prompt: circle, title: the bushwick blues in "the next big thing" flash fiction

When I lived in LA, people lingered on the city’s past as something wonderful-yet-naïve. Better, but only in shallow-surface ways. The open-air malls, gigantic record stores, the bikers haunting glamrock bars, the gentle faux-rebellions of comfortable white folks having a great time without realizing how many people were exploited to make their fantasy real. The gorgeous pastel world that existed in Tom Petty’s videos and may have never really happened outside of MTV, this was what we dreamt upon. My sister-in-law was raised in The Valley, someday I will ask if anything other than the names were real. “Over Mulholland.” “Living in Reseda.” “Ventura Boulevard.”

When I lived in New York City, near-to-everyone considered that city’s past awful, yet radically more authentic and secretly better. The peep-shows and broken windows, the iffy hot-dog carts, the little blue-and-white coffee cups in Greek Diners, all of it. Dangerous, sure, disturbing when you’re on your sixth-grade field trip and the whole bus sees some homeless man defecating at a street corner in broad daylight, of course. All the bus-driver could say was that’s just how it is in New York and you felt equally repulsed and drawn in all at once. How different someone’s days must be surrounded by that instead of snowmobiling idiots and cows. Frightening. Exhilarating.

Stage-Five capitalism killed both of those worlds, of course. Both the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Times Square were bought out by Disneyland, even if Times Square dragged its feet longer, soon both sites were inundated with posh souvenir huts, Guyfieri restaurants marked double for the tourists and street-buskers like my friend Frank, making daily bread off selfies for the rubes.

Though both places became pale monetized echoes of their past-selves, paved over by investors and stockholders and many similar forms of modern monster, the way the differing places dealt with their dual trauma is telling. Los Angeles forgets, Los Angeles dreams, Los Angeles doesn’t know how to tell the difference between its history and the histories of the fantasies about itself. New York City remembers. Manhattan holds blood grudges. Nothing’s lost even in changes, the past just gets pushed into their subways and sewers. 9/11 hangs in the air twenty-odd years later, still giving people cancer. Saturday Night Live has been on twenty-odd years too many, as well.

They came full-circle together from different sides to become luxury shopping malls, horseshoe theory and all, but those mirrored arcs do tell the tale of their radically-divergent paths on to the same goddamned air-conditioned nightmares. While I ran out of coin in both cities, after failure and other learning experiences, I had to retreat to the place I’d been running from, the town that killed Cousin Alan and framed my dad for crimes he didn’t commit and, all I could do was stop running and make it better through the lessons I learned in places those rich folks live, instead.

Full-circle. No corners. But many blades are curved and, from experience, they cut just as deep.