Last week felt endless and it isn’t over. I still can’t comprehend the scope of the natural disaster in LA County. The trauma of affected communities like Altadena and the Palisades is going to be impossible to process. My mental health has deteriorated and I’ve personally not been impacted at all. The rebuild is going to be a nightmare. The consequences are overwhelming: insurance migraines, abandoned pets and medication, ashes lost in other ashes, mass displacement exacerbating the housing crisis, price gouging doing the same, erased small businesses and jobs, and so much more.
I live in the San Fernando Valley. The Santa Ana winds are indeed the devil. Tuesday night he unleashed Hell.
I’m beyond grateful that the area in which I live experienced minimal damage and zero fires. The anxiety my family experienced was a fraction of the terror felt by those who had to flee on a moment’s notice into gridlock traffic, ditching cars or freeing horses to run through apocalyptic haze, only to return to a wasteland. Still the palm trees bowed westward before their queen. Still the windows rattled. None of us could sleep through the white noise of persistent 80 mph plane-grounding gusts. Then the entire county became an ashtray. The devil tapping his cigar against us with a powerful exhale.
I only received false alarm evacuation warnings, but I now understand the stereotypical Florida Man who refuses to evacuate a hurricane. In crises the sense of community is heightened. Citizens have been mobilized behind the mission of helping each other as much as possible. I’m sure this sort of civic unity happens everywhere natural disaster strikes, this just happens to be the first time I’ve been in such close proximity to one of this scale. I learned when the building next door to me caught on fire exactly a year ago that I don’t actually care about the walls I pay to live in, or the physical items I’ve amassed. But even though I’ll always be a transplant I care about the people of Los Angeles and I now I weirdly feel more connected to the place where I’ve lived for 15 years than ever before.
While trying to reckon with what was going on last Tuesday night, I turned briefly away from the Watch Duty app and the inane politicized X conspiracies in search of other non-social forms of media. In particular I sought out LA-specific art. I listened to Bad Religion’s “Los Angeles is Burning” for the first time in over a decade and it hit much differently. Pat Regan’s song “When The Big Shit Comes,” a comedic tune about how everyone’s going to die on the 101 if a natural disaster strikes Los Angeles, was non-consensually stuck in my head, providing some dark relief.
On Twitter, people re-shared this seasonally relevant Joan Didion quote:
A couple of weeks ago, I had visited the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena. At the gift shop, I bought a posthumous collection of poems by Charles Bukowski called What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire. As I sheltered during the initial red flag warning the book was sitting there on the kitchen table, mocking me. I picked it up and flipped through it, wondering if there were any poems about wildfire that could make me feel like maybe this was normal, maybe this always happens.
The poems were mostly typical Bukowski writing about drinking and women, the pointlessness of life and the beauty beneath the horror. I loved Bukowski when I was a teenager in Illinois, when I knew nothing about California. As with Didion and Babitz and Fante, I also enjoyed reading his work after moving to Los Angeles. It captures the essence of the city, albeit at an earlier era. I used to like drinking at the same places he once did, such as the King Eddy downtown. Every time I drove on the 105 toward LAX I’d think of a story he wrote about slamming on the gas to get to Hollywood Park for the horse races. I lived for a period of time, incidentally, down the street from his childhood home, which I believe is now or once was an Airbnb. I also understood the criticisms of him that broke out during the #MeToo era, and often felt ashamed at my stereotypical teenage white male adoration of him and other blatantly misogynistic writers.
There was one poem in What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire that struck me as particularly relevant, though. It’s called “he knows us all” and here is a screenshot of it:
In the context of reading it while hiding from hellish winds as entire cities burned nearby, this poem impacted me deeply. Hell does know us all indeed, and you better be grateful if the son-of-a-bitch spares you.
I feel compelled to acknowledge that the list of LA artists and writers I’ve mentioned are incredibly mainstream and narrow. I don’t claim to understand Los Angeles from them. That’d be like going to the Santa Monica Pier, Griffith Observatory and Hollywood Blvd. then going back home and saying you visited Los Angeles. There are many other writers associated with this place whose work I either already enjoy or desperately need to read.
What I do get from the Fantes Didions Bukowskis Babitzs Regans et. al is a sense of the ever-present natural danger that adds yet another layer of complexity to the city. Hollywood overshadows the local literary scene and films about LA tend to masrurbatorily glorify the industry. My favorite Los Angeles books leave me with a deeper understanding of the place in which they are set, including the natural nature anxieties most people living here experience. Especially those who like me moved here from a place that doesn’t have the same types of disasters.
In the above-pasted Didion quote, her tone is calm and calculated, but the violent image of birds exploding and the hodgepodge list of items reveal the rushed urgency she was forced to choose and flee. In John Fante’s Ask the Dust I could feel the main character’s desperate terror when he escapes downtown’s tall buildings for the desert after an earthquake. Even though it’s set in a fictional Central Valley town called Peaches, Chelsea Bieker’s novel Godshot is relevant to the southern portion of the state. I can feel her characters’ need to believe their cult leader’s promise: that one day, with enough prayer, another rain will come.
I’ve had to rush outside from a neighbor’s burning home (I calmly grabbed my Telecaster). I often find myself believing that despite all odds the skies will open up and steelhead will return to the LA River. I think about Ask the Dust all the time in Los Angeles, whenever the ground’s shaking or I’m worried it might. An exception to my previous Hollywood declaration is San Andreas, an undisputed classic Rock joint which also accurately depicted earthquake anxiety. I watched it at the pre-Quentin Tarantino Vista Theater, worried the speakers would rattle off the wall and onto my aisle seat head from even a 3.4.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad that there is a lot of literature about the too often-ignored natural danger of the place where I live. Even if I’ve only scratched the surface of the writing that exists about the land known as Los Angeles, what I have read has helped me confront and contextualize my anxieties. When a natural disaster did unfold, turning to the mainstream LA lit I am familiar with allowed me to make some sense of the scattered mess in my head.
Even before this tragedy, I was already reckoning with some of these themes and anxieties in my own writing. For the FIRE issue of the literary journal Panorama, I published a story called “a palmtree untrimmed” about the fire risk from the Santa Ana winds, living where I live. I doubt it will help anyone feel anything but I figured I’d share it. I’ll also share another poem I wrote and posted on Thursday morning, after a second sleepless night stressing over the safety of my toddler:
Here’s another quote from a real poem, from Bukowski: “Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.” This, clearly, relates to the title of the collection. It can be applied to a reader’s own life in myriad contexts. A few weeks ago I might have dismissed it as lit bro livelaughlove. It came to me at a helpful time.
This quote also ironically sends me the message that literature is not necessarily effective at enacting real change in the world. Relief efforts ongoing, and my time would be better spent assisting or staying out of the way however I can, rather than burying my nose in a posthumous poetry collection of an admittedly problematic writer. What matters most is not how well you read through the fire, nor how well you post through it. But I’m grateful there was a canon to consult during the peak time of disastrous confusion.
Once again, I apologize for a pointless and inconclusive Substack post. But I’m going to keep sending them every Monday. Unsubscribe now.