Rain Noir Stirs Mystery in L.A.

I got the call just hours before my flight. “My backyard looks like Lake Powell,” cried my sister. “Can you postpone your move for some emergency water-bailing?”

It was the first week of January 1995, a shadowless five-or-so days during which Southern California was wetter than Seattle and as damaged as Joan Didion’s psyche. Hillsides became suffocating avalanches of mud. Houses and cars and the canyon-dwelling homeless were buried or smothered or swept down streets in a deluge of murky chocolate rapids.

With two huge suitcases waiting by the door, I had been biding my time, witnessing the disaster on my parents’ TV. “Of course!” I told my sister. “Who wants to fly in this weather?” But the truth was, I was looking for an excuse to stay in L.A. through the rains.

Call it perverse, but I love Los Angeles when it’s raining like mad. The streets become sickly chaotic. Drivers become rain-drunk and tense--make that just plain stupid--able to rear-end you with a tap of the accelerator or a panicky slam of the brakes. Every lane-change, every left turn, every red light is an urgent, teeth-clenching near-miss. Koreatown truck loaders, hooded in thick sweatshirts, lift their cargo with newfound purpose. Hunched at bus stops on Melrose and Virgil and Vermont, immigrants, seniors and students--the only people who use and appreciate L.A. mass transit--take on the look of Bowery bums.

In rainy L.A., coffee tastes better. A cigarette suddenly feels healthy, good for the soul, even makes you feel cosmopolitan. I guess it’s that when it pours here, sprawling and pedestrian-unfriendly L.A. feels insular, communal--more like a city.

Lately, it has been raining sheets in L.A. Unlike Seattle, to which my neighborhood, Silver Lake, is sometimes compared, Los Angeles gets rain in thick and merciless droves. This particular weather is an ocean storm--Pacific-bred and grown to a capacity that blankets our city in gray and our hillsides in green, assuming they don’t slide away. This one is kicking up off-shore winds that are anything but hot and dry; a far cry from the Santa Anas that drove Didion to gin and Dexedrine and eventually to New York. You can roll down your car window in Sherman Oaks and still feel the sea air on your face. One day last week, at the land-locked Farmers Market in the Fairfax District, hundreds of misguided sea gulls floated surreally overhead, as if they were circling the gloomy docks of Baltimore looking for live fish but finding only leftover lox.

Staring out my window at the fog-shrouded lights of Los Angeles, it occurred to me what makes the rain in this town so unique: mystery. Here, rain is strange news. It brings change--a change of moods and behavior and routine and dress that people are not accustomed to or expecting, are never prepared for, and can rarely handle with ease. This is, after all, La-La Land. To a few Angelenos, rain is a refreshing urban shower with the water-pressure turned on high; to others, it’s a firehose-caliber, style-cramping assault of the good life. To these people, dry weather is an entitlement. But it’s the possibility of impending doom, and the sense of urgency that comes with L.A. rain, that I have loved for so many years.

It turned out my sister’s house was OK. We spent that January afternoon, six years ago almost to the day, bucket-brigading, push-brooming and wet-vacuuming the patio, yard and garage. The house itself was watertight, fortunately, and the next day, with the sun shining bright, I moved to New York, as planned. There, rain was not news, not an obstacle and most of all not appreciated.

Not that I don’t love New York, with all its witty banter and sexy swaggers, those big black glasses on pale intellectual faces, the magazine-smart women with street-strong legs who read and enjoy Joan Didion. But I live in L.A. again. And if I were scheduled to leave tonight, for New York or anywhere, in this thick wind that has the palm trees of Elysian Park whipping their fronds in defense, you couldn’t pay me to get on that plane. Not until the rain is gone.