© 1997 Rich Grzesiak, all rights reserved.
When you approach L.A. by plane at night, it's tempting to sleep — sleep, the natural feeling of the human body at midnight. But if your eyes turn toward those airline pillows of night, you miss the photo-electric brilliance of L.A.'s soul. There's blackness everywhere as the plane swoops west, and no sign of civilization in sight. Then, suddenly, almost mystically, a gap begins in the underlying mountains, and slowly, then blindingly, a flash of light hits your eye like a bullet wound.
There's such a flood of brilliant light leading to every stretch of the horizon it becomes hard to grasp, let alone assimilate. It blinds, even hypnotizes you with its mythic brilliance. It's as if all Hollywood had lit up the landscape with a scathing starlight.
You step off the plane and you're nervous, but don't realize it. The world stops momentarily to allow you to get your bags, a car. The representative at the rental car agency is sweet, primitive, subtle. Her red dred-locks would seem odd in Peoria, let alone Philadelphia.
She hands you the keys with the exuberance only a 26 year old can summon. "You're new here"? she giggles with a practiced, absurd friendliness.
She won't betray the secret though. Her green painted fingernails hand you the keys of your rental car. She has a secret about This Place Called Here she won't surrender. Her triangular shaped chin comes to more than a smile, maybe almost a leer. "It's great being in L.A.", she allows. With the look of a practiced scavenger, she adds, "There' s so much to do here."
She almost believes what she says.. Hers is the voice of an announcer for a space shot intermixed with a Donna Reed Show simplicity. "So much to do here."
You have no idea she means so much.
You get to your car, its color a red gash that blares in the illuminated light next to the replanted palm trees. It seems like a priviliged conveyance for a safari journey, far from civilization, but the headlights are far too civilized and reassuring.
You nervously pack your bags in and slam the trunk lid. There's a subtle kerplunk, like life ending, when the car trunk door slams.. It seems odd, terribly odd, but right...
In the car, a radio station you tune to proclaims itself as the 'soundtrack of Southern California.' Its announcer purrs a rhythm, as if a cat were drowned at high tide, but his dying meows remained insistent. The sound of the imitation Muzak seems rewarding, slickly hypnotic.
You begin to feel there'll be a day you hate the sweet sound of this alternative radio music. It mystifies and hypnotizes you tonight: this is the music for an electronic tropics of good will..
All these images collide in your head as you enter the rental car. It seems odd you're wearing grey, which grates with the sight of the red rental car door as it closes.
Overhead, you hear the sound of what could be a nocturnal wheeze: in the moonlight, a breeze causes a palm tree to sway. As your car door closes, and the radio station's sounds become more insistent, you hear a gasp. A man and woman exchange a kiss in another car, two lanes away.
You blanch at their audacity to do this in public with the freedom of a handshake. They've no idea you notice. They embrace harder when they notice you.
You start the car and close the door. The noise of hypno-station starts to hallucinate. As you leave the parking area of the airport, you notice the almost savage look of the landscape, a jungle well manicured.
The music seizes you with its insistent rhythm: Los Angeles, it seems to be saying, believe in our melody... The road from the airport lot seems endless, caverned, circular, cemented. The palm trees only detract from the cavernous look of the infrastructure in a schizophrenic way: The highway should look threatening, sinister, but the music and the palm trees say, no, this is normal reality for this tropical space.
You accelerate. It's hard to verbalize the feelings as the blues, reds, grays and golds of the night lights blitz you. Soon your vehicle is like an airplane: 60 gives way to 80 miles an hour as it merges with the local freeways. If a camera could capture the scene, it would deflect the blue light of the street lamps onto the red of your car's hood, creating a strange colour of pink on your face.
Your face would erupt with fear, but you wouldn't feel it. Hypnotized by the car, and an announcer whose voice would approximate the sound of your car's brakes, you'd stare straight ahead, your eyes narrowing so only wide angles should do: palm trees and more palm trees. It would be a look of fear on your face, but one you practiced.
A man, homeless and wetting himself on the street, would suddenly watch your drive onto the streets of L.A.: he'd avoid your glance except for that brief nanosecond when he'd catch your face where he'd see a well practiced mask of fear, eyes drawn tight, jaw held in, hands gripped in pain to the car's wheel.
You'd arrive at your hotel like a demon in a bad thirties horror film, its white eyes unnaturally different from other buildings. After your car hits near warp drive to enter the hotel's entry, the cigarette voiced announcer of the melody station would proclaim the temperature and the time, and you would sigh three hours behind reality.
I'm here, you'd say, a refugee from a huge and terrible storm. 'Cept there would be no storm. As your car door opened, the radio voice would insist all was calm.
There'd be terror in your face, but you wouldn't know it. As the car door slid open, the electrically controlled window sliding down, you thought you'd feel peace. Instead, as you rose from the driver's seat, there'd be more fear.
The radio announcer's voice would insist, "All peaceful here in beautiful Santa Monica. It's midnight."
The car would somehow stop in the right visitor's parking space at your motel. The blue light of an overhead beam would turn violet the look of its car's red trunk door opening. As it flipped open, it'd seem a body was being resurrected from the trunk lid. You'd remove 4 trunks from the rear.
Suddenly a terrible cry hit your ears. Was it fireworks? You looked up. A man was shot, but to your ears it was thunder. A block away the sound of a bullet ripping into flesh scented the air as if it were a murderous perfume.
"O-h-h-h-h," the voice would reverberate as its insides would be pulled out by the metal fragment...
You'd only see it from the corner of your eye, recalling it a year later, dimly in a dream.
The voice of the radio announcer again echoes in your ears. "It's clear here in Santa Monica," he'd say. You'd tell yourself the sound of the bullet was merely that of a trunk lid closing on your red Ford.
At the hotel desk, the woman is redheaded, gracious, a machine reduced to robotic humanity: "Have you had a good trip, are you comfortable?"
"Feel real cool." you'd reply, your sweaty palms trying to get a grip on the pen to sign in, your tired brain proud of its ability to imitate the lingo.
From L.A. Stories, a novel in the making, by Rich Grzesiak