Matthew Specktor - Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

For K, whose life was beautiful anyway

CONTENTS

One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind.

SEYMOUR KRIM, For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business

These are the picture people.

Do not blame them too much.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Notebooks

THERES A CERTAIN sort of person one sees all over Los Angeles, the kind youd rather stare at, perhaps, than know. These peopleyouve seen them tooare elegant, compact, and possessed of a bland perfection, a vegetable grace. You barely notice them, not because they arent visually strikingon the contrarybut because they seem to lack credible flaws. Their bone structure, their carefully tended hair and stubble, their laughter. If you were the type who was inclined to judge such things, a casting agent or just a garden-variety asshole, youd probably be able to tell what was which and who was most likely to succeed on the basis of these attributes (for these people are almost all, in one sense or another, actors), but me? All my life Ive viewed such specimens with confusion. Gliding past in their cars, hanging on the terraces and patios of outdoor cafs, hunched over laptops, scowling, in the back booths of restaurants or lollingin pairs, in quartetsdrinking green juice, drinking matcha tea or iced cortados, giving off the air, always, always, always, of ease, of success, of industry, of hope, of readiness, of the absence (see the yoga mat, the keys, the sunglasses, the well-thumbed copy of Stanislavskis An Actor Prepares, or Save the Cat!) of all visible signs of difficulty.

Such people once filled me with envy: the sad pangs of an ugly duckling sentenced to waddle among them. Later, the feelings they stirred were ones of resentment, and competition. But it is only recently, after a long struggle with my own ideas of success and what these people might be aiming toward, that I have begun to pity them. To look at them now feels like looking at a photograph of soldiers headed to war, or one of those spammy internet pages that purport to show images taken on the precipice of calamity: the instant before the shark bites or the bear lunges, or the foot slips fatally from the ledge. This morning, I slalomed through a crowd of them on my way to get coffee, my hips brushing up against their shoulders, glancing down at their sunstruck, symmetrical, self-enclosed faces, the narcissistic flowers of Beverly Boulevard, innocent, every last one, of what wind was coming to destroy them. By the time I made it back to my car? I was in tears.

Some time ago (in my younger and more vulnerable years), I suffered a kind of crash. Suffered may be a grand and heroic word for it, considering the quantities of a more profound misery in the world, but, nevertheless. I found myself loose, at large within the city where Id grown up, from which Id departed in a nervous panic at eighteen, and to which Id only recently returned. Hollywood. Los Angeles contains so many sub-quadrants, most of them having nothing in particular to do with the movies, but Hollywoodwhich is as much a notion as it is a neighborhood, one that permeates the actual city like a gasis where Im from. My childhood home may have sat in Santa Monica, a sleepy suburb by the sea, but my family resided in Hollywood as surely as anyone ever has. Which place is to many folks still a metonym, a symbol of all that is shiny and empty and attractive and awful in American life, all that is stupid and all that iswe cant help itirresistible to us, pulling as it does with the hopeful energy of sex. To me, growing up, this city had been the precise opposite: a glamourless desert, a hall of mirrors where I was unable to escape my own unfortunate reflection. All these roads and avenues running nowhere beneath the green palms, leading me back inexorably to my own perceived limitations. Surely there was something the matter with me. How could I dislike my own hometown so much? Id ejected myself with all the force of a hairball, fled east to college in Massachusetts, west to San Francisco, then east again to New York City. Id been elsewhere for a long, long time, and now that I was home, probing along the margins of my native place the way you would at an abscessed tooth, with tenderness and care and a gnawing fascination... I fell in love, though to this day I cannot quite say with what. Maybe it was just the thing about Los Angeles that claims everybody, eventually: weather, buildings, loveliness, light. Or maybe, Id fooled myself again. Having expatriated myself from the city for so long, and having insulated myself for a while by marriage, one that had recently ended, I was coming to it now as an outsider, and for the same reason so many do: as a sucker, hoping against some very steep odds for success.

Ill take it.

My voice echoed sharply off the walls of a small but empty room, the acoustics of whichwood floors, high ceilingmade it feel slightly larger: just big enough that I might not feel for a while the potential for confinement.

OK, great. The landlady, a gnomish, leathery-looking figure with the straw-blond hair of someone thirty years her junior, smiled. Ill draw up a lease. She leaned over, conspiratorial, and whispered, Yknow who used to live here? Cary Grant.

Really?

You know who else? She beamed. Al Pacino.

I stared at her. There was no way of knowing if either of these things was true, if she was serving up local folklore or if (as she pulled a cell phone from her pocket and showed me a number she insisted was Pacinos) this landlady was in fact a little bit nuts. But in a way it didnt matter: Los Angeles is full of such apocrypha. This apartment was just a ghost crib, a launching pad toward a greater, more hopeful future.

Cool, I said, as I followed her outside. Ill try to honor them both.

The place Id landed was at the stone center of Hollywoods mythological grid: the head of the Sunset Strip, the intersection at Crescent Heights that shears off into Laurel Canyon on one side and toward Beverly Hills and the beach if you gaze straight ahead, at the twisting road that winds past the Chateau Marmont and a million other landmarksthe Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, the Polo Lounge, and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Hollywood. If you picture it, apart from its fabled hillside sign this is what you see. If youre attuned to this place, its history and poetics, you think of all the things that have happened along this very street, or in the canyons that branch directly away from it: John Belushi ODing on a speedball in one of the rooms at the Chateau; Jim Morrison kicked out of the Whisky forever for unspooling the oedipal psychodrama of The End an obscenity too far; Arthur Lee of the great sixties band Love, himself stoned immaculate between Clark and Hilldale, his band collapsing in a fog of drugs and money problems; the Manson murders; farther west, the O. J. murder. If you wanted to, you could map the entirety of Sunset Boulevard, all twenty-one and three-quarter miles of it, exclusively in terms of mayhem and collapse, chart it as purely as the stations of the cross. For a place so synonymous with hedonism, this city sure seems to arrive at one bummer after the next. And for a place so gilded, so enamoredagain, stillwith stardom, it sure does seem to cradle more than its fair share of failure, of oblivions both natural and man-made.