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I love LA — but I’m working twice as hard for half as much 

People love to trash talk Los Angeles and California, but I LOVE IT HERE. I’m committed! I even married it.

That’s right, I’ve never married a man, but I took my city’s name and officially became Liz Angeles.

I’m committed to staying warm, staying in shape, and staying broke!

I’ve run a luxury massage business for 37 years, but lately I’m working twice as hard for half the money.

As a California-bred, Sonoma County-raised kid, I was sent to live with my blackjack-dealing mother in Vegas because, well, I was a teen living with my dad and two brothers. Enough said.

Because I finished high school in Sin City, we couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition, so UNLV in the ’80s it was; ALL of the ’80s.

And what a time indeed. Slinging cocktails and cigarettes was my obligatory demise.

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In my mid-20s, I managed to escape in 1989 with $30, and relocated to Hollywood to act.

After two years, I was severely discouraged by the predatory nature of the industry — one that, as Patrick Swayze said, “is bound and determined to turn you into a whore.”

Well, if “happy endings” were my jam, I would have stayed in Vegas and made that part of my massage practice. But — eww!

I was always a scrapper. I had started my own typing service in college. So in LA, I did whatever jobs I could find. I became a court reporter, a realtor, a waitress, a salesperson, and a feng shui practitioner. I did it all; always a hustler.

Eventually, I put my massage skills to work, and founded Just What You Knead.

I relocated to Santa Monica — for the ocean breeze, the flowers, the trees, the health food, and the yoga, where I could be creative and enjoy my life.

My massage practice that took off, growing exponentially, so that I had to bring on other highly-seasoned practitioners to join me. It got so big that I had to open another studio in 2022.

But with the economic roller-coaster after the pandemic, I had to close that second studio.

Now that we are suffering from the loss of residents from the Palisades Fire nearby, business is slower than it’s ever been.

And since relocating to LA, my rent has gone up 1,000%. The price of a massage has not!

I cannot compete with the very cheap massage establishments on the street that exploit the immigrant workforce.

People expect so much for so little.

What we do is very strenuous, and most people don’t last 37 years in this business, as I have.

I thrive on pampering and spoiling people, but because I’m a self-employed single mother in Santa Monica, the hustle continues!

I can’t afford vacations, ever, but I stay here because my daughter is in a great school district in Santa Monica. My business has taken such a hit that I have to take my massage chair to the park to drum up work.

I don’t know what I would do without my community of amazing natural healers and practitioners. We often heal each other.

I’m still hustling and doing random jobs. Just recently, I got paid to scream for a short horror film, “Killer Revenge,” written and directed by Jasmine Davis.

I also got paid to create a postcard for my friend Denise Young, who founded the California chapter of the Children’s Health Defense, and who worked alongside RFK Jr. She is now working on trying to promote regenerative farming, a technique that should replace our current crops of dangerous foods.

I’m so grateful to my clients, who have always put me No. 1 on Yelp or Google.

But now that I don’t pay to advertise there, it’s crickets.

So many of us can’t afford much of anything right now, including enjoying our beaches or parks, because work and survival are paramount.

So I’m back to hustling. I’m taking comedy classes. We’re learning to do crowd work. We are told to make fun of the people in the audience.

Since that’s so against my nature, I pretend those people are the politicians who got us into this mess.

Liz Angeles is a massage therapist who runs the top-rated Just What You Knead in Santa Monica.

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