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Chapter 1
I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, but on any given night Los Angeles can do a pretty good imitation of either locale.
In the early morning of January 17, 1994, L.A. slipped into
Hell mode in a big way. At the time I was living in an apartment
in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando
Valley. Despite the early hour, I was still awake when the event
occurred, having been unable to nod off due to a strange mixture
of listlessness and unfocussed anxiety: it's said that dogs experience
similar precognitive distress prior to seismic events. I had
just closed the book I was reading, Rudy Wurlitzer's Hard Travel
to Sacred Places, and reached for the light when I heard a terrifying
rumble in the distance. Something big was about to happen.
It was an incredibly loud noise, yet it seemed to be emanating
from a distant place and moving closer with great speed and violence.
I realized it could only be a few things: an earthquake, a comet
striking Earth, a nuclear blast, or some other big ass explosion,
maybe from a stunt gone awry on a movie set filming in the west
Valley. It was four-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King's
birthday and the idea that anybody, even Joel Silver, might be
blowing up buildings at this hour was somewhat unlikely.
I had only a split second to consider these possibilities
and I quickly circled number one -- earthquake -- just as the
first shockwave hit. The entire apartment complex was lifted
into the air and brought back down hard. The halogen lamp fell
from the top of my bookshelf and shattered. Glass hit me in the
face. A rip of plaster tore straight up the wall directly behind
my head. When the crack reached the ceiling it zigzagged across
the surface out of the bedroom. The streetlights in the alley
outside the room flickered and went out, followed immediately
by the flashing lights and neon trim on the marquee of the La
Reina Plaza on Ventura Boulevard a half block away. My bedroom
was plunged into darkness.
The initial shockwave seemed to last an eternity. It was probably
only twenty or thirty seconds in reality, but that can be an
eternity if you live on the second floor of an apartment building
that feels like it has turned into wood and plaster flavored
Jell-O. When the huge bookshelf itself fell over and crashed
six inches from my head I decided that this was an earthquake
worth getting out of bed for. I scrambled over the fallen bookshelf
to the doorway, got the door open and stood in the arch. Five
feet across the hall I saw my roommate, Jeff, standing naked
in the arch of his doorway. A vaguely familiar TV actress, also
naked, dangled from around his neck, looking up into his stoic
face as if she were seeing the face of Jesus in the gloom. It
was easy to see how she could have been confused. Jeff had his
arms outstretched and pressed against either side of the doorjamb
for support. A flashlight at his feet bounced illumination up
against the rubber walls, hauntingly lighting his face from below.
He looked like he was suffering on an invisible cross.
"It's the fucking Big One!" Jeff screamed in an
unJesus-like fashion. He seemed to take little notice of the
girl carving her initials into the back of his neck with her
fingernails.
I nodded approval of his assessment. It did indeed appear
that this could be the notorious "Big One" that we
had all been waiting for. I had experienced hundreds of earthquakes
over the years, most of them small, a few of them sizable, but
I rarely moved to a doorway for any of them. This sucker was
intense. It felt like the entire building was going to tear itself
apart. We could hear glass breaking everywhere, in our apartment
and outside, in the dozens of apartment houses and office buildings
that surrounded us. The shaking did not seem like it was going
to stop. I had a brief aerial vision of the entire area, along
with half of California, heading out to sea.
The quake abruptly came to a halt. Nine million car alarms
filled in while the rumbling earth took a quick cigarette break.
"That wasn't so bad," I said.
The woman around Jeff's neck let go and bolted for the front
door. "I'm outta here!" she screamed, seemingly unaware
of just how naked she really was.
Jeff stayed in his doorway and yelled "Don't!" as
loudly as he could, but she ignored him.
I smiled at Jeff and said, "She'll never make the door."
We braced ourselves for what we knew was about to happen.
The first aftershock hit with almost as much force as the earthquake
itself. It was enough to turn the apartment into a Salvador Dali
landscape. Everything became liquid. The girl was tossed into
the air and catapulted into the front door with a resounding
splat. Luckily her shoulder was leading or her head probably
would have gone right through the wood panel. The vibrations
were on the gentle side by the time Jeff and I decided to apartment
surf out of the place before the next shockwave could hit. Jeff
reached into his room and grabbed a bathrobe and a towel. I made
my way gingerly through the darkened minefield of fallen items
and broken glass, snagged my leather jacket off the kitchen chair
and slipped it on. I was wearing boxer shorts, so a jacket was
all I'd need. I grabbed Jeff's lady friend by one arm and started
to pick her up off the floor. Jeff, dressed in his Hugh Hefner
robe, grabbed her other arm and we hoisted her to her feet. She
looked like a dazed raccoon that had bounced off a car fender.
Jeff had the flashlight in his free hand. He swept it across
the apartment and we saw that everything was on the floor. Everything.
He bounced the light into the kitchen where pots and pans were
still gently rattling against the thousands of pieces of broken
glass that had been our dishes. The place was thrashed.
The apartment stopped shaking for a few seconds, but it continued
to rock and sway gently, its beams and girders singing out that
this was not the way things were meant to be. The place was old,
and part of it appeared to be older than the rest. We had two
front doors, almost side by side, one in the kitchen, the other
in the living room. An open arch separated the two rooms. The
arch looked like it had been designed in the forties and I had
a feeling that the kitchen area had been an add-on. I hoped the
place wasn't going to split at its seams.
We got the living room door open and piled out onto the balcony.
The hammock strung diagonally between two opposing beams of the
balcony was still swaying from the aftershock and the wood floor
was creaking as if it wanted to collapse under us. We negotiated
the darkened stairwell with the girl. There was another door
at the bottom of the stairs. I turned the knob but the door would
not open. Jeff shined the flashlight around the edge of the doorframe.
The building had settled on the door slightly. Jeff and I looked
at each other for a moment of Butch and Sundance bonding and
then we both kicked the door hard, knocking it open and sending
splinters everywhere. Luckily the building had been standing
for more than fifty years. The wood was soft, practically rotten.
We dragged the naked actress into the large parking lot next
to the building and received a standing ovation from our neighbors
who were gathering in clusters in the safety zone, shining flashlights
wildly about in the dark. Beams of light danced all over the
stunned girl's naked body until Jeff wrapped her in the towel.
He held her close as another large aftershock rocked the ground.
Even over the Earth's rumble I could hear someone in the crowd
say, "Hey isn't that...?" referring to Jeff's dazed
actress girlfriend. The great thing about natural disasters in
L.A. is that they are star studded events. An Irwin Allen Production
made flesh.
In the hours, days, months, and years of earthquakes and aftershocks
that would follow, we would never again trust the ground on which
we walked quite the same way as we did before this quake (which
at 6.8 on the Richter scale was impressive, yet far short of
the "Big One"), but at least we were finally going
to get to meet the neighbors.
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