Walking to work through the ghetto - By N.L. Belardes
I walked through the ghost-filled hood today. My own street is filled with gangbangers, crazy folk, artists, and every ethnicity imaginable. I was walking last week and one old fella yelled, “I’m doing good now that I had my morning coffee!” I don't think he was talking to anyone but himself. Did I mention that a tiny yellow car next door is about the size of a shoe? I think it's a left shoe, a Sketcher... I'll try to remember to take a picture...
Ambulances are a regular occurrence down my street, as are lowriders and tattooed-up ghetto-street hoodlums. Early in the morning I saw none. I walked down my street and onto ‘H’. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk to my day job in a boxy downtown dwelling up on a 4th floor rise. Along the street there was litter along houses, not all of them, but those without fences that can't block the trash thrown at them. I imagined transient poetry, a cowboy novel, and then pieced together a discussion I would have with the BHS Dean.
I was getting over the flu. It’s going around. I saw several Black Widows, spindly in their webs as I headed onto the school campus and waited for the Dean. I sat down and immediately felt like I was in trouble. I stared at the clock; I twiddled my thumbs and sent text messages that read, "I'm bored." The Dean wasn’t around and I would wait for half an hour. I watched kids come and go like they had stepped from my favorite Brat Pack films: Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club. I won’t tell you about my meeting with the Dean. But it was worth the wait and I soon headed to my day job where I worked on the very same agenda that the old LA Beat, Larry Lipton used to do in between gathering poems at the old Gass House in Venice West… artists have to make a living… and being an ad man is sometimes what creative people have to do.
(the book: Venice West)
Ambulances are a regular occurrence down my street, as are lowriders and tattooed-up ghetto-street hoodlums. Early in the morning I saw none. I walked down my street and onto ‘H’. It’s only a fifteen-minute walk to my day job in a boxy downtown dwelling up on a 4th floor rise. Along the street there was litter along houses, not all of them, but those without fences that can't block the trash thrown at them. I imagined transient poetry, a cowboy novel, and then pieced together a discussion I would have with the BHS Dean.
I was getting over the flu. It’s going around. I saw several Black Widows, spindly in their webs as I headed onto the school campus and waited for the Dean. I sat down and immediately felt like I was in trouble. I stared at the clock; I twiddled my thumbs and sent text messages that read, "I'm bored." The Dean wasn’t around and I would wait for half an hour. I watched kids come and go like they had stepped from my favorite Brat Pack films: Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club. I won’t tell you about my meeting with the Dean. But it was worth the wait and I soon headed to my day job where I worked on the very same agenda that the old LA Beat, Larry Lipton used to do in between gathering poems at the old Gass House in Venice West… artists have to make a living… and being an ad man is sometimes what creative people have to do.
(the book: Venice West)
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Monday, September 12, 2005.
You can leave your response.
leave a response