Sam rented a one-bedroom bungalow, near his grandparents, on the precise, if disputed, eastern border between Silver Lake and Echo Park. Originally, he had planned to move out to Venice, to be near the Unfair office, but his recovery had taken longer than he’d expected, and in the end, it had seemed simpler to stay on the Eastside near his grandparents and the hospital, with its many doctors and physical therapists that he was forced to interact with multiple times a week.
One of Sam’s new neighbors—a Popeye-armed woman with a pride flag on her porch and a rotating assortment of rescue pit bulls, always female—had referred to the neighborhood as HaFoSaFo, or Happy Foot Sad Foot, after an advertisement for a podiatrist that spun on the corner of Benton and Sunset, just below their houses. Each side of the sign depicted an anthropomorphized brown foot. “Sad Foot” had a Band-Aid on its big toe, bloodshot eyes, a mouth gaping in pain, crutches, hands and feet. “Happy Foot” was miraculously healed through the power of podiatry: two thumbs up, a manic smile, and the feet of the foot in pristine white high- tops. The sign was suspended high above the parking lot of a Comfort Inn, whose ground floor contained a Thai vegetarian restaurant and the podiatrist in question. The sign pirouetted slowly, making approximately one revolution every twelve seconds. Legend—though perhaps this was too grand a word for a spinning sign over a budget hotel—had it that whichever side of the sign you saw first would determine how the rest of your day went.
For over a year, Sam never encountered anything but Sad Foot. He tried to see the other side: he varied the speed of his approach to the sign; he came upon it, both walking and driving, and from all four cardinal
directions. No matter how he varied his routine, it was Sad Foot every time. It did not take a former Harvard math major to know that this result was statistically unlikely, and he could not help but feel as if the universe was mocking him.
