Polaroids From the Dead

by Douglas Coupland

  A hand taps her shoulder. Juanita turns around to meet an elderly woman wearing tan slacks, her hair in curlers under a red scarf. She is carrying a small bundle of blue carnations. She says to Juanita, “I know you. You’re the TV lady.”

  Juanita says, “Hello,” nods politely, and returns her gaze to the black marble. But the woman taps her again and says, “I want you to have a flower, TV lady.” And so Juanita accepts a flower from the woman, who is then clasped around the shoulders by a younger woman, visibly her daughter, who makes apologies to Juanita with her eyebrows. After a moment the daughter steers her mother farther down along the monument’s face.

  Juanita watches the pair, and quietly moves down the slight slope toward them, to the apex of the monument’s V. There, Juanita sees the older woman touching the stone with her hands, no doubt rubbing the name of her son carved there. Moved, Juanita ambles closer, whereupon she hears the daughter say, “Mom—stop playing with your reflection. David’s name is up here. Mom—David’s name is up here.”

  “Oh,” says the older woman. “Who’s David?”

  Part Three

  Brentwood Notebook A Day in the Life

  AUGUST 4, 1994

  We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  AP/Wide World Photos

  MORNING

  BRENTWOOD, CALIFORNIA, POPULATION 35,798, IS THE LOS ANGELES DISTRICT where Marilyn Monroe’s ambiguously debated death occurred thirty-two years previously in the early evening hours of August 4, 1962. Brentwood is also the psychic nexus of the O. J. Simpson/Nicole Brown saga, somewhere between 10:00 P.M. and 11:00 P.M.., June 12, 1994.

  Brentwood does not exist. Not technically. It is a hilly, canyoned Los Angeles suburb—a ZIP code: 90049. Letters sent to Brentwood will be returned to sender. Roughly 250 letters a day end up in the small, Northern California town of Brentwood, ZIP code 94513.

  Brentwood could have transcended mere 90049 ZIP code-ness and had genuine civic autonomy had it not been for the simple fact of water.

  In June of 1916 Brentwood signed a pact with the City of Los Angeles, receiving freshly imported 250-mile Owens aqueduct water courtesy of William Mulholland, in return for incorporation. Brentwood’s property values increased and the city gained almost 50 square miles of new territory. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica avoided this pact by virtue of their having enough well water to resist enshackling by Los Angeles.

  In the daytime, Brentwood is almost exclusively a city of women old and young, focused on a small band of retail strip along San Vicente Boulevard. There are women peppered with hunky aspiring actors and slinky actresses springing about from auditions to the gym. It is a soap opera terrarium of post-humanized objects of desire pantherishly unleashed into the boudoir. The worker bees are across Interstate 405 in the city, or in Santa Monica or in the Valley—at ARCO, Disney, The Prudential, Security Bank, RAND, Lorimar, UCLA and the Jon Douglas Realtors Company. Brentwood gives the impression of being a 1970s future utopia, one with a secret at its core, perhaps a pleasant secret and perhaps an unpleasant secret, but a secret that nonetheless remains fiercely protected. Brentwood, like Palm Springs, offers a version of an alternative future that might have occurred had certain factors not continued unchecked, futures that daily seem less probable.

  Brentwood generates a mood that arises, possibly, from the difference between what Brentwood posits itself as being (a secular nirvana: better living through sex, money, fame and infrastructure) and what the suburb actually is. One receives the distinct aura of a municipality embodying secularism in crisis. And a part of the crisis of secularity seems to stem from a crisis in our cultural concept of fame, the body—and the way we dream of leading our lives. The area possesses an air of exile: Bermuda during the 1940s; the duke of Windsor, half-crazed with boredom. The unsolved murder of Harry Oakes. During its early years, it was a suburb somewhat engaged in Anglophilia.

  Five miles eastward down Santa Monica Boulevard stand the twin towers of the ABC Entertainment Center at Century City. These towers, plus the ocean’s presence to the west, combined with the Santa Monica Mountain Range canyons, lend Brentwood a notion of geographical “place-ishness.”

  Q: What sort of person lives in Brentwood? Old money? New? Offshore? Midwest spinsters? Middle-class aerospaceoids holding on to their jobs by their teeth? Hungry young TriStar execs? Angie Dickinson? Divorcées? Poverty line pensioners? Gym freaks? Soap opera walk-ons?

  A: All of the above.

  Brentwood is not a place where one establishes a dynastic root. It is not a homestead neighborhood. North American suburbs rarely are places where people expect their children to inherit the family Tara. Traditionally people came to Brentwood to raise families, with the common end scenario being divorce, atomization, property divestiture and a move onward. This is the way it works in suburbs; Brentwood is no exception: the kids grow up and leave; the parents move to Newport or Santa Barbara or Connecticut.

  Families come and go. Increasingly Brentwood is a district of diatomic professional couples earning large incomes. The household molecules are growing increasingly smaller, richer and older. It’s no longer a place where one goes to breed Bradys.

  One learns that Bel Air, Hollywood and the Canyons used to be the only “talent-sided” neighborhoods. In recent years, the talent has moved in greater numbers to Brentwood, in pursuit of invisibility, in pursuit of privacy.

  Confessional wisdom has it that “Mediterranean” is the sort of house where the “talent” likes to live. Writers and production people prefer Tudor-style houses, remnants of L.A.’s turn-of-the-century Anglophilia.

  HONORARY MAYORS OF BRENTWOOD

  (8-by-10-inch glossies on view at the First Interstate Bank, 11836 San Vicente)

  1968 Lloyd Nolan

  1970 Fred MacMurray

  1971 Phyllis Diller

  1974 Lorne Greene

  1976 Sandy Duncan

  1978 John Forsythe

  1981 Tony Franciosa

  1985 Mark Harmon

  1986 John Saxon

  1992 Sally Struthers

  Celebrities Who Live/d Within O. J. Simpson’s 460-House Brentwood Park Neighborhood

  Julie Andrews, Roseanne, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Angie Dickinson, Phyllis Diller, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Tom Hanks, Paul Henreid, Betty Hutton, Hope Lange, Angela Lansbury, Cloris Leachman, Fred MacMurray, Mike Ovitz, Gregory Peck, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dennis Quaid, Claude Rains, Rob Reiner, L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan, Meg Ryan, William Saroyan, Jimmy Stewart, Meryl Streep, Shirley Temple

  From City of Quartz by Mike Davis: Community in Los Angeles means homogeneity of race, class and, especially, home values. Community designations i.e. the street signs across the city identifying areas as “Canoga Park,” “Holmby Hills,” “Silverlake” and so on have no legal status. In the last analysis they are merely favors granted by city council members to well-organized neighborhoods or businessmen’s groups seeking to have their areas identified.

  It is almost impossible to locate someone who knows where Brentwood begins and ends, as though certainty of boundary would imperil land values. Slightest nuances of undesirability can considerably affect the resale value of property in transient neighborhoods such as Brentwood, where over 80 percent of the population arrived since 1980.

  Only a U.S. Post Office map marked with colored pencils inside the Barrington Station yields definitive results. Brentwood, (rather, 90049) is a squiggly Vermont-shaped rectangle, delineated by Wilshire, Centinella, Montana and 26th on the south, the American Veterans Association grounds and the 405 Freeway and Sepulveda on the east, Mulholland Drive on the north, Sullivan Canyon Fire Road on the west.

  Technically, Brentwood also includes the Los Angeles National Cemetery east of the 405—the Arlington Cemetery of the West—as well as p
arts of Bel Air, though it would be a grueling fight to the death for Bel Aireans to accept this notion.

  Brentwood has an ironically mall-like name. (There are no known records of how its name came about; it emerged ex vacuo in 1907.) Malls, however, don’t exist in Brentwood—not the double-anchor, parking lot for 3,000-style malls of the edge cities. There is, however, a mini-mall at the corner of Barrington and San Vicente that sells Francis Bacon lithographs; on the berm where most other malls might have anti-loitering lighting systems installed sits a line of small Henry Moores.

  From Brentwood’s inception at the turn of this century, retail was seen as a land value detractor and has persistently been kept at bay. The almost poignant notion of the “country club,” however, is as a land value enhancer; the Brentwood Country Club has 500 members.

  At Hamburger Hamlet, next to the Henry Moore-sculptured mini-mall, a NASA retiree boasts of having had ten responses to an ad in the local paper asking for “an intelligent, sociologically aware woman.”

  Social note: at the restaurants, al fresco dining is passé; shade is in; not because of UV’s but because one side effect of the new families of antidepressants is photo-sensitivity. It is not considered indiscreet or even stigmatized to appear in public greased with post-cosmetic surgery Polysporin, nose plasters or wraparound dark glasses.

  To further fragment Brentwood would be to break it down into smaller, mallishly named neighborhoods: Westridge, Kenter Canyon, San Vicente Park, Brentwood Heights, Crestwood, Brentwood Park, Westgate, Brentwood Terrace, Mountaingate. Most of these are ruled by homeowners associations who enforce to the best of their ability rules and regulations that will prevent a neighborhood from going “downhill.” Much of Brentwood is without sidewalks (drifters!).

  Brentwood’s main streets are Sunset (an east/west corridor), Bundy (a north/south corridor and Nicole Brown Simpson’s street) and the somewhat retail San Vicente, Wilshire, Barrington, running east/west.

  MESSAGE BOARD AT THE WESTWARD HO MARKET

  NEAR THE CORNER OF BARRINGTON AND SAN VICENTE

  Effective personal protection. Easy to use. Better than mace or pepper spray.

  Cannot be used against you. 310 207-XXXX

  Benedict Canyon house for rent. 4-bdrm, hdwd floors, quiet patio, 2-car garage.

  $1,800/month

  Westec patrol officer seeks guest house for rent.

  [Various index cards touting home computer training, home security systems

  and pizza ovens. A vogue for home pizza ovens seems to have apparently come

  to an end.]

  1976 Porsche 911S Targa. $10,000

  Ted Soqui/Sygma

  One has a hunch that in 1964 the same billboard harbored index cards offering dance lessons, free kittens and piano lessons.

  The local newspaper, the Brentwood News, a puree of local chitchat fueled by real-estate-driven editorial, follows Brentwood’s home sales minutiae with seemingly pornographic fidelity, chronicling monthly the ebb and flow of land capital followed by ads for local properties.

  Real estate perhaps is still the driving force of conversation in Brentwood. Subdivision maps, and lots resembling cross-cut vacuoles of loofa sponges are a recurring civic visual motif in newspapers, drawn on bar napkins and faxed between neighbors from house to house.

  DISPLAY ADVERTISING IN THE BRENTWOOD NEWS

  CPAs

  law firms

  picnic baskets

  gem appraisals

  cellular phones

  local Cartier dealer

  Glendale Federal Bank

  electronic security systems

  Mountain Gate Country Club

  Mercedes-specific car repairs

  chronic fatigue syndrome counseling

  ArmorCoat anti-earthquake window glass

  post-earthquake stress counseling seminars

  seismically reinforced document storehouses

  background investigations and asset searches

  tummy-and butt-specific aerobic reduction classes

  separation, divorce, custody, visitation, paternity, property division legal specialists

  Lower Brentwood, or rather, the lower part of Brentwood below San Vicente (referred to by a local youngster as “Nieder Brentwald”), is a mishmash of higher-density rental units, war bride bungalows and Los Angeles generica in the style of Ed Ruscha’s mid-1960s paintings.

  Tiny Spanish bungalows sit alone; the shielding trees out front died long ago and were never replaced, overexposing the structures to daily solar flare, lowering their land values in the extreme.

  The housing density is higher by far in this portion of Brentwood: three-story rental and condo units, most of them toting VACANCY signs, all of them designed in the usual clutter of styles, predominantly DesiLu Moderne, 101 Dalmatians-Mansard, Orange County 1986-Mission and Anaheim-Motel.

  Lower Brentwood’s plantings, like too many actors at a party, are exotic yet not rare: Waikiki plants—hibiscus, bougainvillea and banana. It is a neighborhood of $900-range renters with nice cars owned by aspiring actors, screenwriters, models and creative types mixed with pensioners. Lower Brentwood’s range of reasonably affordable accommodations means that bodyworking men and women can assume night jobs, reserving their days for auditions and the gym.

  This is where Brentwood’s sexually charged party mix derives its midday and nighttime soap opera ecology.

  This Brentwood “underside” is by no means impoverished, yet certainly several cuts below what lies on the other side of San Vicente and above Sunset. It was into this neighborhood that Nicole Brown Simpson landed after her divorce, in a $650,000 condo near the noisy southwest corner of Bundy and Dorothy, on Bundy, a condo that would cost maybe $350,000 were it in most other parts of the city.

  One Brentwood resident who grew up in Brentwood Heights (above Sunset; equidistant from Monroe’s and Simpson’s houses), now in his twenties, calls lower Brentwood a divorcée ghetto. Three of his best friends from high school had parents who divorced, and all three mothers ended up “in the ghetto. Only my own mother [also a divorcée] got to keep the house. She’s the exception.”

  Brentwood, like many West Coast urban districts, acts as a living guide to what might be termed a catalogue of the new temptations:

  instant wealth

  emotionally disengaged sex

  information overload

  belief in the ability of ingested substances to alter the aura

  of one’s flesh or personality architecture

  neglect of the maintenance of democracy

  willful ignorance of history

  body manipulation

  willful rejection of reflection

  body envy

  belief that spectacle is reality

  vicarious living through celebrities

  rejection of sentiment

  unwillingness to assign hierarchy to values

  The punchline to this particular cataloguing is that the link between temptation and sin has been severed. Temptation is simply “things one either does or does not do.” This leads to one possible question: Is amorality a state of mind that requires hard work to achieve, or is it a state of mind achieved by default? Another question is raised: Is amorality even up for moral inspection? Brentwood shows us what people can do…if they can.

  Brentwood is also technically the 12-step program capital of the planet. The University Synagogue at the corner of Sunset and Saltair every Wednesday between 7:00 and 10:00 P.M. hosts the world’s largest weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, with 1,100 attendees.

  While held within a synagogue, it is important to remember that AA is non-denominational while at the same time accepting of a higher power.

  Driving through Westwood Village en route to Brentwood, amid a Persepolis of dental clean skyscrapers, a friend driving the car proudly proclaims, “See all these buildings? Full of shrinks. Every single one of them. Ain’t that great?”

  From The Day of the Locust:

  They were
savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment…. Where else should they go but to California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once they got there, they discovered that sunshine wasn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time…. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they have been tricked and burn with resentment…The sun is a joke…. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed.