The Big One

Flirting with disaster, again

There’s an uneasy quiet here now, the invisible simmer of a hot pot just taken off a burner. The fires aren’t out, a shocking fact, but the predicted whistling wind didn’t materialize, so the remaining fires weren’t stirred up, embers didn’t fly, new outbursts didn’t occur. Yesterday, though, as I drove to the grocery store, I saw flames in the middle of Ventura Boulevard. A small pile of trash, mostly fast-food containers, was burning in the left-turn lane—not just smoldering but truly burning, with licking flames and gray smoke. My heart started pounding, and I pulled over and called 911. The emergency operator could see the fire on his screen—how, I have no idea—and within a minute, a firetruck was on the spot.

Photo by Anthony Maw on Unsplash

We’re all going to be jittery for a long time. It’s not only that nature has showed us how vicious it can be sometimes, but it’s human mistrust, too. A pile of trash burning in the middle of Ventura Boulevard is not, I dare say, a natural occurrence. Some of these fires will certainly be attributed to arson. The two fires near my house appear to have been deliberately set. Other fires will be blamed on stupidity—a fast-flying rumor is that the Palisades fire originated with a bonfire in someone’s backyard. In California, you don’t have bonfires, especially when the air is as dry as dust and the wind is wild. People are no damn good sometimes. And yet, as evidenced by the bighearted response to calls for donations and pet rescue and temporary housing would suggest, sometimes they are pretty damn good.

As I mentioned a few Substacks ago, my scorecard for disasters is filling up. In 1994, I was dispatched by The New Yorker to Los Angeles to write a story about Hollywood assistants; it was going to be featured in the magazine’s first-ever Hollywood issue. I got to town a few days early so I could see friends and run around a little; I always loved running around LA. I got friendly with a film producer who was incredibly lively and fun, a proverbial barrel of monkeys, and he invited me to join him at a a string of parties on the Sunday night after I arrived. We raced from one party to the next, guzzling drinks and gabbing; it was a blast. He finally dropped me at my hotel at about 3 am. I was so giddy and wound-up that I couldn’t fall asleep. I finally surrendered to my insomnia and took an Ambien; I had reporting to do the next day and I was desperate for some rest. The pill kicked in around 4 am. At 4:31, I was jolted out of my bed. My television bounced off its stand. What had awakened me was a thunderous crash; at first I thought a truck had driven into the building.

As a Midwesterner, I had no fluency in earthquakes, so I didn’t recognize what was happening. It was just very loud and bouncy. I called down to the front desk, and the operator told me that I should stay in my room and that nothing was happening. Something most certainly was happening, and whatever it was, I didn’t want to be in a hotel room while it was happening, so I found my room key and headed out. I was on the seventh or eighth floor—I can’t remember which—and I figured I should stay out of the elevator. The stairwell was jammed with hotel guests, shuffling down the stairs in their pjs, brandishing toothbrushes and a few hastily-assembled items. By then, we all knew the thump and roll had been a major earthquake. In the lobby, there was an almost festive atmosphere, everyone chattering excitedly, and then freezing in absolute silence each time there was a rough, hard aftershock. The huge cut-glass chandeliers in the lobby swayed overhead; most of us dashed out of the building until the rolling stopped. Nowhere felt level or immobile. It was like being on a very large ocean-liner that was cresting waves. Not far from the hotel, the overpass of the I-10 buckled and crashed down, something that seems like movie magic, but this time was real.

I wrote a Talk of the Town piece about the experience, and while the tone is a little merry and bright, the whole thing really was terrifying, and remained terrifying, for weeks. I never did my story about Hollywood assistants, because all the studios closed for a while after the earthquake, but mostly because I was scared to death and wanted to get out of town as soon as I could. Here’s the Talk piece, which was published January 23, 1994:

The 6.6 at 4:31

The unhappiest person in the lobby of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel before dawn last Monday was a slight, sandy-haired man who had gone to bed Sunday night wearing bright-pink wide-legged pajamas. Who knew on Sunday that their sleepwear choices were going to be on public display before the night was through? Only a few minutes passed between the bang of the tremblor and the hotel management’s herding of all its guests out of their creaking, quaking rooms, down the seldom-used stairs, and into the elegant marble lobby. In those minutes after you were bounced out of bed by the vibrations, you had a few random, hysterical thoughts, you wondered whether you should take your room key, you fluffed up your hair, you threw on some things if you were sleeping without things, and you ran.

The evacuation outfit of choice at the Beverly Wilshire appeared to be the hotel’s plush white terry-cloth bathrobe, and slippers. So many guests chose this ensemble that the lobby could have been a country-club steam bath or the color room of a hair salon. Nylon warmup suits were also popular—and they were an appropriate choice, because in the hours following the earthquake, guests alternated between cooling down in the lobby and, with each aftershock, wind-sprinting out of the building and across three eastbound lanes of Wilshire Boulevard to the median strip. Even at 5 a.m. or so, the traffic on Wilshire was pretty heavy. The cars were filled with people who were fully dressed and were driving somewhere (where?) in the early morning of a national holiday during a natural disaster. They looked weird, and those of us on the median probably looked a little weird, too.

A few of the guests seemed as if they had dressed for something other than disaster. Carl Portale, the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, was wearing a sort of yachting outfit—crisp trousers and a sporty crewneck sweater. One woman did the median dash in a skintight black micro mini, sheer hose, high heels, foundation, blusher, mascara, eyeliner, lip liner, lipstick, and pearls. Pelé, the world-famous soccer star, was wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and between sprints he signed autographs and discussed the World Cup.

As dawn approached, the air was clammy, and the sidewalk glittered with pieces of a big glass window that had shattered and fallen from the old Drexel Burnham Lambert offices, just down the street. The man in the pink pajamas missed all of it. He remained huddled in a far corner of the lobby, alone, his legs crossed to cover up as much of the pajamas as they could.

Thanks for reading. xSusan