Having lived in Southern California for roughly forty years, I consider myself a true-blooded Angeleno.  An Angeleno?” you might exclaim puzzled, “Unless you were born in Los Angeles, how can that be?”

Well, that is kind of the point. Virtually no one who lives Los Angeles was born here. Almost forty percent of our population was born outside of the US.. Of those remaining, roughly half come from out-of-state. Given those statistics, you might think that there was no such thing as a typical “Los Angeleno” -- but you’d be wrong. Similarly to the way perfectly sensible, level-headed Manhattanites move to Florida and inexplicably lose their shit to the point where they’d be better off sedated, newcomers to Los Angeles undergo a weird transformation that renders them virtually unrecognizable to anyone who knew them whence they came.

No one knows why this happens. It may be due to some weird emanation from avocado trees, or a side effect from freeway smog. Or it may have roots in our unique climate. Whereas most places have four standard seasons -- summer, winter, spring and fall (or, at least, a rainy season and a dry season), Los Angeles has five: Earthquake season, Drought season, Landslide season, the Santa Anas, and Academy Awards season.  In any case, many decent, god-fearing, and at least nominally intelligent, normal human beings move to Los Angeles and, as if by magic, something creeps into their psyches and gives them delusions of being Someone with a capital S.

Undoubtedly, Hollywood is partly to blame. By “Hollywood”, of course, I mean the Entertainment Industry, and not the five block circumference around Mann’s Chinese Theater. Nowhere else exists where everyone – from supermarket cashiers, to dental assistants, to insurance agents -- feels they are “really” someone else. The woman who cuts your hair is a wannabe actress. Your lawyer or accountant is likely to have a drawer full of unproduced screenplays. Your child’s fourth grade teacher scoffs at the work of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and believes that, given half a chance, her directorial genius could have made New York, New York and 1941 into major box office hits. 

Los Angeles has been described (by no less a wit than Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huvley, H.L. Mencken, or Groucho Marx as, like most things in LA, it’s hard to pin down with any accuracy) as a series of suburbs in search of a city. While this is certainly true, the quip fails to capture the true ambiance of LA – that of the fraud, grifter, and huckster capital of the world.  Visitors to our fair metropolis are often taken aback by how much chicanery goes on, how thoroughly hype , hyperbole and shameless self-promotion has replaced reality, and how badly they eventually find themselves “taken”, both financially and otherwise. When you stop to think about it, however, the phoniness of LA is inevitable. After all, our three biggest industries are all based almost entirely on fantasy: Entertainment, Illegal Drugs, and Real Estate. (“Real estate?” you ask, confused, “Huh?” But, take a step back and ask yourself: what else but a fantasy could make anyone believe that a one bedroom, one bathroom, 350 square foot bungalow with a leaky roof on a 400 square foot plot of land is truly worth $4.5 million because of “the view”?) 

Please don’t think that I’m merely LA Bashing.  I would never do that. I love my city – truly I do. Flaws and all. Particularly Hollywood  – and this time, I do mean the geographic area. I have spent the better part of four decades here – with only a brief 2 ½ year detour about 15 years ago into Highland Park where I bought my first home (which I dubbed the “House From Hell”, and which will eventually be the subject of a future blog post  – once the trauma has finally faded). I was so Hollywood-centric, in fact, that I was convinced that if I ever dared set foot above Mulholland Drive, God would strike me down with a burning bush. No, the reason I bring all this up is because, recently, we tried to hire a handyman. 

One wouldn’t normally think that finding someone to do a few odd jobs around the house would entail a Herculean effort.  However, if you believe that to be true, you are obviously not an Angeleno.

First, there’s the whole actor-thing to get past. It may be incomprehensible to people living in Cleveland or Hackensack, but it’s no lie that the exterminator who does our bi-monthly pest control once co-starred as James Dean in a television biopic. When you hire someone to repair the drip-lines in the back yard, and he strips out of a brilliantly white, perfectly starched T-shirt to reveal a set of pecs that are the envy of all three Hemsworths, and an 8-pack that would make Zac Efron blush, you need to stop drooling and realize you might be in BIG trouble. The exception of course, is if your name happens to be Peter Jackson or J.J. Abrams. In that case, you still won’t get your double-paned windows installed correctly, but at least the wannabe movie star will wash and wax your car, if only because they’re hoping for a credited part in your next picture. 

The other alternative, of course, is that you’ll end up with someone who claims to have been a neurosurgeon in his native Bulgaria, and who doesn’t seem to know the difference between a hammer and a shovel.  At least with the Hemsworth/Efron knock-offs, you get some decent eye candy. 

Still, you’d think, in a place the size of LA, you could find someone to patch a driveway. After all, the city limits alone extend all the way from just north of San Fernando, all the way to Long Beach. The size of LA County is even more startling. You can drive from Long Beach to Lancaster, or from the ocean to Pomona, and never cross the county line.  But once we rule out the actor/director/writer “hyphenates”, we’re back to the con artists and grifters. You have to remember that LA is the kind of place where people hire other people to take the contractors’ licensing exam for them – not to mention the State Bar, the Medical Licensing Exam, and even the Cosmetologist Exam. 

The first hint that you’ve been tricked into hiring someone that you probably shouldn’t have is that they’ll want scads and scads of money. The second hint is that somehow, even though they’ve done nothing other than put up new shelves in the master bedroom closet, somehow they’ll manage to make sure that the roof over the dining room caves in. I have personally experienced the dubious joys of having a toilet installed and, six months later, discovering that it was never hooked up to the sewer line. We still have nightmares about the carpenter who built a patio with alternating roof support beams he hacked out of the attic, and the woman who used Elmer’s Glue-All to install a kitchen back-splash. Nor have you truly lived if you have not had the opportunity to navigate a brand new staircase with every riser a different size, and treads of a variety of depths. 
	
I’ve had several friends suggest that, perhaps, it would be worthwhile for me to learn how to do certain things myself. As a matter of fact, I already know a fair bit about carpentry. In my early teens, I spent several summers working in repertory theatre where the actors quickly learned to pitch in to help build sets and alter costumes if we wanted to get paid. Unfortunately, manual dexterity decreases with age. Just because I know how to use a circular saw doesn’t mean I can still cut a board in half without it looking like it’s been chewed by wolverines, and while I can replace a light bulb or re-wire a plug on a lamp, anything else risks a conflagration tantamount to a Topanga Canyon brush fire. 

So I’ve pretty much given up. Sure, I still occasionally prowl the internet in search of a handyman to help out when something around the house needs fixing. But, to be honest, I tend to ignore the ads without pictures. After all, if I’m going to have to re-mortgage the house in order to pay a guy to paint the living room, or if I’m going to resign myself to being without running water for two weeks while he replaces a bathroom faucet, as long as he’s pretty to look at, what do I care if the rest of the house collapses around me? 

After all, I am an Angeleno and, for us, form almost always triumphs over substance.