R U Ready 4 Doom?

Where has Doom gone?

Beats me. All I know is, Doom hasn’t been seen around these parts in a long time. And Los Angeles just isn’t the same.

You know what I mean, right? “Doom” is the thought that flickers through your brain when you see the hills burning. When the shaking starts.

It’s part of us. We expect it. The writer Gore Vidal tells the story of taking a taxi into Los Angeles on a hot August day. Smoke fills the air, a pall hangs over the city, and Vidal asks the cabbie how it’s going with the fires.

“You mean,” the cabbie says, “the holocaust.”

Yes, of course. Except it hasn’t happened here in a long time.

A couple of weeks ago, when we were having one of our standard 100-degree days in November, a friend of mine called to say that Altadena was burning.

My heart quickened. Doom had returned. Then my friend, who lives there, looked out the window.

“A tanker just dropped some water,” she said. “and put it out.”

See what I mean? If this keeps up, we’re gonna lose our reputation.

*

It was only a few years ago--the beginning of the ‘90s, as a matter of fact--that Doom seemed like the Man Who Came to Dinner. He just wouldn’t leave.

We had fires, big ones. Then floods. We had a riot. We had an earthquake. All in a four-year stretch.

I remember sitting on the Santa Monica Pier in ‘93, watching Malibu burn. It was late, about midnight, on a weekday night. The pier was filled with hundreds of people.

In the far distance, the flames licked their way toward the beach like lava coming down the mountainsides. Occasionally a hot spot would erupt and an orange halo would expand into the night.

You could call our watching an act of voyeurism, and it was. But of a special sort. The crowd had not come to party. The watchers were quiet and soulful, as if the flames confirmed their deep beliefs about life here. Which is to say, something will get you sooner or later.

As gloomy as this prospect might be, it also set us apart. The regular recurrence of Doom made life in Los Angeles seem bigger, more theatrical, than in other places. L.A. had life in Technicolor. Everyplace else had black and white.

So what happens when the disasters cease, as they have now for the past couple of years? It’s my theory that we grow uneasy. We feel threatened, vaguely bereft. Yes, yes, it’s crazy but just witness the breathless anticipation we have extended to El Nino.

All fall, has anyone chattered about anything else? Perhaps Doom is returning! Or maybe not. The mere possibility has this delicious quality, almost like the Second Coming.

On my block men march down the street every day with packets of fliers they stuff into mailboxes. The other day I plucked one out and it read:

R U

Ready 4

El Nino?

*

In an earlier era, such a message would have been interpreted as having religious meaning. In this case, the flier people were hawking rain gutters.

But you see what I mean. We have a special relationship with disasters here. They tear our houses down, burn up our worldly possessions, and sometimes even kill us. Still, we have this connection.

The writer Stephen Dobyns once wrote a poem about Death disappearing for a time. Instead of bringing joy, this interlude produced aimlessness and corrosion of the spirit. No one knew anymore how to pass the time.

Finally the people begged for the return of Death, and they got it. When it arrived, they uttered a great cry of welcome.

Of course, we have not been deprived of Death, merely of Doom. Still, the similarities remain. We seem to need our Doom, and we want it back.

This past week, when the rains came and then came again, you could sense the tension: Maybe this was it! The pools in the streets began to deepen. The world seemed to be getting wetter and wetter.

I walked down to my stretch of the L.A. River and, sure enough, it was running pretty big. The water had started to foam.

On the boulevards, I noticed that people had perked up. They stepped livelier, looked more alert. Their eyes wandered to the heavens.

It didn’t happen, of course. The rains stopped, the birds sang, and we were spared. But the river still ran high and in its rush you could hear the scary, exciting promise: soon, soon.