“The remote control to nothing,” my sister said, recalling what another friend had remarked when she saw all the television and stereo equipment lying in wreckage and all that she could unearth was the remote.
I myself was knocked conscious by my great old Rudolph (Rudy Valentino book, a collector’s item given to me by my old boyfriend Dan, who, in 1971, was here for another earthquake and left L.A. because of many things, earthquakes being one of them. This book was on a shelf, unsafely, at the foot of my bed, and thus I was Rudy awakened.
My friend Ajay and I decided that if we had to live in a tent city, we hoped it would be in Roxbury Park (in Bev Hills where they have the croquet games). “It would be catered by Wolfgang Puck, the blankets would be handed out by someone from Giorgio’s and the water would be some Ramlosa or whatever.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and you could barbecue with mesquite.”
Though it was all coming back to me–what they tell you at the Red Cross Earthquake Preparedness class, which my friend Caroline and I had signed up for after the Oakland earthquake jitters bad captured our imaginations. What they tell you is that the kind of food everyone wants in a disaster is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or peanut butter and anything. Peanut butter being one of the great safe foods you can store for years–it keeps so well because ofthe oil. And peanut butter being most people’s idea of comfort.
It has become common to be a disaster victim (courtesy of CNN, which always has as many orange flames as possible, scaring my friends from coast to coast). It’s even more common to freak out from the disasters of others (also courtesy of CNN). But in spite of everything, what happened during the riots–that feeling of complete anarchy–was a lot worse than this earthquake. Because this time, for one thing, our police chief and mayor are on speaking terms. It was during those riot days that we learned that you could phone out during disasters but nobody could phone in. So you had to call all your friends and say “Reports of our death have been edited by CNN to make things look worse than they really are.”
What people take from their houses or apartments, given 15 minutes before they run for their lives, are family photographs, underwear and their pets. Which makes you think, maybe we don’t need all that much stuff after all.
And what we learn is that people shouldn’t live in certain places. New York in the winter, L.A. during earthquakes, riots, floods or fires, the Midwest when the Mississippi overflows, Florida and Kauai during hurricanes and various other places for various other reasons.
A very brilliant and gallant millionaire I know who made a fortune from computers, Jerry, moved a couple of years ago to a chalet in Sun Valley, which he believed would be a better place to raise his child and live with his wife than horrible L.A. with all its bad publicity in reality and fiction. However, recently I saw him at one of those Sunday brunches I often go to and asked, “Jerry, you’re here on business?”
“I’m not here on business,” be said. “We moved back.”
“You’re back?” I said. “You moved back?”
“Yes,” he said. “My brain died. I need action.”
But of course with L.A., the reason this place is so nice is the reason it’s so temporary, like lace. Yesterday I drove out to the Valley, to Sherman Oaks, where places I used to like going to are now ground down, shattered, have huge strange cracks in them and otherwise seemed shaken to their cores. (“Oh my God!” I said over and over and over.) The reason so many people love this place, the weather–hot desert by the ocean–is the reason for the fires, for the floods that come raining down, for the earthquakes that aren’t done tearing up our coastline. The reason they came here long ago to make movies, the reason (among others) Rudolph Valentino could become the world’s first sexy male star–the way he looked riding a white horse through the desert in a sheik outfit with his noble handsome face and liquid brown eyes was that the desert nearby could be the sandy terrain with the palm trees in the background that so set off this story of Arabian nights. A story that couldn’t be shot really in any other state but just here, where everything was laid out like lace at the edge of an ocean.
If we live here, we should, like the sheik, live in tents, ready to pack up and go at any time. My friends and I decided last night at dinner, the thing to have is a rubber house–something that bounces during earthquakes–with rubber plates. And rubber freeways. Not that I ever drove on the freeways anyway, since, to me, they’ve always been much too scary just on an average day with average bad citizens, one to a car.
In a few months, when this all settles down, what people will realize is that this weird new subway they built to take people to downtown L.A. held up so well–we hardly heard it mentioned. Perhaps people in Los Angeles will finally become good citizens taking the Metro Rail.
My brains are still scrambled but perhaps this is what we needed here: earthquake preparedness. Diminished attachments, happiness to be alive and have your friends alive, and peanut butter.
