All the poor kids in South Pasadena lived in the Raymond Hill district. Immigrants and the POC who were not East Asian, because they also lived in the rich white areas. There were burglaries constantly, the sound of car alarms going off at all hours, police making their rounds at every odd hour. Everyone was wearing the wrong thing in this area — bad shorts and bad T-shirts, knockoff sneakers, budget gear. Everyone had bad haircuts, bad attitudes. All of us walked to and from school — this was an area for kids who had the keys to their house when they were still single digits, who barely knew their parents growing up because they worked so many jobs, who learned how to babysit when they were still babies as the siblings came in. This was the kind of area you wanted so badly to leave one day. It bred aspiration that way while the rest of South Pasadena was a wonderland everyone was a forever-citizen of; they all came back, but not the Raymond Hill kids, if we could help it. We were scared of the few white people who were our neighbors; anyone who was white who lived there had definitely done something extremely wrong in life. I made out with boys in their cars, made sure they parked uphill so my parents couldn’t somehow spy us from their bedroom window, worrying about why I was late. When it came time to leave, I went as far as possible, 3,000 miles away, and when I came back to visit, the greatest compliment I received was New York had really changed me.

[...] There were several male editors at RayGun who’d been fired from SPIN for sexual harassment, and they didn’t seem to have learned anything. But there was a power in being 19 and having so many eyes — especially their eyes — on me. I felt dangerous. I’d wear long, tight white club dresses and black platform sneakers with silver glitter face makeup — the kind of thing that would be a hit at a rave, but I felt fine wearing it to work. I made sure you could see through everything. What’s the worst that could happen? People thinking badly of me, people wanting me? It was 1997 and everything seemed mostly okay. One night my friend from high school and I went to a bar/club in L.A. called Louis XIV and an older French man took us to a private room where there were platters of coke. I had tried some at Sarah Lawrence, so it was with confidence that I took the rolled-up bill. Before the end of the night, we were with him and his friend in a dingy motel room — dingy but historic — the Saharan Motor Hotel on Sunset, which I’d always driven by and wondered about. He played music videos on a dying TV, rewinding Enrique Iglesias over and over, and eventually he began groping me. We managed to leave and laugh about it for days, zero trauma somehow, just another night where we’d skim danger but be fine. That summer, I thought I would have no future but I didn’t care because I was happy to be in that moment, the one time summer in L.A. felt good to me. Ever been so happy you wished you could die? I asked the VJ one day after he fucked me behind the Hollywood sign. He was almost my age now, and didn’t look at me when he said, Never.

I’ll start out Fanny Factoid then say it straight: L.A. is the most populous county in the nation; adjusted for the cost of housing we have the highest poverty rate; we’re the manufacturing capital of the US (used to be steel, now it’s tshirts and underpants and wut, u got a problem with that?); almost half the goods that arrive in this blighted and trinket-rich nation come through our two ports. If you want to know what the future looks like, and I mean its near-brutality, this is the place to live. Snow-capped mountains, citrus blossoms scenting the breeze, and scavenged train tracks with a bomb-blast of packaging materials for miles. Text me when you get to Union Station I’ll pick you up in front. — XOXO, Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room