Welcome to LA, Part 1 by Alexis Justman
“being ambushed in a SWAT team drug raid while ghost hunting”
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Welcome to LA: Part 1
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Mine is not an epic tale of flight and misfortune, despite what my online dating profile would lead you to believe. I was unlucky, true, but I told myself I was not the kind of girl to believe in luck. I was unfortunate (maybe) but not the kind of girl to believe in fortune, or "dreams coming true." And then I was young, yes, and whimsical and maybe even witless, but most definitely not about to be another starry-eyed small town hopeful with a suitcase and a headshot doomed to be hardened by a brutal metropolis. I was armed with little more than a college degree and a cagey attitude when I did what most twenty-somethings do and loaded my mattress into a U-Haul and cleaned out my savings account to cover the security deposit on the first vacancy I came across: a studio the size of a closet in downtown Los Angeles.
From the outside, the 12 story hotel boasted old world architecture and glamour, while the inside was mostly under construction and empty save for a few pieces of tufted leather furniture, a grand piano and a couple sad flower arrangements. Framed lithographs hung on the walls leading to the main lobby where scenes of the building’s rich history were depicted in black and white, and ancient cinematic figures mingled around enormous marble columns in the grand ballroom, leaning over the mezzanine banisters in sequins and furs, cocktails and cigarettes in hand. It was perfect. I took a leasing application and was led on a guided tour of the hotel’s main quarters; the lobby, the ballroom, the mezzanine, all backlit by silent-film industry folklore accented with star names like Chaplin and Valentino. The columns no longer stood, but I recognized smaller details probably overlooked in the restoration process; the dusty, graying gold leaf ceiling, Italian Egyptian marble stairs now edged in reflective tape, extravagant crown mouldings of cherubs missing facial features, cracked and cobwebbed. To me, this was more romantic: hidden secrets murmuring under chipped paint, harkening back to grander, lusher times. Now it would be me walking across these floors every day, coming home from work or doing my laundry, as it were, tripping over the ghosts of iconic coattails that once swept this lobby. I live here.
On late nights coming home from work, I’d take the stairs instead of the elevator, loitering through each hall, floor to floor, in hopes of catching a glimpse of one of the lost spirits. The guard on duty would ask why I never got scared, and I’d respond, “Right now I'm preoccupied with being scared of my other neighbors,” meaning, the living tenants, because after its heyday in the Golden Age, and before I got here, this place was, and is, home to a slew of hapless characters: the junkies, the sick, and the elderly. Often times I’d wake up to scratching in my walls or knocking on the pipes and I’d sneak out the 7th floor fire escape for a smoke at 4am, noticing my neighbors all appearing to be awake- some more than others. They kept their doors propped open, leaking out putrid odors of warm piss and amphetamines, but whenever I tried to peek all I could see were bare mattresses illuminated by the blue glow of television static. More than once I’d have one of them mistake my room for someone else’s and they’d jiggle my door handle and hiss at me through the threshold, clutching a fist full of aluminum foil and dollar bills.
And every morning I walked one block to the subway station. This was my commute, which I deemed the “the gauntlet” because I had to walk fast and with purpose, gaze fixed downward as I pushed through a barrage of bums aggressively opening their coats lined with bootlegged DVDs or any prescription painkiller you could possibly want at 8am. The walk back at night was always easier, though probably more dangerous in the desolate late night hours. I’d be hustled for change, at the very least, by a couple of transients on their haunches outside the entrance to my apartment building. But on this particular night, no one is out, the restaurant has closed early, the lobby is eerily silent and the guard at the security desk doesn’t greet me. I wave. He jolts to attention, his face as pale as a sheet. Sorry, he says. I fell asleep with my eyes open again. I tell him goodnight and he calls the elevator. After being ambushed in a SWAT team drug raid while ghost hunting the week prior, I’ve given my late night paranormal pursuits a rest. I press the button for my floor, seven, but nothing happens. I press it again, and it lights up, but it takes me down to the basement where the laundry is. I press it one more time and all the numbers light up one by one. It takes me up to the seventh floor but the doors remain shut. I jab the “door open” button repeatedly, frantically, until it finally lets me out. I hightail it to my corner studio, nestled in the armpit of the tower, all the while being followed by the unmistakable sound of a child’s laughter resonating from the tinny intercom of the elevator speaker. I am terrified.
There would be a new security guard manning the elevators the next day, and one of the janitors would whisper to me in Spanish, “He got spooked. He saw a little girl last night, run down the stairs in her nightgown and into the elevator." His eyebrows arched up to his hairline, "Through the steel doors.”
Strange things would follow. Power outages, shadowy figures asking me to traffic greasy paper bags to other rooms, inexplicable homicides, anthrax scares. The next week I’d notice a stranger on my floor, a woman in a black gown and veil. I assumed she might have been a performer or artist leaving to sing downstairs, or maybe a theatre attendee looking for the third floor. I follow her past my door and she turns the corner. Out of my peripheral, I barely see the hem of her skirt swish the baseboard before she’s gone.
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Read Part 2 here.
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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.