Los Angeles is a special kind of hell. Yes, everywhere in this place they call turtle island is a dumpster fire, but there is something particularly sinister about this city and it has only gotten worse.
La La Land sure but that’s too nice. Surviving in that city isn’t a flex, many do it because they have no choice and most, and yes most who succeed have sold their souls and they are coming for yours at all cost.
I went to and completed grad school in orange county and spent a lot of time in LA as a result from 2007-2010. Ya’ll can fight over orange county not being LA county but its all the same treachery.
What I did not know is that I would be back there in 2023 fighting homelessness, after a year of living in Portland, OR.
Portland is anotha story, for anotha day.
Afrikan bodies ain’t got no business being where the sun doesn’t shine regularly, and that lesson is forever learned.
Grad school was also a special kind of s(hell).
I made it thru undergrad and when I had accomplished that goal, I realized that I would be traversing this new territory alone.
My parents had no idea what to do. My knowledge had superseded theirs, so they doubled down on the lying and pretending, pushing me further into harms way, they were proud of my assimilated mind and body.
They were proud of the yt man’s tongue in my mouth and on my breath, slowly sealing away the landscape of my indigenous body to that of a foreigner.
Someone with no belonging, no land to call home.
And since I had no clue what to do next and no guidance from those around me, I did the only thing I knew how to do, I went back to school.
I joined URTA (university resident theatre association) and I started interviewing for grad school in spring of 2007. By the fall I was a full time graduate resident at the University of California, Irvine in Theatre (stage management, arts and event mgmt).
I chose Cali and Cali chose me. My parents had a rule that I needed to stay close to home for undergrad, likely because my father went away for undergrad and failed miserably.
These are the only details I know.
My mother stayed close to home for college and still failed. So whatever the reason (queer minds included), likely my father’s addiction to power and control, I was less than 30 minutes from home on full academic scholarship at Middle Tennessee State University for my undergraduate coursework. I finished with flyibg colors and load of credit card debt.
Which for my parents made no sense, they had pushed so hard for something and had no idea of the true consequences of the grooming me to ytness.
So naturally when grad school became an option, I wanted to be as far away from these people who used me like a pawn piece and then had the audacity to be disgusted, refusing to connect the dots they had led me to.
California was not the best decision but it was mine, and I made it. I planned to be highly educated if nothing else. California was also closer to Colorado the home I had been ripped from in order to suit my fathers all consuming needs.
My paternal grandmother gave me her cranberry red crown victoria for the big transition. A land yacht anf a gas guzzler to boot. I packed up my 23 years of life, and we drove cross country to LA.
(the road trip to cali my mother and I on ro(o)ute 66)
I remember the grief I felt when it was time for my parents to leave, it’s weird how much you learn to love your abusers.
They left and I was scared AF.
(them leaving me at the hotel)
A 23 year old in LA. Dream big and formed from somethibg other than the core of my being, naiveté even bigger. I might as well have been 12.
The next 3 years I suffered. They rolled out the red carpet to capture me but when I arrived it was anything but.
I was the only Black person in my year and there was only one other Black femme in my program.
(Stage Managers UCI)
In year 2 of my program a yt woman in my cohort lied on me and filed a false report with the police.
It changed the core of me. I realized I could never just be.
It was the first time I realized that my success in this world wasn’t going to be a thing and that yt women could make up lies of any scale and they would simply be believed and trusted.
I didn’t know that my mind was wired differently and the school did all they could to rewire me, unsuccessfully.
I should’ve left after year 2 but I didn’t, everyone told me to finish and I did. No one cared about the trauma it had created, or creating space for me to heal from this traumatic ass threat on my life.
I swallowed a very violent (see)d and went back to business as usual. That tiny bomb in me, would continually explode over the next 10 years of my life. Changing my inner landscape forever, it was nuclear level event brewing.
(graduation brunch, c/o 2010)
I went back to Irvine in summer 2021 while I was on tour with Black Beauty School not realizing that I would be learning more dusty ass lessons from this desert, lacking oasis city.
(stepping back onto that campus in 2021 was hard. i was grateful it was summa and empty)
Dating in LA
Friendship in LA
Living in LA
Working in LA is all about what people can extract from you especially if you are perceived to be new.
During our year in Portland, burnout due to my uniquely wired brain set in. The apartment we had moved into was crumbling. My partner had just completed grad school and I was the sole means of our coins coming in. I stopped doing everything, my body shut down, I just couldn’t anymore.
(packing up our shipping container for the move to Portland)
Grad school had spun my life into a journey that wasn’t what I thought it would be.
My body was being shaped by this colonial wildfire and I was disintegrating.
We filed a complaint with HUD and the city for our disintegrating apartment in Portland. I experienced some of the deepest racism hurled at my body.
(when our uhaul trailer was stolen)
Staying in a hotel, exhausted, we came out the next mourning to find our trailer gone from the back of our car.
That was my first red flag, they never stopped after this one, the sea turned blood red.
We had had our Uhaul trailer stolen when we first moved to the city, and later that year our Subaru was stolen.
Our lease was up in March. We had to sell everything, and we couldn’t even do that.
(one of the images as I attempted to sell the things that made up our home)
I was devastated. I placed my entire wardrobe up for sale, the apartment I had worked tirelessly to make into a home had betrayed us.
We sold what we could, placed the rest in storage, rented a car and drove to LA, a city I swore I was done with, and yet here we were.
We would spend the next year fighting homelessness. Week to week. Staying in air bnbs, being taking advantage of by greedy folx with a fingernail of property and nada else.
There was one brighter spot of respite and humanity in our year long fight, and it still required emotional labor I didn’t have the capacity for but had to endure anyway. The rest of that was total chaos.
My shoulders are burning typing this as I remember and the tears have begun to flow.
We’ve only been housed 5 months.
The ways in which I have been forced to compartmentalize things to survive. They won’t stay walled up for long though.
I am too far into this healing journey, now.
It was a year of me begging and pleading for mutual aid while folx wished death on my body, bullied me, so called friend exposed me to more harm, on & on.
There is no Black excellence in LA just Black treachery.
I was trying to figure out how to relaunch my work, I was making jewelry, engaging every resource I could, and everyone was lying, the standard in LA is to lie with the hopes that the truth remains unknown and the lie and your ego intact.
No one believed we were homeless but folx were happy to use my resources to benefit themselves.
Black folx of all shades and types, the center of their own universe, community means money.
Purpose lost and all to see and be seen, except there is nothing to see.
Zombies
Empty
There are very few engagements I had with Black folx that weren’t laced with treachery or them leading me to it proudly.
Black bodies in that place have been made into zombies. Its clear that the cities and its industries care not about Afrikan bodies, only how to profit off of, and now the Black/Afrikan LA community is a direct reflection of the emptiness that has always been Hollywood.
Los Angeles is Lost Angeles. It is a city rotting inside out(side) in. A city where brightness goes to die, or is consumed to sourness in the name of profit. Where demons have perfected their shape shifting to goodness, smoke and mirrors, rotten to the core.
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