After the Collapse of the Soviet Union

In those days, Aids, was starting to take a terrible toll in West Hollywood

Few effective medicines to hold the wildly plundering and runaway beast, at bay

A good friend of one my girlfriends, at that time, had succumbed to the horrific disease

At first, the bus was filled with African-Americans and with Latinos either going to work

Or on their way home from their backbreaking and poorly-paying jobs weighing down

the endless dirty old, hot busses, in an increasingly political economically crisis-ridden LaLaland

Often, there would be great tension, on these exhausted busses slowly limping down Vermont Ave.

Heated arguments or even fights would break out especially among the young passengers

Sometimes, the LAPD, had to be called by the tired bus driver to keep a handle on the situation

You see, in LA, there was a slowly growing racist anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican backlash

nastily brewing and beginning to spread like a cancer in the community, at large

Often subtlety aided by newspaper reports and television reports about growing black and brown

gang warfare with little or no focus on the reasons why this was happening while

On many of those very same tense busses, only now heading full speed, down Santa Monica Blvd.

A remarkable change was taking place in certain parts of West Hollywood

Ever more young and older Russian immigrants were taking their places on the busses in 1992

And, starting to move into West Hollywood, filling the growing void being created there by Aids

With new Russian shops and stores with all kinds of Russian goods opening up

Young and older Russians immigrants had also already started coming to the United States, to flee

the brutally continuing societal and economic collapse, in the brutal wake of the dying, and

ultimately of the dead Soviet Union in late 1991

These Russian immigrants, who just like the Mexicans and the Central Americans, had come

to the U.S., in search of their little piece of the widely-celebrated North American Dream

Interestingly, while the rumblings continued to increase concerning the incoming ambitious

Mexican workers, whom everyone, gladly employed, in order to make their gardens look good or

to paint their houses or even to look after their small kids

Nothing much, was ever said, about the also massively inflowing Russian immigrants at that time

Into a golden state that was ever more becoming Latin American and Asian each and everyday

In the land of make-believe and the home of the brave, which had been arrogantly set up, in the

midst of the very beautiful Native American land, as proudly “a white man’s country” only

Oooooh, those often unknown and dangerous infections, of the violent colonizing past in the West

Still very much deadly alive

In the nasty exhaust, of the MTA-busses*, constantly riding everywhere into the increasingly

changing multicultural, transforming multi-ethnic, and also into the restlessly

and the ever more paranoid-multilingual Californian paradise.

©Gregory Gilbert Gumbs

*MTA—Metropolitan Transport Authority.