Starting Over: The Village of Los Angeles

Prologue

Before the Pandemic

No one saw it coming and no one believed what it was doing when it did. But I, Drake Hutchins, bearing witness to what happened, am writing this so that everyone will know what my partner, Derek Jones, and I did to try to create some sort of a new beginning from the wreckage of the old world.

But first, let me begin with how it all started… Who we were before. Our fathers were unlikely roommates in their freshman year at California State-Long Beach when they were assigned to the dorm to share a room and began their college studies in STEM, science, technology, engineering and math. My dad, Cal, for Calvin, Hutchins grew up in the Central Valley and wanted to go to school near the coast so that he could surf. Cal's father was a small farmer who grew various crops according to the season to market. He had a few small stands of fruit and nut trees. All suffering from various crop diseases and the occasional drought. It was hard to keep ahead of large landowners trying to buy him out.

Derek was from Watts, but received scholarships and a Pell grant for his studies as he worked hard with his father, Josh, for Joshua, Jones, an apartment manager for a slumlord. Both of our fathers were no strangers to hard work and making do when they met that day in their room. They introduced themselves, and almost immediately, developed mutual admiration as they started going to classes and competing with each other for grades in classes they shared. To save money, both were soon rooming together off-campus with other students and each had jobs to help pay the rent and for their schooling.

Upon graduation, my dad was hired by an Internet startup and found himself deeply involved in creating a commercial website for what the company was attempting to do, hoping to becoming one of the leading brands in the brave new world of Internet business, evolving at lightning speed. Dad had nearly burned out in 2001, desperately coding 24/7 when the Internet imploded, the company failed and Cal Hutchins, along with many others in the cyber industry, was jobless with few savings.

Likewise, Josh had fared better, joining one of the infrastructure companies creating the Internet on a heady ride with stock options that involved getting out into the community and installing the company's equipment, getting the Internet into every home in the greater LA area.

Proud to be able to even provide Internet services to Watts where he grew up. A bit worried the drug dealers would soon find the Internet helpful in doing their business. Josh also hoped that it would help young people with their schooling. He had been bussed away from the very beginning because he tested high on IQ tests.

When nothing else came up in a market crowded with unemployed Internet engineers, Cal turned to a maintenance job for a large apartment complex to make do. Learning as he went about his various tasks, he hatched a plan to start his own maintenance and construction company. He rented an abandoned warehouse space and mounted a shingle, Hutchins Construction and Maintenance. Created his own website for the business and soon found himself bidding jobs big and small, growing to the point where he had to hire workers. Finding many from south of the border eager to work for low pay in the city maintained labor locations. Many of these men had good skills already learned. Soon, he also needed management help supervising crews.

In 2003, Josh's company reorganized and he was out. He thought about a lawsuit for a while, but after talking to a couple of attorneys, thought otherwise. He had been in touch with Cal all along and when Cal heard, he made an offer to Josh. "I need to expand, and I need someone to help me manage all this work. If you throw in your savings and your severance, I can make you an equal partner and we can expand our operation here."

Josh thought for a minute, and replied, "That sounds like an offer I can't refuse. When can we draw up the paperwork?"

"Anytime you like. Let's meet for dinner at 8 pm at Sand Pier in Venice. And then, tomorrow morning at 9 am, we can meet with my lawyer to make sure that the paperwork is correct and legal."

They soon were doing contract maintenance work for some buildings and remodeling others. The company was growing. Dad married Julie Hughes, who he dated in high school. When he found her by accident working in LA at a company he had a contract with. They began dating again. Soon, he hired her to work for the company and the rest was history. I was born in 2014, four years after my older sister, Erica, who looked after me like I was her child.

Josh married a schoolteacher, Sharonda Wilkes, while he was at the Internet company, but they held off having children with their busy lives. It wasn't until Sharonda quit teaching that they started to have children: Derek in 2014 and Angel in 2016. Once the kids were in daycare, she started working with Josh and Cal's company, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When the mortgage debacle happened in 2008, many properties came on the foreclosure auction market at reasonable prices. Cal and Josh jumped in and started buying houses and flipping them. It wasn't long before the Construction and Housing Network, CHTV, spotted them asking to create a TV series.

With the producers' help they came up with the title, Cool Flips. With as much as 30% profit on each flip and projects taking as little as three months to complete, the two entrepreneurs were making big money and getting national attention because of their TV show. Bringing their wives into the show made it even more popular. When Derek and I came along, that popularity grew with our antics on the show.

Two of the houses they flipped were on Pacific View Drive in Malibu. The street followed a curving cliff three miles from the Pacific, overlooking it far below. The properties were built in the 1920s for movie moguls with high wall enclosures of two acres that had fallen into disrepair with age. There was one property between the two and all three of them were about the same size.

First, Cal, and then, Josh, bought the properties to renovate. And then, they completed the year-long task of restoring them to their former glory while working on other projects at the same time. Both homes retained the original California Spanish design with the latest conveniences: large vegetable gardens, infinity pools with diving boards, adjoining hot pools, barbecue patios and fire pits for outdoor living in the large, very private, backyards.

As a result, both of us were born into luxury and the California lifestyle only because of the hard work and perseverance of our parents. From day care through high school we were inseparable, often called the D Brothers by classmates. At an early age, shown off with our sisters on the TV show and helping out with our fathers' work by the time we were 10.

One time when I was working on layouts for one of the buildings we were renovating on my smart pad, dad took me aside and told me, "Enough of that, we have a punch list to do tomorrow and I want you to go along with me and start learning how to write with a pencil on paper. You'll never know when it may actually come in handy."

Oh, how those words come back to me as I write this with pencil on paper! As though he were visionary and looking over my shoulder right now. The next day, dad showed up with a clipboard, paper and a pencil. He gave it to me and had me write, awkwardly, what he keyed on his notepad inspection form, as we systematically inspected the building looking for things that needed to be corrected or replaced before releasing the project for sale. He showed me both architectural lettering and cursive writing that he used in high school and college. Methods of writing that weren't being taught in our school.

I was so awkward trying to write with a pencil, that dad insisted, for a month, that I go over to aunt Sharonda's, as I affectionately called Derek's mother, in the evening after dinner. She then spent an hour with both of us helping us learn both cursive and architectural writing and lettering. We both took to drawing easier with a pencil because we had been doing it all along with our fingers on our touch screens. I was even quite good with a stylus for more precise work. It was refreshing to leave our busy Internet and social lives to learn older ways of doing things.

But the D Brothers were not just all work and study with no play. We surfed, spent time in the Sierras, both in summer at our cabin and winter skiing. Dad took us to grandpa's to hunt quail in the Central Valley in season. We did rock climbing, skateboarding, parasailing, parasurfing and other wild activities. When we were 16, we both acquired electric sport cars that, fortunately, had enough built-in AI safety features to keep us from wrecking them when we got a little too reckless, sometimes racing each other through the hills. And we traveled, first to Hawaii, and then at least once a year, off to some other country for a week or two--an education in itself. Girlfriends came and went. We were carefree, loving life.

But not always… Getting ahead of myself, again. In April, 2020, when we were only six years old, our private school was closed and we were forced to stay home while dad and uncle Josh shut down their construction company for a few months.

But we were often together at home until it was okay to go back out in public. Dad insisted that we all get vaccinated, but Derek and I couldn't get ours until late in 2021. We all got some form of Covid-19 in 2022, but by that time dad's business was taking off again.

Our illnesses were brief with few symptoms and nothing lingering. Our families were lucky. Some of our classmates lost loved ones. At my age, I heard that there was a lot of political discord that I didn't fully understand at the time. Some of the kids we knew went through divorce. We knew nothing of that, either.

Congress passed a huge infrastructure bill to get the economy changing from fossil fuels to more efficient ways of providing energy for all of the luxuries that we enjoyed and people missed during the pandemic. That huge expenditure kicked off what would be called later as the "Roaring 20s of the 21st century." A period of unprecedented growth of the United States economy, often disrupted by a rapidly changing climate. Bringing both drought and floods to California and destructive storms throughout much of the country. The seashores were rapidly eroding and the ocean began to eat away at shorelines everywhere in North America and the rest of the world.

The urgency to change became a new war on the environment. Young people like us in high school knew that we would have to change the whole way we were living. Even though Derek and I already living it because we were so wealthy and so many others weren't.

Uncle Josh often reminded us about his upbringing in Watts and the terrible riots back there in 1969 before he was born but still bore the scars. "Protest like that with all that burning and looting doesn't solve our problems, it makes them worse. We have a lot of rebuilding and repair to do."

We had solar arrays on our rooftops that made enough electricity giving us a surplus that was sent back to the electric company. Dad showed me the check that he got each month. We had a 10 foot-high concrete block wall around the property from the front to the back that was covered with stucco and overgrown with colorful bougainvillea blooming nearly round. Mom kept our large garden full of fresh fruit and vegetables nearly year-round, too.

Behind the house was our very large pool where we had many parties with neighbors, friends, clients and classmates. Beyond that our property dropped off like a cliff that was crumbling a bit so there was no need for a wall. The original wall hung out over space about 5 feet because of the back of the property gradually eroding away with every earthquake and rainy season.

We often hang glided and repelled from there, sometimes causing our neighbors below distress when we landed in their backyards and apologized for the intrusion. Hang gliding took us all the way to the beach. Where our sisters or friends would drive down and pick us up to take us home for another flight if we wanted to.

Fortunately, most of the property was solidly steel piered in bedrock and only that edge was dangerous. Dad built a fence and rail there so that anyone visiting would not get too close to that precipice and accidentally fall off. We also had a fence around the pool to prevent small children from drowning there.

Dad also put in a large ceramic cistern to provide water for the garden. During the rainy season with its gully washers, the cistern would fill up and provide water throughout the nine months of nearly no rain, just a little mist off the ocean from time to time with the fog.

But it was much cooler there than LA with always having a sea breeze in summer. While in winter, huge windows to the south sunroom provided heat for the rest of the house even when it was quite cold by an ingenious duct system bringing the heat from the top of that huge room to the rest of the house.

Derek had lined up studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I was going to USC as we approached our high school graduation. It was a time of joy graduating from our private high school together and a sober thought of being separated while going to college.

But fate would enter in and everything changed.

Copyright 2023 © Ronald W. Hull

2/4/23