Ham and Cheese
Marlowe Lee was off the clock, 12 more hours in the can, but Call-Me-Jessie had changed the closing procedure, and now, for the second week running, Marlowe had to do final cleanup and lockup after clocking out. It was 9, and she was starving, with another 15 minutes of unpaid work ahead of her. She hadn’t eaten since her lunch break, and as sick as she was of Charcuterie Girl’s sandwiches (The Best Deli on Ventura Boulevard, Human-Owned and Operated!), it was torture making and serving them on an empty stomach.
She set two slices of baguette on the counter and stared at her options. Roast turkey and mortadella, vegan salami and imitation tuna salad. It was depressing, that fake tuna, the best on the market but still a vaguely unsavory amalgam of fish paste and seaweed powder — nothing like the tuna she remembered. It made her think of all the things she missed, those lost treasures of the recent past. Avocados, panda bears, temperate weather.
Her eyes landed on Charcuterie Girl’s crown jewel: a whole leg of ibérico ham in its own bespoke rig. How much longer would the world have black Spanish pigs, fed nothing but acorns and chestnuts? The jamón cost $70 an ounce, but rich people were too rich — they bought things because they were expensive, and those pigs were in higher and higher demand. Jessie named the sandwich the Trillionaire’s Ham and Cheese at the suggestion of the richest man in Los Angeles, who personally requested to see jamón ibérico on the menu. He bragged about it online, and now it was every local billionaire’s favorite sandwich in town.
Marlowe had yet to try the jamón — she wasn’t allowed to touch it, except to slice it by hand for high-value customers, who liked to record her slow, methodical movements as she handled the special ham knife. It came off in thin red ribbons that she piled onto baguettes with manchego and grated tomato. She tried to imagine the taste, and her mouth watered.
She eyed the camera, which transmitted footage to Jessie’s iGlass, with any irregularities flagged for immediate review. An irregularity could get Marlowe fired, never mind that the camera also logged hours and hours of labor violations.
She was lucky, she knew, to have this job — any job at all, when she was only 23. Just that day, a customer had asked how long she’d spent on the California Hourly Employment.
Marlowe answered, truthfully, that she’d gotten on when she was in college. The customer shook his head. He’d been waiting for two years — how could anyone be expected to go that long without work? Marlowe didn’t mention the exemption for small business owners, who could circumvent CHEW if they were willing to invest in superfluous human labor, or that her mom and Jessie had been classmates at Wellesley.
Marlowe looked back at the camera and picked up the ham knife. It slid easily under the oily meat, again and again and again. She worked until she had enough jamón for a half-dozen sandwiches, then pulled a last slice right off the leg and popped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and laughed. Oh man, she thought. I could get used to this.
Steph Cha is a critic and author of “Your House Will Pay,” winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy.
Allnight Supermarket
I’m here to tell you a few things. Some are triumphs and some are facts. But first — let me welcome you to the first official meeting of the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Doesn’t sound historic to you? Well, let me say, we’ve been trying for decades to get recognized. As a neighborhood. As a community. As people. The BID stopped us. The Downtown Neighborhood Council stopped us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a succession of supposedly helpful mayors hadn’t a hand in stopping us.
Let me also say there was a moment when I myself lived in the elements. That’s what I told my daughter. “I’m living in the elements.” Nevertheless, it’s part of my story — this story that brings us here today. Thirty long years after we first tried to get a neighborhood council of our own. What’s the big deal? Let me tell you the big deal. This is a real neighborhood — an actual community. We all know each other and what’s what and what’s up. Did people in Hancock Park know each other? Did folks in Beverly Hills help one another out? Nothing doing. Just strangers in big houses. It’s different down here. Always has been.
It took some doing to get recognized. We are the last ones not driven out by climate and prices. That’s what sent the rich people away. They gave up and made this city a ghost town of heat and poverty. But we stayed. Climate and prices don’t mean a lot when you don’t have a lot of choice. Not much we can do about the elements. Fact is — we are used to the elements. The elements are our thing. And rising prices don’t matter when you can’t afford anything anyway.
So when everyone up and fled, we got our neighborhood council charter. We are Skid Row proud — climate and cash be damned.
Things happen by default, you know. I got sick. I lost my home. I wound up on the streets. I got housed for good. So be it. That was a long time ago. Same with this council. We tried. We tried again. We got denied. The city got hot. The city got wet. The city became the climate crisis’ ground zero. Prices shot up. People didn’t want to pay for water rights. They didn’t want their kids suffering at recess. They didn’t want to pay soaring gas prices for their private jets to take them north. So came the great abandoning.
We could have moved into their houses. We could have swept into the Hollywood Hills and Brentwood. But that’s not a place. That’s not a home. That’s not a community. We are who we are and where we are. And with no one left but us, we got our council. And now we have plans, and plans are happening. You might think our plans are simple. But these small things are everything.
And so I’m proud to set in motion our first community market. All these years, and this is the first time Skid Row has an exclusive place to shop, hear music, get your hair cut. A place to get trained up to work, a place to give back. A place from which we will rebuild this blessedly emptied city in our own image.
Ivy Pochoda is the author of several novels including “Wonder Valley,” “Visitation Street,” “These Women,” “Sing Her Down,” which won the L.A. Times Book Prize in 2023, and “Ecstasy,” which was released in June.
2047: Meet David Allen, the Minister of Commemoration
Stanleg and I had long planned an expedition to meet the Minister of Commemoration. Very few people knew as much as we did, which made Stanleg and me famous frenemies. Stanleg was the Emperor of Dead People Hill. I lived in Bonelli with the Boaties. He liked org as much as I liked disorg, but we both remembered the floodtimes from when we were children, so the little amnesiacs liked to flock around and pepper us with queries, but our information was nothing like Minister Allen’s.
You could get by gondola up to the mouth of the Euclid trail, where the donkey trolleys dragged the sledges up toward Baldy. That was where the Minister lived. He liked the high places and never went by water. David Allen was made and lived in the Dry and still saw it all with the Eyes of the Dry: the Gabriels and the Wetness below. They had once named some of these places for the water, like Riverside, or the Wash, before the water came. But those who truly remembered the Dry wanted no part of the Wetness.
So Stanleg and I packed in and portaged through the Pomonliest swamp and then crossed the Downland gondoliers’ palms with bribes to get us to the shore where the mule sleds waited, and then we bribed the mule sledders. They had no interest in our tales.
The Minister of Commemoration waited in his temple, only lightly guarded by amnesiacs. He was deep and surprisingly tall, though crooked and bald, and his robes hung long. He greeted us with a magnificent smile. The lenses as well as the repairing tape on his spectacles were thick.
We had brought waterkale cakes and wild bird hand-pies, because we had been encouraged to believe David Allen liked these things. Perhaps he did, though he seemed to take no notice of our gifts.
“Stanleg is from Dead People Hill,” I said before Stanleg could get a word in. “He likes org, and he orgs those dead people pretty good. Maybe the amnesiacs not so good.”
“Fitchly hails from Bonelli Underwater Park,” said Stanleg, returning the favor. “He is an expert in disorg and keeping it real. I had to bake you those hand-pies myself.”
“Org and disorg were sitting on a fence,” said David Allen. “Org fell off, and disorg felt the bump.”
We were humbled by his wisdom, and all the rancor was relieved from our bodies. We wanted only to be suffused with his powers of Commemoration.
“Is it true,” asked Stanleg, “that where there is now a beach there was once a forest and a lawn?”
“It was a forest lawn, yes, on the top of the hill, when the lands surrounding were dry. But it took much watering to keep the Forest Lawn from reverting to yellow scrub. I know this might seem preposterous to you…”
“Watering is one of the old mysteries. Was it the watering that brought the flood?”
“Not in a direct sense,” said Allen.
“Will you give us a Commemory?” I asked.
“I have been thinking much about the Beach Boys,” said Paul Allen. He seemed to draw deep inside of himself to summon the Commemory. Perhaps he mused upon the chosen theme because Stanleg had mentioned his own beach, there at Dead People Hill. “There were many debates,” the Minister intoned, “back in the dry times, about the extent of their Inland reach. Some scant evidence suggests they came to Riverside in 1962. An autographed glossy or two. But did they actually perform?”
“What miracles might the Beach Boys perform?”
“At that time, they might have performed ‘Don’t Worry Baby.’”
“This would have been a consolation.”
“If they made it to Riverside and performed ‘Don’t Worry Baby,’ it would have been a terrific consolation, yes.”
“We thank you for this Commemory,” said Stanleg. “We don’t want to ask too much of you.”
“I am old.”
“Yes.”
“It may or may not have happened. Go now.”
“Yes.”
“And remember, and speak it to your amnesiacs.”
“Yes.”
“Tell them this. Tell them they are all Beach Boys now.”
Jonathan Lethem, a MacArthur fellow, is the author of several novels, including “The Fortress of Solitude,” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and several short story collections. “A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories,” will be published in September.
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