By Stephen Hunt Santa Monica
THOSE PEOPLE are everywhere in my neighborhood. They come into your store, and you don’t want to, but you can’t help but notice them. I know what the liberals and do-gooders say — they’re just like you and me, that prejudice is born of fear and ignorance — but I can’t help it. Those people steal. Those people are drunks and drug addicts. They have sex with just about anyone who asks, and are hyper-sensitive and overly-obsessed with what everyone thinks about them.
I can’t stand these freaking, shoplifting, millionaire celebrity white girls. “See? What did I say about white women?” my wife Melvin Superstar asks me. She is African-American, a five-year, north-of-Wilshire resident of Santa Monica, and, at the moment, hugely, marvelously pregnant. “When I got to Bennington (a private liberal arts college in Vermont), all of those rich white girls used to go into town and go to the Gap on Saturdays. One girl would take all this stuff up to the second floor and open a window up there. Another girl would stand on the street, and the first girl would just drop all that shit out the window to her. They did this every single weekend, going around to all these stores, stealing everything, until finally they got caught — and then they turned it into a cool thing! Parole became this rite of passage they went through; everyone but me, fresh air fund girl! Those girls all drank, did drugs and had sex and I didn’t do anything. And then I move to Santa Monica, where every time my black ass walks into a store on Montana Avenue the owner’s eyes light up like, I know what people like you do, you steal!”
Her problem is also her blessing: Despite being a working actor in her early thirties, who has the SAG Producer’s Plan (full medical benefits), she looks a lot like one of those mythical, black, 16-year-old teenagers who got pregnant and wants to go on welfare just like the Republicans are always warning Americans about.
A lot of what my wife says sounds paranoid and overly conspiratorial to me. I fit comfortably into the demographics of my neighborhood (white guy, thirties, writer, jogging shoes, khaki shorts). I don’t feel all that paranoid and conspiratorial about Santa Monica store owners. When I read about the need to clean up the homeless, and keep them from sleeping and defecating in the storefronts of shop owners, frankly I identify more with the shop owners than the homeless. I used to live in the East Village in New York, next to Tompkins Square Park back in the late ‘80s, when it was a virtual homeless shantytown. I had to walk through it every night to get back to my Avenue C apartment, and although I prided myself on my urban authenticity living next door to a park that was closer to New Calcutta than New York, I felt even better when they closed the park, kicked out all the homeless people and re-opened a year later, transforming it into a place where parents could take kids again. It was a lot less authentic, but I took care of that — check the wife.
Where was I? Oh, yes, what to do about shiftless, teenage-looking, shoplifting, celebrity white women, who do all the stealing the shop owners of Santa Monica blame on women who look like my geeky, beautiful, pregnant wife.
It’s just a thought, but before we blame it all on the homeless, has anyone confirmed it’s them defecating in the doorways of those stores? I wouldn’t want to start singing the praises of our new, tough anti-homeless laws only to discover it was Nick Nolte, sleeping off a roofie binge while researching a role.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 15, 2002. Read the original PDF.