A City Owned

This story begins in a vast and pulsing metropolis, the central districts of which are today noted for cleanliness, even blandness. It is a world of high-rise glass and steel, of functional if dull design. With its collection of music stores, the Rock Walk featuring concrete handprints of rock 'n' roll luminaries, and the historic Sunset Grill made famous by the Don Henley song of the same name, it presents a thoroughly digestible version of hip to the many tourists who flock to the city every year. The principle attractions are dining, shopping and scanning the surrounds for a celebrity or a dog in a tote bag. Nobody worries about visiting at night. It does not have time for crime, or squalor. This is no stomping ground for the marginal and deviant. Those folk have mostly moved on—to somewhere, anywhere, some other place; it doesn't matter.
Twenty odd years ago, Hugh Grant was very publicly arrested after receiving a blowjob from streetwalker Divine Brown in the front of his BMW. That was just before the big clean-up: large swathes of Hollywood were commercialized and purged of “undesirables”. But native Los Angelenos who have lived in the city their whole lives will tell you the late seventies and eighties gave us Hollywood at its grotty worst.
Back then, the entire stretch of Sunset between Gardner and Western Avenue was a teeming sexual marketplace. Hollywood's east side thronged with pushers, panderers, bums and runaways. A porn cinema stood on the site of every old theatre. The detritus of the failed counterculture, drug casualties in bandannas and flared denim, migrated south from Haight Ashbury, their ideals dying gracelessly in the salty marinade of sex and drugs for profit. It was an interstitial time and place; the glamor and the production houses had gone elsewhere, the future and its juggernaut of cleansing commercial interests had not yet arrived, and in the empty space garbage collected in a steamy pile.
Hollywood circa 1977, when this story begins, was home of the desperate and damned. Any night or day of the week, cars would cruise the Boulevard, just slow enough for their occupants to size up the human wares lining the grubby pavements. The war between the cops and prostitutes simmered night after night, occasionally boiling over, then cooling off again. Right next to the Rocky and Bullwinkle statue on Sunset the city line dividing West Hollywood from the City of Los Angeles runs right through the strip. If a Hollywood cop car passed through, the women would move over to the West Hollywood side; if it was a sheriff's car they saw, they would move to the LA side. Most women preferred that side. The sheriffs were known to line the girls up against their vehicles and have them place their hands on the hood, then rap them over the knuckles with their metal flashlights.
Hollywood girls made dodging the cops into an art form. Most knew, for instance, that vice officers had Sunday and Monday off, so those were good nights to work. Some were known to call in at the station and if there was no answer, out they went on the job.
Sometimes though, no matter how clever you were, what precautions you took, you were going to get got.
The cops could go undercover, and pretend to be johns offering a job. Then, to make matters more confusing, civilian men posing as undercover police officers was oddly not an unusual situation.