‘I Am Everyone I Meet’ -- an L.A. story

I Am Everyone I Meet

Random Encounters on

the Streets of Los Angeles

James P. White

Tabloid Books: 134 pp. paper

Growing up in New York City, we were taught not to look people in the eye -- they would certainly follow you home and murder you. Mothers the world over teach their children the same sad lesson.

In this collection of brief encounters with strangers on the streets of Los Angeles, James P. White proves the poverty of that legacy. He talks with people at bus stops, in lines, over counters. He talks with homeless people, elderly people, travelers and the urban overwrought: “Seeing the world as filled with strangers who threaten us or seeing it as filled with other people who are like us and who interest us, makes a difference.”

White is surprised by the extent to which his life is deepened, enriched, vivified by these experiences: “This book is about approaching part of my life by meeting and listening to strangers tell about their lives. It is about their lives touching mine, and mine touching theirs, so that their stories become something important for me to learn about.”

Not everyone is delighted to talk with White, but most are. When he is moved by something, it often resonates with his own past -- like the son holding his father’s hand on the bus. “I did not know my father,” he writes.

Many are homeless, but some are wealthy. He talks to a stockbroker at a deli in Beverly Hills and notices that “years ago almost anyone I told that I was a writer would ask the name of my books. Today everyone tells me about a plot idea they have for writing their book.” He wonders why the salesperson in the trendy shop is so rude.

The people White talks to, because it is Los Angeles, come from all over the world. This makes the vignettes even more fascinating -- the cab driver from Moscow who is the first person White has ever met who is nostalgic for communism, the Latino man who has learned Japanese while working in a Japanese restaurant, the Arab who lived in Israel and proudly calls himself an Israeli Jew. “It is not so unusual,” he tells White. Not unusual but astounding, and fascinating. There is the young man who looks so much like Jesus -- White learns that it can be an annoying burden to look like Jesus. Why wouldn’t anyone want to look like Jesus? White wonders. “Why does this man have that face?”

Some of the encounters contain dialogue, some conjecture. White approaches strangers with humor and respect and a side-by-sideness that leads at least one homeless man to give White his list of places to get free meals in Santa Monica. Often, White takes the steam out of hostile encounters; like a middle child, he offers explanations to antagonists.

White has an instinct for gentleness. A homeless man on a bus shows him the contents of his bag. He wonders about things, about people’s lives. He is interested. This interest has a different quality than caring or wanting things to be different.

White set out years ago to write a spiritual history of Los Angeles. Not long into the project he realized “just how easily it could fail under its own weight.” So he wrote this book instead. Something similar in many ways, but different.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com