There are no lonely women in Los Angeles

There are no lonely women in Los Angeles. If you live alone, or love alone, it is not without purposefully doing so. You can’t walk down the street without a stranger commenting, “Hey there pretty baby.” Some call this just a compliment, some call this harassment, but I call it living in the community.

It’s Sunday morning when my next door neighbor, Marly, a squirrely librarian type, is visiting with me. For real, she’s a librarian at the university library. She’s sitting on the fire escape with me, smoking a cigarette with her wool socked feet up on the edge. The man who digs through our trash for recyclables is down there, even on Sunday. He shouts up at us, “Hey there, pretty birds!”

I wave at him, but Marly snorts disapprovingly. “It’s harassment to look through someone’s trash, I mean it’s goddamn illegal, isn’t it? Identify theft and all.”

I sit back in the plastic patio chair, adjusting the candy-colored nylon slip I sleep in and live in on Sundays. “If you threw it away, what does it matter to you anyway?”

She stubs out her cigarette in the plastic ashtray on the ground. “Yeah well, he shouldn’t be making suggestive comments while he’s doing it either, unsolicited advancements are sexual harassment. Now that is illegal.”

“You’re not in your goddamn workplace, what are you going to do, sue him?” My turn to snort, pressing a cold glass of orange juice and vodka to my barenaked lips.

“There are laws in this world, Sunny, just because you live beneath it all--”

“I don’t live beneath it all, as you call it. I’m an entertainer, a choreographer and a costume designer. I’m not a goddamn whore, Marly.” I say indignantly.

“You’re a stripper, Sunny.”

“I’m not a stripper, Marly. It’s burlesque. It’s goddamn theater with a long, respectable vaudevillian history. And brilliant comediennes came out of it. Brilliant, beautiful comediennes with style. That’s it, I’m a comedienne.”

She snorts with laughter, “Oh yes, you’re a regular Lucille Ball in sequined pasties.”

I stand up swiftly and pick up Marly’s half-empty lace-print glass and my own now-empty glass.

“Hey now!” Marly drops her feet to the ground and sits up straight. “I’m not done with that – I didn’t mean to be insulting, Sunny – I just meant that you don’t have rules like – oh holy shit!”

I’m walking into the kitchen of my tiny studio flat, glasses between my fingers, and I ignore Marly. In the kitchen, I stride past a gold sequined music box set on top of the counter. This is all my grandmother left me – okay, to be honest, this is what I managed to sneak out of her house before her children swooped in on the estate to argue over who deserved what. Grandmother Heather was more of a “live-in-the-moment” kind of lady, so much as mention a will and she would throw one of her legendary thunderstorm fits.

My grandmother’s screaming reminiscing in my head faded to Marly’s real time screaming outside.

“Move it, asshole, move!” Marly is screaming over the bar of the fire escape. I run up next to her and look down.

Below, the trash collector is sprawled out on the asphalt in the alleyway. His leg is caught underneath the back wheel of a trash truck whose warning beep is sounding indifferently.

“Stop! Stop!” We both shriek down, but to no avail. The trash collector just stares up at us, with panicked, dark silent eyes like marbles. He grasps the asphalt with flat palms, spread in a perfect plié. He wiggles like a mermaid, trying to escape from under the massive, treaded wheel.

A man pokes his head out from the truck window, and looks around. Shrugging, and with our voices lost in the grinding and moaning of the trash truck, he doesn’t see the trash collector.

With a final act jolt, the rust-wrought truck rolls backwards over the trash collector – leaving a fantastic blood splatter across the cement driveway, like a jeweled headdress.

The men in Los Angeles, however, are more alone than ever.

(683 words)