages like that and swallow hard.  His wife Nanette apparently said it was natural causes, and there’s no reason to doubt her. There’s nothing so natural as getting your switch flicked out of the blue by the big man these days. Getting plucked out of thin fucking air.

I met him once, almost exactly 10 years ago. It was a story for the Times magazine. Kinkade was already the most collected painter in America and was turning over half a billion a year at the time in revenue – he’d managed to parlay a somewhat hokey art style into a massive brand. When I met him, he had a line of furniture, haberdashery, garden goods, mousepads… He even had Kinkade houses. He was a one-stop shop. An astonishing success story, and at the very top of his game, making fortunes. But the art world couldn’t stand him. They hated his brazen commercialism, his mass appeal, the consistency of his product (they were loathe to call Kinkade’s work “art”).

So I pitched it, and the Times said yes, great, top idea. Just like that. This was back in the days when they still had budgets enough to send you on a short haul flight, and stick you in a hotel maybe – a vestige of the magazine life of yore that would soon be ravaged by the internet and the recession.  We made a trip of it, me and the Mrs. We flew into San Jose, picked up a rental and met a couple there, friends of the artist, who we could follow back to Thomas’ enormous ranch. I remember they wore matching outfits – matching red, white and blue sweaters and pale blue jeans. We weren’t in the city anymore.

Kinkade was an interesting character. He had the confidence and swagger of a wealthy man, combined with the eagerness of a true believer. Christ, he said, was his inspiration; his art was a vehicle for the Good News. And yet, he was defensive – about his faith, his art. He had the indignation of a country boy who’d been denied entry to the club. He’d been shunned by the gatekeepers of the New York art world, and it had left a wound that even his colossal commercial success couldn’t heal.

A month later, the coroner’s report revealed a tortured man. He’d killed himself, essentially, with an overdose of valium and booze, or “acute ethanol and Diazepam intoxication”. It was the end of a spiral. A drunk driving conviction, separation from his wife and on top of all that, financial troubles. Turns out his commercial success was on the slide, and my guess, only a guess, is that he overextended himself, reaching for that financial validation where artistic validation was missing. I suspect it was this core wound that killed him.

As a journalist, you’re naturally supplicant to your subjects – it’s them you’re interested in, their enviable lives of achievement, while you’re just a cog in the delivery system. So when they die, these people, and the cog persists, you wonder – about how suddenly people disappear and what’s left of them when they’re gone. You wonder what it is we’re meant to be chasing. Dennis Hopper was another one. And David Hans Schmidt, the troubled “pornbroker” who hanged himself. And every time, it always turns me back to the article, that day our arcs intersected.

I remember that trip to his ranch. The horses he kept. The daffodil picture he was painting that day. It would have that same idyllic look to it, the twee bucolic fairyland that his critics so loathed, but that he painted hundreds, if not thousands of times. Thomas Kinkade was always consciously reaching for a kind perfection, a heaven on earth, a place to escape to. And now, his escape is complete.

The Times never ran my piece in the end for some reason – probably “not sexy enough” or “too American”. So no one has read it. And it’s a decade out of date. But I’ve decided to publish it in my archive all the same, as another tiny addition to his vast legacy.

Rest in peace Thomas Kinkade.

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Bombay Driver

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Sanjiv

Bombay Taxis

[This is an old feature I wrote for Quintessentially Magazine in 2009. They never sent me a copy of the mag, and it's not on their website either, so I thought, why not make it a blog? It's about 2000 words, so it's not bite size exactly. And it's not about finding the sunshine in LA either. But who cares? It's from another land, another life. A brief blast of the Bomb Bomb.)

“Hallo Sir! I am Das!” The call came every morning. It was my first week into a new job in Bombay – I was staying at the Taj hotel there – and the office had booked me a driver to take me to work in the mornings.

But Das wasn’t working out. He didn’t speak a lick of English (beyond the five words above) and he was never on time. So the next week they sent Philip whose English was fluent and timekeeping exemplary. But Philip would flap when there were traffic jams, which was always, and when he flapped, I would ask him to calm down, and that made him flap even more.

Then one morning, a new voice on the phone. Breathless, excited. “Hallo Sir! I am in Ready Position!”

It was Rohit, a shambles of a man in his thirties who wore grubby clothes, spoke comedy English and had an inexplicable enthusiasm for his job. I liked to picture him crouched down on the hotel forecourt, under starter’s orders, waiting for the pistol to go off. And the reality wasn’t far off – he’d see me come through the lobby and spring into action, rushing to open the door for me, his eyes bright with excitement. He seemed to find driving a joy, and tooted his horn like a maniac. But best of all, he wore a little blue Fez hat with gold tassels. ‘Ready Position’ was hired.

I’d never had a driver before coming to India. And I hadn’t planned on having one while I was in Los Angeles packing my bags. But once I emerged from Bombay airport, there was never any question that I would need one. If you’re not familiar with Indian traffic, imagine a world in which all order has perished and the lords of mayhem rule the earth. It’s not traffic so much as man and beast in a headlong charge, as though the bridge were collapsing behind them and a cash prize was waiting at the other end. Cars come within brushing distance, jostling along like corpuscles in an artery, creating bottlenecks and somehow wiggling through. Every risk is taken, every horn is tooted, and everyone has forgotten to take their meds.

So that was one reason. The other reason for hiring a driver was because I could, for the first time in my life. I would have hired Ready Position even if Indian traffic was as sane as Switzerland. ‘Chauffeur’ might sound all ritzy and French, but in Indian everyone’s got one. Well, not everyone, but you don’t have to be Lakshmi Mittal. You don’t even need a nice car. I had a Honda Civic, and even then, the car payment was more than the driver’s salary – which was all of $250. That’s the great thing about India – you don’t have to be anybody to be somebody.

This sudden availability of staff drives some expats a bit loopy. One French woman advised me in all seriousness to buy my driver a uniform with my initials embroidered on the breast pocket. ‘It makes them proud, you know?’ She also insisted that I get my money’s worth. ‘These drivers, they just sit around all day. Tell him to pick up your drycleaning!’

At the time, I was appalled. I couldn’t possibly treat Ready Position as some sort of errand boy. He was my chauffeur. He wore a Fez. But those were the early days when I was still adjusting to this new person in my car and my life.

In Los Angeles, I’d thought of my car as a sanctuary, a wonderful place to be alone. I’d take a drive to clear my thoughts, listen to some music and percolate. Perhaps talk to myself like a crazy person. The open road as therapy. But now, there was this other guy, whom I scarcely knew, and he was always there. I’d lost my sanctuary, and I wasn’t sure what I’d gained in its place. Was Ready Position a friend, now? I’d hired him because he seemed happy and bonkers and he wore a Fez. But then I ended up spending more alone time with him than anyone else. It’s oddly intimate, the relationship between a driver and his boss. We went everywhere together – obviously – and that meant several hours every day, going to and from work, then off to some bar afterwards, or a friend’s house, or the shops. He saw me in all kinds of moods – happy, tired, irritable, drunk, wistful, scatterbrained. And I hadn’t bargained on a relative stranger suddenly knowing quite so much about me. I felt naked.

Bombay Market

At first, I tried to level things out and find out about him too. Perhaps in time, I’d be able to visit his home as he’d visited mine. I didn’t want to be one of those snooty back seat executives who just rustled their newspapers and barked orders. I would close the gap and forge a proper bond with Ready Position – stop calling him Ready Position for one thing.

But that didn’t go over so well. We would be chatting away happily enough – Tarzan Hindi meets Tarzan English – but he’d tell me that his home was ‘very far distance’, and he had to travel two hours to pick me up in the morning, too far to take me, by all accounts. When I suggested that I might sit up the front with him, he squirmed. The front of the car was his domain, his office. He kept his things on the front seat – his little notebook to log mileage, his Fez. And when we were out at the shops, it felt wrong to just leave him behind while I popped into Starbucks for a frappuccino. So I’d invite him in – tell him to park and join me. But he looked uncomfortable.

‘Price is too much, sir,’ he said.

‘Rohit, relax, I’m paying.’

‘No sir. Better I stay. In ready position.’

Ultimately, it was he who suggested that he pick up my dry cleaning for me. ‘Why you come sir? I will bring um… this thing and you can enjoy!’ I didn’t take much persuading. And soon enough, he became precisely the Man Friday that the French woman had told me about. While I was at work, he’d be off buying lightbulbs or picking up take-out or taking the dogs to the vet – any of a hundred different errands. And he seemed perfectly happy to do all this. I’d thank him and tip him, and he’d say, ‘No sir, this is my duty!’ But he always took the money. Maybe this was what he’d wanted all along, the tips. Or maybe he just liked driving about town on his own, listening to music, clearing his thoughts. The car was his sanctuary now.

We settled into a rhythm, one in which a certain distance had been established between the front and back seats. We didn’t chat quite so much, but that was OK – he’d leave me in peace to read my paper, and I’d leave him to swelter out in the sun rather than join me for a milkshake. And all was well in the world. This was a dynamic that he was familiar with, and the car became a restful place to be. Months went by in which I never experienced road rage or found myself fretting over a map, or had to take the car in for a servicing. I got some reading done. I made some calls. I had a drink whenever I felt like it. Such is life in the back seat. And I forgot where the dry cleaners were, or how much lightbulbs cost. Ready Position did all that. I was unburdened.

It no longer felt awkward to have this mute witness to my every mood sitting in the car with me. While at first, my wife and I would be careful not to bicker in the car – ‘not in front of the driver!’ – we soon eased into our usual squabbling. I’d happily tell Ready Position to drive gently so that I could attempt a snooze. He had become that silent presence in our lives, a role that staff play for their masters. They only participate when called upon. They judge not, they are there to serve. And I have to say, I can see the appeal.

But then the niggles began to gnaw. The back seat can be an awfully boring place after a while. You just can’t properly enjoy a car unless you’re driving it. I never understood the Indians I met who’d tell me excitedly about their brand new car, but then only ever sit in the back. I’d always enjoyed driving back in LA – engaging with the machine, pushing the pedals and fiddling with all the buttons and switches. I liked the feeling of control and purpose, and still do. You’re a man of action in the front; in the back, you’re emasculated, your limbs are idle and you depend on others. And dependence can be crippling. When Ready Position took a week off for a wedding, we didn’t just lose a driver, we lost all these different people at once – the lunch delivery, the laundry pick up and all the rest of it. We were hopeless, stranded. This is the byproduct of staff – they infantilize you.

Push came to shove when spring turned to summer and the heat was like murder. I was fine, up in my air conditioned office all day, but Ready Position was out by the car, in the beating sun, and come the afternoon, he’d be sweating like a soul man – Rorschach sweat maps on his chest and sopping underarms. And the whiff wasn’t your ordinary locker room funk, but something far more acrid and deadly – a choking ammonia stench, thick with spices. It made the bile rise and the eyes water. They could have used Ready Position’s armpits to quell riots.

What to do? Either I opened the windows and let the heat in, which was a separate punishment all its own, or I closed them and sealed myself in a box of weapons-grade stink. My Indian friends were unequivocal – ‘buy him some deodorant! Tell him it’s summer and everyone has to use it now. You’re the boss!’

Well, something had to be done. I could barely breathe in there. So I broached the subject one afternoon, when the odor was ripe and clinging. ‘The car isn’t fresh anymore, Rohit,’ I said, sniffing conspicuously, trying not to gag. And I handed him some Right Guard spray-on, which he assured me that he would use. But nothing changed – I later discovered that he was using it to spray the mats and the seats. So the next time, I actually demonstrated how to use the stuff. And he looked embarrassed. ‘Sir, every day, I am bath,’ he said. ‘Five am, I am bath, sir.’

About three weeks later, he found another job. He said it was near where he lived, so there would be no more two hour commutes. But I think I know the real reason. And I still feel awful about it. Then a year after that, I moved back to America, where I drive myself about as I did before – back in the front seat, engaging with the machine.

But I often think of my former chauffeur. And not just because I could do with his help – who doesn’t miss their Man Friday? – but because Ready Position showed me something about India, something important. It remains one of my most cherished memories from my time there.

Barely a week after Ready Position left, I found myself out of a job. A crushing blow. And as we languished at home, my wife and I, confused and hurt by what had happened, there was a knock at the door. It was Ready Position. He looked devastated for some reason. My first thought was that he’d lost his job, and wanted to come back. I was bracing myself to tell him my own news.

‘Sir, I am bad feeling,’ he said. ‘You are good person.’ And he burst into tears, properly crumpled up. Through the sobs, he said that he’d heard from his driver friends that I’d lost my job and I might have to leave India. And he felt so bad about it that when his boss took a few days leave, he came up on the bus to see me. He wasn’t my driver anymore, but he would be happy to drive me around if I needed, free of charge. Anything I needed.

‘I am here for you, sir,’ he said. ‘In ready position.’

Bombay At Dusk

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Confessions

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Sanjiv

I’m not going to pretend. It’s neglect, guilty as charged. If my blog was a baby, Child Protection would have me up on charges: “you didn’t change the poor thing for months.” And it’s true. Months have passed in which I moved apartment, to a whole new part of LA, did a bunch of readings, worked in Vegas, San Francisco and New York and met celebrities and all sorts—months in which there was plenty to blog about, if I wanted.

And yet, here I am, slouching through the door, the deadbeat dad, a guilty shrugger who can’t even look his own home page in the eye anymore. I’m not proud. Scrape away the smirk and it’s all shame underneath, I promise you. I just couldn’t face that relic of a post about the grocery stores anymore. It was a rebuke, a nagging shrew on the landing. What time do you call this? Where have you been anyway?

I won’t bore you with excuses, though there are plenty whirling about right now, like shreds of paper at a landfill. All I can think about is the encouragement and advice I received when this blog was about to launch. Those kind souls who said, “that’s great Sanj”, “it’s your shop-window” and “it’s so important for journalists to get out there…” There’s a summoning of hopes that takes place around the dying embers of December, a way of rinsing out the regrets of the year just gone, and convincing ourselves once more that new years are in fact new beginnings. That’s where this blog was born, in late 2010, out of a seasonal surge of big hearted, sunny-smiled si se puede.

I’m told that at this point in life, I mustn’t chastise myself for such lapses. It’s better to, if not embrace them, then at least forgive. Because this is shared dirt. None of us sinners stand alone. We begin things with exuberance only to falter and fill with doubts:  “What is this blog even about? What’s the point of it? Who cares?” And as the voices clamor, the confidence crumbles and the serpents of self-loathing start to slither.

I don’t pretend to understand these things. I’m just sharing. But what I do know is that sharing is easier now that I have confessed. I feel that I can tell you all kinds of secrets now. And perhaps I will. I also know that this blog is not a shop window, really. Shop windows have displays. They’re tainted by marketing. They long only to be admired. This blog is different. It’s not a representation, it’s the thing itself. If you can’t see a man’s innards, then what’s the point?

I have a treadmill in the garage, I call it my ongoing dust-gathering experiment. But tomorrow, I’m going to get on that thing, you watch. It’s late December and, just like last year, I can feel the animal currents, the primitive emotions, pull me again towards that hopeful horizon where change is possible and I am the architect. So what if it wanes? We all buckle over eventually. For now, I’m surfing this wave right through the champagne crest of the 31st and into next year, 2012—the Mayan Year Of The Blog.

More soon

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Them Apples

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Sanjiv

You move country and your brain changes. What’s new and startling at first becomes quickly familiar—the jolt gets muffled—as new memories are banked, new synapses built and new grooves etched over the old. But ever since I moved to LA a decade ago, so help me, one of those jolts has stayed with me. It won’t die, it’s too primal. I’m talking about when you’re in a grocery store and it hits you: Sweet Jesus, the plenty. It’ll make you go blind.

The first time I moved to the plenty was from England, where the local Tescos was more human in scale, more head height and conceivable. The bounty of America knocked me sideways. Over eight years, I grew more and more accustomed—complacent is another word. And then we moved to India, where food shopping, or “marketing”, is a cramped scrum of dirt and barging in a sweatbox, a fight for the last scabbed potato in the bucket. It’s such a savage business out there that they leave it to the staff, a matter for the slaves. So to return from that to LA is all the more extreme. A visceral experience. Giddy.

Shopping Aisle distorted, sanjivb.com

I could rhapsodise about them all – a bog standard Ralphs on Crenshaw would do – but since we’re doing this, let’s wander the palaces. And by palaces, I mean places like Wholefoods on 3rd , for instance, that organic wonderland of gluten-free yoga girls with their mats rolled up under their arms. Or – and this is my current favorite, the Everest of the genre – the gay Pavilions on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Bo Derek shops. It’s so huge it messes with your perspective, like the Grand Canyon. And there’s something profound about engaging with such a vision of abundance. Lately, a trip to Pavilions has been less about shopping as epiphany.

Some days, in the afternoons, when the traffic is light, it’s as empty as a dream. I can turn a corner and see no one—it’s just me, my cart and this vast eatable landscape. Great cliffs of apples to my left, their dimples catching the tube light, and on my right, the waxy slopes of Lemon and Orange, with their bright bobbled crests, behind which in the distance, you can see a diverse province of onions, ranges of white, red, yellow and sweet Hawaiian. Up ahead is a misty forest of sprinkled greens and shoots and trees. I like to go rambling in those hills, alert for cougars as always, marvelling at the new species like broccolini and pluots.

We know that architects construct these citadels of plenty to best exploit our natural impulses and patterns. They put the candy near the checkout for a reason. They have explored decision fatigue, our preferences for lighting, aroma, aisle width and shelf height. We become lab rats in these places. But we also know that our brains physically and chemically adapt to the environments we create. So the patterns converge, brain and blueprint. It’s not unreasonable to think that the more time we spend in these superstores, the more the grooves and channels of our brains will conform to supermarket aisles.

But there are anxieties to all this. The anxiety of choice is one—the 47 varieties of all things. Another is the creeping erasure of our primal relationship with food, any hunting or farming instincts we once had. And then the extravagance. The dwarfing scale. The staggering, obscene abundance. All these imports, from Fiji, Peru, Switzerland and every other place, all arranged perfectly, so the labels turn to face you and everything gleams and winks, even the floors.

I come to Pavilions and I’m gobsmacked, I marvel and gasp,  but ultimately I feel diminished, even humiliated. Amid all this perfection, I notice my bed hair, pot belly and grubby T-shirt. What self-respect I manage to leave the house with is whittled—Pavilions reduces me to a gaping ape with a pushcart, witnessing some lavish performance I neither requested nor can quite comprehend. I become a boy king, squirming at all the fuss that has been made just for me. Because I can’t fathom the trillion processes that it took to create this. All I know for sure is that I am not worthy – how could I be? No emperor in history has seen such casual abundance on the scale of the Boystown Pavilions—Caesar would weep at this shit and Alexander would kneel and pray.

They ought to airlift Darfurian refugees into the sheer pornography of the produce section, just so they can see us Angelenos, us sunbaked Americans in our stonewash and our Juicy couture, with our fat rolls and Lakers shirts, how we shuffle through the aisles, grunt and grab, and get pissed off if we forget the olives, because now we’ve got to all the way back, and it’s fucking miles.

I reach the checkout, blinking and ashamed. Pavilions is a reminder of just how fortunate and spoiled we are—the ingratest generation, full of urges and wants, who earned nothing and received everything. Present a savage with perfection and he just might recoil.

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Secrets & Wives @ Skylight Books

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Sanjiv

Clips from the launch of “Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy” on Vimeo.

So the launch was fun. A while ago now but still. (I’m a bit of a slowtard with Windows Movie Maker).

And it was a minor miracle how the whole thing came together.

The phone went and suddenly I had all of three weeks to fill a trendy book store full of people and give some kind of speech. So I did what any rational adult would do in those circumstances. I shat my pants.

I don’t have a vast number of friends, as I’ve mentioned before—I’m not one of those “connectors” or “hubs” or “likeable people”—and the prospect of public speaking just makes me reach for the Depends.

But it all worked out. It takes a village to launch a book it seems. A village with a wife in it, to be precise. Because my wife has friends, plenty of them and they’re all lovely charming people who understand the importance of milestones and showing up to stuff. So they came, they laughed and bought a shit load of books. They asked questions and drank wine, and when a mad woman with knockers down to her navel threatened to disrupt things by answering her phone in the middle of my speech, the redoubtable Rebecca Field pulled her to one side and—if Adam Lamb is to be believed—slapped her about a bit.

Look at these fine people. I mean seriously.

Secrets & Wives book launch

If you go to Los Feliz, buy a book at Skylight. Independent bookstores are the last remnants of civilization and they need your support. And if you fancy a drink afterwards, check out Vinoteca around the corner. Ceviche! That’s where we went after the event to get trolleyed on Pinot Noir.

There’s a podcast of the speech here. And there’ll be updates about future events on the book’s facebook page.

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