Salvation Canyon. Ed Rosenthal

      I.

      THREE MEN HELD a massive desk just outside my office. I stepped aside as they hoisted it through the doorway, carried it to the corner, and placed its plain oak top just under the window ledge.

      “Thank you.” I held the front edge and leaned over the top of the five-by-eight-foot gift from my client.

      The lead man gasped, “Okay,” and I gave them each ten bucks. The last man pulled the yawning door closed. It was a bear of a desk — and it had been a bear of a deal to close. Don Clinton had sent his father’s desk to thank me.

      I pulled open the flat middle drawer and found a crinkled ad from 1932 for a meal at Clifton’s Cafeteria. “Two eggs, bacon, and toast for $.05 cents, coffee included.” I pulled the tarnished handle of the top drawer on the left and found an old wooden contraption with a weight and a balance for measuring, and under this, a pamphlet with a drawing of a clock and bold print across the picture that read, “The clock strikes twelve.”

      I’d been heading out the door and was already late, so I shoved the pamphlet in my pocket and headed out for the press conference through the marble hallway whose mahogany moldings pointed the way to the elevator. The long corridor was strung with lamps from the 1920s, opaque deco glass in sinuous black metal frames. At the polished brass elevators, I pushed the call button.

      In the lobby hung a globe etched with a deco goddess lit from within by a glowing yellow bulb. Through the etched-glass entry doors onto the street, it was a short jaunt to the corner of Fifth and Spring Streets where The Preacher stood, a black man with a bible in his right hand who held forth below the historic cornices and large glass windows. I crossed Spring Street to the Rowan Building and saw, as I did each time, the shadow of the first landlord I dealt with here in Downtown Los Angeles. The vision of him, a bedraggled man in a black raincoat, screamed, “I’m going to kill that mother fucker!”

      Walking these streets, my mind was haunted by memories of people I had dealt with. But the upper levels of the street were inhabited by mythological dreams. The bas relief carved into the granite base of the Stock Exchange Building reflected my own weariness with business. Crafted eighty years earlier by radical immigrant stonemasons, the huge central panel shows a goddess of enterprise with her arms draped around Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. At the old Alexandria Hotel, floral moldings and hour-glass balustrades decorate the roof. Classical statues stand out from the corners of the grand old hotel as the ghost of the old hotel owner barks, “I don’t need any fuckin’ broker to tell me what my place is worth.”

      Crossing Fifth Street, I was disturbed by ghosts of County policy. A decade ago, councilwoman Jan Perry pleaded with deaf Supervisors for homeless facilities. From south and north, now the sidewalks were lined with people opening and closing their bedrolls. A scene that extended deep into the Toy District.

      I stepped over a sleeping woman wrapped in a dirty blanket sprawled across the sidewalk. A