TL *Humaning the Best She Can*’s Reviews > The Line > Status Update

The first half of the eighties hasn’t been kind to Hollywood Boulevard. The decay is everywhere now, incapable of being washed out. Hallie even hates how it smells around here—the exhaust fumes, the stale tang of old popcorn, the sweat scorched into the asphalt by the relentless Californian sun.

That’s how she shuts out the noise in her head; how she deals with the guilt of being a passenger as this city stalks its victims. Most of the stories she hears in this town, most of the stories she’s ever tried to write, have been marrow in the same withered bone—ambition and naivety, lies and lust, misfortune and oblivion.

The battle she faces daily is trying to pretend none of it affects her.

The tables are filthy, the food looks terrible,and across the street is a crumbling movie theater, lit up in dying blue neon. As she waits,she glances around at some of the other customers and realizes the diner must be where the local debris blows in. It’s full of hustlers,pushers,and scammers; of washed-up actors and spillovers from the rundown stores that sell bongs and bootleg cassette tapes on the blocks nearby.