Three women just ahead of me were talking about a t-shirt. “Because my cousin asked everyone what their favorite food was and then before the party she gave us all t-shirts with the name of our food. So yeah. My favorite food is spicy kim chee.”
In front of the beauty salon – the one with the green wall of plants that haven’t quite grown together to cover the paper – two girls were sitting on the curb. One of them was crying. Her long blonde hair fell forward and covered her face, so that all I could see was her shoulders, shuddering, and her knees poking out from the curtain of hair, and the tips of her green suede penny loafers.
“But it’s you,” her friend said, while she patted her. “This is you.”
“I’ve never felt this bad before,” the girl said between sobs.
The new bar that replaced the Indian restaurant was almost empty, on a Friday night. The décor is Moroccan boudoir. The lights at the points of the arches are emerald green. I want to drink in a lonely Moroccan boudoir on a Friday night.
Smokers stood on the curb outside the bar. A strong, buff woman in black jeans with a black and red mohawk laughed. A woman in an electric blue blouse looked skeptically at the bouncer who was trying to talk to her. Two doors down, the sports bar had a row of televisions tuned to different channels. Men playing basketball flashed by images of men yelling at men playing basketball, flashed by bikes flipping over, all inaudible above the din of people drinking and eating and leaning over their tables to talk to each other. From outside, you could see six of the eight screens inside. There was blackened bubble gum on the ground between the tables on the sidewalk. The sports bar was packed.
The city has extended the little pocket park at Sunset and Griffith Park Boulevards by painting the ground electric green with pale green polka dots. Two people played night basketball on the polka dots outside the raw vegan restaurant. The children’s boutique had a crepe paper rainbow, lit from behind. The lamp hanging above the table in the apartment across the street was a too-perfect echo of the moon. I wanted them to turn it off. In the house across the street, a woman got up from the dining room table, full of people, and came back in with another bottle of wine.
