
I’ll make up for the years of the locust, the great locust devastation — locusts savage, locusts deadly, fierce locusts, locusts of doom, that great locust invasion I sent your way. — Joel 2:25–27, The Message
In the beginning weeks of the new year, I texted my friends in Los Angeles.
The first was to my old college roommate Elliot, who’s still in the same house in Woodland Hills he’s had for thirty years.
“It’s bad, bro. We’re okay here, but the Palisades are gone,” he said.
I last saw Elliot about six years ago when I visited LA to run the Pasadena Half Marathon. He was heavier and wore a thick leather motorcycle jacket with matching black boots. His hair had thinned.
He said he was still practicing law — divorce — and I knew he had an unmarked office in a strip mall in Van Nuys with porn warehouses across the street. When I jostled him about it, he didn’t want to discuss his practice, so I let it go. Elliot hadn’t changed. His father died in his early forties while riding his bike in LA, and Elliot still held that anger.
Elliot was a pilot, too. We spent many weekends taking our dates to Catalina Island for dinner, where we’d land on the primitive “airport in the sky” that resembled something out of a drug cartels' — a sixty foot long runway with steep cliffs on either side seemed impossible to land on.
On the flight to the Island, Elliot enjoyed spinning the plane sideways, stalling nose pointed to the sky, and doing rolls just to get our reactions. “My dad died on his bike. I wonder if that’s how I’ll go,” he’d say.
Bison roamed the canyons amidst the Catalina manzanita and bedstraw shrubbery — the same dry, vast kindling found in all of LA’s canyons, the same shrubbery that lit LA on fire — and we’d stroll Wrigley Memorial & Botanic Gardens before dinner, watching eagles soar from the trees. Elliot liked to remind us that the island was full of Southern Pacific rattlesnakes that climbed trees.
He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. — Nathanial West, The Day of the Locust
I told my friend he could come to Atlanta if he needed to, if the smoke became unbearable.
“It’s in the Hollywood Hills now, but I think the Valley is safe. Ruyan Canyon is toast.”
It was true. The fire decimated one of my favorite hiking spots in LA, Runyan Canyon. During my tenure in LA, I’d only experienced a few canyon fires that were quickly controlled. With the current Santa Ana winds, this fire was unstoppable unless the winds ceased.
I spent part of the 1990s in Los Angeles chasing a beautiful Danish actress and model, attending Santa Monica college, and taking extension classes at UCLA trying to complete a degree (ironically, I would later earn three in completely different subjects after attending colleges in three other states).
When I first came to LA, I drove across the states from the east coast, navigating the entire trip with a paper map and a red pen. I dipped to the Southern route, then back to the center of the states.
Like many in my generation, I devoured On the Road by Jack Kerouac and became inspired to drive out to the west coast. I stopped along the way to visit the places in the book — New Orleans, Denver, Las Vegas.
I spent two days skiing in Colorado, then walked Larimer Street in Denver, visiting Kerouac hideouts.
Seeing the varied landscapes of the United States on my week-long journey made me appreciate Los Angeles even more, and now it made seeing the fire damage more difficult to bear.
California’s terrain is unlike any other, with endless, coyote brush-filled canyons and rustic trails overlooking the city of lights, while the green expanse of the campus at Pepperdine University in Malibu rolls above the Pacific Ocean.
When I settled in LA, I spent months visiting places of my literary and music favorites: Nathaniel West’s Parva-Sed Apartment, the old Garden of Allah Hotel location on Sunset Boulevard (now a CVS drugstore), the Alta Cienega Motel on La Cienega where Jim Morrion stayed. The Whiskey on Sunset. Laural Canyon.
I see your hair is burnin’ Hills are filled with fire If they say I never loved you You know they are a liar — LA Woman, the Doors
Even more unsettling is the irony of my sojourn in LA. In the Day of the Locust, West’s protagonist, Tod Hackett, spends the entire book working on a painting called the Burning of Los Angles, meant to a portray a mammoth blaze that destroys the city.
It begins in the canyons and consumes the city, causing mass riots and endless violence. The day of the locust.
The book also explores Hackett’s many cast of characters he befriends while living in an apartment above Hollywood Boulevard (modeled after the Parva-Sed Apartments).
My life in LA mirrored Hacketts. We rented an apartment above Hollywood Boulevard across Runyan Canyon and had friendships with characters far more eclectic than any of West’s.
There was BlueJay Presley, the “illegitimate son” of Elvis, who we met one night after a movie while we strolled Hollywood Boulevard. Bearded and clean cut, he said he was in his third year at UCLA, which somehow turned out to be true.
Then he began talking about Elvis. He often showed up at our door at insane hours spouting ideas and memories with insane tirades about his “childhood and Elvis” — especially his anger that no one believed him or wanted to listen to his Elvis-inspired music he insisted he had on multiple CDs in a cart he pushed around the touristy spots.
And like West’s Claude Estee, Al Sims was a fifty-something, bi-polar screenwriter who said he’d written one hundred movie scripts — on cocktail napkins — that he claimed “were all hits, just you wait.”
We spent many nights at Sim’s West Hollywood bungalow, discussing politics over dinner, listening to jazz, and letting him rant about leaving the United States if elections that year went sideways (I don’t know what happened to Al Sims, but I wondered what he’d think about the insanity of the current election and the Oligarch that is in office).
For a time, I worked at a defunct grocery store called the Bel Aire Market Place in a village just below the Palisades (that village is now ashes). I befriended a young French-Canadian couple, Monique and Surge, who were cousins that decided they liked each other.
Former meth heads, the drug had damaged Surge’s nervous system and his speech was like quicksand, a thick slurry of drawn out French-English words with syllables that didn’t exist. When you asked him a question, his eyes clouded over as he attempted to process thoughts.
His movements were far worse. Like a sloth, he’d often freeze when performing a task, or just stand there until someone gave him another direction. Surge and Monique loved to tell you about their voracious sex lives — as cousins.
I moved around—living in the Valley, Santa Monica, and Calabasas — and I had friends in Pacific Palisades. We ran the annual Palisades Will Rogers 5K & 10K Run every summer on July 4th.
The race began from Alma Real Drive, ran along Palisades Recreational Park to Sunset Boulevard, then around Will Rogers State Historic State Park. It was one of my favorite courses, with views of the ocean and a historic piece of Los Angeles.
At the finish line, I watched the kids and families and dogs cross with ebullient smiles as we gathered and mingled at the Palisades Recreation Center full of July 4th flags and music and celebrations.
Palisades was a community where everyone knew everyone, and it was an idyllic place, even if you were visitors like we were.
That community is gone, gone in a time of the locust, reduced to cinder ash by the Burning of Los Angeles.
Across the world, it seems, it’s a time of the locust, with earthquakes and mudslides and floods. There are those that insist it’s cyclic, that we’ve visited these times before, and it was partially true. Yet, fifty miles per hour Santa Anas and unprecedented storm surges? The earth is furious.
I visited parts of the east coast after the insidious hurricanes battered Florida and washed away parts of North Carolina. Couches and beds sat in medians while cars hung from trees. Standing in Asheville’s famous square, I saw the waterline marks at the ceilings on the exteriors of restaurants I once adored.
In these cities, it was as though a Godzilla had stomped through, tossing semi trucks like toy cars and breathing fire into the canyons.
I drove the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco many times when I was in LA, passing through the glorious beach-side houses of Malibu, now only gnarly, charred frameworks of million dollar houses bent to the sky, with the Pacific licking its feet.
The fires severely damaged or leveled places I frequented along Pacific Coast Highway—Moonshadows, the Reel Inn, Rosenthal Wine Bar, and Gladstones.
“Those people built houses where houses are not meant to be,” said Elliot about the Palisades. ‘They lost everything, but they’re wealthy. They’ll just rebuild in the fire pit.”
He had a point. The canyons of the Palisades contained massive houses built on stilts. You got in and out via one road — and it’s one reason the emergency vehicles had such a tough time getting to the fires. Palisades is off the Los Angeles grid.
“You know, they complain that the fire trucks took too long to reach them, or that the city ran out of water, but they forgot where they built their houses. Bro? There was no saving that community or anyone in the canyons. The Santa Annas are gonna blow, and now they’re blowing at sixty miles an hour. Climate change on steroids.”
It was the same in Florida where I lived for decades. People with massive, stilt houses on the beach complained when the hurricanes huffed and puffed and blew their investments to toothpicks, but denied climate change had anything to do with it. And where was FEMA, they demanded?
My last message was to my friend Mike, who has lived in Pacific Palisades with his Chinese wife, Samantha, for most of his life. His father was a physiotherapist who worked as Ronald Reagan’s personal physiotherapist. Reagan himself was a resident of the Palisades in the decade after his term as president.
Mike inherited the house after both parents died and had grown up in versions of the stilted bungalow.
“You answered my message. I hope that means everything is okay,” I said, even though I knew everything wasn’t, as Temescal Canyon surrounds Mike's house.
“Everything is gone, friend,” he said. He sounded winded, as though he had been fighting the fires himself, because he had, emotionally. “They won’t let us back up there yet, but the house is gone.”
I waited a beat. What could I possibly say?
“Samantha keeps talking about her hometown in China. It doesn’t have canyons,” he said. “But it’s not the Palisades.” He paused. “It’s the Chinese Year of the Snake. We will persevere.”
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