Life in the Last Lane : It’s L.A.’s Birthright to Love Its Freeways to Death

Only in L.A. . . . How often does that phrase roll off the old silver tongue in this town? Only in L.A. would the oil boys be able to run the little red, go-everywhere, do-everything, efficient commuter train out of town on a rail and replace it with the hot rocks we call freeways. Not modern freeways with room for Metro Rail up the center. Plain old bring-nothing-to-the-bargain freeways with room for 10 zillion of the 30 zillion cars on them, and boasting the dirtiest, smelliest, junkiest buses in the nation, looking for all the world like the dinosaurs they have become. Fumes, noise, heat, speed, crashes, spin-outs, shootings, breakdowns.

Ask an average Angeleno about public transportation and the state of the interstate and he is unequivocal: No problem.

Not that the average Angeleno has ever taken a bus. No real Californian would do such a thing, except maybe San Franciscans, and they’re nothing but the advance camp for invading Easterners. See, the secret weapon with which L.A. can beat back the advancing hordes, the one gross-out guaranteed to discourage most Easterners, the leavening that separates the men/women from the boys/girls in this world, is the freeway as the exclusive agent of transportation. It is indeed the last frontier.

In fact, the very personality of the Angeleno is forged on, by or in connection with the freeway. The first words that Baby is likely to hear upon emerging from the womb are those of the delivery-room staff complaining about traffic on the 405. Outside the hospital windows the whoosh and roar of the cars, the thunk and rattle of the trucks, the squeal of the brakes laying down tracks of burnt rubber from this side of the road to that and halfway up the retaining wall, send a signal to Baby, lying wide-eyed in his little crib: Go back before it’s too late. It’s a tough old big-bird of a world out here. Subliminal messages these, but potent.

The freeways can be read like Tarot cards by any traveler with stomach enough for the task. Watch the shoulders of these monsters and you can read the past and future of the lives flickering in the wake of the traffic whizzing by. The discards are there, the litter of our throw-away society, but that can be found anywhere now. Here we have the blow-aways, the fly-aways, the roll-aways, lie-aways and die-aways. Dodger-blue hats, crisscrossed now with black bands of grease. Stuffed toys, probably blown out a window on Baby’s first ride home. Chairs and sofa cushions on their way by U-Haul to Denver, victims of a sudden lane change, never to see the other side of the mountain. There is a selection of hubcaps, the likes of which a junk emporium would die for. Fenders, tail pipes, enough rusting metal to build a pretty decent heap for the Road Warrior’s next outing.

Under the bridges and trestles of these engineering marvels, men and women live as if this were the England of Charles Dickens instead of the L.A. of Tom Bradley. Fires burn under the overpasses. Tents and cardboard boxes are the walls and windows of nameless cities peopled with homeless souls, owning nothing but front seats to the wierdest, loudest parade in the world: the procession of highly dressed and tressed people cruising endlessly on a circular track. If the Kingston Trio’s Charley ever got off the MTA and made his way to L.A., he’d find himself the only passenger in a lonesome little Honda, riding the freeway at breakneck speed, afraid to slow down lest the demon riding his bumper get angry and decide to cash in Charley’s tokens for good. At least on the MTA Charley had companionship.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from? If you had a dollar for every car you see at rush hour with more than one person in it, you might have enough in a week’s time to buy a corned-beef on rye at Nate ‘n’ Al’s. That is to say, Angelenos don’t do car pools. Putting car-pool lanes in freeways was supposed to cure this civic stubbornness, but real Californians will go to any length to preserve their auto-mobility. Court cases have been won in this state on the theory that a pregnant woman constitutes a car pool.

The personalities of drivers develop, warp and churn behind their sun-glazed windshields. Each one is alone in his little hot box, looking out with fear and loathing at the other combatants in the war to get there first, even if “there” is only down to the next light or the next back-up. Vanity plates help him judge whether he made the right moves. If TIFFY, whom he beat out on the ramp, shoots past him in the tie-up at Avenue 64 because she was in the center lane and he was in the left, the day is shot. The boss is gonna have to wait for that report, because our freeway flyboy is too bummed out now to do the job right.

And to think that back East--even in Frisco!--those suckers are riding the rails, finishing the morning paper, maybe even talking to some other wimp about the miserable market or the even more miserable weather. Pretty radical stuff. All that socializing could disrupt the development of a good hard-driven xenophobe whose car is his ultimate weapon and whose freeway charts the pathways of his mind.