The 10 years I lived in L.A. one year. Looking out from my hotel room on the 18th floor of the Sheraton, I couldn't hear the shattering glass of looters or the yells of the marching protesters. The bullhorns and the horses didn't even reach up that high through the double-paned glass, but I could see the fires. They were in the distance but they seemed to sprout up from varying places like they were random lightning strikes. Wait… I've started way too soon in this story and a little poetic for my tastes…It's easy to get confused when you are telling a ten year story that lasted only a year to live. I'll go back a bit. The police officers who had beaten Rodney King severely, and evidence was shown to the public and in testimony on tape, were found not guilty on the day of the riots in L.A. Rodney King had been stopped by police in L.A. because of a supposed high-speed chase in his Hyundai and found with marijuana in his position. He was a big man and was considered to be resisting arrest when he was Tased and beaten. African-Americans considered this to be racially unfair and responded with violence in the streets. Still too early in the story….You don't even know that I lived there, my son lived there, my first wife and I had my son… and everything else that can happen in L.A. that really does not seem to happen in other places. Let's go a little further back in the Apocalypse that I refer to as the one year decade in L.A. What sticks in my head twenty seven years later as the actual beginning of L.A. was Howard Stern. I was driving to work down the expressway. (Side note: Work was 12 miles from the apartment. In L.A. that means a 45 minute commute on surface streets or an hour and 15 minute commute on the expressway. However, flip the times if you guess wrong because of traffic delays). I had turned on the radio and I was listening to this DJ, Howard Stern talking with two strippers and a midget about oral sex. It is the first time I had ever heard anything like this in my life. I started looking around to see if anyone else was hearing what I was hearing on their radios. No one was moving a muscle. The next guest was a former male porn star who claims to have been in more movies than any other porn star ever. Then Howard farts. I had never heard anything like this kind of radio anywhere, EVER. Nowhere had I lived was this allowed. It was 1988, a time of possibly some of the worst version of rock music ever. Even with that being said, you did not air this type of program. I was in awe.
The radio show cut to a local news report about the earthquake we had just suffered moments ago. I was in my car. I hadn't really felt anything but the jolt of forward movement which I had categorized as a positive sign. I had not been in an earthquake before. I had been in traffic jams before, but not like L.A. traffic jams. When you move forward and there is a little bit of a lurch to it, you are not afraid, you are grateful. When I got to the office, I called my wife at the time, Patti, who was having a very difficult pregnancy with our son Zach. Things had fallen off our walls, furniture had slid, but overall it had been more frightening than damaging. Until she told me, I did not even know we had had an earthquake. I've touched on race riots, city burning and earthquakes. I should do a preface…What the hell was a nice guy like me and his nice pregnant wife doing in L.A.? Career advancement and climate. There was a period of time when I chased the corporate ladder, income and opportunities like a rabid dog chases a bone thrown into the street at a steakhouse. All of these were available in L.A., so my wife at the time and I decided we would go. Patti was pregnant with our son Zach. It was a difficult pregnancy requiring bedrest during the last trimester. Let's add to the cauldron of brewing excitement already listed. Add an uncomfortable and thus unhappy wife, demanding new job, miserable commute and no support network. This gives some context to the story rather than moments in the timeline. Where was I in the story? Oh yeah, earthquakes. All of California was enduring its 7th or 8th or possibly 100th year of drought. Because the local news was focused on California as if it were its own country, much as New York City does the same thing, we heard about the drought 7x24. Remember, this was about 25 years ago, 1988. No internet. TV, newspapers and magazines were the source of information. People were glued to the television to hear about what was going on in California with a 30-60 second update on the news of the world in every half-hour broadcast. Fires were everywhere in the canyons and up the mountains because of the drought. Million dollar homes were burning every day. Fires were jumping highways, making containment very difficult. Rumors at work were rampant that the entire valley was going to burn to the ground. I have to stop for a moment. If you have been to the valley in L.A., there is nothing to burn there unless concrete is flammable. If anyone in our offices had simply stepped out in front of our building and looked in 360 degrees, all that could be seen that looked like vegetation were the plants in planters next to adobe concrete buildings. A garden hose and a modicum of effort would put out the forest fires of the valley where we were located. The fires burned everything on every hill, valley up and down the available space for miles. It was very sad. If it would only rain, right? Rain would put out these fires. Rain would give relief to these terribly damaged areas. Please, God, send some rain! God was good to the four people who still prayed in the City of Angels, and he let loose with rain. It next rained for 40 days and 40 nights, or some number like that. It rained so much and so hard that the streets around our building were almost impassable. Our reserve generator for the company, which was suspended and supported in case of earthquake, was now in danger of shutting down from being flooded. Employees could not get to the facility because the buses would not run their normal routes. Reservoirs that had dropped feet over the past years were now filling inches. The damage years of drought had caused would not be repaired with one flooding rain, but a little bit is better than nothing. A tough rain, hard on everyone to be sure, but in many ways welcome…Except for the mudslides. I do not have any degree in eco-anything, but I believe if you remove the root system of plants and trees which anchor the dirt to the ground, when lots of rain keeps dropping on that ground, gravity will drag it to its available lowest point. The drought had killed everything. The fires had burned up what was holding the dirt back and then it rained. Mudslides do not care about primary and secondary roads. They do not care about property rights or the oft repeated statement, "We've never had that problem before." Mudslides move tons of gooey, heavy earth from a hill downwards. For these reasons, houses were destroyed, roads were closed and mayhem ensued. When you have lived in Omaha, Dallas and Phoenix, my background, there really is no context for a mudslide. The variation in height in those areas is mostly seven or eight feet. You would wind up with more of a mud-creep rather than a mudslide. Nurse Ratchet was a character in a movie, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." She had neither humor nor compassion. Her job allowed her almost absolute authority over her area of responsibility. At the hospital where Zach was born, we were treated to our own version of Nurse Ratchet in the maternity wing. Patti, Zach's mom, was having as much difficulty giving birth to Zach as she had carrying him to term. Labor lasted 27 hours of pain and exhaustion. They gave her an epidural injection for the pain, took her into the birthing suite, (that's what they call them, go figure), and decided now was time. Up until this moment, our Nurse Ratchet and been as friendly as a guard at a Maximum Security Prison on third shift. Now that it was time to have the baby, she showed up as a different person. Patti was totally wiped out. The nurse, coached her, guided her, pushed her and we had Zach. We were so grateful we sent her flowers the day after we took him home. Not long after Zach's birth, I received an offer to return to the Midwest to run a company and our little family decided to take it. I sent Patti and Zach along by plane, while I finished up the details of my last few days at the company I was leaving. Reflecting on the year; earthquakes, fires, floods, mudslides, race riots and looting mobs, it felt like a good time to leave. It was a decade of life lived in just one year. Looking out over the burning fires advancing and the television’s coverage of protestors coming closer to the hotel, I wondered if there was any danger of me missing my flight the next day. The Gideon's put a bible in most of the hotel rooms in the country and I flipped to Revelation to see if it covered moments such as this. Quick inventory:
• Blaring Horns of Angels – Kind of a stretch, really. Blaring horns, yes, all day and night, on the freeways. This was technically the “City of Angels,” but I had not seen any yet. There was a description of beings with 6 wings, but I did not see a clear match anywhere. This box is going to have to be a checked “NO.” • Shaking of the earth – Bingo! Got that one covered, happens all the time whether Howard Stern is on the radio or not. Box is checked “YES.” • Pestilence – Again, this is a rather modern interpretation opportunity. The insects described in the book are not seen anywhere. However, back when I lived in L.A., smog was a pervasive and invasive pestilence of its own. On bad days, your teeth would develop a very fine gritty covering. Coughing would happen as if you had drunk water and it went in the wrong part of your throat. Smog and the muddy haze of an invading life force in the air was not really too far a stretch to be a Revelation match. That comparison having been made, the Box is still checked “NO.”
The numbers were clearly showing that this was not the end times. It was just a relatively active Wednesday night in L.A., (except for the riot fires).
I said a quick prayer and seeing that the references in the Bible were not specifically about appliance stores being looted, felt that I would make it out. I called the receptionist, who quickly answered on the 23rd ring, and scheduled my wakeup call. Eighteen floors are a lot of floors to climb if you are looting and there are many other rooms to scavenge for TVs and Gideon Bibles before getting to mine. I closed the shades, double-locked the door and turned the TV to a white-noise station as I drifted off to sleep for my last night in the City of Angels.