Christmas Day in Studio city

The streets of the San Fernando Valley, In Los Angeles, are eerily empty on the morning of Christmas day- don’t get me wrong, they’re usually quite empty- Los Angeles a city not known for its foot-traffic. I had a unique perspective waiting for the greyhound bus sitting on a curb in Studio City. I don’t think your average car-obsessed Angelino feels the void that one experiences when simply sitting for even just a half an hour taking in the atmosphere.

It’s a world of cars, that’s for sure, but it’s also a world where space is undervalued, where what really matters is the joining of two destinations and not what actually happens in between. Each block is so exaggerated in its breadth and its absence of people is overwhelming. There’s so little dialogue possible in such a landscape, it’s as if the city were purposely designed for minimal communication between human beings, not even the basic pre-requisites for dialogue are satisfied, everything is streamlined for efficient indifference.

When two drivers cross each other at 50 miles per hour on some empty four-laned street, what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Do they even have a relationship? Are they fellow citizens? In most parts of greater Los Angeles, it’s considered bad luck if you’re forced to engage with a fellow human being outside of a properly understood and rehearsed institutional interaction (i.e. consumer/sales representative , driver/parking attendant, customer/waiter, account holder/bank teller, resident/telemarketer, employer/employee, etc) . The absence of humanity is striking.

In most traditional cultures, everyday interactions between people are buffered by cultural formalities (gestures, facial expressions, eye contact avoidance, role playing, etc), there are many such cultural habits that have developed in order to avoid real or potentially uncomfortable interactions with people. In "modern" cultures there's more of a need for this sort of avoidance but in places like Los Angeles, the landscape, the architecture, the physical space and the style of life renders these sorts of adaptations almost unnecessary, it's just easier for people to avoid extra-oficial interactions with other people. To say the least, this is a serious problem.

After a few minutes, a disaster of a woman arrives on the scene. The scene, at this point, consists of the sidewalk, a closed greyhound ticket office serving as the backdrop, and me (sitting on the curb reading “war talk” written by Ahrundati Roy). The woman is flanked by a silent mustached companion. She is a curly-haired woman in her early forties, punished by years of smoking cigarettes, wearing an old sweatshirt intended for tourists and sweatpants just begging for early-retirement. Several gaps in her teeth, bad skin, and a voice that respects few cultural norms as to pitch or volume. She stomps over to me and without introducing herself, or making a single recognizably human salutary gesture for that matter, yells, “You goin’ to Vegas?!” I realized quickly that she was hoping I would be, but nothing short of lying would have made her happier. Her bus had left her. The Vegas bus had come, had left a few minutes early, and she hadn’t been on it. She was furious and she had a right to be, Greyhound had screwed her. She kept on asking, “that’s not right, is it?” I didn’t think it mattered one way or another; who the hell was she going to complain to? America is famous for its unaccountability, and that extends to consumers as well. Buying something is as easy as apple pie if you can afford it, but trying to regain that same attention after you’ve used up your customer status is very nearly impossible. At that point you become a nuisance and nobody wants to deal with you.

At that point I noticed for the first time the presence of another Greyhound ticket holder, a fat Asian pacific man. This guy was huge. This guy was the kind of guy you’d have trouble describing to a stranger without being politically incorrect. He walks over to me and I can tell he’s listening to the kind of music that sounds better if you can't hear it at all. I ask him the time and realize that he's mentally challenged. His question to me is slightly more complicated and I couldn't understand him. My hunch was that he was on medication and that it was slurring his speech. We left it at that. Huge guy, drooling, and he's carrying what seems to be an empty leather bag. I ask myself why a person like this, barely functional, is waiting for a greyhound bus, alone on Christmas day. Meanwhile, the sweatshirt lady is bargaining with the unsuspecting driver of another bus that has just pulled in; he wants to hear less than none of it and she storms off with her companion who hasn't said a word since I first saw him.

A few minutes later, the fat Asian man's bus arrives and from its belly emerges a black bus driver. He's running on "let's get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible". The fat Asian man, however, has a different idea. He's running on "I want this black man to carry my leather bag onto the bus for me." In between them stand a few barriers of communication. Although the fat man insists that the bag is too heavy for him, the bus driver is adamant about leaving it on the sidewalk (because there's just no fucking way he's going to do anything for this slightly retarded Asian pacific man). The latter switches discourses somewhere in the middle and starts talking about his medication being in the bag. This complicates the bus driver as he starts to imagine who knows what further calamity happening onboard somewhere down the road. So he walks over to the bag and lifts it up. Obviously the bag doesn't weigh anything and this ticks him off. Why is this man causing such a scene? The bus driver decides to pull rank; after all, he's the bus driver and he's in charge. "I want you to listen very carefully sir... if you don't pick up your bag, it's staying here, do you understand?" The fat man switches discourse again, now it's capitalism. "I'll give you twenty bucks", he says.

The bus driver responds with what might have been a counter offer. "You're gonna give me forty bucks if I carry the bag onto the bus?" Meanwhile, the people on the bus have become spectators in a curbside clash of wills and I'm trying to mediate a little by clarifying the fat man's intentions to the bus driver. The bus driver decides that he can't accept money in front of all these people so he decides to leave the bag on the sidewalk for good. The fat man is already halfway up the stairs when the bus driver announces departure.

Mediation is one thing, but, "should I intervene directly?", I asked myself. Why not, nobody ever said that the anthropologist can't help out a little, as long as I don't supply machetes or epidemics. The operation took less than fifteen seconds and involved little planning. I grabbed the leather bag and brought it onboard for the fat man. Everyone was happy, the bus driver especially.

OK, so what did we learn? The disappointed Vegas-bound sweatshirt lady, the unsympathetic, forced to work on Christmas day bus driver and the semi-coherent rejected mountain of a man- this is America, these are Americans, for better or for worse, they're not the exceptions, they're the fabric, the voting public, the product of a dysfunctional society whose economic model is exported all over the world. These are the stories that are seldom heard, everyday interactions and struggles like the one above, where people bicker with each other for crumbs. Where the most trivial things become the most important and where life gets "nasty".