A Drive Through Hollywood
She Thought I Was Exaggerating
I drove down Hollywood Boulevard with my girlfriend this weekend. She’d never been to LA and wanted to see it. I warned her that it wasn’t going to be what she expected, and that the style of liberal city management that she’d recently witnessed countless professors exalt the virtues of in one of the nation’s most respected educational institutions hadn’t created the egalitarian utopia that the so-called experts had promised.
Before arriving at the star-studded boulevard, we began the day by exiting the 405 Freeway at Wilshire Blvd. I wanted to show her Westwood Village and UCLA, a University that she’d been accepted to 4 years earlier, but ultimately decided to pass on. What was normally one of LA’s most bustling locales, was eerie and desolate.
Without much to see in Westwood, we took Sunset to Beverly Hills. Outside of the opulent shops, people stood in line for a chance to get in. They had limited their capacity due to the virus. But these people weren’t the usual crowd that purchases luxury goods on Rodeo Drive. The normal parade of half-million dollar luxury cars was noticeably absent. Instead of Arab sheikhs and Chinese princelings illegally parking their Bugatti Chirons (*they enjoy diplomatic immunity) before walking to purchase $1,200 t-shirts and $40,000 handbags, the lines in front of the shops were filled with aspirational lower middle class families who wanted to see in real life the luxury goods that they normally only hear about in rap songs.
At the Beverly Wilshire, a hotel which proudly claims to cater to the “Global Elite”, the Global Elite were missing, nowhere to be found, and so were their limited edition Lamborghini Sesto Elementos, which are normally proudly displayed in front of the hotel. Instead, with its restaurants and bars closed, the famous destination boasted such amenities as a Chinese-made body temperature scanner at the front door and a sign over the middle urinal informing you that it’s closed in order to help you social distance.
The mid-rise Beverly Hills office buildings made infamous for hosting the headquarters companies like Drexal Burnham and Myspace had been long ago shuttered and were left as dirty and decrepit as they were empty.
Next we took Coldwater Canyon up to Mulholland Drive, where I showed her the Laurel Canyon home where I used to live alongside a handful of minor celebrities. We snaked down Mulholland Drive towards Cahuenga Blvd, dodging endless potholes, so that she could see the Hollywood Sign, before arriving at the much anticipated Hollywood Blvd.
While stopped at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga, she got to see a crack deal take place about six feet outside her window. It was the first crack deal she’d ever seen in real life. Both the dealer and the junkie were health conscious enough to wear their masks. I’m not sure whether they used hand sanitizer before the hand-to-hand.
In front of the famous Pantages Theater, the site of The Academy Awards, a duo of eccentrically dressed black pimps marketed a gaggle of scantily clad prostitutes. Scattered between the crack dealers and pimps, dozens of mentally ill people were pacing in frenetic circles or manically writhing on the sidewalk, experiencing schizophrenic fits of delirium.
Needless to say, my girlfriend, a leggy brunette, wasn’t interested in getting out the car to take photos.
The cops don’t bother to arrest the pimps and crack dealers. They’ll just be released on zero dollars bail and be right back out on the same corner within a few hours. It isn’t worth the drive downtown.
Nearly every business on the famous street had been boarded up and left for dead.
The few entertainment industry magnates who still live in the adjacent Hollywood Hills and West Hollywood flats silently grieve the loss of being able to dine, and more importantly, be seen, at such haunts as Spago and Craig’s—though they do enjoy the easier access to hard drugs and cheap whores. Having to drive all the way to the Fashion District for such canapés was such a drag.