Western Vibe from an Eastern Eye

Los Angeles- a sprawling dream city. I walk along my palm-lined street at midnight, a quiet oasis resting between the Tijera/Cienega industrial rush. The feeling of life is at once everywhere and nowhere at all; modest one-story houses standing in colorful clusters but extending no friendly hand. Here, I watch 405 freeway pile-ups impose their afternoon chaos in screeches and halts, smile while fifteen-year-old boys cat-call mid-day business women, and fight goosebumps while chilly echoes of police sirens infiltrate the stillness of a night, lurking dangerously between side streets and alleyways like predators, just waiting.
Trapped between smoggy sun-streaked horizon and sweaty asphalt, the city of angels seems to possess, like many others, a weird sense of tension; the tension of competition, of dreams unfulfilled, of a never-ending rush, of economic disparities, plain fear, whatever. Yet Los Angeles itself, as a very large metropolis with an exceptionally multi-cultural population (almost four million people from hundreds upon hundreds of cultures), expresses its many faces in a kind of vibe unlike that of other cities.
While studying at the Ladera Starbucks the other day, I fell into conversation with two men about this. Both had lived over spans of time in Detroit, New York, and Miami, and out of curiosity I asked what they found distinctive about L.A. One answered that he was a fan of the rich mix of culture, but found that "when people here don't like you, they won't say so. In fact, they'll go out of their way to appear like they actually do." The other answered simply by asking a question: "In your apartment, do you know the neighbors on both sides of you?" I thought for a minute. I am friends with one or two people in my building, and I will occasionally greet others in passing, but do I really have a sense of knowing my neighbors? Not really. "In L.A., people live in quasi-communities," the man continued, "I never lived in a city where folks walk out on their street and don't acknowledge one other. People here just do their own thing."
As I strolled back home that afternoon I mulled over the thoughts of these strangers, hoping to examine this dichotomy between insincere pleasantry and major avoidance.
Being an East Coaster I have definitely picked up on the quality of fakeness the guy had mentioned, something I'd actually come to call the 'softy' or, when appropriate, 'bullshit' factor. To many who have spent time in New York, Philly, or other Eastern cities, the gracious west coast, "I don't mind that you cut me in the coffee line" vibe can be somewhat flabbergasting, even worthy of suspicion. I sometimes wonder about the development of this amiable mentality. How, in a crowded urban atmosphere, did this come about? An influence of sun, breeze, and beaches, perhaps? Maybe, but upon moving west I did and still DO find myself struggling to understand how a SoCal driver can react with relative mildness to an especially annoying event when they've just endured a TWO HOUR crawl down a four mile stretch of highway! Or how to respond to the excessive smile and false enthusiasm of a girl telling me, "WELCOME TO PINKBERRY!" when even a garden snail could sense her boredom and actual indifference. I don't mean to imply that people should be rude, practice no restraint or let loose on the next thing that peeves them, nor do I think that being cool about about a petty inconvenience after a freeway drive is a bad thing. Genuine patience and kindness are rare to come by. What I don't like is the insincerity, the seeming inability to keep it real and just tell me to my face. Some of the "nicest" people I've met here have some of the darkest shadow sides, spilling nasty poison. It's the kind of quality that leads to passive aggression, which leads to misunderstanding and contempt. An attitude that prefers to wade on the shallow end rather than diving into often unpleasant depths of reality, of the medley of life.
The odd thing about this superficiality, the flip side of this 'happy coin', of course is that this oh-so-dreamy town has its own underbelly. I know this may be characteristic of many cities but I've come to see that Los Angeles, with its huge population sprawled over a wide range into different residential and business areas, lacks a central place of functioning for everyone in the city; a heart, if you will. People can successfully maintain without seeing these less desirable aspects, without having to witness the variety of life that exists around them, maybe because they can zoom the other direction in their Range Rovers and Priuses (two cars one person may own simultaneously- another bit to add to the theme of contradiction!). I sometimes look off the Westchester bluff and think about Los Angeles' shape, how bustling downtown meets urban grime meets beach house paradise meets semi-suburb. It's really a strange separation, a horizontal city spread wide (but not sparsely) between ocean and mountain. I'm much more akin with the towering verticality of New York and the expectation that when I turn corners I might land somewhere different, maybe only for a block or so, but still enough for a taste. I am used to a city that functions at the same pace, that draws itself from each borough and meshes with the intricate population.
I thought about what the man said about estranged neighbors. It's true; as I said before, there seems a friendly face but no friendly hand. In my reasoning, I must attribute this to the amount of immigrants- out-of-state (like myself) and out-of-country- that come here seeking dreams or simply refuge. Some come from other dangerous nooks, already having a protective film from their rougher existence; others may have developed a film of their own from the bitterness of sunken hopes or the unanticipated realities of the city. Either way, I sense a fear of the unknown. Maybe it's because we're boxed up in our cars, living on the freeway, where the primary exposure we have to the unknown portion of the population is confined to the reflection of a windshield or the back of a bumper. For New York, I believe it is the subway system, the main mode of transportation, that makes at least one fundamental difference. Rather than letting fear of foreignness dominate (moving over two lanes of traffic to avoid that low-riding car with the mysteriously tinted windows), the diverse and bustling crowd must be pushed quite literally into each others space, walled inside underground contraptions that move beneath the surface like the city's pumping veins, its life force.
Obviously, there are always exceptions to the rule. This set of observations is not meant to be revelatory or even profound, they're just thoughts. The complexities of any city are impossible to analyze in a few paragraphs, these are just the perceptions of an observer caught on the line between the inside and the out. I would love to hear your thoughts.


---Alison S. May