key word: montage, title: the opposite of elephants in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Mark Twain once said “if you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes” or maybe he didn’t. Maybe someone said it first but because he was famous it was remembered as his alone. This happened to him often and to countless different wits down through the ages. Wisdom’s a transitive property, ending up in whatever mouth makes it sound most important.

Frank the yeti told me “if you don’t like Los Angeles, just drive a few minutes, it’s a different city every mile.” The glitz of Hollywood’s hills, the squalor Downtown, the slick gentrification out in Echo Park. “And if you don’t like your neighbors,” he added, “just wait a few months.”

Frank rode city buses late at night, just to watch the storefronts cycle through. Neighborhoods rising and falling, record shops becoming video stores becoming cafes becoming yoga studios. You go there to be remembered but you stay so you can be forgotten.

New York may never sleep but Los Angeles is the city that forgets. Everyone native is trying to leave, everyone born elsewhere trying to arrive. When you finally realize you were never going to make it, but you can’t handle going home where they’ll say they told you so, it allows you the lone mercy of being forgotten. Places like London build on top of themselves, preserving parts along the way. L.A. is a self-cleansing Etch-A-Sketch, when real estate decides a location is no longer profitable, it picks itself up and simply shakes itself clean to be drawn on once again.

Buses were even less conspicuous than usual for him as almost no one uses public transportation in L.A., only the desperate and the tourists, and in his way of course he was both of those things. In the 1940s, the gas companies paid off the city council to tear up its marvelous light-rail and soon nearly no one could function in society without a car. If given the choice of only a vehicle or only a home, most would choose the former. Even if you saw through the magic making him seem human, he’d be far from the strangest thing on any given L.A. city bus.

Most nights, Frank would use them to explore the town as it rebooted itself over and again, one trend on top of another in succession, like a montage conveying passages of time in the sort of movie that used to be filmed in Hollywood but now was usually shot in Vancouver or Prague to save a couple bucks. To make a little more money, Hollywood erased in all but name even itself as if it were just a streetcar standing between a councilman and a bribe.

Frank Yetti told me “if you don’t like Los Angeles, just drive a few minutes” or maybe he didn’t at that. Maybe it’s something I told myself once but later misremembered into Frank’s mouth to make it sound more important. I wouldn’t put that past me these days.