HOLLYWOOD — People book my tour picturing a Hollywood that was never quite real, and most of my job, quietly, is walking them toward a better one before the two hours are up.

I have guided groups on and around the Boulevard for nine years, on foot, rain or shine, which here means shine. They come from Osaka and Stuttgart, and just as often from Bakersfield an hour up the road. They arrive holding the same picture in their heads, stitched together from a hundred movies, all klieg lights and limousines. Then they step onto the actual sidewalk, and I watch the picture wobble. The brass stars are scuffed and gummed. A man sweating inside a superhero costume is negotiating a photo fee. It is ninety-one degrees, and someone always asks, with real hope, when the celebrities come out.

I used to correct them fast. I have learned not to. If a woman wants to believe a star might stroll past, I let her hold that for a block. What I do instead is start pointing at the things that are actually there. The costume shop that has rented capes and crinolines to three generations of one family. The lunch counter where the waitress has worked since the first Bush and can tell you which stool a director sat on to sketch a scene on a napkin. The tailor who still chalks hems in a window the width of a door. None of it is on their list. All of it is why I keep the job.

The most common question is where the stars live, and the honest answer — that they live behind gates I cannot show you, in canyons the vans idle outside of as if that means something — always disappoints. So I answer the question under the question. You came a long way to stand where the movies come from, I tell them, and here is what that looks like up close: a working neighborhood that happens to manufacture the world’s daydreams and still has to get its trash collected on Tuesday.

We finish at a spot with a clean line to the sign. I have watched thousands of people see it in person for the first time, and it is the same every time. They go quiet. The letters are smaller than they imagined and farther away, sitting on that brown hill like laundry pinned to a ridge, and something about the modesty of it lands harder than any grandeur would have. A boy from Manchester told me last spring it looked “brave, being up there all alone.” I have not improved on that.

They tip me and thank me and head off to buy a keychain, and I straighten my hat for the next group gathering at the meeting spot. I did not give them the Hollywood on the postcard. I gave them the one you can only reach by walking it slowly beside somebody who loves it, and not once has a person turned around at the end and asked me for the postcard back.