Crack Pipes and Grad Tassels
The trials and tribulations of South Hope Street.
In about a month, Maddee, Glove Box, and I will be vacating our apartment in Downtown Los Angeles and making the 2,000 mile drive east toward Alabama. It feels like just yesterday that I lamented the difficulty of boxing up my life and moving west. Yet here I am, doing it all again.
We currently live on South Hope Street, which I took to be a positive sign when we moved in. Though, I now realize, there’s no street in the world named South Doom Street, or Demise Road, or Turn Back You’ve Made the Wrong Decision Avenue.
For all the gripes we’ve had with this apartment, our 700-sq. ft. home on South Hope Street has been a delightful surprise, considering we leased it sight-unseen from the opposite coast.
Sure, it’s had its issues over the past two years. The roaches are back, for one thing. And they’re growing bigger by the day.
The exterminator proudly informed us that he’d sprayed our walls with a chemical designed to stunt roach growth.
“It doesn’t kill them, but it ensures that when they hit adolescence they can’t grow into adults and reproduce.”
“Oh, wow.” I nodded along, grinning. “That’s kind of fucked up.”
And for a couple weeks, his fucked up plan worked. The roaches shrank and shrank, until eventually they disappeared altogether.
But recently they’ve returned, and grown in size. I fear they’ve evolved past their chemical castrations, and are producing exponentially larger offspring, with more potent sexual proclivities.
Other than that, I swear everything’s been great. One of our lighting fixtures fell out of the wall, but maintenance squared that away and no one’s been electrocuted yet. Not even Glove Box, who went through a phase of inserting her claws directly into an outlet next to our bed each night.
The shower drain hasn’t clogged since it almost flooded. And the tub faucet has worked perfectly ever since that time the shower knob broke, and it was stuck on cold, so I kicked it so hard that the knob turned upside down and the wall shook, so I kicked it again even harder until it did a 360 and came unhinged, and the water didn’t turn off for 48 hours. After that, everything was fine. Our leasing office — the saints — even offered to compensate us one month’s water payment, so long as we could produce a billing statement proving that running the bath for two days straight is, in fact, expensive.
Anyway, if you ignore all that stuff, it’s been a great apartment. Of course, the floor is slanted, so if you place a ball down, it rolls to the western wall. But you know another ball that rolls westward? The sun. And no one’s ever filed a complaint with the sun. (Skin cancer joke.)
Speaking of which, there’s plenty of natural sunlight glaring off the glass high-rise across the street. Sure, the skyline allows us little view of the sunset, but we get twice the sunrise. In fact, the blaze that reflects off those windows saves us money on heating in the winter, when the light broils our apartment to a crisp 80 degrees each afternoon.
I’m not exaggerating: our neighboring high-rise is 95% window and 5% strobe light. Whenever you look out the window, day or night, you can see pulsating LEDs bumping in the windows of what I can only assume to be 24/7 raves. I sometimes fear that the airplanes I hear overhead are flights mistakenly redirecting from LAX to the the blinking lights across the street.
But worry not! If you crave raves, look no further than our cozy complex. We have drug-hungry, light-strobing, music-bumping party people aplenty here on South Hope Street.
Our next-door neighbors once played Meek Mills’ “Dreams & Nightmares” so loud at 5 o’clock in the morning that I could rap along verbatim. (I didn’t, because nobody wants to hear that.) The frequent screaming matches that accompanied the late-night music sounded like an IMAX screening of 2019’s Marriage Story behind our wall, complete with a 4DX vibration feature intense enough to knock books from our bookshelves.
The cops have only been called the one time, during which I cooperated out of equal parts neighborly concern and sleepless frustration. I’m still not sure how our neighbors weren’t evicted after the police presence and the numerous noise complaints, but their lack of reprimand granted the rest of us an immunity the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Supreme Court granted former presidents God-king powers.
If they hadn’t been thrown out, what was stopping us from doing what we wanted?
So followed a months-long rampage as we tested our newfound liberties. We bought a bird feeder, which is explicitly and nonsensically outlawed per our lease agreement. We began pouring grease down our drains, and feeding the rats by the pool. The lady next door broke bottles on her balcony, and the trash rooms filled to capacity as residents left used butane torches and greasy Chick-fil-A leftovers rotting on the floor.
Ragers were thrown down every hall. Ring cameras sprang up like wreathes during Christmas. Someone even installed a jerry-rigged surveillance system with a rotating camera protruding from their door.
It was a true test of the American dream. How many civil liberties can you intrude upon as an expression of your own?
And yet, for all its issues, I find myself prematurely nostalgic for our funky little shithole. Maybe it’s the knowledge that I’m finally leaving that has gifted me the freedom of bittersweetness.
I’ll miss the ten days out of the year when the sunset crawls its way between the high-rises and onto our balcony. I’ll miss our few friendly neighbors who share beers with us in the hot tub, and invite us over for cook-outs and card games. I’ll miss the family downstairs, whose daughter points up at our balcony and screams “kitty cat!” when Glove Box hangs her whiskered face over the railing.
In a way, our apartment on South Hope Street is just a microcosm of city living. Dare I say, it’s what the literary critics call a slice of life.
There’s equilibrium here. Good and bad. It reminds me of the time my coworker asked how I enjoyed walking to work.
“Well,” I told her, “some days I leave the house and stumble upon a surprise graduation in the park. Other days, I turn the corner on Hope Street and discover a couple of guys smoking crack behind Macy’s.”
To paraphrase the Disney cartoon, Phineas and Ferb, if I had a nickel for every time I encountered someone smoking crack in Downtown L.A., I’d have three nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened three times.
Despite it all, I’m thankful for the checks and balances. I’m happy to have lived in a city where I saw more graduation tassels than crack pipes. Where, for every cockroach, there’s a cook-out. For every neighbor with a camera, there’s another with a beer waiting for me by the hot tub.
Every blinding sunrise has its sunset — clawing, fighting to be seen.
It’s regretful that we have to surrender this beautiful, complicated “luxury” living space, yet we do. Not just because bigger and better opportunities await. But also because, since writing this, the roaches have grown opposable thumbs. They just informed us that they want a cut of next month’s rent. And, if we don’t have it, we’ll be sleeping with the rats, at the bottom of the pool.
Shouts out to…
IKEA of Burbank, for the free coffee.
Jerry at Seven Grand, for teaching the youth to shoot pool.
Book Soup, for recently becoming my favorite L.A. bookstore. Better late than never.