The Repressed Anger of all of Los Angeles

I have this class now that's just referred to as 531, or sometimes, in hushed voices, Sue's 531. For a long time I didn't know what it was, I just knew that it was something to be afraid of. The teachers would say things like "This may not seem important now but you'll need to know it by the time you get to Sue's 531."
and
"I'll answer your questions now, but with Sue you won't be able to ask questions like that.",
and
"What class do you have next?" "531." "Oh my god."

Today was the first day of that class. We came in and sat down and Sue came in and was talking to the TA, and then stopped and turned and stared, annoyed, at a group of people talking in the corner. "Are you done?"

The next hour and a half was basically the same as the first hour and a half of the movie Full Metal Jacket. "This school is a cookie cutter school," she said. "You people are all tasteless cookies, you know, the cheap kind that crumbles in your mouth. That's what you'll be when you come out of the school. And right now you're not even a crappy cookie, you're a piece of crap cookie in training."
and
"I will not hesitate to tell you that you suck. The only reason I would hesitate is if I thought there was no way you could improve. Because there is no point in kicking a retard."
and
"If I could find any other job that pays me the same as I get paid as an editor, I would take it in a second."
and possibly most disturbing,
"No other teacher at this school cares about teaching as much as I do."

Apparently she used to be able to “fire” people from her class, so most of the rumors I had heard about her involved classes ending with a sole surviving student, and, according to her, some classes that didn’t go to completion because all the students were fired. Today she told us that the school has forbidden her from firing any more students, so instead she would fail us, the difference being that we find out at the end instead of in the middle.

Also at one point she called the entire profession of film editing “A Widowmaker.”

The point is that as uniquely furious as Sue is, I’m starting to realize she’s just another link in very long chain of angry Los Angelenos who claim they aren’t angry, but instead knowledgeable and well-adjusted.

See also: my previous boss. When I was still working with him I tried to keep his depiction on this blog as neutral as possible, in case he ever found out it existed. But now that we no longer talk I am free to discuss and analyze his general inner rage.

One night he and another guy and the woman who did accounting were working late in his garage. The guy went to the bathroom and left the door open. My former boss said “Hey man, close the fucking door, there’s a lady present!” The other guy said “It’s just Nancy,” and my boss picked up a power drill from the desk and threw it on the ground hard enough to break it in half.

The next day he tried to explain things to me from his point of view. “I mean, not closing the door, when there’s a lady... it’s just rude, you know? I get really mad when people are rude.”

And then his favorite “joke” is to walk next to someone who is working on something for him and fart.

Also he’ll say “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not racist, but-” and then say something really racist.

See also: everybody on the highways who honks at you when you try to merge, or when you’re just not going fast enough. Also: homeless people who don’t ask you for money, they just yell at you. Also: the people behind the movies whose titles end in the word Movie and occasionally the word Spartans, and the people behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua.



Also: me? My biggest fear these days is that Los Angeles will turn me into a Sue or a My Former Boss. Could it be that with the brownish yellow smog, the constant traffic, the heat reflecting off cracked sidewalk pavement that no one is meant to walk on, the fourteen dollar movie theaters, Los Angeles has a different bell curve than most cities, by which fuming at whoever crosses your path averages out to “telling it like it is?”

The other day after the earthquake I realized that kids going to school in California would have had earthquake drills, and not the tornado drills of the Midwest. The people in my class from California were really surprised that I’d never been in an earthquake, and I pointed out that they’d probably never had to go to the basement in the middle of the night because of a tornado warning. One of the guys in my class said “I'd rather have earthquakes than tornados.”
“No, man,” I said, “Tornadoes are way better.”