Zombies of Los Angeles
4 min readZombies have taken over Los Angeles. It’s strange how this has slipped under the radar. Most normal people do not spend their waking hours thinking about zombies or how they directly (or indirectly) affect them. It was not until I was filming my latest project, The Truth About Monkeys, that I first noticed them. Until that point, zombies were quite literally invisible to me. Truthfully, I didn’t really believe they existed. But they do. And they are everywhere. All you have to do is look, but, as you will read, looking takes courage.
The revelation of zombies first came to me during casual conversation with other members of the crew. “Did you see that lady back there?” I was in my car. I had seen the lady. She was urinating on the side of a wall. She was nameless… faceless. And I found myself looking away as if looking away would somehow give her some dignity. I don’t know.
Maybe I thought my looking away would somehow return to her some sense of humanity too. But in truth, I don’t think she noticed me. With her bum literally against the wall, she just went. The urine spilled down the side of the brick wall. I just sat there, a little dumbfounded. It happened so swiftly that I really did not have time to process what was happening; even after she finished, zipped up and darted over to pick up a half eaten piece of chicken that was on the ground, I couldn’t fully process it. What just happened? Someone had urinated in front of me barely aware that I (or anyone else for that matter) was even there. Shouldn’t there be something wrong with this?
Yes there should be.
Each weekend, for four weeks, I returned to the same parking lot to load and unload my equipment. For those of us involved on this feature, we would exchange stories about what we had seen. Each time it seemed to be something stranger and stranger that unfolded before our eyes. Human excrement on the ground, the smell of urine in the air, puddles of fluids revealing who knows what from God knows where. It was everywhere.
A strange and messed up cinema verite was unfolding before my eyes. All I had to do is pay the parking attendant five dollars for admission. And then I would step over the fluids, ignore the drug use and slide through doors guarded by security into a virtual utopian high rise. From the inside, you would never know what happened outside. You would never see the people living in boxes after dark. People begging for change. People smoking crack. People shooting up heroine in doorways of abandoned buildings. I was a witness to all of this. To be honest, I was becoming numb to it. There was even a point where I was stepping over their troubles the way you would avoid potholes in the asphalt – with minor annoyance.
But your conscious mind cannot see all of this without trying to make sense of what you are seeing. There are only so many instances of avoiding the issue before the issue is so unnerving and so demanding of your attention that you must take notice. There comes a point when you must see that there is something so wrong with it that you can’t help but ask, “What the hell is going on here?”
For me, it was not until I noticed the people in the middle of the night that I got it. The close of each evening (or early morning) started to resemble a horror movie: a cold, deserted parking lot in the middle of an area known for high crime. That’s when bad things happen… at least that’s what happens in the movies. The things that lurk in the night slowly creep forward… towards me.
As I put my keys in my car door, I get my first glimpses of what they really are. I can see them coming from across the parking lot at such a slow crawl it’s unnerving. I can hear the low grumbles of unhappiness, creeping out from behind the shadows of parked cars. I can smell the disease of addiction and see it rise from hiding spots no bigger than the space between cars.
Though they walk slowly, they are fast enough to make me feel as though they are sprinting. And I feel fearful. For the first time in my life, I feel as though they are going to take something from me as they inch nearer – these people. These Zombies of Los Angeles. Until they swallow me whole…taking away my brain. Fade to Black.
As the sun rises on a new day, I look back, knowing that they did do something to me. They had taken something from me. The way that I suppose the nuclear ooze of whatever it is that creates zombies in the movies does. In seeing them and the lives they lived, I had lost something… maybe I lost my humanity too.
Somehow, I felt less human and dirtier. Not because I had seen zombies and lived. But because I had seen zombies and did nothing. I have to admit it is quite overwhelming to see that many of them all at once, all wandering the streets as if they were singing one long opera of misery and discontent.
I watched this dance, this show. I paid money to see it. And I did nothing, except hurry away and hope they could not catch me, devour me and turn me into something even scarier than them – the unaffected masses who do not believe in them.
