L.A., OUTTA THE WAY AND LET US HAPPEN! (2000)

Three images:

That general who leaped on his horse and rode off in all directions.

The inspired chicken who, placed on a rainbow plate, laid plaid eggs.

Ten million Angelenos marching to 10 million drummers, all different.

That’s L.A.

New York? Ten million White Rabbits crying, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.

Paris? A big, beautiful nose that too often detects fish.

London? A larger nose, sending the fish back.

But L.A. now. L.A.?

The true center of the world. Inventor of most sport fashions for women with long lives and short skirts.

The absolute nexus of television. All TV films are born or born dead here.

The absolute San Andreas Fault line for films that crack the world.

And then there’s our changeless weather, that endless summer toward which our whole continent surfs dreaming landfalls on Muscle Beach in one great jumble sale of sunburned limbs.

Our endless summer.

Oh, how they hate us for that!

They got us wrong long, long ago.

Describing L.A. as the laid-back, snooze-happy town.

Laid-back, no. Stand-aside, yes.

To let you pass, let you go, let you become.

It only pretends to be cool. I hate cool people. Next thing you know, they are cold. Soon after, they rent rooms at Forest Lawn.

Not us.

We are in a state of becoming. If we persist, we go on becoming whatever in hell it is we want to be.

First off, and best, we don’t believe in neighbors. Neighbors are a concept that, if you’re not careful, fence you in. We are, in that way, truly western. The cowboy off his horse in Steinbeck’s Red Pony faced with the Pacific, with nowhere to go.

Save that there is. We simply turn on our heel, spin slowly, to become ourselves. Our continental boundary is just turf. We don’t have to accept its landfall palisades or its seeming run-out-of-space. We can simply stroll off through Subliminal Acres. Fancy talk? Maybe. But we wish to stay separate and ignore, if possible, those e-mail idiots trying to run up our noses and out our ears.

So that’s it. Los Angeles is everything you want to be. Whatever you decide, L.A. becomes. It’s going nowhere. You are.

Your engine drives the machine. The machine isn’t laid-back, nor is it la-la-land-encrypted. It only looks that way. It’s waiting for you to tromp the gas and hit and spark.

You want to thrive in the foothills, linger at the beach, carouse Boyle Heights, pretend a half-life in Beverly Hills? Do it.

The simple fact is, there is no Los Angeles. With luck, there never will be. Our prayer should ask that these eighty towns, these eighty oranges in search of a navel, never find it. The connective tissue that once fused jigsaw L.A., the big red Pacific Electric trains, have sunk in freeway dust. And the freeways? Are mobbed with people aboard an attractive nuisance. Crammed with gas-buggy immigrants who each day must make up places to go because, mostly, they’re going nowhere.

So listen up, stay off those no-destination freeways. Keep to the side streets, live your special life, cancel your Variety subscription with its foibles, fibs, lies, and disinformation.

Shoot off in any direction along this languid octopus’s tentacles to find that the San Bernardino orange groves have not truly vanished but picked up their bright skirts and headed for the foothills, there to take root and drop fruit. Between freeway and orchards, find that mix of wineries and dairies that Got Milk? and One More for the Road California reds. Wade the Ventura surf or jump off a Torrey Pines cliff, whose citizens deny it, but, hey, it’s all L.A.!

Stand in the center of the empty cement L.A. dry bed and sing:

    Got to cross that river,

    Got to cross that hardbed river.

    There’s no water in that river,

    But I’ll walk upon that water

    ’Cause the river’s in my head!

 

And so reach the far side and Mexico City Two to find a huge piñata that, whacked, will flood Broadway with Castilian and taco-brown complexions.

Ride Ventura Boulevard’s Cornucopia Mile floodgates of restaurants, nail emporiums, and palmistry shops that outrun H. G. Wells’s futures.

Or sand-surf Venice and its baroque rococo outré burlesque carnival sideshow geeks’ half-lives. Where beauty itself, being rare, is the greatest show on Earth.

Survey your yards. There, by God, are the lawn-mower nomads trimming grass and manicuring azaleas, unwetbacks from Guadalajara and El Paso; tall, not short, Oriental sumo wrestlers who know how to thwart, tie, and twist a maple tree into a bushido box.

Laid-back? Hell, no. What appear to be immovable L.A. feasts may blossom as picnics. What seems a rootless statue is an idea inside a self-made chrysalis that may crack and let free a papillon or death’s-head moth. Not an invalid trapped in a life of quiet desperation, but suffering serene inspirations in this adjunct to the U.S. Patent Office. Where some of the best twentieth-century ideas leaped forth as cripples and learned to walk, then run, by the Irving G. Thalberg Building or the Warner Bros. commissary. Where the Jews circled their tribal wagons and birthed Hollywood. Where Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky, Christopher Isherwood, and Henry Miller, blown across the world by the winds of war, grabbed hold and grew beanstalks.

So here’s to Los Angeles, diverse, multitudinous, going nowhere, arriving somewhere, a gigantic pinball machine with several million balls ricocheting off the future. May it never be integrated, may it never be described. With its tentacles snaking south to La Jolla, north to Santa Barbara, east to Palm Springs, west to Catalina, what a sprawl, what a roulette, what an Ohio-Iowa collision. It’s Hello, I Must Be Going country. It’s a last night I saw upon the stair, a super town that wasn’t there, it wasn’t there again today, my God, I wish it’d go away town. Not full of men running helter-skelter just to run helter-skelter. Laid-back? No, standing aside to let some other genius, torch-brained madman pass.

When François Truffaut, the talented French film director, first visited L.A. years ago, we ended the night on top of Mulholland Drive, where we showed him our City of Light, five hundred square miles of lights extending from sea to (almost) Salton Sea.

“See all those lights,” I said. Six million lights, each representing an individual who doesn’t have to join the pell-mell rush, who is not laid-back but merely considering the ganglion just under his heart, those nerve endings that know what it wants better than TV ads, better than your battered brain. Six million singles who don’t have to “go fetch!” but turn in circles on their own Reebok deck shoes, watching the freeways fill with quasi New Yorkers while they quietly manifest themselves on off-paths and side streets, managing to get where they want to go ahead of the crowd.

L.A. My town. A town with no elbows, no hustles. Where you pick your neighbors, ten miles off, and ignore those across the fence if their shadow lies funny on the lawn.

A town with an ignorant subway that arrived at Hollywood and Vine recently. Folks wander up for a look-see, find nothing, turn, go back down, and try again some other year. A town of those endless summers with the ghosts of surfers nudging Malibu, daring the mud slide to hide them or the brush fire to torch, out beyond reach, not laid-back but upright, riding high. A town more reale than real and therefore a town worth dreaming in. A town where you can trade your tits and ass for a stroller and playpen and not mind the change.

And way up ahead in 2101 Millennium Third? In bungalow courts and multiplex flickers, new generations of mellow kids better educated at last, at last, mapless, chartless, just by going will arrive.

I would go there to that bee-loud glade, to Innisfree Two, California.

Finally, hark (as they once said) from all across the five hundred miles of the City of Light, L.A.

Can it be? It is!

The sound of 10 million people.

All marching …

To a Different Drummer.