Year in Van Nuys

The View from My Window Recently I've started coming out of denial over the fact that I do not live in Provence. Not only do I not live in Provence, I do not even live in a nice part of Los Angeles. It's true that when we first moved to Van Nuys -- this ethnically mixed, upper-lower-middle-class suburb in the sun-swept grid of the San Fernando Valley -- it didn't seem such a hellish place to live. My hand-painted Italian ceramic coffee cup rattled in its saucer but once a month due to wheeling police helicopters. The night sky -- smoggy, starless, nougat-hued, flamed by a million Burger King signs -- was so bright in summer you could actually read by it. With ever more carnicer'as, taquer'as, and pupuser'as opening daily, with no effort one could become both bilingual and an expert on pork products, and I celebrated that knowledge. I will admit that -- in contrast to Provence -- the sudden shriek of a rooster in the dead of the afternoon tended not to be a welcome sound. Particularly when one was sitting at one's (Ikea, but by no means the cheapest thing at Ikea) desk in one's neatly appointed home office in the middle of what one had thought was an upwardly mobile L.A. neighborhood. The lawns somewhat balding, yes, the houses perhaps a bit too gaily painted, every third or fourth bungalow the color of eye-piercing sorbet -- lime green, raspberry cream, banana yellow. . . . I'm not trying to be elitist here. I'm not trying to be classist. All I'm saying is that at the time we bought this, our tiny, "swamp-cooled" ranch-style house, which was in 1991, near the top of the Southern California real-estate market (and I'm not even mentioning our ticking-clock/uranium fission/Jerry Bruckheimer-type loan, with balloon payments swelling suddenly into a boil and bursting mushroom cloud-like in the year 2014) . . . Anyway, all I'm saying is that at the time of the procurement of the title deed of this particular lot, within a two-hundred-foot radius of the property lines, to my knowledge, there were no chickens. Of course, then came the tsunami of Bad Media Tidings about our bravely tattered little neighborhood. The bombshell that Van Nuys is regularly ranked one of the ten worst neighborhoods to live in in Los Angeles (courtesy of Los Angeles magazine), L.A. itself considered one of the ten worst cities to live in in the nation (courtesy of Fortune). The caravan of production semis rolling onto our street to film an episode of the glamorous new Aaron Spelling show Models, Inc. . . . my smugness turning to horror at the news that our block's most resplendent Victorian three-story had been cast as the tumbledown shack of the "grungy" model's crazy musician boyfriend who wanted to kill her. You'd think maybe we could get some counterculture avant-garde art points for living in such a dangerous -- and yet vibrantly creative -- neighborhood, a kind of . . . Hell's Kitchen of the West Coast. Because, after all, Ben and I are artists (he's a musician, I'm a writer) (or at least I used to be a writer) (I used to be a writer when I was actually still writing my novel) (even now, the thought of it brings a wave of heaviness -- must suppress). . . . Anyway, Ben and I are artists, so why shouldn't we live in a vibrant, dangerous neighborhood, with graffiti, gunshots, roving gangs who swagger and flash hand signals and groove on down to the beat of a . . . a feisty street kid drumming on a . . . an overturned white bucket. . . . (You know the one I mean? The kid in that commercial? And Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk? Who plays the bucket?) But no, even our San Fernando Valley gangs don't match up, in Los Angeles. Echo Park: That's, apparently, where the really trend-setting -- the really seminal -- gangs are. "You have to understand that Echo Park gangs have a whole unique semiotics," this nasal-voiced blonde told me recently at a party. She was one of those Echo PaLoh, Sandra Tsing is the author of 'Year in Van Nuys' with ISBN 9780609608128 and ISBN 0609608126.