One of my ambitions in writing this mystery novel is to pay tribute to the city that I grew up in—a city that takes all comers and lets them reinvent themselves. One day you can be some outcast nothing in a bible belt town and the next, you are ensconced in a rat-infested Hollywood apartment living your life as a bleach blond and working out your true passion in the world of underground bondage films.
And this is because the city has always been a zone for cast-off humans that are refurbished and polished like vintage chrome. The city is all about its own reinvention—a place where nothing is true unless their is a press release. This is a city of New Age mystics with really great head shots and bleached teeth from a Beverly Hills dentist working on his third ex-wife.
One of the venues in which I wanted to memorialize my town is Grand Central market—a bustling indoor market that has been in Los Angeles for what feels like a thousand years. I imagined a chase scene through the arcades and the neon signs—the bustling crowds of Mexican women shoppers with their mesh shopping bags—the cooks in their stained white smocks—the fruit stands with their too-ripe bananas—the spice vendors with their neat display cases of chilis and their wall of canned goods.
The suspect is always just ahead, entering from Broadway to exit by Hill: his silhouette backlit like a specter journeying to the other side to meet his maker…or a get-away car driven by a woman in a wig and black sunglasses.
The reasons for this choice are not entirely benevolent: there are so many opportunities to describe the smells of spices and grease; there are also fantastic opportunities to describe the din, the metal clang, the muffled music of a dozen sound systems slapping up against each other like sweating sumo wrestlers: banda, pop, reggaeton–all that white noise against the sound of the beating of your heart. This is the stuff of realism, the kind of realism that makes the champagne cork of the detective novel pop.
There is a cinematic quality in Grand Central Market. I’m not the first to notice it. Some of the classic movies of Los Angeles have been filmed there–movies like Chinatown, Wolf, Lethal Weapon 4 and The Artist. The Chop Suey joint with the neon sign and the long bank of bar stools that line its formica countertop—Jack Nickelson ate there.
And this is probably why so many tourists have been drawn like iron files to the magnet. This wasn’t always the case: Grand Central market was a run-down place in the middle of what appeared to be an abandoned LA—an LA that at night was like the still of a zombie apocalypse. There were the artists who emerged from their jury-rigged lofts like postapocaylptic mole people to avail themselves of the cheap produce. There were also Latinos of all stripes—Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans—who turned the venerable market into a place that looked like something from their homeland where such markets are common.
All that has changed, though. The market is undergoing a process of rapid change—some might call it gentrification—and almost all of the old businesses, except those in the core of the market, have fallen to newer fancier businesses serving a much more well-heeled clientele. Organic butchers, Pressed Juices, French confectioners—these are now the order of the day.
One of the biggest of these upstart newbies is Eggslut—one of those joints that serve up egg sandwiches for breakfast-all-day. Eggslut started as that uber-trendy enterprise, a gourmet food truck—the brain child of classically trained chefs who source only local and organic. They don’t serve bread; they serve brioche; the line, which is long and snaking, is filled with well-coiffed foodies fiddling on their iphones and they wait; wait they do, for well over an hour.
The sanitation of Grand Central market has leapt upwards like a frog reaching to catch a dragonfly. Now, there are attendants in blue polos and khakis, armed with spray balls and rags and walkie-talkies. The nonexistent security staff is now beefed up with beefy you men who man the security desk that was always there but always empty.
The typical Eggslut customer is a far cry from the typical pupuseria customer!
I’m not here to lament about gentrification. I’m not going to go after that sitting duck, the hipster, who is easy pickings with enough buck shot. I’m not here to get nostalgic either, because cities like Los Angeles are engaged in constant acts of reinvention—dying their hair some outlandish color and twerking their way down a red carpet in hooker heels: even their nostalgia is something entirely fake—tinsel and cubic zirconia.
No, I’m thinking about these things because the changes in Grand Central Market present less a political problem and more a formal problem. How do you chase after a chase scene when the venue has changed so much that it is no longer recognizable either to you or to anyone else? How to write about something in a process of rapid transformation but, still, thinks of itself as the gritty grimy place of an authentic LA that never was and never has been?
You raise a very good question, Khanh. On the one hand, Central Market as it was is so full of life, energy from all kinds of sources, and real diversity (i.e. not contrived). It might not have been quite as hygienic, but it was…alive. So I can completely see why you’d want your chase scene there. On the other, Central Market as it is, is reality. It’s what’s there. Every writer handles that sort of dilemma differently. One option is to set a novel slightly in the past, so as to capture that time and the sense of a given place during that time. Another is to acknowledge a place as it is, and look for ways to fit the scene to reality. Each choice seems to me to have both ‘payoffs’ and ‘trade offs.’ It’s an interesting dilemma.
Margot, you have phrased the dilemma so well. You just made me realize that a chase scene, unless successful, is about a return, too. So, perhaps a way to get to know that world is to have the sleuth question the various characters and types afterward. My guess is that the vendors behind the booth might not be so forthcoming. But a disgruntled table-cleaner, one of the working poor, who is now servicing the monied class but comes home to his bed sit in Skid Row might have some knowledge of the suspect–might have seen him “around,” so to speak. My guess is that a Mexican worker behind the counter might worry about how his knowledge would impact his situation, especially his legal status. My guess is that the organic butcher might not care for controversy from a business perspective. But someone who has less skin in the game might be persuaded to talk.