When I first moved here, the first person I met was a guy I think was named Richard and he was both dying of cancer (maybe) and trying to find, not a publisher, but a promising young (preferably male) person to type up his manuscript, an experimental poetic song-cycle-style fictional novelistic/biographical trilogy documenting the spirit quest and coming of age of a young man in (probably) the '70s. I'd see Richard most mornings, briefcase and ratty ponytail, hunched in front of a coffee shop scribbling. An unspecific Mob was searching for him, he told me. He figured the last place they'd look was the coast because who goes to the coast? No one important, he concluded. And he, knowing nod, was important, albeit only to a small scummy underworld in one of L.A.'s less interesting poor neighborhoods. It all tied back, he said, to a girl though the details had become foggy.
Now it's five years later. I caught sight of Richard in mid-October while I was eating sushi. He looked the same, but his surroundings have undergone a curse-removal transformation. The fact I was eating sushi in what used to be such a 'Merican town is one sign. I watched "Beauty and the Beast" the other day so I'm up on the curse-removal transformations.
Talk to anyone who lived here before the early 2000s and you'll understand some holy, good-fairy rain has fallen on this place turning all the Gothic revival architecture sparkly white -- cherubs sprouting everywhere, though in this case cherubs look a lot more like trendy Portland (think: piles of old books no one reads arranged on shelves too high to reach and a general wash of decor culled from "antique" stores... lots of hardware and rust and chipped paint, which might actually have been painted on and then purposefully sanded back to make it authentic by which we mean truthful? by which we achieve salvation in our times? Quinoa.)
This summer someone in New York (I think) wrote an article about the town, mentioned the pub where I work and said something like, "Wow. You saw all these people drinking beer and wearing flannel shirts and they weren't hipsters! Their flannel stood for something...like lumber or whatever..."
Bad news. None of that flannel stood for anything. It was false flannel. Those were tourists. Craft beer tourists, but tourists none the less. They were wearing flannel because that's what people do these days and they were here doing that because this place is no longer scary. Its buildings no longer look like remnants of an air raid blackout. There are things to do here besides overdose or dwindle into poverty, although both activities are still options. Richard has became an anomaly where he used to be the cocaine-heroin addled norm.
