The sunset had already started when I got into the Nissan that G drove for Uber, this was an Uber pool, meaning that G was picking up and down different passengers along the way.
After a couple of solo Uber rides, I found out that pooling not only made the ride cheaper but also a lot more interesting because you´ll have the chance to mingle with the people that actually lived in the place.
Two girls were in the Nissan, a black girl in her twenties, who was focused on his mobile phone. The other girl was younger and blond, perhaps not yet twenty years’ old. She was also wired to his phone. Suddenly she said: “Hi girl in the front seat, do you maybe know somebody who may want to share a room?”.
The other girl said no, G asked her where she was from, her accent was certainly not from LA, instead, it featured a distinctive twang.
She was from Oklahoma and had come to LA looking to become a singer, or a dancer or something. I always thought that this was something that happened in movies, but I was just in front of somebody who had been seduced by the Hollywood call to fame.
She told us that she had a budget to spare for some months and hoped to find whatever she was looking for before it disappeared.
The streets of Beverly Hills started to become lit by the neon signs and street lamps. The horizon was flaming red. “Gosh,” she said, “look at that… It’s so beautiful!!!”.
It really was, we kept passing streets filled with people of all colors races and ages. Suddenly after a turn, a line of people seemed to be camping outside of a white building. They were sitting on foldable chairs or on the ground. Some of them had backpacks and sleeping bags.
The blond girl opened the window and asked what they were doing. An old white-bearded man, maybe in his sixties told her that they were camping to get a place for a book signing event due next day. The book was the autobiography of Bruce Springsteen, who was going to be present there the next day.
The blond girl gave a sigh followed by a “freaking unbelievable!!!”, then a song started in the radio, it was a Taylor Swift song from what I could see from the radio LED display.
Suddenly she started to sing along with a sweet, powerful voice. She seemed to get lost in the song while we were leaving Beverly Hills and getting to The Grove, a sort of open-air shopping mall that seems to be the current cool place to see and be seen.
Both girls left us and got lost in the crowd.
It was already dark, and I wanted to reach my hotel and rest. Curious about his name, I asked G if he was Italian, he said that his parents were from Guatemala, he didn´t know where the name came from.
I was surprised by the large number of homeless people walking the streets of Beverly Hills, a couple of years before I had been in New York, and although there were homeless people in the streets, the number was far lower.
G told me that in California the winter is soft, temperatures rarely were below 15 degrees Celsius (I was constantly mentally switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius, from miles to kilometers, from pounds to kilograms), New Yok winter was, in comparison, quite hostile. Homeless people could not survive NYC winter, but they surely could affront LA´s one.
I will always wonder if the blond girl actually succeeded in her quest for fame, I really hope so.
The day before I took a pool from the California Science Center to the historic downtown. I was looking for an Arts and drawing supplies store. A Mexican lady called L was the driver, she didn´t spoke English well, and seemed to be relieved when I switched to Spanish. She told me that she was worried about Donald Trump´s candidacy and compared him to a sort of Hitler-like figure. She had been the manager of a store but lost her job after failing to learn English. She was quite happy working for Uber and told me that she could make 150 USD a day without problems.
We had to pick up J from the UCLA campus. L called him by phone and he appeared running out from one of the UCLA dorms. He had come to California to become a neurologist and seemed to be really serious about this goal. He was also learning Spanish and wanted to keep on talking in that language with us. In the small amount of spare time that those activities left him, he was learning to play guitar. His goal was to help kids with neurological problems. It surprised me being so focused since he told us he was nineteen years old.
I left L and J and went into the store. A fat bearded man with thick glasses asked me what I was looking for. He was doing some design work in a couple of iMacs. I asked him where I could find some graphite pencils. A tall black guy who was the sales attendant appeared and gently lead me to the corresponding sector, which was fully stocked. He was really tall, was wearing a dark suit and had a dense hair and used Lennon like glasses.
The store was old and beautiful; you could find whatever you may ever need to draw or paint. After choosing some pencil sets I started to walk the streets.
Suddenly I found a sign informing that I was entering the historic downtown. The Central Market was in front of me, behind it, the huge towers of Bunker Hill seemed to scrap the blue sky. Half a block to the right, just in front of the market, I found the Bradbury Building.
I became familiar with the Bradbury Building after reading some Raymond Chandler stories featuring Philip Marlowe, but for most of the people, this building has become a reminder of the Ridley Scott´s Blade Runner film.
The character Sebastian lived at the Bradbury, along with some bizarre replicant midget created by him. It´s also the place where Rutger Hauer hunts Harrison Ford in a deadly match and is in the ceiling where his character pronounces those lines:
“ I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears; in rain. Time to die.”
A lot of Japanese tourists equipped with huge DSLR cameras appeared and filled the Bradbury, I crossed the street to get into the Central Market.
It was an assault on the senses: vapor and fumes came out from dozens of small restaurants, the aroma of Mexican food mixed with the smell Jewish, Arab, Chinese and Indian dishes. Once again the sounds of dozens of languages resonated in my ears. The place was lit by lots of neon signs on people filled up the place. It was like the set of Blade Runner, without the replicants
After crossing the market, I found out a strange kind of tramway, used at the beginnings of the 0{s to shorten the climb from downtown LA to Bunker Hill. After some accidents, it was determined that the climbing tramway was not really safe so the city closed it. This tramway was called Angels Flight. There is a stairway just beside it, as I passed by I found a young woman that was preparing her arm to inject something. Upstairs, unknowingly, people enjoyed the view and kids played and ran.
I stopped at a Starbucks that just happened to be there. Dylan could be heard among the children playing. Talk about a contrast…
Then I reached the top of Bunker Hill, and after the massive corporate towers of glass and steel, I found the extravagant buildings of The Broad, a theater where a performer unknown to me was offering a free show, the Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. Almost a look alike of the Guggenheim museum located in Barcelona, Then the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
Lots of young men and women formed lines to enter these theaters, looking more like they were part of a scenography than of real life. Expensive cars, Maseratis, Porsches and several Teslas crossed the streets while a few hobos rested against the walls of an old building.
It was getting dark, and with my phone showing less than 10% of juice remaining, it was time for another pool. LL appeared in a white Prius, he seemed to be either Korean or Chinese, I’ll never know. We picked up a young black man who said that he needed to have a haircut, taking out his cup to reveal his curly hair. He wore whitened jeans , a sleeveless t-shirt that had seen better days and a big woolen sweater. He wore sandals and carried a messenger bag that contained a Macbook Air.
LL’s Prius was loaded with cables for phone charging. As a matter of fact,in the US it’s becoming more important to have your phone charged than to carry cash in your wallet. People look with suspicious eyes whoever dares to pay cash, especially for things that cost more than 50 USD.
Uber reinforces this feeling because since you pay your rides with your credit card, there seems to be no actual commercial transaction between you and the drive. It’s surreal, just like if money didn’t actually exist.
Three days before, A’s Nissan took me to LAX from Newport Beach, he picked me up from a Best Buy store. I had been looking for a well-priced wifi repeater for my SOHO network.
As we went through .LA’s highways, he started to offer advice about home networking, suggesting the use of Powerline adapters. Unluckily many electronic devices sold in the USA only support 100’120 VCA, making a Powerline adaptor useless in a 220 VCA country like the one I live.
He then told me that the coolest tech-related activity was drone racing using VR goggles. You fly a remote controlled drone equipped with twin cameras and receive the video with the VR goggles and then race against other drones. As many others his car was full of phone recharging cables, he even offered me to use his mobile hotspot for free. This being California, 4G data transfer speeds were equal to my home ISP cable modem connection.
A few days later I was on route to the California Science Center in M’s Prius. We picked up a Japanese girl called S along the way. She came from Houston, where she worked as a product designer for the pharmaceutical branch of Johnson & Johnson, she was sort of a hotshot young specialist and the company wanted her to work at their facilities at Irvine.
Talking about Irvine, near Newport Beach, this is the town with the highest income per capita in the whole US. And that fact is clearly demonstrated in the buildings, in the shopping malls, in the people and mostly, like anyplace in this country in the cars this person drives:
In a single block, I counted an Audi A10, a Lamborghini Murcielago, a Ferrari F12, two Bentley Continentals and a modified and ( I guess) bulletproof Hummer.
That amounts to more than 2,5 million USD in cars, in one block.
This blatant exhibition of wealth seems to cause no issues with the middle classes, whatever the definition f middle class you may have.
In fact, I think that this show of wealth reinforces the idea in the US can achieve that level of income. But reality shows it’s uglier face every now and then.
In my last full day in LA, I took a Uber pool to the Petersen Automobile Museum. I think of cars just as a way to get from point A from point B and consider driving an enjoyable experience only in some rare cases, like empty highways or roads with good weather. In most cases, driving is just not fun, like in city downtowns or in rush hours.
But I like how cars are designed. In fact, I think that car design is one of the most significant forms of industrial art in our world. Car design shows a lot more about our nature that we could imagine.
After my visit to the Petersen Museum, I started to walk and found the Hancock Park where you can find the La Brea Tar Pits and the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries. Past the Park is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, just crossed by to find out that there was an exhibition of monsters and creatures from Guillermo del Toro’s movies, along with another featuring Picasso printed works and several contemporary art installations, so many things to see and do.
I walked a few more blocks more to get to the famous intersection of Wilshire and San Vicente Boulevards where the Beverly Hills sign is located.
In the distance, a huge dark monoblock marks the location of Bloomingdale’s just past the point where San Vicente turns into La Cienega Boulevard. Just listing the brands of the shops present in the mall’s directory you’ll get the idea of the place: Hugo Boss, GUESS, Lacoste, DOLCE & GABANNA, Omega, Louis Vuitton, Armani, Prada, Gucci, Versace, you get the idea.
I went for another Uber pool ride, this time with K, who was a middle aged guy that didn’t seem to want any conversation. Just as I was getting into K’s Prius I could saw a homeless black man in a wheelchair eating a McDonald’s burger, the man suddenly fell off the wheelchair to the ground and lied there seemingly unconscious. I told K what I had seen, he simply emitted a grunt. When I arrived at the hotel I turned the TV to watch any news that may appear about the wheelchair man, but I couldn’t find anything. The idea that maybe I had been one of the last persons to have noticed the man still alive crossed my mind.
That night was my last at LA, the next morning I took my flight to Houston and then to Buenos Aires. Then I started to write this lines.
I’d like to end with some kind of smart commentary or a nice ending line, but I really can’t. Life and death seemed to collide in that precise moment when the empty wheelchair disappeared behind the streets.
I wonder what happened afterward. Unlike movies, reality doesn’t have a proper end whether happy or bittersweet and this chapter had a cliffhanger with a resolution that I’d never be able to watch.
Light and shadows constantly compete in our world but in just a few cases we can witness this struggle. This time, it was my turn.