ISSUE #21 LA/LA
Lit Angels Los Angeles
LIT ANGELS, #21
L.A./L.A.
Table of Contents
LA is a pretty bitch (or you are a goddess living in the city of angels) by Hannah Eko
Excerpt from the Novel Ash Dark as Night by Gary Phillips
Excerpt from the Novel Cinnamon Girl by Daniel Weizmann
Poems by Jack Skelley
Yoga in a Jail Cell by Tomas Mournian
Poems by e.r. baker
Edited by Francesca Lia Block
Art: Robin Carr
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LA is a pretty bitch
(or you are a goddess living in the city of angels)
by Hannah Eko
LA is a pretty bitch. It’s almost not even fair. Sunshine highways and exclusive roof parties with guests lists written in invisible ink. LA is a paradise with smog-filled sunsets and Wednesday earthquakes. LA is a trickster with noonday cerulean skies which make you forget your seasonal depression and that dreams do not always come true. Her hair is a long cascade of oceans and opulent avenues. LA has a goddess complex, flaunts without regard to your fragile ego, will destroy your life with a veneered smile and make it seem like it was your idea all along.
LA is a She, like Miami, Portland, Barcelona—cities dripping in feminine exuberance with a talent in seduction. She pulls in transplants from masculine of center cities (Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, Washington, DC), has been found to magnetize the odd nonbinary visitor (Chicago, Mexico City, Ohio), and even woo the outright femme (Baltimore). LA is an ethnically ambiguous bisexual strolling down avenues of palm trees and diamond studded strip malls. She is the girl you wish you could fuck or be her best friend. Maybe both.
I am not from from LA. I was born in south-east London of Nigerian descent. Yoruba with a side of Benin Empire. My first visceral experience following my sudden departure from England was meeting a Bart Simpson doll at the LAX Airport. He was so yellow and his shirt so blue and I wondered who this sharp-headed alien was and what news he symbolized about my new home state.
My parents first lived in the suburban cities dotting the San Gabriel Valley or the Other Valley as I’ve heard people refer to everyone outside of Sherman Oaks. La Puente and City of Industry, conservative, quiet towns not exactly familiar with Africans.
Then we moved to La Habra, a city of 62,000, where like most of Orange County, the Black population hovers around 1.5%. This is the city of two Walmarts less than a mile away on the same street and a well-known children’s museum. I am from the land that gave refuge to OctoMom in the early aughts and the site of the first Hass avocado tree. (Technically, that tree is in La Habra Heights, the bourgeois cousin of La Habra full of mini-mansions and lush tropical hills, a city that unlike its kin is officially part of Los Angeles County and not Orange. Also technically: the Hass avocado tree died in 2002 from root rot.) The first time I saw my town mentioned outside of California and my small group of friends was on the on the last page of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold, Fame, Citrus, a post-apocalyptic novel about a California gone to seed and dirt.
I may have lived in Orange County, but my dissociative daydreams were firmly attached to the 310. LA had my heart from the jump. My parent’s business pursuits were always outside of La Habra. My uncle and father co-owned a convenience store at the corner of Western and Seventh. I remember the broken glass after the Rodney King riots and how selfishly happy I was that the intruders didn’t steal away The Last Unicorn. I remember the birthday parties in Crenshaw, Carson, and Inglewood. I remember the cramped five freeway and the little kid murals on the 101.
My mom did a lot of her food shopping in downtown. Every so often, disparate aunties would meet and chat near wholesale merchants selling tomatoes, bell peppers, industrial sized plastic tubs of Maggi. As a child and early teenager, my favorite place on earth was the Santee Alley. She was so generous: Balenciaga dupes, graphic tees, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, purebred pug puppies, lilac-blessed sage, cell phone covers, and fake leather luggage. There is so much fun to be had. It’s very busy, very loud, a little dirty and blooming with so much humanity you cannot but help to fall in love.
Every pretty bitch holds an inner sad girl on the verge of hot tears. There are 46,000 thousand homeless people in Los Angeles, a figure that given the new housing developments not developing, may soon climb. There are humans lost to the worst of substance addiction and severe mental illness. I saw a woman with a torn dress and a ribbon of period blood circling down her thigh and her leg as she stumbled down Maple. I have witnessed dystopian levels of mental and physical distress, people so gone you wonder if it is possible they can ever be found. There are pockets on Melrose and Hollywood Boulevard which I do not vaguely suspect are haunted. I know they are. Some streets seemed baked in desperation and that dirty pennies smell. Some neighborhoods hold too many ragged billboards warning of fentanyl overdoses and the dangers of eye syphilis.
A couple of days ago, I received an air quality index message. I took a screenshot. Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups it says. What an understatement, I thought. LA is not easy on the vulnerable, which is why so many are moving east towards suburban centers or to the deserts of Arizona. Any one with eyes to see and skin which listens cannot help but see the warning signs of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, but I cannot also help but see her love too.
I love that jeweled corner of Leimert Park that carries Sip and Saunder, Art and Practice, and The Salt Eaters bookshop within a four-minute walk on Queen Street. I love the weirdos and hidden canals of Venice Beach. I love the weed shops: Gorilla RX, Off the Charts in La Cienga, The Artist Tree, WYIIOW, and yes, the spate of not-quite-legal traps that flash their green crosses with a little bit of an attitude. I love the taco trucks and the Broad. I love the San Franciscan hills of Los Feliz and the Portlandesque expanse of Highland Park. (Every major metropolitan US city has an LA neighborhood equivalent, ask me if you want to know yours.) I love the dark sexiness of downtown and the overly curated thoroughfares of Culver City. I love the so LA-it-hurts immersive events: the sound bowl soul retrieval seminars and vulva casting ecstatic dance workshops. I love the neighborhoods: Little Tokyo and Koreatown and the Flower District. I love the rich ass neighborhoods with the ridiculous landscaped lawns. I love going on high girl walks through Silver Lake and Mid-City, an inner cloud of myrcene and linalool and gratitude.
There was this one time very not that long ago, when I was with my mom and my sister in downtown LA. I bought eleven pink and purple bracelets and a yoga outfit that ended up being about seven sizes too small when I ripped it out of the bag. When time came for us to split up, me to Koreatown, my sister and mom back to La Puente, I begged my way into getting a ride to my car which was not parked far at all but I was playing lazy, whiny daughter so my mom finally gave in.
As we’re walking back, there is someone laying in the middle of the sidewalk, spread out long ways on the sidewalk as if taking a nap, naked save for a small t-shirt pulled up to their armpits. They are using a piece of something plastic and blue as a pillow and their Renaissance painting pose suggests a duvet and not a gum-stained concrete sidewalk on a 98 degree summer day in full view of inquisitive, slightly disturbed eyes.
My mother cannot believe this person was naked. No, Mom, they definitely don’t have pants on, I said as we moved towards our parking lot located on a rooftop with panoramic views of downtown. She’s wearing pants, my mom countered. The bigger question of course was how this person came to be sleeping in broad Saturday afternoon daylight, exposed to the world. Whatever chain of events that produced this scene, I am sure they were not pretty and were not fair and this is LA too. We piled into the car, drove down the ramp, I and my sister still trying to tell my mom that this person was naked and not wearing hyper-believable flesh tone leggings, but a part of me wasn’t sure. Maybe they were pants.
When we finally reach street level, we turn left and are stopped at a red light and directly across from the person. My mother still believes they are pants but all of sudden, the woman rises up to sitting with her feet flat on the floor, one arm resting on a knee, as if she was waiting on a good story. Her hair is short and matted, her gaze is unfocused. When she is sitting up, we see that despite the wear, she is beautiful woman, and close to six feet with Amazonian thighs and even dark brown skin. Her legs part slightly and my mom gasps. Ihoho ni sha, my mom says which is basically Wow, she’s for real naked, in Yoruba.
Minutes away from this section of downtown is a well-loved mural at the corner of Hope and 8th street with angel wings and lower case letters : you are a goddess in a city of angels. These are the words that shot through my mind with a sharpness and for a moment, I did not, could not see a Black homeless woman, exposed on the sun-baked streets of LA. I saw a goddess, Califia Herself, sitting on a blanket of grass, proudly surveying the paradise before her.
Hannah Olabosibe Eko is a writer, multimedia storyteller, and founder of The Lit Club, an event series and creative community celebrating the healing power of cannabis, yoga, and literature. Her debut collection Honey Is the Knife is forthcoming and her work has been featured in Bust, Buzzfeed, Fractured Lit, and Witness Magazine. She divides her time between Los Angeles and the universe
