Whose House?

“I could have been killed.”
“But you weren’t…”

This frequent snippet of dialogue is part of the movie running in my head most days. I assume similar thoughts occur in others. We are an apocalyptic culture, thinking end-times thoughts on the regular. It’s part of being human, except writers write it down.

It involves touching the sublime, near-death experiences that teach us how to live.

Some nights, like last night, I’d like to tell the sublime to take a long walk off a short pier.

I don’t believe in trigger warnings or disclaimers, but a disclaimer might be necessary to save me some trouble later.

Here it is: mental illness is a scourge. The homeless and ill need taking care of, and my anger that follows in no one reflects how I feel about, really, anything except the way local governments acquit themselves in a crisis.

So, once upon a yesterday, I hoofed it home from a movie in North Hollywood to where I live in Normal Hollywood. I have made this journey countless times. I like movies quite a bit, and if the movie is The Terminator, one I’d never seen on the big screen, I will traverse most cities to get to it.

Fun was had, but this is not the story.

As I reached my Metro stop, a gentleman in black, who had seen some sun in his sixty-odd years, approached the first elevator where I waited. He held the door for me, pressed the button, and that was that.
When we got to the second elevator leading to the street, I got on first, and then a kid with a bike. The man in black hesitated, but I gestured to him there was room.

He turned away from me and faced the corner. I clocked that detail but thought nothing of it at the moment. I did not hear him mumbling to himself, and if I had, I would have chalked it up to this being Los Angeles, where the weird come to die or be in the movies.

We got to the street, and the guy with the bike got out, but the man in black stayed facing the corner. I got out and went on my way. I passed places and people I see every day, especially the homeless guys who have been residents of Hollywood Blvd. as long as I’ve lived here. I know some of their names, and they know mine. There is an oddly peaceful coexistence between the street and house dwellers. It would be charming if it weren’t so sad.

About 46,000 people live on the street in the City of Supposed Angels each year. I got this from ye olde internet, from a statement called The 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. That this is a thing called that is the gallowest of gallows humor, I’d hate to be the guy doing the counting. There are shelters and “places to go,” but mental illness within the community and COVID make it challenging to get these folks the help they need. LA’s problem is a synecdoche of the more significant issue of mental health around the globe and how that’s not addressed, but that’s for another day, another essay.

I reached my building around 10:30 pm, and a neighbor held the door for me, which was nice. I rounded the lobby corner and waited for the elevator. I heard footsteps behind me and assumed it was my neighbor. I was Visions of Arnold Schwarzenegger still danced in my head.

As I got on and pressed the button for my floor, I didn’t look up initially. When I did, I nearly jumped. The man in black was in there with me. He saw me press my floor, and I calmly, stupidly, asked him for his. He said it was the same floor, another clue that something was wrong.

The door opened to my floor, and I waved him out. The man in black exited and shuffled down the hall, eventually turning the corner. I waited a beat and passed by to find him admiring the half-finished renovation of a previously damaged wall.

I steadied my key to the lock, and as I opened the door and turned to close it, the man in black stood inches away.

At that moment, I missed New York, that aggressive and dangerous place where I used to live, where no scratch ever came upon me. I survived that and believed I could survive anything until just that moment.

In a rather mousy voice, the man in black asked if he could stay with me. I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly, and he repeated it, but before he could say “stay,” I said, “nay,” and closed my door with a swift flick of the lock.

I sat in my darkened kitchen, listening to the man’s breathing on the other side of the door. I was technically safe but didn’t move a muscle for about ten minutes.

Finally, I went to the west wing of my studio and dialed my building’s manager, leaving a calm, measured message about not wanting to be in this particular horror movie. There had been previous instances of homeless people getting in and sleeping in the stairways or laundry rooms.

I sat there for a few minutes more, then, for only the second time in my life, called 9–1–1. I recalled Public Enemy’s derision of the service as a joke, but that uniquely black experience — another tragedy for another essay — was not this; at least, I didn’t see it that way.

The initial dispatch took my story and rerouted me to the police, telling me not to hang up. I said I wouldn’t, and my patience, which, apart from my baby blues, is my sexiest quality (I’m told…), went into overdrive.

(Note: I once remained on hold with an insurance company for four hours to erupt at them over a $186,000 bill they had misprocessed, so the hour I spent waiting to talk to the LAPD was like a bothersome gnat to this blue-eyed rhino.)

When finally someone answered, I told them the story of the man in black. The woman on the other end asked questions and responded with kindness and attention. She asked for my personal information and reassured me the cavalry was coming.

Some two hours later, I received a call from the same lovely lady asking to verify everything I initially reported. I gave it to her wearing my C-PAP (I’m a catch!), and she said someone would come and hoped I was okay.

No one ever came.

I know this because the phone, which connects to the building’s intercom system, never rang again, and I passed in and out of sleep without further incident. I had some wild dreams, though, so this must have rattled me more than I admitted to myself.

Pragmatic existentialist that I aspire toward, my thoughts ran to feeling alone in a godless universe and having to accept that with serenity. I can do that most days, but when your life feels threatened, you find yourself in a prayerful state. To what, I’m unsure, but I grew angry at being left so vulnerable and undeserving of harm. Yet, I remember Clint Eastwood’s immortal line in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” I also remember a therapist saying, “Why not you?”

Then I stop because God, Fate, or Luck has less to do with this than bureaucracy.

We have a right to expect results from our government. Whether they meet those expectations is another thing, but when I went to my local police station to follow up about the incident, I was told they probably didn’t come because the man in black didn’t actually commit a crime. I thought trespassing counted, but the officer shrugged and said if it happened again, call 9–1–1 again. I got this hollow feeling in my stomach because I realized then that, for them to act, I would have to get hurt. Needing safety is insufficient for formal protection.

This caused me to spiral into those apocalyptic thoughts and motivated me to write them down. Creativity’s primary function for me is to try to make sense of chaos. I love movies because they unfold in specific ways that a filmmaker controls. We allow the Terminator to give chase because we believe, or know, it meets its end through Sarah Connor’s heroism.

Yet, life is that unending assembly cut with the boring parts left in it, which makes the story harder to see.

I know how to create, and that’s really it. That’s not a dig at myself because the arts can facilitate change. A movie can’t change the world, but the audience that sees and is moved by it can. I don’t know much, but I know that.

Others have the unenviable job of changing broken systems. In the Age of Trump, this task is met with exhaustion, but helping others, be it the attacked or the attacker who’s so sick he doesn’t realize the harm he’s doing, needs our attention. To do nothing is the actual crime. These words, then, are an attack on institutionalized apathy.

I don’t want to suffer by anyone else’s hand, I’m sure of this. I also don’t want others to suffer needlessly, but if I can’t get the help I politely and justly ask for, what’s the point in ever going out and meeting the world again?

I’m a patient man. I can wait, even through the tears of fear from my baby blues.

I don’t want it to be forever.