LA: More Light Than Dark Again?

Cautious forgiveness, soft-serve vegan ice cream, Highland Park, and JOY

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

—Primo Levi 

It’s the summer solstice and also our last day in Pasadena. These have been best few days I’ve had in LA since before 2014. Since before the FIRST before when I became ill suddenly and my world split apart. 

It was as if LA had somehow reclaimed itself from the dark hellscape it proudly became from 2020 onward.

LA had been a long love story for me. Our relationship began in 1997 when I moved from Staten Island to the Fairfax neighborhood to pursue my dreams of creating films and music while basking in the sunshine. When you live somewhere long enough you move in and out of different chapters, both light and dark. Some brief, and some that drag on far too long.  Until 2014 most of the dark chapters I experienced were brief, and the bright light of LA stayed with me way longer than I had anticipated. I’ll never forget getting out of my car in December 1996 while scouting for a place to live and being stopped by the snow-capped San Bernardino mountains for the very first time. In that moment I knew I’d never leave. I was tempted to not even return to NY to get my things. How can anyone live someplace where they don’t see snow-capped mountains while hiking in the sunshine in December? Something about this sight stirred a freedom in me that can still re-ignite my passion for Southern California despite all its wrong-doing during the last four years. Despite the fact that it enabled such hideous darkness while pretending nothing was wrong.  

It’s been four years since we moved to our new home in the mountains. We stayed in Pasadena during this trip- had breakfast at our favorite gluten free/vegan spot in Altadena, checked out Vroman’s (my once go-to bookstore), and clumsily ran through a dark alley in Highland Park to get vegan soft-serve before they closed for the night.  When I met my now-wife Cate in 2018 in Boston (where I had been re-located to film a documentary series), I told her she belonged in LA and that she should come back with me. She was so much more rock ’n roll than Boston, and there was no way I was leaving without her. 

We moved into Atwater Village in March 2019. Little did we know that the city of my dreams and our new home was prepping for a descent into madness that would strip away all its magic for years to come.  Without much hesitation, in July 2020, we said our goodbyes. It wasn’t sad for me, because it wasn’t LA anymore and hadn’t been for a long time. It was a dystopian shit show that turned a once civilized urban playground for grown-ups into a mass formation of violence and segregation due to vaccine and mask mandates. Both illegal. Both immoral. Both responsible for erasing all that was decent about us. The monsters closed Griffith Park, the beaches, and anywhere that the healing properties of nature could be felt. The culture became obsessed with policing their neighbors, firing co-workers, and spewing hatred for anyone they deemed as “different”. The irony is that they called themselves inclusive while doing it. There was a wild madness in the air that is difficult to describe unless you were there, looking at it through a sober lens. 

On our second night in Pasadena we returned to my old neighborhood Highland Park, where I had owned a home and lived for 13 years. It was dark by the time we got there and we were in full-on panic mode that the vegan soft-serve ice-cream place we had been dreaming about had closed for the night. We decided to take a chance on the parking ticket and just booked it through the dark alley to York. It wasn’t until we were walking back to the car (now more calm because we had accomplished our mission) that I noticed how dark the street was. There was a version of Highland Park that had been etched into my brain since we left, but this wasn’t it. During those early years Highland Park felt like a little pocket that just a few of us knew about, and there was edgy energy in the air that I never wanted to forget. 

I noticed a young woman alone with her laptop, smoking.  In the crosswalk, there was a guy with tattoos covering his body aimlessly crossing the street. There was an air of uncertainty, not quite danger, but not an altogether safe feeling either. Was it always like this? Was I just seeing it with fresh eyes? Perhaps that last visit to Highland Park was still lingering in my subconscious. It was a few months into the pandemic, and we wanted to get takeout from Joy, one of our favorite spots on York. We already knew that mask-wearing was not about health, but we wore bandanas to be able to get where we needed to go on a daily basis. Not altogether different than wearing a big yellow star so you could come and go without getting beaten on the sidewalk in Nazi Germany. You think that’s an exaggeration? Watch this Vera Sherov clip and get back to me. For those who aren’t familiar with Vera Sherov she is a Holocaust survivor and human rights activist. She’s a voice of reason. 

BTW - Google, Safari and Duck Duck Go will all have you believe that your financial data will be stolen if you open this link. Classic censorship tactics by those that vehemently oppose freedom. Don’t let them win, be brave, listen to the clip. 

I was double-parked on Avenue 51 while Cate ran across the street to the “Covid-friendly” take out window they had set up. Apparently the woman behind the counter didn’t want to take cash because it’s dirty. Cate reminded her that it’s not legal to exclude patrons who don’t have credit cards. Begrudgingly she agreed but then asked Cate to pull her mask over her nose. I guess now that Cate was paying in cash, she feared for her life. Cate said no, as she was several feet away on the side-walk. The woman then refused to give her our order. She got into a verbal dispute with the woman, and an Uber eats delivery guy waiting on line told her to “go back to where she came from”. Since we were local, and I had lived in Highland Park since both those people were in grade school, I wondered what they meant by that? Suddenly, I was not permitted to get take-out in my own neighborhood? When I moved to Highland Park there were no groovy cafes, or hip yoga spots. There was no “take-out”, and the place that was now Joy had once been Elsa’s, a small Spanish bakery that had been there for years catering to the Mexican population that made up the majority of the neighborhood at that time. Now that hipsters had more rights, I guess the older population could just take their cash and freedom elsewhere.  Out of principle we never ate there again, but man, I do miss their taro pudding. That’s the price you pay for standing your ground, I guess. We never did get our food. 

So how to reconcile our memories of that version of LA, with the magical summer days we just spent in the very same city? We went to a restaurant in Old Town Pasadena to meet up with friends I hadn’t seen since before the SECOND (Covid) before.  I was nervous, yet excited to re-visit a part of my life that I had all but packed away. We had spent the better part of our thirties being wild in a town that always brought more fun and surprises than you expected night after night.  There was no shortage of dive bars in Chinatown, concerts at the Bowl, and good old fashioned Sex and the City gatherings with wine and Twizzlers at someone’s apartment. These same friends led me straight to a party in Hancock Park where I would play pool and drink wine with Joni Mitchell for an entire night. Yeah, those were the days. 

That evening and the rest of our stay was somehow life affirming. It was a deep reminder that that letting go is essential to the healing of the human spirit. It affirmed that most of me is well and the rest of me is getting there. Sitting outside on the balcony at One Colorado overlooking the courtyard was reminiscent of so many summer nights out in LA and yet, it was an entirely new experience.  We had all grown apart, survived our individual ordeals, and found ourselves once again enjoying common ground like our mutual love for this town, even with its now-heavy past. Not unlike the cafes in Berlin in the 50’s. It was also a reminder that the only way to move on is to accept what is. For those who just want this subject to go away forever, I suggest accepting the truth about what happened. That is your ticket out. Until that acceptance piece is there, you will not only be faced with what you deny non-stop but you will re-live the suffering in your own life in various ways over and over again. 

I was actually sad to leave LA but as we drove toward the 134 we both recognized how difficult it would be to ever fully trust this place again. It hasn’t been that long.  Would they do it again? As we drove up the San Jacinto mountain and wound around the bend, with a view of the entire basin below us we sang along with John Denver… “country roads, take me home, mountain mama…”,  and held hands. No place is perfect and I will forever miss the old days in LA. Tough to give up having endless restaurant options, and frequent occasions to meet up with friends, but in the past 10 years since my big wakeup call, my food options have disappeared along with many of my friends. 

I’m not saying it’s over forever with LA; it’s just that my heart belongs to some other place now.