The Writer in the Sun : They came, they saw, they wrote. Sometimes they didn’t even see; they imagined, and it turned out to be true. A sampler of how various writers have tried to pin L.A. down.

I approached the great goal of my desires--Los Angeles.

I entered the city near the little, old, mean, Spanish quarter, with its red-tiled adobes, and straightaway fled out of it to avoid the horrible dust. . . . I strolled down little alleys, with willows which hid the heavens, or with queer old Spanish hedges of cactus; through gates left in Eden-like simplicity unguarded; across frowsy gardens, where all manner of weeds twisted themselves in their riotous rankness, and castor-oil plants shook out their leaves in every hedge-row; and through orchards, whose yellow and fragrant fruits of every variety that grows above the tropics, smirked upon green boughs, or wasted their quality in the rank and tangled grass. . . .

If anything unusual happened in Los Angeles while I was there, I am not aware thereof. Indeed, I am not certain whether I stayed a week, or two weeks. All the people are such nice people, so frank, so free, so generous, and all the while riding up and down in gorgeous buggies, bowing and smiling. You can buy lots on every street corner for nothing, and sell them for ever so much money and get rich in an hour, or--the other thing. Everybody is so glad to see you, and jumps over the counter to shake hands, and wants to sell you some lots.

Stephen Powers, “Afoot and Alone” (1872)

*

Southern California, which is shaped somewhat like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way . . . This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night--usually starless here--comes down.

And although you’ll soon discover you’re still separated from the Sky, trapped down here now by the blanket of smog and haze locking you from Heaven, still there’s the sun, even in winter, enough--importantly--to tan you healthy gold . . . and palm trees drooping shrugging what-the-hell . . . green-grass . . . cool, cool blessed evenings even when the afternoons are fierce.

And flowers . . .

Orange and yellow poppies like just-lit matches sputtering in the breeze. Birds of paradise with long pointed tongues; blue and purple lupines; joshua trees with incredible bunches of flowers held high like torches--along long, long rows of phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair . . .

Everywhere!

And carpets of flowers even at places bordering the frenetic freeways, where cars race madly in swirling semicircles--the Harbor Freeway crashes into the Santa Ana Freeway, into the Hollywood Freeway, and when the traffic is clear, cars in long rows in opposite lanes, like cold steel armies out for Blood, create a whooooosh! that repeating itself is like the sound of the restless windswept ocean, and the cars wind in and out dashing nowhere, somewhere. . . .

Anywhere!

Along the coast, beaches stretch indifferently.

You can rot here without feeling it.

John Rechy, “City of Night”

*

When I was working with . . . Robert Altman in his wooden mansion by the sea, I was in a tower of plexiglas with sea gulls flying around me and the Pacific rolling under the house like a white man’s dream of peace. I had a typewriter and there was a Spanish maid who would bring me coffee. But it was too nice and I had to turn on the radio. Altman came up and asked me how I could work with the radio on that loud.

I needed the music, the tinny loud music, to remind me of all the trouble in the world. I missed my kids so much, I wanted to hear how other people hurt too. I could not accept paradise. I had to drag in the bad music and the cigarettes. I had to foul up the air and my ears. With no whiskey, what else was there to talk about?

Barry Hannah, “Boomerang”

*

Kraft cruises down the Golden State: would it were so. “Cruise” is a generous figure of speech at best, label from another time and biome still imbued with quaint, midcentury vigor, the incurably sanguine suggestion of motion more forward than lateral. “Cruise” is for the Autobahn, the Jet Stream, Club Med. . . . Freeways, like rivers, age and meander. Lane lines, at this hour, are just a manufacturer’s suggested retail, more of an honor system than anything worth bothering with. . . . Fortunately, most everyone is a diploma holder here.

Driver’s Ed: the backbone of the high school certificate. One might emerge from the system unable to add, predicate, or point to Canada on a map, but thanks to rigorous requirements would still be able to Aim High in Steering, Leave Oneself an Out, Second-Guess the Other Guy.

Casting his vision into the advance shoals, getting what his Driver’s Ed teacher almost two decades ago affectionately if firmly referred to as The Big Picture, Kraft catches the total, pointillist effect: cars flaking off each other in the steady current, making a shimmering moire, like sheer curtains swaying in front of a screen. He takes his hands from the steering wheel, passes his extended fingers in front of one another in unconscious imitation. Time (in this country of ever-expanding unusable free time) for an experiment: infinitesimal easing up on the throttle produces a gap between his grille and the nether parts of the Marquis in front of him. The instant this following distance exceeds a car length, the two vehicles on either side both try to slither in.

Richard Powers, “Operation Wandering Soul”

*

In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.

Joan Didion, “Play It As It Lays”

*

Dawn in Los Angeles, coming up over the Hollywood Hills. You get the distinct feeling that the sun only touched Europe lightly on its way to rising properly here, above this plane geometry where its light is still that brand new light of the edge of the desert. Long-stemmed palm trees, swaying in front of the electronic billboard: the only vertical signs in this two-dimensional world.

At 6 a.m. a man is already telephoning from a public phone box in Beverly Terrace. The neon signs of the night are going out as the daytime ones become visible. The light everywhere reveals and illuminates the absence of architecture. This is what gives the city its beauty, this city that is so intimate and warm, whatever anyone says of it: the fact is it is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.

Jean Baudrillard, “America”

*

During the months I stayed at the resort, I came to know it in a way we can know few places. It was a town built out of no other obvious motive than commercial profit and so no sign of commerce was allowed to appear. Desert D’Or was without a main street, and its stores looked like anything but stores. In those places which sold clothing, no clothing was laid out, and you waited in a modern living room while salesmen opened panels in the wall to exhibit summer suits, or held between their hands the blooms and sprays of a tropical scarf. There was a jewelry store built like a cabin cruiser; from the street one peeped through a porthole to see a thirty-thousand-dollar necklace hung on the silver antlers of a piece of driftwood. None of the hotels--not the Yacht Club, nor the Debonair, not the Yucca Plaza, the Sandpiper, the Creedmor, nor the Desert D’Or Arms--could even be seen from outside. Put behind cement-brick fences or wooden palings, one hardly came across a building which was not green, yellow, rose, orange, or pink, and the approach was hidden by a shrubbery of bright flowers.

Norman Mailer, “The Deer Park”

*

Marlon Brando suddenly wanted to go home. There was too much political argument. “This party’s making me nervous,” he said. Miss Winters agreed to leave, but in leaving she took Elizabeth Taylor’s coat (“We both had the same blond beaver coats we’d bought wholesale when they were just coming back in style”). Mailer was dismayed to see Brando parting. “Where are you going?” he demanded. “You didn’t meet anybody.” Brando responded in kind. “What the . . . are you doing here, Mailer?” he asked.”You’re not a screenwriter. Why aren’t you in Vermont writing your next book?” Mailer’s answer evaporated in the general confusion. Not only did Miss Winters wander off in Elizabeth Taylor’s beaver coat but Brando took the coat of a young actor named Mickey Knox, whose car was subsequently found to be blocking the driveway. “Nobody could get out,” Miss Winters recalled. “Hal Wallis, Mickey’s and Burt’s boss at Paramount, called me at three a.m. and sent a police car over to retrieve Mickey’s keys. I suppose Norman himself had mixed feelings about being in Hollywood. . . . “

Otto Friedrich, “City of Nets”

*

Then suddenly the car . . . emerged into another world, a vast, untidy, suburban world of filling stations and billboards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste paper, of occasional shops and office buildings and churches. . . . It was a winter day and early in the morning; but the sun shone brilliantly, the sky was without a cloud. . . . The car sped onwards, and here in the middle of a vacant lot was a restaurant in the form of a seated bulldog, the entrance between the front paws, the eyes illuminated. . . . The bulldog shot back into the past.

ASTROLOGY, NUMEROLOGY, PSYCHIC READINGS.

“Goddam, these hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.

Raymond Chandler, “Red Rind,” in “The Simple Art of Murder.”

*

DRIVE IN FOR NUTBURGERS--whatever they were. He resolved at the earliest opportunity to have a nutburger and a jumbo malt.

He pointed to a billboard across the street. CASH LOANS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.

Mile after mile they went, and the suburban houses, the gas stations, the vacant lots, the churches, the shops went along with them, interminably. To right and left, between palms, or pepper trees, or acacias, the streets of enormous residential quarters receded to the vanishing point.

CLASSY EATS, MILE HIGH CONES.

JESUS SAVES.

HAMBURGERS. . . .

As they turned to the left on Sunset Boulevard, Jeremy had a glimpse of a young woman who was doing her shopping in a hydrangea-blue strapless bathing suit, platinum curls and a black fur jacket. . . . Small, expensive looking shops . . . restaurants . . . night clubs shuttered against the sunlight.

Aldous Huxley, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”

*

In the fall of 1982 I attended Brugh Joy’s conference in the Lucerne Valley desert, in California. Brugh Joy was an eminent Los Angeles physician, who had, through intensive meditation, moved progressively away from medicine into areas of personal growth, psychic healing, and so on. For several years he had run two-week conferences in which he shared his findings. . . . One morning at a conference I attended I passed a cactus and I thought, Well, if this cactus is really my teacher, it’ll speak to me.

And the cactus said, “When are you going to stop running around and talk?” Irritably. Like a grouchy old man. I didn’t hear it as an actual voice, I just felt it like an impression. The way you can see someone and get an impression of what is going on with him or her. But I was startled to get a sense of personality coming from a cactus.

It was early in the morning. Nobody else was around. So I said out loud, “Are you my teacher?”

No answer. . . .

One day, as I arrived with my notebook and pens, the cactus said, “Where have you been?” In that same irritable, resentful tone.

I was surprised. It hadn’t spoken since the first day. And this time I really felt as if it had spoken aloud.

I said to the cactus, “What do you care? You haven’t said one word to me; why should I hang around all day in the hot sun waiting for you to say something?” Because I was defensive. I felt I had been criticized.

The cactus didn’t reply.

Immediately I regretted my words. Boy, I thought, now I’ve blown it. After days and days of waiting, the cactus finally speaks and I immediately attack it because I feel defensive, and now it won’t talk any more. My one chance, and I blew it.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

No answer from the cactus.

I wasn’t going to ask it to forgive me. That was too much, for a grown man to ask a cactus for forgiveness. On the other hand, maybe if I did it would speak again. I really wanted to know what it had to say.

“Will you forgive me?”

No answer. Hardball from the cactus.

Michael Crichton, “Travels”

*

The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Graumann’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. There was no one who cared. Until Dirk. . . . On the first day of the semester, Dirk saw Weetzie in his art class. She was a skinny girl with a bleach-blonde flat-top. Under the pink Harlequin sunglasses, strawberry lipstick, earrings dangling charms, and sugar-frosted eye shadow she was really almost beautiful. Sometimes she wore Levi’s with white-suede fringe sewn down the legs and a feathered Indian headdress, sometimes old fifties’ taffeta dresses covered with poetry written in glitter, or dresses made of kids’ sheets printed with pink piglets or Disney characters.

“Thanks. I made it,” she said, snapping her strawberry bubble gum.

Francesca Lia Block, “Weetzie Bat”

*

Los Angeles is hell. Take Peacehaven, multiply it by 400 square miles, sprinkle it all along the French Riviera, and then empty the Chelsea Flower Show over it, adding a number of Spanish exhibition buildings, and you have the Los Angeles coast. The Americans have an unequaled genius for making everything hideous. Hollywood, however, is fun. It is pure fantasy--you never know what you come on round the corner, whether half an ocean liner, or Trafalgar Square, or the facade of the Grand Hotel, or a street in Statford-on-Avon with . . . houris walking down it. We were taken round by Mr. Gary Cooper. . . .

Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia Woolf, 1933

*

Los A. is silly--much motoring, me rather tired and vague with it. California is a queer place--in a way, it has turned its back on the world and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. I don’t want to live here, but a stay here rather amuses me. It’s a sort of crazy-sensible.

D.H. Lawrence, in a letter quoted by Carey McWilliams, “Tides West,” Westways, April, 1936

*

Aimee Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind--the objects which barked the intruder’s shins--had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the spirt--ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas. . . . As she grew up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure she saw in the looking-glass seemed less recognizably herself. Aimee withdrew herself into a lofty and hieratic habitation.

Evelyn Waugh, “The Loved One”

*

When the bird grew silent, he made a effort to put Faye out of his mind and began to think about the series of cartoons he was making for his canvas of Los Angeles on fire. He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roof and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.

The bird began to sing again. When it stopped, Faye was forgotten and he only wondered if he weren’t exaggerating the importance of the people who come to California to die. Maybe they weren’t really desperate enough to set a single city on fire, let alone the whole country. Maybe they were only the pick of America’s madmen and not at all typical of the rest of the land.

Nathanael West, “The Day of the Locust”

*

Gold’s Gym in Venice is the bodybuilding mecca of the western world. Located two blocks from the beach in a semi-industrial area that is now populated by the lofts of successful artists, design firms and the extremely prestigious Chiat/Day ad agency, it is a former warehouse. There are 47,000 square feet of Nautilus, Icarian and Eagle machines and enough free weights to give one to every man, woman and child in Belize. At any given time there will be several hundred serious body-builders pumping iron to some jacked up bass-heavy rock and roll while examining themselves in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that cover all the walls.

I hurried in to get out of my suit and into my workout clothes and to see if Rodney was there. I don’t know Rodney’s last name. Somehow we’ve never gotten around to last names. He and I been knowing each other, as they say, for about two months. We’ve never made a serious commitment to each other, but whenever we are both there Rodney will spend some time training with me or spotting for me. Freud said, “The body is the ego.”

Mercedes Lambert, “Dogtown”

*

It was a hotel near the top of a hill, just enough tilt in that hill to help you run down to the liquor store, and coming back with the bottle, just enough climb to make the effort worthwhile. The hotel had once been painted a peacock green, lots of hot flare, but now after the rains, the peculiar Los Angeles rains that clean and fade everything, the hot green was just hanging on by its teeth--like the people who lived inside.

Charles Bukowski, “The Way the Dead Love,” a story in “South of No North”

*

Aliso Village. East LA.

Welfare/unemployment/teenposts.

Brown/black villagers

wade in a sea of stucco green

imitating cool, as 14-year-old

girls, with babies by their feet,

sing oldies from darkened porches,

here, across the LA River,

concrete border

of scrawled walls,

railroad tracks, and sweatshops,

here, where we remade revolution

in our images. Here,

where at 18 years old and dying

I asked her to marry me.

I carry the village in tattoos

across my arms.

Luis J. Rodriguez, “The Village,” collected in “The Concrete River”

*

My family believes Southern California is a treacherous desert outpost where everyone is an informer and thief. . . . You can’t trust it outside. Not the pale drained sky with squalid clouds in the rubbed-away mockery of blue. Not the fat sea birds with their malignant strangled sounds. Not the ripped-away shreds of the palms.

Kate Braverman, “Wonders of the West”

*

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. . . . All it comes down to is that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.

Bret Easton Ellis, “Less Than Zero”

*

Kissing is not feeling, Miserable thinks as she’s driving home on the Hollywood Freeway. She crumples up the paper with Jordan’s number on it and throws it out the window. When a highway patrolman stops her for weaving, she agrees to go with him to a motel off Van Nuys Boulevard.

“I’ve never been with one of these punker-girls before,” he says, and then he hits her before she has a chance to explain that there isn’t punk rock anymore.

Susan Compo, “Life After Death”