Welcome to LA, Part II by Alexis Justman
“line my bathtub with trash bags and sleep there in stockings, gloves and a ski mask”
Read Part 1 here.
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Welcome to LA: Part 2
I’ve taken to walking to my room with the same beeline purposefulness that I reserve for my morning commute to the train. I even look down and use my hands as blinders on the sides of my head, lest I be haunted by another apparition or derelict meth head. I’ve grown accustomed to the sour stench of sweat and ashtray, I avoid the broken glass littering the walkway and pay no mind to the syringes lining the floorboards. When I come to my room I fumble for my keys like it’s a race, hands shaking, holding my breath to unlock the door and with eyes squeezed shut I reach in and feel for the light switch, so no ghosts or goblins can jump out of the darkness at me. As soon as the light comes on, I see a few cockroaches scurry into the cracks in the wall and I shudder. There’s no place like home.
In the morning I wake up to no running water so I skip the shower, and groggily wait for the elevator with Peggy, my prostitute neighbor. Peggy is actually an African American man, a man with great legs, long lacquered fingernails and a short blonde wig. Peggy always compliments my outfit, handbag, hair or perfume. But today, she’s quiet, and as we step into the elevator together she shifts her weight onto her left hip, causing her angular bones to jut out of her pink pajama pants. She says good morning and scratches at the sores on her stubbly throat. I impulsively scratch at my own neck, and that’s when I feel them. Bites. They’re everywhere. Up and down my arms, ankles, behind my knees, on my stomach, behind my ears. I run my fingers over the rows of them. Dozens of swollen welts, the doings of tiny blood-sucking nocturnal insects.
When I get home from work, management has already posted a notice on my door informing me how to prepare for fumigation. What little belongings I possessed must be disposed of. My apartment would be uninhabitable for 48 hours. I push my mattress into the hallway and line my bathtub with trash bags and sleep there in stockings, gloves and a ski mask. After work the next day I come home to my studio, which is foggy with pesticides. I take off my shoes and start putting my room back together. Within five minutes I notice huge red sores welling up around my bare ankles. Uncertain if it is a reaction to the chemical cloud or more bedbugs, I run downstairs to find Peggy. She would know. But instead I end up showing my ankles to Allen, who hangs out by the vending machines. Allen has lived here for eleven years. He weighs over 400 pounds and rides a motorized wheelchair. He has no teeth and the best ghost stories, which for whatever reason makes me trust him entirely. He tells me I'm infested, or infected, I can't understand. But he must be wrong. My stomach turns and I feel the color drain from my face. I decide I will comb the alleyways for my friend, my decrepit neighbor who allegedly barters sexual favors for illicit substances. “Has anyone seen Peggy?” I ask. And then I hear myself, I see my reflection in the glass door of the Coke machine. The reflection of someone I recognized, but also someone who woke up in a bathtub and just asked for the whereabouts of a transvestite tweeker by name.
Then the elevator dings, and out walks Angel, the apartment manager who first gave me my tour. He's all smiles until the look on my face alarms him. He’s followed out by a young girl and her mother, both fresh off the U-Haul with apartment leases in hand, ready to be signed. Angel introduces me to my soon-to-be neighbor and she shakes my hand limply. She has the same glow I had when I first visited, and I know exactly what she is and isn’t seeing. Across the lobby, a pregnant teenager is balancing a laundry hamper on her shoulder, dragging two filthy, screaming toddlers behind her down the staircase, which I once recognized from select scenes in Gone With the Wind. Dwindling are my daydreams of ball gowns, top hats, and silver screen sirens in opera gloves, but they’re there all the same, albeit interrupted occasionally by a crusty tenant in a wheelchair rolling past me as he hacks up a lung, reeking of peroxide and Raid.
My fantasies are filtered through this halfway home, through mandatory meetings and classes of how to avoid tetanus, staph infection, domestic violence arrests and lead based paint.
"She’s an actress," says the proud mother and the girl flips her hair over a shoulder, feigning modesty. “She’s not famous yet but she will be."
"Good luck with that," I say, and the girl replies, We don’t believe in luck. I went to college.
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I eventually moved out of downtown and into an apartment in Silver Lake with central heating and a full kitchen. I got my driver’s license back, joined an online dating service and now my daily concerns are closer to the norm for LA: Traffic, parking spots, gluten-free diets, whatever. I only miss downtown on nights I can’t sleep, when I can’t believe I’m the kind of girl who needs to fall asleep to pigeon fights, sirens or breaking glass on the street. I only miss my first year in LA when I can’t believe I used to eat dinner at 7-11, and now I’m the kind of girl who knows what a gluten is.
But then other times I realize I don’t miss those things at all, at least not as much as I miss the kind of girl I was, or wasn’t. When I claimed to be neither starry-eyed or to believe in anything, for good reason, when really I believed in most things--for no good reason. Now I prefer to believe in luck, in miracles, in karma, in ghosts, parking spots, in the milk of human kindness, in dreams coming true, I believe in God. I believe in true love and I believe in affordable auto insurance and I believe they can be found on the Internet. I believe in everything now, because no one’s given me a good enough reason not to. I still lock my doors, I wash my hands. I drive past the Hollywood sign and suppress the secret giddiness I feel about wanting to have my photo taken next to it. I still swear up and down I’m not starry-eyed, but if the shoe fits, I now know better than to risk tetanus.
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Alexis Justman is a writer -- on the Internet, and also in real life. She works in an office with a big window and a yard, but isn't sure what she does for a living yet. She is a wearer of many hats, and hangs them all in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.