At the Crossroads
WHEN I first moved to LA, I worked at a clothing resale shop situated on an asterisk-shaped intersection near the Children’s Hospital. Medical helicopters would approach laden with equipment and precious things, causing the earth and buildings to pulse under their blades’ whomp-whomp baritone. It felt like Vietnam; a thing I’m not qualified to say but somehow feel is accurate.
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The fire station was just a block up and we constantly had sirens between them and the ambulances. Cars were rightfully confused in the “inventively” shaped intersection and inevitably would honk furiously or creep with hesitation. In the melee, a Prius was clipped and jumped the curb, nosing itself into a wall of glass and thus the store. The firemen all but teleported, they appeared so fast. They helped sweep up the glass, move the car and board the window. The rest of the night the staff talked in wide-eyed sentences about how we’d heard a loud pop only to realize a car was where the widow display and luckily-empty-bench had been.
People would come in to sell their clothes, and what a parade of characters it could be some days. The end and beginning of the month was always people clearing out the dregs of their closet in search of rent money. Worse was when it was obvious they’d cleaned out a roommate’s closet. The skater bros would come in with variations of Hanes t-shirts and be annoyed when you had to turn them away on account of the fabric never having been washed. I made a sexist joke about women to a pair of them once, to watch the way they’d suddenly treat me like I was one of their own. It worked. They did. I smirked; idiots.
A teenage boy had ridden his skateboard all the way from Timbuktu with a cheap trash bag that was laden with sneakers in shoe boxes. He had no ID, claimed he was seventeen (which was too young for us to buy from) and his eyes were the emptiest black pools of glass I think I’ve ever seen. He was in so much pain. He desperately wanted to sell the shoes. He HAD to sell the shoes, he told us. But they were either stolen or knock offs, and wouldn’t sell in the store at any rate, so we couldn’t take them. He became so angry, so defiant. Nothing I said helped, in fact my coworkers sent me to the staff room to avoid inflaming the situation. They were right to do it - no matter how I tried to communicate I only made things much, much worse.
They finally got him to leave the store, but then he promptly parked himself outside the doors and appeared to be waiting for us to close. It got to the point where we felt trapped inside and unsafe walking to our cars. The impression I had was of a terrified kid, and while I wasn’t afraid of who he probably was as a person, the forces and people that had driven him to be so desperate in the first place scared the shit out of me. He was running from a much bigger fish. I didn't need to see what he was willing to do to us to survive being hunted by that.
Our assistant manager kept trying to downplay things, and insisted against reason that we were safe - even as shoppers who’d left the store already had come back to warn us that this kid was outside and seething, waiting for us. She kept exasperating how ridiculous this was and that we should all just walk to our cars, like normal. And I remember putting my foot down saying there was no way I was doing that until someone could come and talk him back to reason. A frankly tense standoff emerged between me, having put myself in park and refusing to risk it, and the manager who was essentially revving her engines and squealing her tires. We ended up calling the cops and scurried away when they arrived like mice near a distracted cat while the boy was avoiding looking the officers in the eye. It felt terrible. Nothing about that felt like a win. It was a few months before I learned part of the assistant manager’s anxiety about leaving right then and there was her abusive live-in boyfriend flooding her with texts about why she wasn’t home yet, and how she must be cheating instead of coming home to be with him. Bad situations and bad decisions are bad situations are bad decisions and they blur one another’s lines so easily.
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There was one man who still breaks my heart. He shuffled up to the dressing room with a defeat and sorrow all around him, some mishmash of random items draped across his arm. We let him in to try things on, and when he walked out a few minutes later, and then continued out the doors of the shop, thought nothing of it. It was clear he hadn’t stolen anything.
When I went back to clear the merchandise he’d left in the dressing room, there was his kit. He’d shot up in the dressing room. It shouldn’t have surprised me but I was and am so unaccustomed to drug use that it was shocking. I guess because I hadn’t ever considered a person would do that, or that they’d be so driven by suffering. It seems naive to say out loud but I had a strange unexamined assumption that by sticking to places that were partitioned from those kinds of addictions that I wouldn’t encounter them. Shows what I know.
After a momentary flash of recognition and an upwelling of deep pity when he saw it on the dressing room floor, my other assistant manager took the kit into the office and locked it away. I presume he tossed it in the trash that night, though looking back I don’t know exactly what he did with it. The man returned within the hour and grew predictably more desperate for his things to be returned to him. The manager said he didn’t know what the man was talking about. I meekly muttered the same. Someone with a more educated understanding of addiction may read this and write to me about the seventeen ways we were wrong here, and they probably would be right to do so. Someone else may write in to point out the concussive social failings that made this entire situation wrong, and they probably would be right, too.
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We always knew when the moon was full because the homeless would pop in and pretend to mill about the racks before unfurling tirades against "the alpha, the omega, and how no one tells you the power of 27. If they just told you about it, man, you would see what an illusion this all is, c’mon don’t you wanna fucking know how you’re all just pawns to the eyes in the sky??”
There was a time I had to escort one gentleman out because he was legitimately scaring a sweet immigrant family. He had a sore on his upper lip, rotted teeth, and was fresh out of the county’s hospital, or so his wristband told me. He called himself “Sister Mary” and according to lore, used to be a regular nuisance. He was also the reason our pencil cups were all below the counter now. On his last visit he’d grabbed a pair of scissors out of one and threatened to stab people. The staff had been wondering aloud where he was for some time, and as if beckoned by their rumors he reappeared feisty as ever.
“Nah man, listen, you can’t talk to these people about the secrets of the universe - they aren’t ready yet!” I confided in him, “You’re gonna blow their minds! I know what’s up though, and I can see you do too. Wanna go outside and we’ll be able to speak more openly?” His face lit up. “Yeah I do!”
And that was how I got him outside.
What followed was more of the same, except outside on a sidewalk while hundreds of cars passed by. It got to the point where we jived so much he invited me to a party he and others were having in the alley behind the movie theater later that night. “You don’t need to bring anything. Well, maybe beer. But you don’t have to.” — Can you imagine, this guy has absolutely nothing but his conspiracy theories to hold on to, and he’s offering to share with me? — “I have to work late, but thank you so much. Plus I have to go back in a minute or my manager will get mad at me. But honestly, thanks so much for the invitation.”
At this he reanimated loudly and in spirited, long steps he stormed into the store, hollering and emphatically pointing to say that if I got in trouble for talking to him he’ll cut people’s fucking heads off. Naturally the rational thing to do was to run in after him, smack my hands together in disdain and say almost as loudly “HEY! I said no yelling. If you’re gonna talk this loud it’s gotta be back outside, buddy. We talked about his.” Don’t ask me why it worked, but to my utter disbelief HE AGREED, murmured a half defense/half apology, and walked back outside. Victorious, the scissors remained sheathed in their pencil cups.
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After closing I would gaze at the near century-old, one-screen movie theater across the street as we cleaned. Many nights I stood still for a long breath to watch the premieres and people through the glass. By virtue of my reflection in the window layering over their scene and by blurring my eyes a bit, I’d appear like a part of it all, standing there with them if not for the intersection (and entire world) between us. “I am closer now than I was before,” I would tell myself, “and somehow I will bridge this distance to make my art and my mark.” I didn’t know that positive self-talk can sometimes be a downright lie. Oblivious to that fact however, I’d go back to pushing a filthy dry mop for a broom and listening to the kids who’d just turned twenty-one discuss minimum wage’s effects on their partying and rent.
The building across the street also housed a fabulous tiki bar, just behind the theater and through a lonely sunken doorway. Red lamps, cushioned benches behind carved wood panels, corn syrup in every drink. It was like walking into something straight out of South Pacific, or if Disney made adult bars in the middle of Los Feliz. Next door to them was a vacuum or janitor supply company, I don’t remember which. The old upright vacuums in the front window never seemed to change but then I wasn’t paying much attention. The store was a landmark in my mind more than it was an alive enterprise. No matter now though; the lot of them are all out of business because some developer bought the block and is razing the old before building the new. I’m looking forward to the sans serif font the new apartments will have and am taking bets on how wide the fencing’s wooden slats will be. Six inches? Nine? It matters so much you know.
To avoid the asterisk-intersection on my drive home, I’d drive the little back streets. It started by winding behind the grocery store and then through the derelict hospital parking lot. Under the garish yellow street lamp one night, I saw a grey kitten who looked terribly hungry. He was friendly and gregarious, but understandably cautious. I dubbed him Roger and started buying food to leave for him. He’d run under the bars of the parking garage and disappear into the filth. I was making $7.25 an hour before taxes, and sliding into debt despite everything I tried to cut back on. Feeding the cat here and there over a few weeks maybe didn’t make financial sense, but absolutely nothing else about my life then did either. At least this way one of us could feel like there was kindness in the world.
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I started realizing something as the helicopters sang the low song of their heavy work over the months. How facing a different direction from the same place in that building could square me with so much of life and death itself. The art of it, the grist of it.
It’s a matter of which way you face, I’d think, of what you want to see. Some people want to look only at what they must. I want to look at what there is.