Series Finale: No TV!

Hollywood Blackout

The morning is clear and cold in the heart of Hollywood and the crows and their lesser minions are flying about without lightbulbs, alarm clocks, or cordless phone rechargers. A city crow seeks only fresh garbage and a tall palm tree to nest. He beds down with his lifetime mate around 10 PM without knowing how far the stock market fell or what country is next on the Axis of Evil cleanup list.

He lives an outlaw life in a gaggle of his own kind, oblivious to history or the welfare of humanity.

Crows are anarchists with their own agenda.

At 8:30 AM yesterday, while I was buying ham and Diet Coke and mayo and pickles and cracked wheat bread at Pay 4 Less, a fire destroyed a DWP “station” somewhere in Hollywood. No one on the street knows how it happened. The DWP is investigating, but I must point out that black DWP wires still hang off wooden poles. Easy picking between the palms.

As I walked back to my apartment building from Pay 4 Less, the stoplights were out and fire trucks raced up Sunset. I cursed the inconvenience when I opened my door to a dead PC and refrigerator, but it wasn’t the first time the lights went out in Hollywood. I grabbed Raymond Chandler and found The High Window and settled in the sunlight with Dogface Riley for the duration.

That was yesterday. Crews have been working all night according to the tired message at the end of the DWP automated voice tree.

Not on my block.

There was a man parked all day in a blinking yellow DWP truck, drinking coffee and waiting for some word from his supervisors or maybe an offer from an encroaching legion of Hollywood prostitutes. The DWP man left sometime after I gave up early at 10 PM and went to bed. (What else could I do after an evening in candlelight?)

Maybe the DWP man found fame, or maybe he just turned off the blinking and drove home to his wife in the Valley when he ran out of coffee.

He wasn’t working in the literal sense, but maybe the word “working” at the end of the DWP automated voice tree meant sitting and blinking on the clock.

It is 8:00 AM as I finish this monolog, just a half-hour short of a 24-hour blackout in Hollywood. The man in the blinking truck has returned to park exactly where he was yesterday with a new thermos of coffee. Cars continue to screech through the blinded intersection of my street and Sunset. Old Armenians are gathered in front of a locked meat market to shake hands and smoke. School kids with backpacks trot along the sidewalks. Older and sadder children of the night shuffle in the opposite direction, trying to remember where they slept yesterday.

Massive green trucks roar between driveways. It is garbage pick-up day and plastic cans overflow the street with the ruined contents of neighborhood freezers. The departing green trucks ride low and leave trails of unfrozen vegetables, spoiled hamburger and defrosted Pillsbury cookie dough.

High above us in their stately palms, the crows cackle at their success and contemplate their next incursion.

:o)>FLAtRich
Hollywood CA
April 24, 2003

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