A Moment In Los Angeles

On the corner of Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Main Street, in Chinatown, is a gas station. Regular unleaded sold there this morning for $3.899 a gallon.

I was hungry and in a celebratory mood after my unexpected win in Federal Court this morning, and Philippe was only a block away. Two African-American women pulled up next to me in a brand-new Cadillac, and asked for directions to Wilshire Boulevard; they looked terribly anxious. I told them to take Beaudry and spare themselves the traffic in the financial district. This apparently helped their anxiety, and they blessed me. I smiled and waited for a funeral procession to drive by before making two right turns and two left turns to get on Alameda so I could go north the one block to get food.

To me, Philippe is a breakfast place, because even though it's most famous for the French Dip sandwiches (which are quite good; I like the pork even better than the roast beef) I always got breakfast there while studying for exams in my first year of law school. But it's best for its democratizing effect -- you have to rub elbows with everyone while you stand in line to order your food, and there are communal tables where you never know who you're going to wind up sitting near. Everyone from the power elite of the city (Mayor Riordan was known to drop in for lunch with some frequency; I don't think the current Mayor does, though) to the blue collar crowd comes in because the food is good and cheap. And while the counter service sometimes feels slow, it isn't really all that bad.

Late breakfast or early lunch (I had to get a "last call" ticket because breakfast was shutting down) consisted of corned beef hash (blander than I remember it; did someone get scared of onions for some reason?), a can of diet Coke, and a scrambled egg while reading The Atlantic, next to a couple speaking quietly to one another in Korean while pointing with great enthusiasm at a picture of Hillary Clinton in their Korean-language newspaper. A retired gentleman saw his brother unexpectedly walk in to the place and he ordered beers for both of them as I read the story about script-doctoring atheism out of The Golden Compass. Two hungry LAPD officers walked in as I walked out (cops love that place), and got in the car and undertaking the drive back to work and listening to the last set of lectures by a USC professor about the American Revolution.

That's one of the cool things about Los Angeles. It takes a little bit of local lore to navigate (for instance, to know that Phillipe exists at all, much less that French Dips were invented there) and looking around always yields such diverse results. You get so much, from so many different sources, all at the same time, and you just have to kind of run with it, and that's fun. People are from literally every part of the world; there are things from all over and it's all right there, right on top of everything else. It's a little less diverse here in the A.V., and it was even more monolithic in Knoxville. Yes, it's often a drag to have to drive that far, but when I get a chance to actually do something that isn't work in Los Angeles, I usually have fun doing it.