Good Food on West Adams
In those days, I spent my lunch hour walking east on West Adams taking note of the changing Los Angeles neighborhood. My office had recently moved there from down the road in Culver City and was in Venice Beach before that, always managing to move to the up-and-coming places as they were popping up and leaving as they became too staid.
We occupied the former offices of architects, who themselves had bought the gated structure from an unknown sculptor whose works, unremarkable twisted metal, adorned lampposts of nearby streets. Next door, a foreign chiropractor whose benefactor claimed to be the inventor of the veggie burger, had taken over a post-production house that, according to its founder, sadly, “failed to anticipate online.” An abandoned salon named Diva on Melrose (despite being completely unassuming and not on Melrose Avenue), was being rehabilitated by a construction crew on our other side.
The aptly-named Cumulus high-rise, still under construction at the time, loomed large south of us at the clusterfuck known as La Cienega / Jefferson Metro Station like a symbol of the brewing storm of amassing “creatives.” Common wisdom said the area was perfect for development as it occupied an empty swath of warehouse property between downtown and the beach. Companies like Apple TV and Amazon Studios were capitalizing. It was only later that I learned government incentives and transit plans backed up this wisdom, which made me feel less like a pioneer but explained the bottleneck that had already begun to form.
Further down Adams was a large compound occupied by an earlier adopter (and online anticipator), Omaze, that auctioned off “experiences” with celebrities for charity. The burgeoning food scene nearby must have catered only to those working at Omaze and the celebs who trekked there because it was difficult to see wherefrom all the creatives in the area were coming.
There was Open Face, a Danish sandwich shop with a stylish green, sheet-metal structure, and a taco stand called Bee Taqueria, which also resembled the hipsterdom of Austin, Texas. Both were quite tasty but worked extra hard through price and presentation to ensure you never ate there with frequency.
A repeatable taco place was a truck parked outside the Advance Food Market, across the street from Rockenwagner, an industrial bakery. Most Angelenos didn’t know they were eating Rockenwagner when they bought bread at Whole Foods, Peet’s, Mendocino Farms, or Lemonade. I had once seen a man carrying an Amazon backpack taking pictures of the grocery store and bakery with a yellow surveying camera. It saddened me to think Amazon might buy up the properties, even though I never went inside the grocery and the bakery gave the area a surprisingly unpleasant smell. If Amazon did build, though, the creatives would be more visible, I thought. And it was possible the taco truck would remain.
The true heart of Adams was east of Hauser at Delicious Pizza, which served pies and sold vinyls from its own label in an adjoining store. It was in the backyard of Delicious Pizza that I had screened Logan’s Run (1976) for my thirtieth birthday. Just as the runners in the film take off to search for Sanctuary, I had decided that my thirtieth year would be one of introspective travel. My passport expired then and I hadn’t used it once throughout my entire second decade.
An American Expatriate in LA
The truth was, I had in been in Los Angeles too long. Local thought proclaimed LA had finally reached global city status; even New Yorkers were moving there in droves and the 2028 Olympics would be coming as well. Yet, I had resided there for over ten years. Every new acquaintance seemed to have just relocated with fresh excitement. I felt like the Gertrude Stein of LA’s supposed renaissance, except instead of mentoring upcoming artists, I was there to quell the dreams of fellow do-nothing expatriates: creatives by association and proximity only.
A couple of months after my birthday, I thought “Gertrude didn’t even need a passport to move to Paris,” as I waited in line at the Hollywood DMV to process my REAL ID. “They didn’t exist then!” I had received my new passport only to lose my wallet days later while eating at Adams Coffee Shop, the lunch part of an evenings-only soul food restaurant named Alta, next to Delicious.
An omen I had ignored the day previous was waiting twenty minutes to order at Mizlala, the new Mediterranean place that was now the most popular spot on the street, only to realize I had left my wallet on my desk at the office. I saw this as a subconscious desire to leave California behind.
After the wallet didn’t materialize for a week, I opted to replace my missing driver’s license. The entire country would need a REAL ID by the following October anyway. It enraged me that the Lost Generation could live abroad with such ease while I would need a special card just to get to a neighboring state by plane.
It was there at the DMV, while watching an inexplicable tutorial for cooking lettuce casserole on a mounted TV, that I began to blame others for not having seen the world. REAL ID would do nothing to fix terrorism or immigration. I read reports of Germany, Australia, and Norway taking out advertisements encouraging people not to visit or think of moving to them. Brexit put the ability to travel and work in the Eurozone in question. The novel coronavirus led to limited-entry from China. Hong Kong had been at the top of my list of places to visit and protests there were already making that idea untenable. I ran the Firecracker 10K in Chinatown to celebrate the Year of the Rat, scoffing at the few people wearing masks for causing my lack of mobility.
I felt the world just wasn’t built for people to move anymore, unless it was between downtown and the beach and, even then, it was more trouble than it was worth. I sought solace in the fact that I had moved. It was only the ability to move without anything to stop me that made me feel like I had gone nowhere. I was more immigrant than expatriate, if gentrifiers counted as immigrants. Expatriates leave by choice and are generally welcome as musing outsiders generating contributions. Immigrants leave because they have to and are often seen as scroungers. Where I came from did not afford the same opportunities as Los Angeles or West Adams. And by opportunities, I guess I meant places to eat.
I eventually found my wallet. A barista who knew my face had stowed it away. There were some advantages to always being in the same place.
The False Spring
Maybe I was also feeling unmoored because during this period my apartment was fumigated. Held up in an Airbnb that was constructed as such, it felt like I was taking a weekend vacation but still not going anyplace. I looked up Zillow apartments in other areas of the city and surmised that price tags and other considerations meant I, unlike my roving office, could not even go to a different neighborhood if I wanted.
This feeling of permanent staycation continued as the seriousness of the virus mounted. It became the Lost Year. I decided my passport would have to wait longer for a stamp. However, I sat down to write my own unremarkable twisted metal, requirements for REAL ID moved up a year, and I thought returning to West Adams might be like visiting a new country.