by David Hirst
The perils of the road extend all the way to the bottom of Pioneertown Road and even beyond. A trip out for breakfast, even to clear the mailbox, is perilous, and may take two hours. Recently, I ran into five friends just getting the mail, almost the entire male population of Pioneertown. Some locals consider it rude not to visit. Ernie and Carole consider a week without a visit a snub. Carole can talk about their dogs, past and present, for an hour, barely drawing a breath.
This did not sit well with my experiences of life in Los Angeles. There I learnt the ultimate purpose of civilisation, its overwhelming drive, and the reason for the striving of the soul. It is not the pursuit of happiness, but the elimination of patience. The pursuit of speed, and the speeding up of pursuit. The great goal of our culture is to banish that bane of true happiness, that most undesirable of human requirements — patience. LA is teaching the world that a wait for half an hour on a freeway off-ramp to purchase a burrito in an instant is a giant step for us all.
Monday nights are taco nights in Pioneertown, and with Boo in LA on business, I ventured forth with Ernie and Carole to acquaint myself with the old Pioneertown Bowling Alley. We had no intention of bowling, and few that attend this establishment trouble the perfectly maintained 1940s tenpin-bowling joint. They prefer to trouble Ron, the proprietor, in the forlorn hope of obtaining a drink and even a spot of food. Ernie and Carole sat, wisely it turned out, at tables, but I waited at the bar in the hope of purchasing my new friends and myself a drink. Realising my intention, Ron scuttled away into the bowels of his establishment, leaving me alone and impatient. The minutes passed. I looked at Ernie and Carole, expecting that as locals they would have some explanation of why a proprietor was unable to serve his three customers — the bar being otherwise empty.
For a few more moments, I admired the place. Roy Rogers smiled down at us from walls adorned with him bowling (in cowboy boots), smiling at Dale, smiling at Trigger, and doing Roy Rogers things. There was even a signed score card from the great man, and I had time to reflect that this was the only time I had entered a bowling alley without being repulsed by the smells attendant to human activity. There was no sign of human effort whatsoever — neither on the floor nor behind the bar. I tried a plaintive ‘COOEE’, the cry that, according to Australian Aboriginal lore, is the human sound that travels further than any other. Ron, a tiny man who was incapable of standing still, returned. He bounced about behind the bar, reminding me of a flea, and ten minutes after we entered the bar inquired whether we would like a drink.
‘We would,’ I told him, ‘sometime today.’
Ron took the opportunity to disappear from the face of the earth, even though all the prerequisites of beers, a limited range of hard stuff, and an even more limited array of mixes stood right before me. Eventually, he returned and took our orders, and disappeared again. I ordered a margarita and then sat down, realising why Ernie and Carole had done so some twenty minutes before. Ron returned and started making a grand disturbance, as though assembling a motor car rather than three margaritas.
We waited. My margarita, when it arrived was, I told Ron, ‘unspeakable’. It was pink, and the salt, rather than lining the rim, seemed to have been included in the drink.
I turned to get a fresh drink — a simple bottle of beer — but Ron had disappeared again.
My cooees turned to bellows, and Ron bobbed up from somewhere, wondering whether all was well. It wasn’t, I told him, asking, perhaps brutally, for a simple bottle of Bud. Ron disappeared again. There was no possible task he needed to attend to. There were only three people in the bar, and Mane Street was utterly deserted. I stared at Carole, bewildered.
‘It’s the desert, David,’ she said with relaxed indifference, sipping on her drink.
In LA, even in better restaurants, food is ordered ‘to go’. And drink is made available instantly. Los Angelenos live to go. They talk all the time about leaving. They are impatient to go. But they never leave. People don’t leave Pioneertown, nor do they talk about leaving.
Patience is the ability to wait without suffering. But for denizens of the modern world, waiting is suffering, and suffering should not, we all know, be part of the human condition. The city has turned the struggle for greater speed — what the eggheads once clumsily labelled instant gratification— into its ethos.
The life of the hunter was hours, maybe days, of patience, followed by a burst of speed. The patience was far more important than the speed. Los Angeles is reversing this arrangement, and creating a society where life is a long burst of speed, followed by a moment’s patience. This, again, is most evident in its eating habits.
From our last apartment in Hollywood, I could walk to the elevator, descend to the ‘secure’ underground parking, simultaneously start the car and open the security gates, fly along Rossmore Avenue, cross Melrose, cross Santa Monica Boulevard, cross Sunset, pull into an Indian restaurant, order, pay, pick up the food, cross all the aforementioned streets on the race home, and serve a warm curry to ten people in about ten minutes. That’s a minute a person. To achieve this in a pastoral society would take many hours. A hunter would be lucky to provide enough food for so many mouths in days, if at all.
The hunter would spend most of his twenty or so years of maturity in pure patience, waiting for prey. The food, once caught, would be eaten collectively: a communal act that evolved into what used to be called a meal. Los Angeles families are so well supplied in foodstuffs that they have been freed from eating together. And who has time for such an awkward arrangement? Instead they graze, at the refrigerator door if time permits. Otherwise they grab something, and eat while pursuing a higher goal than that of getting to know other members of the family. They make money. As the family disintegrated, psychologists invented ‘quality time’. Time spent with loved ones has been institutionalised.
‘Quality time’ has not been a complete success. The very title implies that this time is more important than time spent making money, and that’s a hard sell to a five-year-old in LA. The old-fashioned meal brought us together for primaeval reasons. To eat. Quality time is forcing a bunch of people united only through biology to meet and get to know and, hopefully, like one another. As a bonding mechanism it’s got a long way to go. It’s a speed bump.
If Los Angelenos have to wait, they do it at traffic lights or on the freeway. They will spend about three years of their lives waiting at traffic lights.
But the elimination of patience has not corresponded with the extinction of patience’s closest cousin, waiting.
Forced waiting and the elimination of patience lead the city’s citizens, primates of a new culture, to other occasional malfunctions. Road rage is the most recent, and one of the more graphic manifestations of the daily battle waged between patience and waiting. To the years they spend waiting at the lights, we must add the years spent stopped, or crawling along what are called, in remembrance of things past, ‘freeways’.
Residents of the High Desert have great patience, as they rarely have to wait, especially now that Ron has sold the bar to Stephanie, who, having worked a bar in New York, knows that there is something of a relationship between service and cashflow.
But they have no traffic lights, or traffic. Not a single stop sign adorns the town, though there is one on the corner where Pipes Canyon departs from Pioneertown Road. Thus we don’t get a lot of road rage, and the closest thing to a traffic jam occurs at the post office. Here, at about 10.00 a.m., up to five trucks and as many as two cars can be found, their occupants yarning and gossiping and avoiding commencing what they have to attend to.
Ed, who first drove me to Boulder House, became a frequent visitor and has bought sixty acres off Roadrunner Rut — a longish rifle shot from Boulder House. He and his wife spent many weekends at Boulder House while finding the right place, and another half-dozen getting a trailer to the site. But it was much-needed therapy, as Ed had come to suffer from chronic road
rage.
He lived in Marina Del Rey, but worked in Seal Beach. That’s only eighty or so kilometres, and in his Le Baron convertible Ed should be able to jump on the 405 freeway, after a quick run along the 92 (The Richard Nixon Freeway, as it is no longer called), and be at the office in an hour. Max!
But Ed, whose lack of patience exceeds the city average, usually spent two and often three hours making his trip — the 405 being the least free of all the city’s freeways. The road home was neither shorter nor quicker. Averaged out, Ed spent five hours a day fighting his way through traffic to get to and from work, and eight, nine, or even ten hours running computer systems that were designed to speed the movement of information. That left him less than ten hours a day to sleep, eat, and have fun. Ed likes his fun.
He likes to go to bars and get ‘a nice buzz up’, beat everyone but me at pool, and then head home. Once home, he will eat, and after a few hours rest it’s back to the freeway.
Naturally, his work suffered.
Ed is way above average intelligence, and he found a way to stack the deck in his favour. Realising the five to six hours in the car were the cause of his social limitations, that his principal ‘recoverable hours’ were those spent on the freeway, he decided to turn his convertible into a mobile mini-bar. Ed reasoned that he could kill two birds and still get stoned. The trick was to get to The Circle, for that was his preferred bar, with a sufficient ‘buzz’ that he could immediately join in the spirit of the place without wasting an hour or two catching up with all the other drinkers.
Although Ed disapproved of drink-driving, he did not consider drinking while driving an offence. That it was against the law did not necessarily make it an offence. Smoking marijuana is against the law, but few would consider that an offence. Only a few years ago, cops in Texas would describe the distance of a drive by the number of beer cans required to complete it. A ‘two-can’ drive was maybe sixty kilometres. A six-pack drive, two hundred and fifty kilometres. Ed’s driving record was, until he made this decision, impeccable.
Ed’s preferred drink, like Buzz’s, is Kessler, a cheaper whiskey that requires a decent dash of Coke to be rendered drinkable. Ed took to buying bottles of Kessler and to stopping at a nearby McDonald’s, where huge Cokes, enclosed in plastic tops, can be purchased in an instant.
Ed had outsmarted society once again. He would pull out of the McDonald’s and, stretching his arm out of the convertible, empty half the gallon or so of Coke and ice into the nearest gutter. The container would be refilled with Kessler, the plastic top returned, the mix shaken, and the straw inserted. Ed would cruise onto the 405, one hundred kilometres from The Circle Bar. A favourite recording of The Rolling Stones would boom out his rebuilt super-duper music system, and Ed could get his evening started at about the same time that his friends were making their way to the bar. As the drive could stretch for three hours and the ice died in the Coke and Kessler slush, he often found it necessary to pull off the freeway, flash into a McDonald’s, and be back on the freeway, level with the crawling cars he had just left, holding a fresh, cold Kessler and Coke.
Ed carries a confident air that can accompany people who have worked for the higher reaches of the US government. If a police car was stuck beside him for ten minutes, he would sip his Coke and Kessler concoction, and smile. Ed has a large head and a large smile, one of goodwill to all men, and he would cast it at the cops stuck a few feet away as they waited for the traffic to edge them closer to their drive’s end. Once he obliged the bored cops by turning up ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and a few other favourites while he sipped in absolute security.
It was a system he was to utilise until he was finally brought down, after a fabulous example of road rage, which led to his eventual involvement with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Tom, who was working that night at The Circle serving Ed and a few others, later calculated that Ed drank a bottle and a half of Kessler before deciding it was time to drive home. This, coupled with the half-bottle he had consumed on the freeway, caused Tom some concern, but he figured Ed was capable of his usual drive home, a mere trip through Venice. And Ed made it home without effort.
He was about to park when someone cut him off, stealing his spot. Ed openly admits to suffering from bouts of road rage, and taking a parking spot someone else has already located is a serious social offence in LA. The rage came upon him just a few yards from his apartment, but attracted the system of justice he so admired, and he was asked to walk in a straight line. The police directed Ed to a section of pavement that was severely cracked. Ed suggested the cops try to walk straight along it, but they declined. Ed walked a crooked ten yards, and was taken to the Venice police station, was found to be three times the legal limit, arrested, and handcuffed to a steel rod in a holding area. There he joined a half-dozen men who were also inebriated.
He was naturally demanding the right to call his then girlfriend so he could be bailed out. He had to be at work in six hours, and as the situation at work had grown tense, non-arrival because of a DUI test would make things even more difficult. But the cops ignored his righteous demands and left him in the tank.
Deep in his jeans pocket was Ed’s mobile phone. He began to wiggle, and after almost half an hour of furious wiggling, his phone slipped into his lap. But Ed’s hands were cuffed to the steel rod behind him, and it was impossible for him to use his fingers to make his call. This deterred him but a little. He had been, in the service of his country, in more testing situations. He didn’t have to punch her number, as the phone was programmed to dial. But he did have to get to the automatic dialling button, guide it to her number, and press the little YES that would hopefully wake his beloved, long deep in sleep. He achieved this by manoeuvring his body and the phone so his elbow touched the appropriate button. Miraculously, she was aroused, but the phone had slipped, and he could hear nothing. Seeing that the call had gone through, he bellowed ‘I’m in the Venice police station, bring $500!’ He did this for a few minutes, not knowing whether she could hear him, and even if she could whether she would be in the frame of mind to come to his rescue.
Then he sat and waited as his cellmates speculated on his chances of gaining freedom.
About a half-hour later a large contingent of police officers entered the tank, all expressing astonishment and wonder. His phone, still on, was in his lap, and the cops, greatly impressed by his feat, released him and escorted him, with the respect due to a commanding officer, and handed him over to his unsmiling girlfriend. It was the last time they were to go out together, but he had time to race home, clean up, borrow a mate’s car — his being impounded — hit the 405, and arrive at work with a relaxed air, on time.
The judge ordered him to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. This made his short day even shorter. Now he had to spend an extra two hours, three days a week, listening to the ‘confessions’ of others, of lost souls baring their sordid secrets to strangers so they could continue to drive vast distances to pursue tasks that usually involved making things go faster.
His drinking time was even further eroded. Mandatory breath tests were made on all entering the sessions. But, Ed noticed, after a few of what was to be three months of this tedium, the tests were not taken on these poor souls as they left their session. He took to buying bottles of Kessler and jumbo-sized Coke containers again. He reported that from there on in, he always left the meetings with a ‘nice buzz’, and by the time he pulled his blue convertible up outside The Circle, was ready to play.
The ending gets happier still. Soon after, Ed was ‘headhunted’ by a major corporation only a few miles from his home and even closer to The Circle.
He had been freed from speed’s grip. But for every free Ed, there are a thousand still in speed’s clutches.
23
Ernie and Carole are the sort of citizens that Norman Rockwell would prize. Citizens very much in the traditional sense of the word. They care for all and sundry,
especially the sundry. No matter how badly their trust is abused, they will offer more. If everyone in the world had the goodness of these two, TV stations in Somalia would be advertising weight-loss programs. When their tenant didn’t pay a lick of rent for years, she was never threatened with eviction. When she had no money for the power and water, Ernie and Carole paid for that, too. The list of those who have enjoyed their largesse is embarrassingly large. Cars are lent — never to be seen in any worthy shape again. Rooms are granted free to those they know will never pay. Carole devotes herself to historic causes; Ernie, to ‘The Gunfighters’ and the weekly enactment of Wild West shootouts opposite the bowling alley in front of the town’s Old West bank, livery stables, and saloon facades. In presenting his productions, Ernie researches the garb and guns of the Old Western fighters as meticulously as a remake of the Titanic.
Getting to be friends with Ernie and Carole was one of the smartest things we ever did. Ernie is a consummate actor who would be superbly cast as Grumpy if someone had the good sense to remake Snow White. In his one movie role, he totally carried The Howling 9, which may be the worst movie ever filmed in Pioneertown.
Their living room–cum-office is the centre of life in Pioneertown, a source of all information and knowledge. The coffeepot is always hot, and the citizenry are always dropping in for a chat, a gossip, and a piece of pie.
‘Tony will be leaving any day now,’ Carole alerts us, as she ladles out great plates of freshly baked enchiladas.
‘How do you know?’ we inquire.
‘I’ve been watching the Wisconsin weather forecast, and the ground is expected to thaw this week. As soon as it does, he’ll be heading back up there.’
Tony’s leaving is both good news and bad. It means that our weather is warming up, but the loss of Tony is a blow. Tony, as could be expected of a man who spends his life in a furious struggle to redefine nature, is politically conservative, and thus we disagree on almost everything. But he is pretty much the only person out here who closely reads the LA Times. For all its sins (employing the worst cartoonist in Christendom), the LA Times is a pretty good rag. Though not a journal of record and without the pretensions of The New York Times, it does go far and wide in covering the world and is, to my mind, a better paper than its east coast adversary. While reviling Liberal opinion Tony is at least familiar with it. And he cans the Republicans as much as the Democrats and the pro-Democrat organs. Thus conversation with Tony is as lively as one can hope for, and his disappearances are an annual blow to those of us who like a vexing conversation on national and foreign matters.
