Visiting Los Angeles, an Aucklander can’t help but think of home, though not in a homesick way. It’s more to do with wondering if this vast, sun-baked, car-mad, homeless-filled place is actually future Auckland.
The taxi driver from the airport is garrulous but, unusually liberal for an LA cabbie, says the city is hurting over the Hamas-Israel war. “There’s a lot of fear.” And, as usual, he’s never been to New Zealand, but he hears it’s very beautiful.
Wife working, me tagging along, for our first few days in Hollywood we’re based at the Thompson Hollywood, new and hip and full of rich youngsters. There’s a rooftop bar and a pool. It’s just a hop off Sunset Boulevard and I can see the skyscrapers of Downtown in the heat-hazy distance.
After 6pm, the sun a fading glow way above Santa Monica, we venture out for a drink and food and go around the corner to the rooftop bar in another hip hotel. The seats have no backs and everyone is less than half my age. There’s no tap beer, just cocktails with names like Jolene. Incongruously, the sound system is playing Dire Straits.
Next morning, even hotter, an Uber driver says, “I’m starting to notice the homeless in parts of town they weren’t before, like Beverly Hills, even Rodeo Drive. There was an influx after the epidemic. For the first time, it’s starting to feel dangerous.”
But the thing he’s really in a state about is the price of petrol. “It’s so expensive now, hitting $6 a gallon.” When I tell him that back home, we pay the equivalent of $14 a gallon, he refuses to believe me.
Taking shelter
It’s mid-afternoon and 30°C and if I don’t walk on the shady side of Hollywood Boulevard I might faint. I take shelter in the Frolic Room, said to be the last real dive bar in Hollywood. It opens at 11 and it doesn’t do food – at all, not even nuts, except for the patrons, none of whom look remotely like tourists, though it’s hard to see. They’re playing Tom Petty loudly and it’s too dark to read my LA Times.
The Frolic Room opened 90 years ago. Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland used to drink here, not necessarily together. It’s where the victim of the notorious Black Dahlia murder had her last drink. LA Confidential, the movie about it, was shot here. The only change they had to make to the décor for historical reality was to remove the cash register.
The next guy along from me leans over and asks, “Are you in the business?”
“What business?”
“Oh, it’s something we ask in this town,” he says. “The movie business.”
He’s a helicopter pilot who works on movie and TV news shoots. He’s on a series of large vodkas. He orders another. He’s an Angelino, born and bred. His city has changed a lot, he says.
“The homeless situation seems unstoppable.”
After we part, walking back down Hollywood Boulevard, I pass several dishevelled chaps peeing on the footpath. Others are lying in doorways. They don’t beg. They’re too far gone for that.
Sanctuary awaits
After the sirens, the high-life hotels and the urine-soaked sidewalks of downtown Hollywood, our next base, in Larchmont, is a still and well-mannered sanctuary. Almost another planet, if it wasn’t for that dome of pure blue sky and the same blazing sun.
Larchmont is suburban Hollywood. It calls itself a village, which it is with its grid of narrow streets lined with well-maintained, 100-year-old character houses, some of them once homes to movie stars of the mid last century, Cary Grant, Charles Bronson, the Bogarts. One of the old factories they worked at, Paramount Pictures, is at the top of our street.
This town is a living caricature. Floating along the toasty sidewalk towards Larchmont village centre, I pass a pair of excitable guys caught in loud conversation. One’s telling the other, “Listen to me, man, whatever occurs to you, just be sure you put it in the script.”
And it isn’t just what the locals talk about that marks them as persons from an adjacent planet. Sometimes, it’s how they talk. Sitting in a shady cafe called Bricks and Scones and nursing my milkshake-sized “small” coffee, I can’t help but overhear a chatty young woman at the next table.
Every third word she says is “like”. If her sentences were put through a “like” filter, she’d be saying almost nothing. And she’d save herself so much energy.
In search of quieter company, I melt my way down merciless Melrose Ave. I walk for 10 minutes and I’m still not past Paramount.
But there’s my oasis, the Edmon, a glorious old hotel playing 70-year-old music in an antique setting to match. The beer is icy and so is the barman. It’s Happy Hour and I’m the only customer. I wish the barman would stop calling me sir.
Going underground
I leave my nerves behind and go underground to ride the Los Angeles Metro, which I was previously unaware of, thinking of this sprawling city as more of an overground place. But there are 175km of train lines running under LA and above ground all the way to Santa Monica, and they’re an efficient way of getting about when every next place you want to go is a long Uber ride through jammed streets.
The Metro is a lot less terrifying than urban legend has it, though there is the occasional weathered-looking bloke who looks like he might actually live down here on a seat in a carriage in his nest of dirty old bags and bits.
Up on the streets of old Downtown LA, there’s an army of homeless and it’s best not to wander too far down many of the streets off Broadway, the once-grand old theatre and business district, which, from a distance at least, resembles a chunk of Manhattan. But this is where the street people outnumber the nervous tourists. And the locals only come here if they have to.
One I spoke to referred to it as a “sewer”, but I’d call it characterful and, as well as some notable museums and galleries, it’s home to at least two magnetic retail forces: The Last Bookstore, a vast, marvellous palace of paper that can trap a reader for half a day; and the Grand Central Market, a rowdy labyrinth filled with more tempting funky food, craft beer and provisions options than the eye, ear and nose can quite cope with.
The reason there are 75,000 homeless camped, parked or just lying on the byways of LA is directly attributable to the dire lack of affordable housing. The cheap and awful drugs many of them take come later, to cope with the horror of the life.
Of America’s homeless, 30% live in California. They drift from America’s cold east and centre to the warm west where they won’t die in the winter, and liberal local governance seems stymied by the sheer scale of the invasion.
Back in Larchmont, it’s as if they don’t exist. Which makes me think a little of home, in Remuera.