a love story in the city of dreams
Last Wednesday, we evacuated our apartment for fear—distant, improbable, but possible, real—that a fire freshly burning in the Hollywood Hills, a minor colleague of those which spent the week devouring swaths of Los Angeles, would reach our neighborhood, our block, building, home. It was my first time trying to outrun an ecological disaster within the limited means man has designed. When the evac notice came I was halfway through a red wine and going fuzzy and childish from having watched two episodes of the terrible (i.e. special favorite of mine) 2000s network family drama Brothers & Sisters1, a text which prominently features the Santa Ana winds, prompting my putting it on as thematically appropriate viewing while Megan scraped out a short nap, and which I’ve been told I am no longer allowed to watch. It was sort of fun. We’d packed go-bags of essentials the day before. Mostly Megan did. I couldn’t think of anything essential besides the new perfume I bought, and a load of books taken up almost at random. I never packed my wallet; baby, I’m sorry about that.
The gossamer haze of grocery store alcohol painted my teeth and protected me from my usual sentimental impulses. If we had our underwear and jeans and passports and each other we’d be fine. I looked at but didn’t touch my fragile stacks of saved cards—cards for birthdays, from valentines, a Halloween card given to me in 1992 and pre-written by my grandmother who died earlier in the year. It’s difficult for me to pack a bag for a weekend yet faced with the prospect of leaving to never come back—maybe, probably not, most likely not, but potentially—I was unmoved. Who needs all this? My mind was so clear; I should have known it was an illusion. I very rarely can make my thoughts that quiet. I swallowed the last of the wine and donned a mask against the smoke to carry bags downstairs to the car. My heart raced not unpleasantly. Texts began to pour in as news of the Sunset fire broke wider. While she drove, I manned both Megan’s phone and mine. At my love’s request, and rightly so, I played “Mantra”2 on repeat. Just touched down in LA! We left quickly and beat the traffic which would soon halt to a crawl as more and more Angelenos accepted the surreal reality of needing to leave their couches and all their objects and went out bleary, too, to drive. The freeways were calm and the air thick.
We slept on an air mattress in a back house near the coast and I imagined the whole structure of the world as I’d known and expected it to be forever falling into a smoky abyss behind us. Laughably, I thought a lot about Stephen King’s The Stand.3 I envisioned waking up in an unrecognizable place. The emails I’d never reply to flitted through my mind and disintegrated. Offices would be over. Maybe I’d let my grays grow in. What I consider the various failures of my life—some real, most made-up, all basically stupid and uninteresting self-pity reconfigured to pass as fault-finding—would cease to matter in the world to come. The impervious calm of the fatalist somehow found its way into my stupid being. Equipped with my girl and frozen pizza, the end of everything seemed almost a thrill.
By four the next day we were home, and I was sobbing. The fire in our area was nothing or at least thanks to the fire fighters responsible for the response was made into nothing. In the daylight, when the sun wept through the smoke and made that impossible LA light stranger than ever, the prior night’s fantasies of soothing emptiness and a new world order turned to pumpkins, or oranges, or loquats like those which may fall from California trees if they don’t burn. I had been foolish, of course, aloft on a chemical wave. Even if our home had been impacted by the fires, had as good as vanished in their might, the world would, of course, continue largely as it always has, just as the world does and will continue largely as it always has in the face of tens of thousands of displaced people in our city. I don’t know if I meant my ravings as an analgesic. The sensations were genuine at the time. Home again, I was embarrassed and sorry and suddenly aware that I’d spent the last eighteen hours clenching my jaw. The fact that we hadn’t slept more than a few hours at a stretch in several days began to announce itself in my every action. The mania which had buoyed me overnight dissipated fast and left a sort of snow-blind sadness, knocked sideways by the destruction taking place just miles from us. It is incredible in the truest sense, staggering, itchy, to find yourself spared of horrors which are all the while visited upon others nearby. I was stressed out and dumb and teary and then a fake evacuation alert was sent in error to the far-flung phones of Los Angeles County’s ten million residents that helped sooooo so much and we all felt really good and super stable and didn’t want to kill ourselves at all.
In the end, it was little more than a long weekend inside. Sadder than usual and devoid of any of the relaxation a person hopes for from their Saturdays and Sundays but mostly uneventful. Nothing happened to us. The air was too bad to go outside for stabilizing little walks and quickly my anxiety redirected itself first from immediate death-and-destruction-by-fire to the black morass of climate doomerism to the safe old landing ground of my own body, of loathing it. Megan taught me backgammon and made this excellent stew4 that I love and can eat more or less merrily even when I believe I should starve and on Saturday night when we were ready to be inside of a movie, I chose Mulholland Drive. During the scene at Club Silencio where the girls are moved to tears by a Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” Megan and I were both so enraptured we failed for several minutes to notice the television volume was way, way too loud. Blasted back into the sofa cushions we melted into that beautiful and eerie voice on tape as it rattled the closed-tight windows and blotted out thought.
What I have always found most impressive about Mulholland Drive and was struck by with greater force than ever on this watch, is how its meaning, such as it were, whatever, please, please, death to the “[X] explained…” genre of film discourse, feels only more and more accessible the less you try to understand it. I seek not mastery over art but communion with it. When I feel Mulholland Drive more than I think about it, its tenderness is overwhelming. What’s to dissect? We dream and dream. I recall my genuine surprise and total pleasure the first time chipper Betty’s cliched mid lesbian encounter question of, “Have you ever done this before?” is inverted out of and through the chains of cliche by Rita’s honest, amnesiac reply of, “I don’t know.” It’s not real, but it happened. You were there!
I do not think that David Lynch’s dying from the emphysema which was the cruel trade-off for having been cool enough to smoke for many decades5 has anything to do with the fires or my rattled nerves or the feeling I had all week that I might, at any moment and quite by accident, trip past the boundary lines of my home dimension and find myself a person I did not recognize in a place where the light was not quite right.6 It is a coincidence that we watched Mulholland Drive this week. But, prone to indulge in magical thinking even in the best of times, I cannot ignore a certain poetry. This exuberant genius of strangeness and love, a congenial imp of creation, was with me through his work for so many years, through many strange times7, through one of the strangest, and now, as the ash still settles and with the smoke yet to clear, not at all. Deadline reports that Lynch’s health, which had kept him housebound for some time, declined in the days after he was forced to evacuate due to the Sunset fire. The flight from home that knocked me out of orbit, that escape which came to nothing, really, a precaution that will hang from the rafters of my mind as a pointy-edged and glinting sort of memory, collecting more, perhaps, growing stranger, certainly, I mean, the journey that I feared and did not say aloud but believed could change my life was the very same which ended Lynch’s.
“I arrived in L.A. at night, so it wasn’t until the next morning, when I stepped out of a small apartment on San Vincente Boulevard, that I saw this light. And it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light.”
Presently, Megan is introducing me to the woebegone television series Smash, a New York theater fandango which actually shares with Lynch’s work a stubborn defiance of explanation though I find the emotional pay-off less absurdist than it is, say, criminally deranged. Maybe we’ll try out Twin Peaks after, in the spirit of continued cultural exchange. But before that I know there will be walks and meals and laughter out in that LA light. I hope. I know.
This excellent resource, which you’ve probably already seen on Instagram, will connect you with the GoFundMe pages for many of the people who have been displaced by the fires. I keep dropping my little bit of help here and there. Please also consider buying a tent to replace those which were destroyed in the psycho, sort of magnificently beautiful but of course ultimately very bad winds. No one is more exposed to the dangerous whims of a battered Earth than our neighbors living outside. As always, any money sent to my friend Catherine via venmo at Catherine-Schetina will be turned into food, supplies, and services to support that vulnerable population. I love you, LA!!!!!!!!!
Brothers & Sisters is largely about Sally Fields hating her Republican daughter, who is the protagonist of the show, and I do really recommend it. 2006 was just so incredibly 2006.
really OUTSTANDING and outstandingly silly LA music video
A novel that’s like 84% good, which is pretty high praise in context of it being a Big Dumbass Tome by Stephen King, a distinct type of thing in this world and one that will always have stretches that are insane and ill-advised.
I have to skip the cilantro though. Humiliating but true—I was afflicted by biology with at least this one similarity to Caleb Nichol.
Kidding! Kind of. I don’t think people should smoke. Clearly, I mean, I don’t even allow myself to do it anymore! But the cigarette’s potential for glamour is hardly debatable.
I suppose there is always the possibility that life could change in an instant; the possibility feels more like a threat when your city is on fire.
In 2011 a surprise October nor’easter brought huge heaps of snow down on my college campus and theoretically canceled Halloween parties by trapping us in the dorms. When a tree branch fell on my neighbor as she snow-angeled and drunk boys wrestled on the white lawn I was drinking whiskey from a plastic cup and dressed as Audrey Horne.