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LA smog
Sunday, July 18 1999
Looking out the window from the fourth floor of the Avalon Hotel towards downtown Los Angeles, we could see a cloak of luminous yellowish grey shrouding the sky scrapers and concealing the mountains beyond. There's something darkly appealing about a city so vast and terrible that it can create its own poisonous atmosphere.
We decided to pack up our belongings and head out immediately, as opposed to attempting to sneak Sophie out the door for a walk (which was a matter of some urgency given the fact that all we'd had to feed her for the past 24 hours had been pears).
So I snuck Sophie out to the car in her little bag while Kim settled up with the guy at the hyper-minimalist front desk. When Kim settles up at a hotel, it's always a huge social event, so I had a long wait.
We'd been smoking pot, and I was feeling exceptionally stupid, so stupid in fact that I could barely drive. When we went to park the car a block away from the hotel so we could finally walk Sophie, I proved incapable of parallel parking. So Kim took over. She seemed so much more capable and intelligent than me just then.
We had a playful fight right across Olympic Avenue from the Avalon as Kim tried to convince me to go back there and take digital pictures of the ultra-modernist swimming pool area. I was slightly paranoid (born partly out of a feeling that perhaps we hadn't tipped the valet enough) and was working under the impression that once we'd left the Avalon we were done with the place and could move on to the next entertaining experience, thank you very much.
By the time I'd grudgingly taken the photographs and returned to Kim's side of the street, she was nowhere to be found. I looked up and down the sidewalks, which seemed to extend all the way to where the smog obliterated the distance, and she had definitely vanished. So I started looking into yards until I found her randomly talking to a young adult woman having an outdoor cigarette amongst her potted plants. Her name was Sarah and she rather reminded us of our friend Steph. She didn't really live here, she said; she was actually a couch surfer staying with some chums. They were all from New York City, living out a sort of Beverly Hills version of the slackerly Big Fun situation. While we were chatting with Sarah, the next door neighbor guy, Stew, showed up. He was more of a businessman type, and in no time he and I were talking shop about a floundering internet startup he's trying to breathe some life into. He was so impressed with my knowledge of backend issues that he gave his partner a phone call right on the spot. So now I have the guy's business card and yet another contact at least as valuable as my stack of non-vested stock options.
Somewhere near West Hollywood (I guess), Kim and I did breakfast in front of a coffee shop on the sunny side of the strip. While we ate bagels and cream cheese, Sophie's breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs. I insisted that she eat downwind from me. Eggs smell horrible to me. (How can people actually eat boiled eggs? They have the fragrance of sublimated farts!)
We eventually found our way down to the beach in Santa Monica, but the traffic situation was so miserable that Kim, who was driving, actually turned down a one-hitter of pot I packed for her. The Pacific Coast Highway sits at the base of a steep cliff of dirt and it's a wonder to me that it's not blocked more often by mudslides. At the top of the roadcut there are castle-like pillars topped off by palm trees whose roots keep the cliff from eroding more rapidly than it already does.
We ended up in Venice Beach southwest of Los Angeles. Kim's interest in the place seemed to be at least partially related to the fact that it was the birthplace for the Doors. That contributed to my interest in the place, in the same way that the rock and roll of San Francisco seems to imbue the City By the Bay with a little extra magic than I associate with towns such as, say, Cleveland, Ohio (the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whose rot resembles that of the USSR).
We parked out on the dull end of Abbott Kinney Blvd. and walked down it until things became interesting, stopping at antique stores and art galleries along the way. We eventually sat down and had pizza from one shop and lemonade from another in an informal seating area strung along the sidewalk between the two. Friendly people and their dogs came by, some of them stopping to chat or smell butts. We were in a commercial district of Venice Beach seemingly off the beaten path of most tourists. It turns out that Venice Beach is like a bigger, more intellectual version of San Diego's Ocean Beach. Like OB, it has the Harley bikers, the dirt, the dogs (many without leashes), the boutiques, the stickers on stop signs, the graffiti, the surf boards, the randomly friendly passersby, and probably the bums (but we didn't see any). But there were also people and things you can't normally find in OB: a New York-style pizza parlour, a genuinely dandy and perfectly silent British-style Mod, and an unintelligible but extremely friendly Cockney ex-patriot with a wire-haired terrier resembling Wacky Jen's housemate's dog, Fly Boy.
Later we walked to the vicinity of the beach, but when we learned we couldn't sip wine out in front of a restaurant, there was nothing I wanted to do more than go back to San Diego and sleep in my own bed. I was overexposed to sun, to booze, to walking, to traveling, to being away from my routines. I'd been complaining and quietly mumbling to myself ever since we got out of the car, and finally Kim was in agreement that we should head back home. Her only concern was that the traffic on the 5 would be bad.
But once we got past LAX on I-405 it was pretty much smooth sailing. I nodded off a few times on the way. Kim was driving of course.
Kim and Sophie in the passenger seat (normally it's Kim who does all the driving, but for some reason I'm more likely to take pictures when I'm driving).
The Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, a former residence of Marilyn Monroe (back when it was still the Beverly Carlton before a 1998 facelift).
Can you see the faces in the dirt roadcut?
I don't know why there aren't more mudslides in California. This is along the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica.
Two ominous buildings at some sort of isolated plant along the Pacific between San Diego and Los Angeles. It looks sort of like a nuke plant without cooling towers. (It turns out that it actually is a nuke plant without cooling towers; it cools its reactor with some sea-water-based system.)
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