WE LEFT SOMEONE ELSE’S house — a screenwriter’s house, to be exact, one of those dream-weavers whose dreams had run out of ink — and headed home with a dining table and two stories in tow. It was just past 10 p.m., and I didn’t feel like threading the needle of Los Angeles freeways or the usual northern artery of surface streets.
So I took us another way. A strange way. A way that felt like falling into a parallel city I’d never known, even though I'd once worked downtown, when the buildings still had names and the corners still held people.
We rolled through an industrial park — empty warehouses standing like tired old gods — until we slipped quietly into the eastern edge of Chinatown. That’s when we saw the glowing sign: Philippe’s. The same Philippe’s that claims the invention of the French dip sandwich.
I’d eaten there before, decades ago, back when LA still believed in a certain kind of hustle. Now, the place looked more like a relic from a forgotten New York borough — a luncheonette caught between lunch and memory.
We ordered two of their famed roast beef dips and a couple of sodas. The bill was almost $60. I nearly choked on the irony. Philippe’s, once the people’s palace of meat and mustard, now rivaled Nobu in price per ounce. Arby’s might not have the mystique, but you won’t need a credit check to dine there. Still, we ate. Because memory has a taste, and sometimes you pay extra just to bite into the past.
But it was what came after dinner that wrote itself into my bloodstream.
Downtown Los Angeles. Deserted. Deserted like a city evacuated, like something left behind when the last train out of Blade Runner pulled away from the neon curb. Where were the people? The cafes, the noise, the nightclub lights? Downtown has added thousands of upscale housing units since the ‘90s — artists’ lofts, high-rises, urban farm rooftops. Yet here it was, a hollow canyon of glass and trash.
There were food trucks still out — lonely taco vendors with no customers, lit up like shrines on dead-end streets. And the homeless... they were everywhere. Fires burned in rusted barrels, like flickers of some prehistoric defiance. The air was cold, strange for summer, the kind of cold that makes your bones remember you’re temporary.
At times, I had to pull over for emergency vehicles, sirens cutting through the silence like broken glass. And as I watched the lights fade behind me, I realized we weren’t driving through a city — we were driving through a condition.
And I thought: This is where you go to become more human than human.
That line, from Blade Runner. That aching promise from a future gone sideways. Because isn’t that what L.A. always was? A place that tried to outdream humanity. A city of illusions so luminous they became real — until they didn’t.
Now, there are no flying cars overhead, no cyberpunk symphony playing. Just silence. Trash-strewn sidewalks. Flames in barrels. Empty apartment windows glowing like fish tanks with no fish inside. It didn’t feel like post-apocalypse. It felt like pre-something. Pre-reckoning. Pre-renewal. A city holding its breath.
I don’t know what to make of it, really. I just know we drove through a part of Los Angeles that night that I never expected to meet — and I don’t think it’ll let me go.
The silence was the strangest part of all.
It wasn’t just the absence of traffic or the lull of late-night footsteps. It was a total silence, like the hush before the talkies — back when you could watch a man’s heart break on a flickering screen and hear nothing but your own breathing.
Downtown L.A., at that hour, felt like one of those silent films, looping in slow motion. You could almost hear the whispers of a great past rustling against alley walls. Ghosts of jazz clubs, perfume counters, first kisses, broken promises. All of it reduced now to echo and steam.
Somewhere in that stillness, I could almost imagine a voice — not the old one saying, “Go West, young man” — that dream expired with the Pacific. No, this was different.
“Go to Mars, aging man. Go to Mars.” As if the city itself had given up, tired of the weight of its own reinvention, and was urging its last dreamers to leave, to start again in a world without trash fires or French dips or broken dreams painted in neon.
I stayed behind the wheel. I wasn’t ready for Mars. Not yet.
But I could feel the pull.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly.org. He is the author of nine books, including his new debut novel, THE BOOK OF MARILYN. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
