Getting Real

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Pablo Ramirez ambled along the streets of East Los Angeles. He was looking for work, looking for love, looking for drugs, looking for whatever the hell he could find. He knew too well he didn’t have much now.

For that matter, neither did East L.A.—or any other part of the huge, sprawling city. Somebody online had called Los Angeles a town with a fine future behind it. Like so many jokes with too much truth in them, that one had spread virally. It must have, if a loser like Pablo had heard it.

He almost tripped on cracked concrete. Nobody’d fixed these sidewalks for a long, long time. A line of shopfronts were boarded up. The ones that weren’t had signs in Spanish, English, Chinese, Hindi, Korean....

You could still find anybody from anywhere in Los Angeles. Anybody who was poor and didn’t have the sense to go someplace else, anyhow. No, Los Angeles wasn’t much different from anywhere else in the United States these days.

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