On my outings down to Studio City I will reveal a personal and possibly shameful act of selfishness: I park on Laurelgrove Avenue, on a street of single family houses north of Ventura Boulvard.
After I park, I walk, and cross a pedestrian bridge and enter the business district.
Today, I again followed routine and entered a hot, inexplicably bustling, crowded street. Who are these people who can afford to shop here, those blogger moms who write about cupcakes, balloons, children and paint colors and their boyfriends and husbands, out of work since Home Improvement went off the air? The sources of income in Studio City are as mysterious, to men like me, as the daily life of God.
At Peet’s Coffee, I passed a friend, a blonde, beautiful and bubbly young woman, a real estate agent, sitting with her mother. We had not seen each other in a year or more, and all I know of her is what I read on Facebook, posts with smiles and exclamations and her 650 sun-kissed, shapely friends.
I asked her what she was doing drinking coffee on a Saturday, a day which in her creed is holy and sacrosanct and, by tradition and practice, belongs to house selling and house showing.
She told me a friend’s father had tried to kill himself last night, jumping off a bridge, but had survived. He was distraught over losing his house, a house he still had equity in, but could no longer afford. Her mother and she had been in the hospital with the friend, and were now just tired and spent and “taking it all in”.
She spoke of another client, also losing his home, who hanged himself in a closet and whom my realtor friend discovered post-mortem and pre-closing.
One does not hear darkness and death from a realtor. To hear it from her sweet lips, in the sunshine, on Ventura Boulevard, to hear why death came and nearly came, was darkening and saddening.
Sane people can turn insane when enough events go wrong.
It takes a walk away from the computer, to not look at a smart phone or tablet, and to simply go out in Studio City and speak to a friend to learn that what we imagine online, the glittering world of Jeffrey Marks and Ross Cassidy, the luxury hotels, the exotic spas, the buff and photoshopped, the stylish and the tasty, all those material goodies we watch on our screens fly by our eyes every second, that is not life.
California is haunted by fear, by scarcity of money, the unaffordability of health care, housing and college, all the basics that a benevolent government once regulated and which are now operated only for the benefit of one percent.
And every time I cross a bridge, by foot or by car, I think there by the grace of God go I.
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