Story 50 of 52

By M. Snarky

Our written plan to exit from Van Nuys (gentrified in 2007 as Lake Balboa), located in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb north of Los Angeles proper, stemmed from an encounter with a person I dubbed Dirtman.

In and of itself, taking the effort to write out an exit plan makes it a serious affair by default. It makes it tangible. It makes it actionable. It moves it from a nebulous idea to reality.

How we met Dirtman was something out of a dark comedy. You see, my wife Kim and I walk with our Aussie-Doodle dog named Sydney almost every night around our neighborhood. We arguably know it better than any of our neighbors. I wrote about Walking in My Neighborhood in detail in July of 2024. It hasn’t changed much.

We know which houses have the dogs that start barking a block away, and which houses have the dogs that start barking when you are two doors down, and which houses have the lying-in-wait assassins that postpone barking until you are directly in front of them before they release their fury…and subsequently makes you release your adrenaline. These furry fuckers are almost exclusively the mean little dog breeds. I recently wrote about my firsthand experience with Mean Little Dogs too. You can hear some of these dogs continue to bark long after you are gone and onto the next block…or two.

On a recent July evening as we were walking our usual three-mile route around the neighborhood, we turned the corner into the second cul-de-sac south of our house and this is where we first encountered Dirtman. There he was, standing on top of a large pile of dirt that was dumped in the street, stomping his feet on it, and raising a huge cloud of dust. Apparently, this dirt was originally to be used for someone’s backyard landscaping project, but since it was on a public street, Dirtman appropriated it and then proceeded to flatten it out in his apparent rage against dirt.

Next, Dirtman took off his backpack and his heavy canvas jacket­­—which was already completely out of place for a hot July evening—and then he started dragging the jacket back and forth through the loose dirt very deliberately (as if he were dredging a piece of chicken through a pan of flour), and then he threw the jacket down and started throwing huge handfuls of dirt all over the entire garment. Dirtman then proceeded to carefully pick up his jacket by the collar and gently shake the dirt off—emulating the character Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip the entire time—and then he folded it up carefully and angrily threw it back down on the pile of dirt again. Then he proceeded to roll his body around in the dirt pile like he was a human steamroller, or as if he were practicing the Stop, Drop, and Roll fire safety technique that he learned in elementary school, assuming of course that he did attend an elementary school of some sort.

He didn’t say one single word, but he did sneeze uncontrollably a few times. By now, his perspiration was turning the layer of dirt that was stuck to his face, neck, and arms into a thin layer of dark mud, looking like something you’d get in a fancy day spa for $500. Maybe he was just trying to channel an Aboriginal man living in the outback.

It was next to impossible to tell how old he was with the coating of dirt and mud, but I would guess he was thirty-something. His dark eyes had a glazed, wild look in them indicating that he was probably very high on something, and I did my best not to make direct eye contact as we passed him at a distance. I once read in some psychology article somewhere that direct eye contact with a person who is having an obvious mental breakdown can trigger a violent reaction. This no-direct-eye-contact technique comes in handy here in the suburbs of Los Angeles where the crazies now rule the streets.

As we walked past Dirtman, I noticed that the gate at the end of the street that leads to the infernally busy Balboa Blvd was wide open. The only thing missing was a flashing neon sign that said, “Open.” This was unusual because everyone who lives on any of the six cul-de-sacs that dead-end at Balboa know to keep the gates closed and locked to prevent the encroaching homeless population from entering the neighborhood, or at least offer a minor deterrent for the lazy ones. I believed keeping the gates locked was common knowledge around here, but someone apparently didn’t get the memo. It was probably a preoccupied teenager staring at the screen of their smartphone.

As I walked past the gate, I closed it and made sure that it locked. Kim said (in the sweetest, most sarcastic voice one could ever hear), “Great; now he’s trapped in our neighborhood.” It made me chuckle at first, but in the next moment I realized my folly: By not knowing the true state of mind of this Dirtman fellow, closing that gate may have seemed to him like I was locking him in and now my mind was racing with all sorts of wild what-if scenarios of nasty in-your-face verbal altercations and unrelenting physical violence. Then I remembered that I had my pepper spray with me and felt a sense of relief, but I kept him in the corner of my eye anyway.

As we turned the corner out of the cul-de-sac to continue our walk, Kim uttered the words that no husband ever wants to hear: “I don’t feel safe in our neighborhood anymore.” This sent a chill down my spine. We have lived in this neighborhood for 26-years. This statement meant—in no uncertain terms—that we were going to need to start planning our exit NOW. Our hand was forced not by a job change, or by a bad economic situation, nor by any other internal, familial, or personal issues; it was forced by externalities that we have no control over.

Granted, this homeless population has been slowly yet perpetually closing in from all of the major boulevards and streets around our neighborhood: Roscoe Blvd to the north, Saticoy Street to the south, Balboa Blvd to the east, and Louise Ave to the west. We found ourselves living on an island surrounded by a sea of homelessness and lawlessness.

Street takeovers, street gang graffiti, deadly assaults on public transportation, homeless encampments, wildfires started by people living in homeless encampments, robberies, burglaries, RVs in various states of decay parked on the streets, abandoned cars, piles of trash, fires, squatters, open drug deals and open drug use in the middle of the day, and people sleeping on the sidewalks have been pervasive for years, but it has mostly stayed in the periphery of our neighborhood. I’m sorry to say that we had become mostly desensitized to it because you see it everywhere, every single day!

The city and county of Los Angeles are abject failures on so many levels that it truly was only a matter of time before we would be forced to leave in order to preserve what waning sanity, patience, and hope that we have left. Mind you, this is not a trivial decision. I was born in Los Angeles, and I’ve lived here for most of my life. I met Kim (who was born in Burbank) and we got married and raised our children here. Our eldest son Travis died here. It makes me so sad that this formerly fantastic city—a city of the world—is now entirely crestfallen and has become so incredibly untenable that it repels its own native sons and daughters.

Los Angeles has completely lost its soul and there is zero sense of community anymore. It is now mostly populated by cliques who are only looking out for themselves. The harsh reality is that tribalism rules the day here as the corrupt cabal in city hall continues to circle the drain.

What was once a shining city on a hill, Los Angeles is now an imploding, burning city poised at the gates of hell. The City of Angels has completely ceased to exist—nowadays it more closely resembles Gotham City.

The reasons most people moved into the Valley in the first place was that it was not like living in Los Angeles: The Valley was less congested with traffic and less crowded, it was cleaner, it had better schools, it had newer malls, it was suburbia on steroids for all of the right reasons. But now the Valley has simply become an extension of Los Angeles for all of the wrong reasons, and it is hard to tell the difference between the two anymore.

Fortunately, our little 73-year-old post war tract house sold quickly, and we close escrow soon. We bought a place in another county as far away from Los Angeles as our jobs and careers would allow. I hope the new neighbors will forgive us for being from L.A. On second thought, maybe we should downplay that little fact

Best of luck with the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles, but I’m sure that the city will put on a lovely façade as only phony Tinseltown can do, and then it will be back to business as usual: broke, broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, and crime ridden. I wonder where they’ll hide all of the homeless people and their derelict RVs and travel trailers for the television coverage of the games. Maybe the city will give them an EBT card and directions to Slab City.

Perhaps Dirtman was simply a metaphor for this insane, dirty, scummy, out of control city.

Vaya con Dios, Los Angeles.