ham fisted theatrics

We pull out of my cul-de-sac and I start dicking around with the car radio. I drove a 1983 Ford F-150 in high school that just had AM-FM radio, and the radio had knobs. I got really good at no-look changing between 91.5 (KJZZ, the local NPR affiliate) and 92.3 (Power 92, the hip-hop station.) A cursory tour reveals that KJZZ is still going strong but over on Power 92, somebody who sounds, y’know, white, is talking about how bad big government is. Is Power 92 dead? (Later Googling would reveal that Power 92
is still around, at a different frequency.)

Leaving my suburb (Ahwatukee) three kids cross in front of us on two bikes and a skateboard and the kid on the skateboard wings his soda cup into a bush, straight-up old-school littering. It's nearly charming.

We spend the bulk of the six-hour drive listening to comedy albums in the little radio bubble created by Dan’s car’s iPod adapter. Not far outside of Phoenix a guy is pulled over onto the side of the highway, tying something that’s come loose to the side of his motorcycle, and I comment about how much it must suck to be him right then. A few minutes later he roars by us and we see him in his full splendor: the things on the side of his motorcycle are old military-surplus ammo boxes, and he is wearing a camouflage jacket and shiny Mussolini-style helmet. His license plate reads SUPRGOD. It is clear that he would disagree with me about who it sucks to be.

We ride past a big truck with several classic cars hitched to the back of it. On the side of the truck are painted the words “Nostalgia Express.” This is an appropriate truck to see driving out of your hometown on the way to a new city.

We stop for gas in Quartzsite, AZ. There’s a restaurant called Best Mexican Food and a trailer park which appears to have only one or two trailers in it and is mostly just a deserted field of trailer hookups jutting out of the ground. The sign for this trailer park advertises it as the WORLD FAMOUS MAIN EVENT. Of all the things Quartzsite is claiming to be world-famous for, what it really ought to be world-famous for is its insane superlatives.

Another trailer park is hanging out a big hand-scrawled sign reading “DOG WALK DOWN IN WASH,” with an arrow pointing down into a dry creekbed. Here is something they could be bragging about that they aren’t, because this is clearly one of the Southwest’s Most Obvious Murder-Traps.

Speaking of murder, next to us at the gas station a shady dude in an Ed Hardy shirt hops out of his truck and I look at him and think “Man, some people, like this guy, must be excited that Ed Hardy clothing makes it that much easier to look like a skeevy murderer.” It is then that I notice the guy has a machete shoved hilt-deep into the far right butt-part of the truck’s driver’s seat. Clearly Ed Hardy has undergone a target-audience shift not unlike the one Tommy Hilfiger underwent in the mid-90’s when it shifted from being popular among preppy white kids to rappers. Ed Hardy has gone from being popular among people who aspire to look like murderers to being popular among actual murderers.

Not long afterward, we pass into California and the scenery gets way less desolate and murder-y, and much more breathtaking. I am in Dan’s car now, at the front of the two-car caravan, and we are all pretty shocked and amazed when some hills part and we are driving into a misty sunlit valley, in which you can look up and see layer upon layer of mountain and cloud stretching back and back, getting dimmer yet more impressive, mountain and cloud becoming indistinguishable after a certain point. We are blasting loud music, Meggie is taking pictures, and it’s beautiful all the way through fields of endless windmills on either side of the road, almost comically everywhere. It will be a more positive memory than the dominant one of that particular stretch of road that I’ve had up until this point, where me and a bunch of other high school drama kids were riding through on an early-morning bus to Disneyland and the first girl I ever kissed was barking at me to give her a better back massage than the one I was giving her at the time.

Soon we’re in the part of Southern California that kind of seems like a prelude to LA, towns like San Bernadino and Ontario. Meggie and I are going to have to get vehicles now that we’re here, and we kind of car-shop the cars passing us on the highway. Peoples' preference for boxiness in cars is sussed out. (Mine is high for boxiness in old cars, low for new ones.)

We pull up in front of our new apartment building, and, in an echo of how New York traffic wouldn’t let us really leave for the longest time at the beginning of the trip, we have to wait out front for a little while for the lady who runs the building to show up with our keys, putting the official end-end of the journey in a so-close-yet-so-far-away place, aggravated by the fact that I have to go to the bathroom. But soon she shows up and we’re inside and upstairs and our places are great (Meggie found them and she did a heck of a job) and the trip is officially over.

Not long after, we are at In N’ Out Burger, at a table out front where a guy in blue scrub-bottoms asks us for a dollar in quarters, and when we all demure, he pauses to remove his sweater before going inside to ask everyone at every table. He is joined inside the restaurant by two young male LAPD officers, a huge table of toddlers of various races, including one little boy doing laps around the restaurant on his belly on a skateboard, and also everyone else in LA, it seems like.

After dinner when we were coming out of Ralph’s supermarket several blocks away, the homeless guy in blue scrub bottoms was standing next to our car. It wasn’t so much that he was in our evening but that we were in his.

We are here now, and we have a balcony.




Thanks for reading about our trip out to LA. I've gotten a really good reaction, and I think I will do a similar thing for my first 100 days in LA. So check back for that starting tomorrow, if you like observations and sweeping generalizations.