Summer in the City--a Simmering Mix of Scents and Sensations
That nobody walks in L.A. is one of the great lies of the 20th century, equal to “there is no such thing as global warming” in obvious ridiculousness if not international import. Of course people walk in L.A.. All you have to do is try to make a left-hand turn in this town and suddenly the crosswalk is crawling with people seemingly unaware that when the “Don’t Walk” sign flashes, they’re supposed to stay on the curb. Instead, these scofflaw pedestrians give you dirty looks as you try to nose your way into a perfectly legal turn while behind you rise the impatient horn stylings of three drivers who don’t understand that there are people walking in front of you and that it’s illegal to run them down.
If only nobody walked in L.A.
Plenty of people walk in L.A., it’s just that many of them don’t walk terribly far, and some of them only walk in certain places--on the dusty trails of Griffith Park or along Santa Monica Boulevard or around their neighborhoods in evenings, misted by a thousand sprinklers. This is especially true in the summer when Angelenos are inevitably baffled and somehow personally hurt by the fact that, jeez, it’s gotten so hot. Who wants to go outside and walk around when, man, it’s just so dang hot?
This is especially true downtown, where many of the streets seem flayed and left for dead under a sun merciless even at 9 a.m. Those dim with shade thrown by skyscrapers have more of a convex-oven thing going on--retaining the day’s heat, long after twilight.
How much easier it is to drive these streets, windows up, AC on, observing summer in the city as if it were a series of paintings in a gallery. An air-conditioned gallery. In another city. Paris, maybe.
The trouble with driving, however, is that you are limited to the harvest of only one sense--sight. Walk through downtown on a summer’s day and you will find the city beneath the city. Reduced by heat and time to its essential elements, this is the demi-glace of urban life.
The air you pass through has hot and cold spots, like the ocean. The heat surrounds you, from the sky yes, pressing on you from the sky like a gentle insistent palm, but also it seeps out of warm stone and bodies passing. It shoots out in sudden jets from exhaust fans and the wide-open back doors of commercial kitchens, interspersed then with bands of sudden chill, where front doors have opened and conditioned air, with its promising scents of candy and dish soap or the perfume of an optometrist in her white coat has escaped.
Passing a market, it is almost impossible to know exactly what you smell--the queasy sweetness of fruit ripening and bruised; the almost artificial breath of roses full blown by the heat with their swampy undertow of waterlogged stems; fish, flat-eyed and suspect on melting ice. The sizzle of hot meat and tortillas hangs in clouds over takeout windows, the lurid odor of unlit, homemade incense marks this street corner or that, and the wretched breath of alleys, of corners in parking lots and beside dumpsters, sighs over the people that live there.
Dropped gum turns to liquid; smeared into black by passing soles, it spots the hide of the sidewalk. Smells rise from underfoot--urine and tobacco ash, unexpected swaths of hot concrete cooled by the hoses of fastidious shopkeepers, the mellow rot of trash cans. Crossing the street, one treads through the sticky scent of asphalt, and a tang like a dirty nickel pried from a child’s fist.
It is frightening at first to walk amid the unfamiliar, grimy heat, to hear people ask you for things--cigarettes, money, a smile, more than a smile--to wonder if it’s true that when people get too hot in the summer violence occurs more easily, more savagely. But after a block or two, there is something exhilarating too. This is the city, what it smells like and feels like. No matter the country, you will feel eyes on you as you walk down city streets. The sidewalk will be hot with sun and the trammel of feet and there will be the smell of flowers and bodies and sweet fruit and hot bread. All brought to a boiling broth by summer.
Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
