HOLLYWOOD — My shift starts at four in the morning, and by five the Boulevard belongs to me and my crew and almost nobody else. If you have only seen this street at night, when it is loud and packed, or in the middle of the day behind a tour group, you have not really seen it. The honest hour is the one before anybody is watching.
I have supervised street cleaning on this stretch for eleven years, and I could tell you the night’s story from what it leaves on the sidewalk. Fridays leave glitter that gets into everything and outlives us all. Summer weekends leave one shoe, always one, never the pair. After a premiere there is a tide line of wristbands and press passes. Around the bars near closing there are the things I will not itemize for a family newspaper, and my crew handles them without comment, because that is the job.
The stars take the most care. People imagine the Walk of Fame cleans itself, or that the city sends a machine down it. We wash them by hand and by hose, one brass name at a time, and I have cleaned some of them so often I know which are cracked and which sit low enough to hold a puddle. Chewing gum is the enemy. Spilled coffee is the enemy. We get to the worst of it before the first camera does, which is the whole idea — by nine the Boulevard looks as if the night never happened, and that impression is the product we actually make.
At that hour the street has its own small population. The bakery on the side street has its lights on and its back door open, and the smell of it is a mercy at five in the morning. There is a man who sleeps in the same recessed doorway most nights; we know his name, we work around him, we do not roust him, and on cold mornings one of my guys leaves a coffee where he will find it. A jogger or two. The flower truck, unloading buckets into a shop that will not open for hours. We nod at one another. We are the people who see each other at five.
I will admit there is a pride in it that surprised me when it arrived. Nobody thanks you for a clean sidewalk; a clean sidewalk is invisible, and mine being invisible means I did it right. The complaint only comes when we miss. So I have learned to take the silence as the compliment, and to find the reward in the street itself, empty and swept and briefly perfect before the day gets its hands on it.
The best minute comes near six, when the sun clears the buildings to the east and comes straight down the Boulevard, low and flat, and every wet star we have just washed catches it at once and goes gold for about a minute. Then a bus sighs up to the curb, the first tourists step down onto the clean sidewalk without once looking at it, and I load the crew back into the truck. We have the next block to finish before they reach it too.