Of Smog and Stucco

THEY REALLY DO have smog in Los Angeles. That's the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane in Southern California. I always knew they had a little air pollution, but for some reason I thought the smog thing was just an exaggeration, like when your uncle Mort tells you about this great fishing spot where the fish jump into the boat, or when some guy from Bangor tells you that it rained so hard the other day that three farmers drowned in a hay loft. I couldn't believe that they would have smog that you could actually see.

But there it was, covering the city like a thick, yellow, semi-transparent blanket. And this was a sunny day! You look straight up and you see blue sky, but look across the horizon, and your view is cut off after a couple of miles by that blanket of claus ophobic petrochemicals.

Ask somebody from California why they have smog. "Hey, like we can't help it, man, it's because of the mountains." Right, Ronald Reagan--and trees cause pollution, too! Mountains may have something to do with it, but the real reason for the smog is the Southern California Automobile Fetish. L.A. invented the 13-car family.

Take your average family from Los Angeles: Dad's gotta have a car to get to work. Mom's gotta have a car to run all those errands. Juedye (Judy) has to have one to get to the health food store. Mack needs a pickup truck so he can haul around babes in the back of it (you really shouldn't show your face at a beach down there unless you got a pick up to haul around babes in). And little Flowertruth has to have one for her 16th birthday. And each family has a couple of spares, too, just in case.

The result is traffic jams, a 24-hour institution. Driving to the hotel from the airport in the early afternoon, we hit bumper-to-bumper on the L.A. Freeway. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps I'd better explain that. I flew out to L.A. for the Fourth of July weekend to attend a wedding. Now, I have to admit, I am what people out West like to call an Eastern Bastard: I don't know how to ride a horse, I've never shot a ground squirrel, and I think Mount Washington is a big mountain. I've lived most of my life right around Boston. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but Madison is really nothing more than an island of East in the vast sea of the Midwest. And the last time I saw California I was two years old. I was really prepared for some kind of Culture Shock when I got out there. I was looking forward to getting a taste of the Southern California Mystique. See a couple of movie stars or something, maybe run into Charies Bronson or Lee Remick. Well, I didn't see any movie stars, but I did see a hell of a lot of people who thought they were. The dress code in California is Show-What-You-Got, even if you don't got it. You see a lot of overweight, middle-aged women spilling out of scanty fashion wear designed for Farrah Fawcett.

The Holiday Inn I stayed at was in Santa Monica, which is really just an extension of Los Angeles--everything out there is just an extension of L.A. I didn't get to see much of downtown L.A., but I was told that downtown L.A. doesn't really exist. The city is spread out like a vast semi-subrub. Driving through Los Angeles is like driving through an endless stretch of Somerville; it's noisy and hectic and you keep waiting for the suburbs to appear, but they never do. Everything is made out of stucco. Stucco banks, stucco taco joints, stucco supermarkets and stucco homes.

The Santa Monica Holiday Inn sits about a hundred yards from the beach at the Santa Monica Pier. On Saturday night, the Fourth of July, thousands of people poured onto the pier to watch fireworks. The Santa Monica pier is a boardwalk nearly a half-mile long lined with your usual Coney Island-style attractions--greasy food, greasy arcades, greasy drunks. But on the fourth, thousands of people of all ages streamed across a narrow bridge and onto the pier. The whole town was electrified by the screaming voices of Southern Californian maniacs. It was like all the crazy things you've heard about the people of L.A. rolled into one aggressively insane crowd. Firecrackers exploded a few feet from the crowd, some right in the crowd. Nobody seemed to mind. The bridge shook under the weight of the people. Across the street from the Holiday Inn, hundreds of people camped out on the lawn of a McDonald's. Hundreds more balanced themselves precariously on a railing at the top of a six-level parking garage. Others took the elevator to the roof of the Holiday Inn before police were called in to kick them out.

Eight of us, eight Easterners from Boston and Connecticut and New Jersey, stood by and watched in amazement as hundreds of bronzed bodies flowed past us. We stood on the street, somebody wanted to sell us a dog, someone else wanted to sell us something else. We retreated to the airconditioned security of our seventh-floor room and watched the proceedings from there.

BUT WHEN THE FIREWORKS ended, the real show began, as all these thousands of people got in their cars to drive home. A few cars got out early, but not many. Boom; the streets jammed up. The headlights below us lit up the street brilliantly, and for as far as we could see, there were backed-up cars fading slowly into the distance in a hazy coud of smog. Behind the hotel was a freeway with a tunnel, and the thing to do in L.A. when you're in a tunnel is honk your horn, so an endless echoing Waaaaaaa of automobile horns filled the air. Drivers were angry and aggressive, but none of them seemed surprised by the traffic. Just another holiday in Southern California--a traffic jam is part of the deal. We watched and laughed and sipped Coors in our room while a couple of police officers tried to control traffic. After half an hour, none of the cars had moved. It was not until nearly three hours later that the traffic had begun to subside.

Early the next morning I was on a plane on my way back to Boston. I hadn't been very impressed with Los Angeles. I know I didn't spend enough time out there to give it a real chance, but I'm not sure I wanted to. It was big and noisy and dirty and I just couldn't see the attraction. When we landed in Boston it was raining and there was a nice layer of fog covering the city. On the way home from the airport we drove through the Callahan Tunnel and very few people honked their horns. It was good to be home.