Big Dreams (49 page)

When I reached the coast later that night, I understood how it would be for the boy and how wide his blue eyes would grow. San Luis Obispo was a lovely, civilized city. After the ceaseless torpor of the desert, the fog blowing in felt wonderful—wonderful and romantic—and I took deep breaths of the bracing sea air. Streetlights shone on boulevards, revealing store windows filled with books and CDs and smashing clothes, all missing from the Carrizo Plain and the Mojave.

Students from Cal Poly sipped cappuccinos and lattes in cafés, falling in love with ideas and with each other. I became uncommonly aware of words and the many voices around me, an agreeable contrast to the desert’s silence. Freed from the demanding geography of solitude, I began to feel less tired and resolved to spend a couple of days recuperating by the water before finally starting for Los Angeles and the belly of the beast.

A
GURU WAS ON THE AIR
, pitching a new foundation for human potential. I tuned him in by chance while inching slowly south on the San Diego Freeway, my car windows rolled up against a sky that was the color of a cotton swab dipped in iodine. His voice was bitter and chastising, intended to sell the old-fashioned apocalyptic vision of a swinish Los Angeles consumed by flames.

“Man is a fallen being,” he said with relish, as if the vileness of people were a constant source of delight to him. “You’re degraded beings! You’re all sinking into the slime!”

The problem, in the guru’s opinion, was that little demon in our underpants. The demon was responsible for every social ill, every terrible disease.

“If they cure AIDS, you’ll wish you were dead from it!” he cried. “Because there’s something worse in the future!”

Flip the dial.

A news report about the health of Elizabeth Taylor, who’s had nineteen major operations in her life, a record of some kind.

Flip the dial.

Some Flaco Jimenez chicken-skin music, followed by a public-service announcement in what sounded like Urdu.

Flip the dial.

The Dodgers game. Dodgers leading the Braves, four to two in the sixth.

Flip the dial.

Retro rock with Mott The Hoople. A call-in cooking show, where a woman was pleading in distress, “I must get some help with my meatloaf.”

Flip the dial.

A traffic bulletin, the commuter report. An overturned tractor-trailer on Interstate 5. A pickup with an exploded engine on the Santa Monica Freeway. Hollywood Freeway bumper to bumper. Some air-conditioner filters spilled on the Pomona Freeway, and on 405, the San Diego Freeway, a jackknifed big rig clogging the flow.

The traffic guy laughed and said, “That vehicle’s going to have to file for a homestead permit soon!”

I shut off the radio and looked into the cars around me, all those private universes on wheels. The man to my right was reading a
Racing Form
while driving a mint-green ’72 Chevy. The man on my left had a tiny Geo and held a bashed-in door closed with one of his hands. Whenever we took an unanticipated spurt forward, the door flew open, and he grabbed at it like someone chasing a balloon on a string.

The Geo had a bumper sticker, I Luv Mozart.

An antique VW Bug in front of the Geo began to sputter and die. The teenage girl at the wheel banged the dashboard with her fists and wept. Smoke issued from her tailpipe, and the Bug ground to a halt, destined for the graveyard shoulder of the road where other ditched and wounded automobiles were arrayed in darkling failure.

In the midst of the morass, a joyously coked-out pilot in a splendid, reconditioned 1956 Corvette was trying to weave his way to his dealer’s for a drug refueling, racing against the tightly wound clock in his head, a lover of chaos darting from one lane to another and squeezing into spaces where he had less than a micrometer to spare.

Welcome to Los Angeles
, The guru had got it all wrong, of course.
The apocalypse had been and gone, and those of us who were sweltering on the San Diego Freeway or the Pomona Freeway or the Hollywood Freeway or the Santa Monica Freeway were trapped in the world’s first postapocalyptic, postmodern, postliterate city, a place without absolute boundaries that floated freely beyond the grasp of history, parody, and any concerns other than the momentary.

Los Angeles had always told its stories with a limited handful of variables, among them power, fame, money, speed, beauty, and sex. It played itself out in a highly evolved surface kinetics that offered premium amusement to the masses. It was a brutal and ghettoized arena in which self-dramatization was not only tolerated but encouraged. A moral life, a life of commitment, they could be lived elsewhere, in Wichita or in New Paltz.

Los Angeles had always been the source of all enduring California imagery, a foundry where the component parts of the Edenic dream had first been pounded out and manufactured for export, and in the American mind, as well as the global mind—even the Urdu mind, for that matter—it continued to be the preeminent signifier of all that was holy and rotten about the Golden State.

The city was inescapable, an unavoidable condition. Its highs were the highest and its lows were the lowest. It invited you to a party, threw an arm around your shoulder, drew you into a lavish bathroom, gave you a hit of cocaine, stuffed some dollars into your pocket, and asked if it were really true that you had no strange desires or perverse cravings. It pressed your nose to the candystore window and coaxed you into admitting that you wanted things.

Los Angeles laughed in the face of virtue. It did not go in for unalloyed feelings. It stared you down and forced you to both love it and hate it. It was about fire and being consumed by the fire and living and dying in the fire.

I joined the single-lane queue of drivers skirting the jackknifed big rig and realized by the sudden nearness of the ocean that I was on the threshold of a definitive Los Angeles experience, the one in which the grossness of a desecrated landscape does an instantaneous
flip-flop, turns breathtaking, and makes you believe that nothing is as bad as you thought it was a moment ago.

In Santa Monica, where I left the freeway, the weight of the turgid air seemed to lift. I could see the Pacific and a line of gentle breakers foaming across a beach. There were billowy palm trees like those I used to covet as a child in New York. Flowering bougainvillea vines trailed over balconies, and seagulls of an unsullied whiteness winged about them.

On the green palisades, some joggers were running their afternoon laps through an obstacle course of shopping carts and rag bundles that constituted a large encampment of the homeless. Here by the sea, in an environment of unwithered promise, the homeless did not look quite as desperate or as destroyed. Instead, they had a weird sort of vigor, as if they had come to terms with their burden and had decided that if they were going to be poor and hungry, Santa Monica was the paradise in which to do it.

O, California! Two blocks up from the beach, in a quiet neighborhood of stucco houses, was the Sovereign Hotel, soon to be my home away from home.

Built in 1928 and designed by Julia Morgan, the architect of William Randolph Hearst’s Castle, the Sovereign had a casual elegance. It was part Mediterranean villa and part Spanish mission, all white stucco, arched windows, and red-and-white striped awnings. It had once been a fashionable place to lodge, but now it catered to Asian and European tourists on a budget, and to screenwriters performing patch jobs on slasher pictures or waiting in limbo for a meeting with a studio executive that kept being postponed.

At some point in time, the Sovereign had rented out its rooms as apartments, so for a bargain price you could have a suite with a sitting room and a kitchen. Sometimes the suite even had a view of the ocean. A continental breakfast was provided, too, and served in a nook off the Art Deco lobby, where guests from abroad seemed always to be grappling in vain with a broken toaster.

Every morning at the Sovereign, I came downstairs to the smell of burnt toast and the sound of invectives in foreign languages, but in compensation there was always some classical music playing from a small radio hidden behind a larger, nonfunctional radio of the 1930s. In some respects, the hotel was a doppelgänger for Los Angeles, never quite what it appeared to be and forever staying one step ahead of interpretation.

I had to settle for a third-floor suite that lacked an ocean view. The door had a peephole for checking out visitors, and the furniture was overstuffed and redolent of powder and perfume. It summoned to mind an era of Gatsby-esque cocktail parties, where the men wore white linen trousers, knocked around croquet balls, and answered to the name of Hal.

A suite at the Sovereign would have been ideal for Philip Marlowe, the definitive southern California private detective, I thought. His creator, Raymond Chandler, had based his corrupt Bay City on Santa Monica. Chandler was raised in England and remained a devoted Anglophile to the end. He claimed that Los Angeles gave him an eerie sense of unreality.

“I’ve lived half my life in California and made what use I could of it,” he once said, “but I could leave it forever without a pang.”

He never did leave it forever, though, in spite of having enough money to move wherever he pleased. In his old age, he tried to escape back to England, only to return to the Coast. Chandler became a victim of the unavoidable condition, carping and griping and carrying on about how he wished to be among a better class of people than the Californians he met, whose pride expressed itself “in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles.”

On and on went Raymond Chandler, raving about corruption and blight and deceit and yet never budging from where he was.

“The whole of California is very much what someone said of Switzerland,” he wrote in a letter to a friend,
“un beau pays mal habite.”

S
AILING ALONG THE PACIFIC COAST
in their four-masted caravels, Juan Cabrillo and his crew came in October of 1542 to the present site of San Pedro Harbor and saw a sky blackened by smoke from the fires at Indian villages. They called the place
Bahia de los Fumos
, “a good port, and a good land of many valleys, plains, and groves.” They were met by some Indians who were dressed in skins and lived on fish and agave, a plant in the Amaryllis family, and they were told about a big inland river where maize and other crops grew.

The Indians were from the Shoshonean family and would later be known as Gabrielinos after their domicile at Mission San Gabriel. Gabrielinos had a visionary bent and used jimsonweed in their cult of
toloache
, instructing young boys in spiritual matters while the boys were hallucinating.

Junípero Serra founded Mission San Gabriel in 1770. His superiors had ordered him to build a compound by
Río de los Temblores
, the River of Earthquakes, now the San Gabriel River. Serra and his party of soldiers, mules, and muleteers encountered opposition from the Indians there, and church legend has it that they would have been killed if they hadn’t unfurled a painting on canvas of Our Lady of Sorrows, who intimidated the Indians with her grief-stricken face and caused them to put down their bows.

The River of Earthquakes, though excellent for irrigation, flooded frequently. The padres had to rebuild their mission compound at a new site five years later. There the Franciscans flourished, but the Gabrielinos did not, plagued instead with the usual miseries of mission chattle and dying off from smallpox, measles, and syphilis. Mission San Gabriel became one of the church’s richest holdings, accounting for the most bountiful wheat harvest in the region. Jed Smith, no brilliant speller, stopped over in 1826, and sang its glories to his journal:

“Two thousand acres of land … An extensive vineyard and orchards of Apples Peach Pear and Olive trees som figs and a Beautiful
grove of about 400 Orange trees … a scene on which the eye cannot fail to rest with pleasure.”

The Gold Rush left Los Angeles largely unaffected, although a few of its merchants made a bundle by supplying beef and wine to miners. Into the mid-nineteenth century, it remained a sleepy settlement whose attributes William Brewer outlined in 1852, while he was camped on a hill in a cold December rain.