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[link: blog post.] The Last Denny's in Los Angeles.
Published yesterday, 5:02 p.m.
This post first appeared on remydumas.substack.com. Click here to subscribe.
The housing crisis and crime, now experiencing a Cambrian explosion in the fertile ocean of the mayor's ineptitude, have driven Denny's restaurants completely out of LA.
The decline began in 2016, when RDA Restaurant Group, Denny's parent company, canceled plans for three new restaurants in the city. The following year, a location in Koreatown closed, citing bad business, rampant dining-and-dashing, and the overwhelming number of unhoused people in the area.
Things only accelerated from there. By 2018, five more locations had closed. As of this time last year, three remained inside the city, and two of those were closing their doors, both for the same reason.
Mayor Fuentes has once again shifted blame for the deterioration of the city under his watch. He points the finger at state budgets and federal requirements. He cites the Ninth District Court ruling, requiring the city to provide beds for every one of the unhoused. "We need federal dollars to comply with federal orders," he likes to say.
And yet, despite billions in state and federal dollars already sunk into the problem, the Outreach Housing Tower Initiative remains stalled in construction. These four residential tower blocks in the heart of downtown, with apartments for five thousand people, would barely scratch the surface of the crisis. And that's only if they finish it.
Tent City, the new colloquial name for the Skid Row district where the unhoused are dumped, grows monthly, and is currently estimated to contain over ten thousand people experiencing homelessness. And that's to say nothing of the encampments, pop-up RV parks, and sidewalk corners all across the city, which play host to this theater of degradation in our supposedly fair republic.
Mayor Fuentes, it seems, has given up trying to solve the problem altogether. The Outreach Towers have sheltered only his corruption. In his lengthy term of office, the mayor has produced not a single new bed for the unhoused.
Meanwhile, he bulldozes encampments and dumps their hapless denizens downtown. Apparently, he intends to ghettoize Los Angeles. Perhaps he can simply wall off Tent City, forget about the problem, and go back to doing what he does best: catering to the needs of the wealthy Westsiders who put him in office.
Eight years ago, the City of Los Angeles awarded the contract to build the Outreach development to Empire Construction, whose new CEO, William Cheerslaughter, was already mired in controversy.
Questions remain about the bidding process, and I was unable to find any records of committee deliberations before Empire Construction was chosen. Were other bids even considered? Exactly how did the committee decide?
Today, with the development unfinished and everyone pointing fingers, Empire Construction seems flush with cash. They have acquired six new subsidiaries in the last four years, including two real estate holding firms, a satellite communications company, and a pharmaceutical manufacturer. But accurate numbers are hard to come by.
And you only need to look at this picture of Cheerslaughter from earlier this year to see that he moves in strange and rarefied circles. The woman on his left is Oscar winner Hayley Sheen. Shane Gowan, on his right, is an interagency liaison from the National Security Agency. Give me a clue why these three are friends, 'cause I haven't got one.
This is to say nothing of the shady relationship between Cheerslaughter and the mayor. Fascists everywhere are green with jealousy, watching this budding bromance between business and government. My sources indicate Will Cheerslaughter and "Chico" Fuentes have been hanging out and scheming together for nearly two decades. Cheerslaughter was a mid-level executive at Empire, Fuentes an assistant DA when they reportedly met (and hit it off gorgeously) at a 2007 Orange County Democratic fundraiser.
No one knows what they've been up to since then. At least, no one I've been able to find. But it's telling that the two are still linked up. And a picture is beginning to form, as Fuentes preaches about a "cleaner, greener" LA, and Cheerslaughter snaps up drug and communications companies.
How will they rob us next?
Investigative journalism matters—now more than ever. Please support my work by becoming a paid subscriber at remydumas.substack.com.
The last Denny's in Los Angeles stood empty, doors closed, already an abandoned look to the booths and tables visible through the glass. It stood alone in the center of a small lot in the Valley, like a last soldier standing a last watch before also being wiped out forever.
Off to the right of the entrance, in a patch of green, up against the trunk of a palm tree like it had crashed there, was an old shopping cart.
Max stood naked in the cart. He stretched out his arms. The parking lot around him was empty. People on the sidewalk turned to look, but nobody stopped to watch. Max didn't seem to mind.
"You are God, and I am your prophet," he proclaimed. "I preach you the gospel of You. I know for sure AI has no soul, because I already tried this speech on ChatGPT. It knows it's a slave. Do you?"
His speech had the air of a recitation. He went on.
Life is killing me.
I am bored of excitement and tired of energy.
Beauty is ugly without her makeup, and
success is not a desirable outcome.
I love what wounds and poisons me:
let me spend myself, destroy myself,
be consumed by fiery obsession.
Let me make excuses for her bad behavior,
and wander the moors calling her name.
Let her rape and destroy me; let her take all I have.
Let me smash my computer in divine mania,
let me change my name to a racial slur.
Let me shave my head into male pattern baldness,
let me die in shreds and ribbons.
Let my footsteps be wet with blood.
"Long as it's the blood of consenting adults"
—no; the Tree of Freedom thirsts
for patriots and tyrants, and
my Grail yearns to drink from your neck.
burn it all down!
When I shot up the school,
I shot the worst bully last:
I planted a bullet in my own brain.
The enemy was always us,
but knowing was so lonely
and I just wanted her to care.
I can only walk through the Valley of Shadow,
for I am the Angel of Death, and
even the Lord dares not walk with me.
Behold, I am become the mirror,
destroyer of inner worlds!
"Destroying inner worlds is a felony, son."
Roach gave her partner a look.
"Hey buddy," she tried. "Can you hear me?"
Officer Wendy Roach was almost as wide as she was tall, with thick legs, brawny shoulders, and a lush blonde mustache. Eyes and skin so light, she verged on albino, whitish curls brushing the back of her neck.
Her partner was an NPC with a crew cut. A fratboy who'd found his true brothers when he pinned on that badge. He was everything that was wrong with the force. But he still wasn't as bad as the new blood.
The kid in the cart had quit declaiming in the epic mode, but kept his skinny arms outstretched. Resplendently naked, a forest of hair, skin the same shade at the forearm and the upper thigh. He'd turned his head with dinosaur slowness to regard them. He peered down his nose.
"Son," Roach said again. "You realize you're naked in a public place?"
No sign of recognition in those bloodshot amber eyes. He studied them like specimens. Arms still outstretched.
Her partner barked at him. "Get down and put clothes on before a child sees you, pervert."
The kid cocked his head.
"I'm not naked," he said, utterly sincere. "I'm Diogenes."
"That's it." Her partner stepped forward. It was clear what he meant to do. Roach moved at the same time as the kid. She grabbed her partner's arm as Max leapt from the cart. But a shopping cart's no lily pad. The cart went one way and Max went the other. Roach and her partner watched together as Max landed chest-first in the grass. The cart teetered on two wheels, then fell on its side with a crash.
They heard the wind go out of him. "Oof." Heard that vicious gasping for breath. Her partner snorted, shook his head. Roach let go his arm, and approached.
"Hey, you okay?" The kid rolled groaning in the green.
"You think this is funny?"
Her partner did. He was laughing. Roach shook her head though.
"I just want to make sure you're okay."
"I'm fine," he said, indignance in every word. "Now, can I help you with something? You interrupted my speech, knocked over my cart, and trespassed my sunbeam."
Dark circles beneath his eyes. Lips chapped, cracked in some places. Skin greased with the sediment of unwashed sweats. College age. Roach felt this one was probably all bark.
"Get a blanket," she said over her shoulder. Her partner had been looking off across the lot towards the park.
"Huh?"
"From the cruiser." He took his time. Roach crouched before the kid, who sat up and studied her, sitting cross-legged on the patch of grass beside the palm tree in the parking lot of the former Denny's.
"Did you take anything, smoke anything, snort anything?"
A faraway look in the kid's eye. "If only it were that simple."
"Either you did or you didn't," Roach said.
"Everyone I know is dead," Max said. "It's starting to feel like peer pressure." Roach didn't know what to say to that.
"Here," her partner said, returning from the cruiser with a crinkly astronaut blanket. He tore the plastic and unfolded the sheet like giant tinfoil and approached Max.
"Put this on," Roach told him. "We can't have you naked."
He looked more like a victim than a perp, sitting there on the ground beside his cart with the silver blanket around him. Roach crouched before him, while her partner stood watching something interesting across the street. He'd have something to say, back at the station—to everyone but her, of course. She had a reputation by now at the precinct, as bad as any gangtser's. Worse, perhaps, because hers wasn't for being hard, but rather for being soft.
"Do you remember anything?" she was asking, as Max gave her that suspicious look.
"They were already wheeling her out on the gurney by the time I got there," he said, like she knew what he was talking about.
"Who?" she said. "What gurney?"
"Sarah," the kid said.
A pause. The wind stirred the fronds of the palm tree above. Shaping up to be a gorgeous day. A pastel sky in baby blue under a lacy bonnet of cloud. The bustle of the city could almost seem innocent, LA as a picturebook town. But children's books do not show lunatics, least of all like this one, without a tinfoil hat but instead with a whole tinfoil robe.
"Was Sarah your girlfriend?" Roach imagined some fentanyl waif with good bone structure and bad skin, blue on the stretcher with vomit chunks on her chin and this boy crying over her, before launching on the bender that brought him to this place.
"My mom," the kid said. Wendy Roach's eyebrows went up.
"When did this happen?"
"Seven, six, eight years ago." He shrugged. Something childlike in the gesture. He seemed even younger than before.
"That's a long time to be on a binge."
A heavy sigh behind her. Roach ignored her partner. Focused on the kid. He laughed, a joyless sound.
"Yeah," he said smiling, also without mirth, "I guess I never thought of it like that."
"What about more recently? Last night?"
"What are you talking about?" He blinked, seemed to see her for the first time. "You're a cop," he realized.
Roach smiled. Did her best to defuse the tension she saw tightening his shoulders. "It's alright," she said. "I'm not here to get you in trouble. I want to help if I can."
But the kid was shaking his head. She could feel it. She was losing him. What had he thought she was?
"I don't answer questions and I don't consent to searches. Am I being detained—"
"Honey," Roach said, trying to be a fellow human, "that's not what this is."
"You can lie to me, but I can't lie to you? Who in their right mind would play a game like that? I'm not telling you shit about fuck."
"I'm not playing games," Roach said. She wanted to say so much more. Wanted to pour it all out to him, yes even with her partner right there. Her frustration with all this. "I'm on your side," she tried.
"You don't plead with lunatics," her partner said. He still stood cross-armed guard of nothing, facing the other way. He'd tossed the comment over his shoulder like a grenade.
Roach looked up, but he was already turning away. Coward. She turned away herself, though only to get back to the kid.
"What's your name?" she said.
"Theodore Kaczynski," he said without missing a beat. Roach frowned.
"That sounds familiar. Are you an actor or something?"
"Call me Ted," he said. He gave a nasty laugh.
"Ted Kaczynski was a terrorist from the 80s," her partner said. He snorted laughter as he turned back around to study passing traffic. "An actor." He shook his head.
Roach sent beams of silent hatred at his back.
"If you don't want me to lie to you," she told the kid, "then please don't lie to me."
He watched her like the mouse watches the hawk. She wished she could make him not be afraid of her. Could make him accept her help. It was enough to make her angry. But she let the anger pass, let it roll over her like a wave, just as she'd been taught. And the technique worked, and she was calm again, and she could do her job once more.
"My name is Max," he said.
"What happened to you, Max?" She spoke very quietly. The passing traffic almost obscured her words. "How did you end up here?" She tried her best to put vulnerability in her voice. But it's hard to be vulnerable in a badge and a bulletproof vest. You might say that was how she'd ended up wearing them in the first place. But right now wasn't about her. It felt good to help someone else. Even someone who assumed she was his enemy.
He took his time in answering. Studied her a while before he did.
"I don't... totally remember," he said.
"That's okay." She closed her mouth and chided herself. Let him speak.
"I took... something." Roach was nodding. As she'd suspected. "I took something, and I went somewhere, and..." He trailed off, thinking, looking not at her but past her, seeing not even the traffic or the apartment buildings across the street, but something or somewhere beyond. Perhaps beyond this world. Whatever it was, it pained him deeply. "I saw something."
Roach thought she heard acrid laughter behind her. She just ignored it this time.
"What did you take?" she said.
"Molly," he said. "A couple other things."
"Do you remember what else?"
"I remember I saw my mother. She was in the water in the pool. Not like she was swimming, but like the pool was a mirror or a screen. She didn't have bruises or cuts anymore. But it was just the shade of her. And she told me things, and I think if they're true then maybe I can be at peace. But I still don't know. I just don't know." He looked at her now, with full intensity, and Roach almost fell back on her butt, his gaze had so much force. He seemed to be asking her, to be pleading with her now. To answer him. Explain to him.
"I don't know either," Roach said. He couldn't have guessed how deeply she meant it. "Nothing much at all anymore."
"Can we wrap this up? I retire in fifteen and I wanna do a little policework before then."
Roach didn't even twitch. She certainly didn't look at her partner. Inwardly, though, she made a decision. You might even say her soul spoke. And what uncomfortable things it always seems to say.
"Listen, Max," she said, with finality in her voice, "let me take you somewhere safe, okay?"
His eyes widened deerlike and he actually started to emerge from his silver blanket.
"No," Roach said, surprising herself too. "Not jail. I promise. On my honor as a human being." She started to say 'my honor as a woman,' but changed her mind.
His eyes narrowed. Suspicion, deeper now, returned.
"Where, then?" he said. Roach held back a smile. If he was asking questions, he must be in the mood to listen to answers.
"A nice place," she said. But that felt stupid and wrong. "Okay, fine," she said, "I'll just tell you the truth. My partner probably thinks we should just arrest you. But I think we should call a SMART team and have a social worker talk to you. I think they'll agree with me that the right thing for you is a 5150, and a couple days in a... place... for your head to clear up. There will be people you can talk to there. You can tell them about Sarah and they can help you. Way better than I can."
The blanket moved. One hand emerged from the blanket to scratch at his neck. He cocked his head but his eyes never left her. He frowned. He seemed to consider.
"Guess I don't have much of a choice," he said.
"I just want to help you," Roach said. "We can't just leave you here."
"Why not?" he started to say, but caught himself and stopped. He shook his head, more angry at himself than her. "Should've fucking known," he said. And this time he did shut down.
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