I woke up yesterday morning to 129 text messages, all essentially asking me if I was still alive. I appreciate all of them. I get it, Iâm thankful, though they flood me with anxiety. But Iâve been in this city for most of my adult life and this ritual is starting to feel banal. This isnât the first time and it wonât be the last. This story has a script.
Fact is, burning down is what Los Angeles does. Itâs what California does. Kansas has tornados and we have fires. There are some things we can do to mitigate it, like taking climate change seriously (wonât happen) and avoiding insane arbitrary overdevelopment (wonât happen either), but ultimately thereâs just this weird cultural complacency: we donât really care if California burns down. Itâs all in the act of God clause.
A bunch of celebrities have lost their homes, untold acreage has been destroyed, and about four paragraphs down, in the part you donât read, the writer will note that people are dead. Thatâs how this story always gets told.
I went to school at Pepperdine University. It was a huge culture shock to move there, coming from a non-town that used to be a labor camp. Everybody was the child of this or that actor or musician, and they were all rich. The place was nominally Christian, but Iâm not sure it mattered. My freshman year, there was a fire almost as big as the one blazing right now.
It was a bizarre fiasco to be there when the fires were burning. I barely had cell reception in the first placeâI had to keep my phone by the window of my apartment to pick up any calls, but it still barely workedâand then we all lost it. Both the roads in and out of town were closed. I went on the local news outside of the Ralphâs on PCH where I used to see Britney Spears and I did a segment for my uncleâs radio show in Bakersfield.
I know, in romantically typing all this out, that Iâm one of the lucky ones. Unfathomably lucky. But the fact is I was scared to death. The sky was a horrifying, oversaturated orange until it turned black. Blue didnât happen. My suitemate who Iâm pretty sure was selling cocaine cried and cried. If you went outside you were breathing through an exhaust pipe. I had recurring nightmares that I was dying from smoke inhalation until pretty recently. Therapy has mostly disabused me of that one, but still.
Then, as now, there were all sorts of novelty news items about princesses and retired athletes losing their palaces, but I think itâs necessary to appreciate that even mentioning that stuff is just gossip. West Los Angeles is dangerous territory and people probably shouldnât live there. Itâs the frontier, itâs the edge of the map, itâs probably not suitable for civilization. One clumsily discarded cigarette butt can blow up the whole thing.
I can barely wrap my head around the fact that Moonshadows, the overpriced yuppie seafood restaurant shipwrecked in the â80s where I saw Gary Busey or maybe Nick Nolte drunk off his ass a few times, is now gone. I can barely wrap my head around the fact that Malibu as I know it isnât really there anymore. I hope Dick Van Dyke is doing alright; heâs the last celebrity from my college days who still lives there, which I suppose is a function of being too old to move to, you know, Aspen or wherever. Heâs 99 and he knows the layout of his property too well to go anywhere else.
These fires are unspeakably tragic, and never mind that theyâre happening to tony neighborhoods on the westside. But theyâre also a function of how this landscape works, this place where fires are part of the normal weather. If we can do anything, culturally, I hope we can pry this story away from sentimentality, just so we can reckon with it. California is the broken promised land, yeah yeah yeah, but people donât have to die about it.
