If You Live in My Apartment Building, You’re a Ghost. Everyone in This Building Has a Story

The Los Angeles underground. This building requires no credit checks and a cash deposit is accepted. Because of this, everyone has a weird reason for being a tenant here, including me.

For the sake of anonymity, I’ll just use letters as first names.

This is the Valley. The San Fernando Valley. For those reading from across the world, the Valley is a suburb of Los Angeles.

It gets hot here below sea level (hence “valley”). During the summer, 103F is normal.

The valley is well-known for many things other than 7–11’s, Taco Bell’s, and laundromats.

It was once the porn capital of the entire world. It’s since been pushed down the list in the wake of the internet.

The valley houses many cool places from very well-known films.

Films such as Pulp Fiction, Boogie Nights, The Karate Kid, and Terminator 2 all had famous scenes filmed here.

Comedian Richard Pryor’s infamous naked run while setting himself ablaze was in the Valley, right down Parthenia Ave., a semi-busy thoroughfare.

Finally, the very well-known North Hollywood shootout of 1997 was — you guessed it — in North Hollywood, which is in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Hollywood (duh).

There are a lot of fronts here. By “fronts”, I mean businesses that aren’t really there for its purpose.

Within these fronts are also apartments. They take cash, don’t do credit checks for new tenants, and ask nothing in return.

My building is one of those.

Everyone is here for a very weird or bad reason. EVERYone.

Me? Well, I already told you this from previous stories. I’m a recovering drug addict. Yes, I’ve fixed my ways since, but I’m stuck here until I sell enough art to get the hell out.

Then there’s R. Kind of a sweet girl with a bad attitude. I later found out that she ran away from home because her family members were assaulting her.

That’s not it though. While she ran away, she joined a gang, committed felonies, got locked up and came out broke, alone and fifteen years older.

Now she’s stuck here.

There’s L. It’s weird because he’s a clean-looking white dude in his twenties. Not very many white people in this building, by the way. I couldn’t quite figure out his story. Not yet.

There’s M. He’s an illegal immigrant who works for cash. He’s a hard worker with a back made of steel and on some weekends, I see a darker side to him.

Every so often while I’m working late, I hear mumbling down the hall. Yup, that’s M, coming home drunk after a bender down the street at the ghetto Tequila club.

There are many recovering addicts here, which is kind of a catch-22. Drug addicts usually ruin their lives and as they turn their lives around, they have nothing.

So they end up in bad neighborhoods such as this one, where drug dealing and drug use is rampant.

Even though they’re clean and on the straight and narrow, they have to suck it up and live in the very place that nearly ended their lives.

Most end up slipping up and starting over — hence the catch-22.

There’s B — an old lady who walks her dog only in the parking lot because it’s gated. She doesn’t like to step out where all the trouble is, right next to the beat-up furniture and used mattresses on the sidewalk.

Turns out she was with an abusive husband. She cooked and cleaned after him for nearly 40 years. Hardly knows a word of English.

She was brave enough to leave him; however, she paid the price of never working or learning English. It’s obvious why she lives in this building.

There’s a black man named D. He loves my long dreadlocks and vows to someday have them as long as mine. I showed him some pointers one day on how to keep them tight so they won’t fall apart.

Nicest guy in the building, hands down.

Turns out D’s here because he just got out of jail a year back. The longer you’re in there, the harder it is to get back into the groove of society.

He got sent to prison for armed robbery. The sad part isn’t his family leaving him and going to Georgia, no.

The sad part is he was falsely convicted. He’s never even held a gun before.

There are a lot of Middle Eastern families here.

My take is that they ran away from home seeking asylum of some sort.

As we all know by now, many wars in that region have taken place since 2001.

I smell lamb every so often. I know it’s coming from those families.

I have Middle-Eastern in me, but I can’t stand the smell of lamb most of the time.

Oh, and remember L, the clean-shaven white guy? Just last week, I was awoken in the middle of the night by a fight down the hall.

The next morning, I found out that it was him.

Turns out he has schizophrenia. That explains the half-naked female who was running away from his unit that night.

His real name’s not even L, it’s O.

He’s moving out next month.

It’s best not to make friends here, I say. I’ve been here a long time and I can’t wait to get out.

The manager probably thinks she’s doing people a favor here, but it’s that very leniency that’s causing such a large pool of trouble in one place.

Hell, that’s how I got in here too. I had nothing when I came here.

But this is home I guess. Order a pizza and call the cops and see who will come first.

Hope you’re hungry. The cops aren’t coming.