The Walk

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

2:42 p.m. Wednesday

The statues had pubic hair.

It wasn’t some artist’s chiseled interpretation of pubic hair, but actual hair of some kind glued to the carved crotches of a dozen stone nudes. Beyond that, the row of gaudy statues that lined the top of the wall around the Sunset Boulevard mansion would otherwise have been unremarkable.

When Martin Slack first saw those statues twenty years ago from the front seat of his over-heated Chevette, arriving from Northern California for his freshman year at UCLA, he knew for certain he’d arrived in Los Angeles.

The wall was still there, only now it was riddled with fresh cracks and surrounded an empty lot full of tall, dry weeds. The statues and the mansion were long gone, but they undoubtedly lived on in the photo albums of a thousand tourists.

The homeowners on Sunset wanted their properties photographed, not by Architectural Digest but by busloads of tourists, and would go to extreme, and expensive, lengths to get those snapshots taken.

The fervent competition for tourist eyeballs often made Sunset Boulevard look like a residential version of the Las Vegas Strip, only without the budget buffets.

To become a sidewalk attraction, it wasn’t enough to have lavish architecture and lush landscaping, or to park shiny limousines and Italian sports cars around a sparkling fountain. Extravagance, opulence, and gratuitous displays of wealth were merely starting points.

Some homeowners made their blatant grab for snapshot glory only on the holidays, festooning their lawns and eaves with hundreds of flashing lights, elaborate floral displays, and animatronic dioramas that Walt Disney would have envied.

Others were in it for the long run, striving to become a permanent stop on the Hollywood Star Tour and yet, at the same time, maintaining the charade that they valued their own privacy with small “no trespassing” signs staked in their lawns.

One such homeowner decorated the circular drive in front of the white walls that sealed his property with incredibly life-like bronze statues-albeit clothed and presumably without pubic hair, real or otherwise. He began with only a uniformed security guard at his gate, then quickly expanded his repertory company of statuary to include a gardener, a painter, a jogger, kids at play, and in case anyone missed the subtle intention behind his efforts, a tourist couple taking pictures of it all.

Marty sat in front of this house, resting on the homeowner’s sturdy, wood-carved “private property” sign. He didn’t know or care if the house behind the walls still stood, the tall trees behind the wall hiding it from view. But he was glad the statues had survived because now, in his mind, nothing was more authentically LA than this.

Except, perhaps, for the statues with pubic hair, but sadly they were already lost. He thought somebody should have lobbied to give them protection as a historical landmark. They were significant to him, if no one else, even if he didn’t really miss them until now.

Even though he’d traveled on Sunset countless times over the last twenty years, somehow this time it felt like he was retracing the path he took when he first came here from San Francisco, when he was full of dreams and plans that still hadn’t come true.

His melancholy was compounded by his physical state. He’d never experienced so many different kinds of discomfort at once. His back burned, his cuts stung, his shoulder throbbed, and his skin itched under his charred, damp, dirt-caked clothes. Every muscle in his body was sore, and his feet felt as if they had swelled to twice their normal size. He was hot, thirsty, and sweating all over.

And then there were all those dead faces that wouldn’t stay buried in his mind, flashing in front of his consciousness like commercial breaks.

The memories, the weariness, and the pain became an almost palpable weight, carried all over his body. This must be why so many elderly people stooped, Marty thought. Seventy years of this shit must weight a lot.

So he’d stopped to rest, to clear his head, to marshal his strength for the next leg of his journey over the Sepulveda Pass. He knew the hills were ablaze, even from here he could see the smoke. But he was going to take the Pass anyway, because the alternative, trekking twenty or thirty more miles further west and inching into the valley from the coast, was unthinkable. It would take days in the condition he was in now and there was no telling what hazards he’d face there-mudslides, forest fires, deranged mountain lions, swarms of locusts.

The locusts seemed like a stretch, but then again, Marty never would have imagined running into a tidal wave in the middle of Hollywood, either.

He figured the Sepulveda Pass wasn’t too big a risk anyway. He was planning on walking straight up the center of the San Diego Freeway. The ten lanes of concrete plus the two lanes of Sepulveda Boulevard should make a nice, wide fire break.

Marty took a deep breath, got to his feet, and started walking again. To distract himself from the pain, and to make the time pass, he sang TV themes to himself, beginning with fifties shows and moving forward from there.

He began with Have Gun, Will Travel and was up to Green Acres a half-hour later as he approached a guy near the ornate gates to Bel-Air, sitting in a lawn chair beside a sandwich board that advertised “Maps to the Stars’ Homes(Only Five Dollars!” The “five” had been scratched out and replaced with a hastily scrawled “two.” The man was going through his maps, spreading them open on his lap and X-ing out homes with a fat magic marker.

“Doing much business?” Marty asked.

“Some,” the man said, intent on his work. “News crews, mostly.”

Made sense. It didn’t matter much to Americans if Los Angeles was destroyed, Marty thought, but God save Jay Leno’s garage, Brad Pitt’s sun deck, and Meg Ryan’s tennis courts.

“How do you know which homes have been destroyed?” Marty asked.

“I have my sources,” he said mysteriously and started marking up another map.

Marty headed off again, picking up where he left off in the sixties with Branded. He was in middle of the seventies and Good Times when he passed the northern fringes of UCLA. The jogging track, like most open spaces he’d seen since the quake, was clogged with people in make-shift shelters and tents. Above them, to the west, the ruins of the dormitories lay across the stands like fallen stacks of Legos.

His first home in LA was gone. Scratch that one off the Martin Slack Historical tour.

Although there might be food and water on campus, he decided not to stop there for fear he’d never get started again. He walked on, reaching the San Diego Freeway just as he was entering the eighties with Gimme a Break.

The freeway stretched up into the hills, towards a pall of smoke a few miles north that blotted out the sun. The ten-lane roadway was riddled with fissures, ripples, and sinkholes and littered with mangled, wrecked, and overturned cars. The only traffic was a small handful of living dead, either heading into or out of the valley. Surprisingly, the people walking south stayed in the southbound lanes to the left, while those heading north remained on the right, as if those rules made any difference now.

Marty supposed they instinctively clung to the habit for the same reason he was singing TV themes. It grounded them, allowing them to forget what they’d seen, to move like zombies on a pre-destined course. So he headed north into the Pass and dutifully stayed to the right, belting out The Greatest American Hero with all the passion he could muster.

3:25 p.m. Wednesday

After the Getty Center Drive exit, the hills on either side of the freeway seemed uninhabited, except by flames, which swirled amidst the acres of dense, dry scrub-grass, sending plumes of dark smoke into the sky, turning day into night.

He’d read somewhere that an acre of brush was equal to 5000 gallons of gasoline. It didn’t give him much comfort.

The fire had a sound, deep and heavy, like a waterfall only without the water. Glowing orange cinders swirled around him like red-hot snowflakes. Waterfalls without water. Snowflakes on fire. Walking through the Pass was surreal.

Marty’s journey was getting much harder now, not so much the walking, but finding TV themes to sing. He was discovering that the eighties and nineties were mighty lean years for TV songwriting. That, and it was increasingly hard to concentrate on distraction with an orange-black curtain closing in on him from both sides.

He stayed low, and well to the middle of the roadway, snaking through the abandoned cars, trying not to look at the bodies and body parts also left behind. Instead, he struggled to remember the lyrics to Helltown. Sammy Davis, Jr. sang it, but Marty kept confusing it with the theme to Baretta, which was easy, since Sammy and Robert Blake did them both.

Little balls of fire rolled down the hillside and across the freeway like tears. He didn’t know what to make of them until one rolled right in front of him.

Only it wasn’t rolling. It was running.

It was a wild rabbit, a ball of flaming fur, fleeing from the inferno. The freeway was being over-run with burning wild life. And where these burning rats, squirrels, and rabbits perished on the hillside, new fires started. The blazing creatures, in death, were unwittingly increasing the size and ferocity of their pursuer.

At least on the freeway there was no dry brush to spark under their fiery corpses.

Just puddles of gasoline.

No sooner did the thought occur to him than one of the burning rodents ignited a puddle of fuel with a loud whoosh just a few yards away.

It burned out quickly, but it was enough to terrify him. Suddenly, in Marty’s mind, those flaming animals became rolling grenades.

He hurried along, looking in all directions, trying to keep his eye on every flaming creature, every drop of gasoline, every wrecked car, hoping to anticipate the next blast.

This was so damned unfair, he thought. After what happened in that downtown alley with Molly, and what he went through in Beverly Hills, he should be exempt from having to deal with explosions any more. Since Fate hadn’t issued that exemption yet, this had to be another cosmic payback, retribution for demanding more explosions in the action shows on his network, despite the creative and financial pleas from the producers.

Blow something up, he’d say. Something big. You can never have too many explosions.

Now he was learning first hand how wrong he was.

To his right, a Jetta exploded, spinning through the air towards him like a gigantic sheet metal football.

Marty ran like a wide receiver, only he was screaming and this was one pass he didn’t want to receive.

The car smashed into the freeway not far from where he had stood, cartwheeling over the top of several cars, then crashing into the low concrete median.

He stared at the wreckage in amazement, gasping for breath.

A rat did that, he thought. One hot rat.

Marty hurried on, frightened, performing “The Eyes of a Ranger” as loud as he could, the flames dancing along with him on the hillside like insane orange ghosts.

Up ahead, a deer stood shivering between two cars, staring at Marty. The animal was seared black, her hairless skin smoldering. Marty passed close enough to touch the deer, but didn’t. “I’ll Be There for You,” he sang, turning away.

Marty marched on through Mad About You, The Nanny,” and Baywatch . By the time he got to Touched by an Angel, the sound of explosions was receding behind him and sunlight began to break through the smoke ahead, revealing the ruins of the Skirball Jewish Cultural Center and the two overpasses that crossed the freeway at its peak.

The smaller overpass, the one nearest to him, joined Sepulveda to a small street leading up to Mulholland on the other side. The span seemed intact, but Marty ran under it with a shiver of panic anyway.

The taller overpass ahead was massive, rising up several hundred feet to stretch Mulholland over the San Diego Freeway. The span had collapsed on either end, creating a towering, concrete island out of the center section that remained. Marty could see maybe a dozen commuters stranded up there with their cars, castaways in middle of an urban ocean. From their lonely vantage point, the destruction in the LA basin and the San Fernando Valley lapped up against their concrete pillars like waves.

The choppers heading into the valley must have seen them up there, which could only mean the castaways were a low priority compared to the calamities elsewhere. That must have been little comfort to them, especially as each new aftershock shook them like glassware on a wobbly table.

The castaways looked down at him sadly as he passed.

“Help us,” a woman whimpered, her voice echoing off the roadway.

He looked up at her. There was nothing he could do, and saying so wouldn’t make a difference. So he just lowered his gaze and continued on.

Once again, Marty had little choice but to go under the unstable span, passing the piles of cars, concrete, and rebar that had come down in the quake. A man’s unscratched arm stuck straight out from amidst the rubble, coated with a fine layer of dust, a cell phone still clutched in his hand. For a moment, Marty thought about taking it and trying to place another call to his wife, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Buck would have, if he had anybody to call. Marty wondered who that made the better man.

Marty emerged from under the overpass and the valley opened up below him. He could see clear across to the San Gabriel Mountains on the other side. And in the concrete, sub-divided flatlands in between, through the haze of smoke, the face of the Big One stared back at him.

It was an angry, wickedly malicious face, the face of a vengeful giant who awakened from a deep sleep and dribbled a gigantic basketball up and down the valley, gleefully smashing entire blocks with each bounce.

Now the giant had taken his toys and crawled back into his hole in the ground to hibernate for a hundred more years before wreaking havoc again. By then, the mess would be cleaned up and everything rebuilt for him to destroy again.

Marty couldn’t see Calabasas from here, it was ten miles east, but he imagined it hadn’t fared much better.

He set off down the hill towards home.

4:07 p.m. Wednesday

Los Angeles shouldn’t exist. It had no natural harbor, no dependable water supply, and bad air. All it had going for it was year-round sunshine.

That was more than enough, with the right spin.

Nothing symbolized this more than the San Fernando Valley, once a parched dust bowl baking under the incessant heat.

But Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and a few other wealthy businessmen saw the potential under all that cracked, dry earth. It was lousy farmland but these businessmen were interested in harvesting a more resilient crop: money. But to do it, they’d still need water.

Otis and his cronies bought up all the struggling farms and only then used their considerable clout to divert water along massive aqueducts from the Sacramento Delta hundreds of miles north to the arid valley.

With the arrival of water, the land was worth hundreds of times what the businessmen paid for it. And what they didn’t own, they took control of by annexing it into the city. Otis used the pages of his newspaper to hype the valley as paradise and soon the people came in hordes.

Of course, Marty wouldn’t have known any of this if he hadn’t seen Chinatown. And if he hadn’t seen the movie, and learned about the scandal and dirty-dealing behind the valley’s creation, he couldn’t have lived there. Without a hint of scandal in its past, the valley would have been just too bland to be habitable.

The only natural source of water to the valley was the Los Angeles River, which remained bone dry half the year, only to swell in the winter as much as three-thousand fold in a single rainy day. As much as Los Angeles craved water, it didn’t appreciate the unpredictability of the river and treated it as they would any other piece of land. They paved it.

Now the Los Angeles River was a concrete-lined flood channel that snaked through the valley, except for one small patch designated as a park, where the Streamline Moderne-style Sepulveda Flood Control Dam held back the water when necessary and served as a cheap film location the rest of the time.

Even when the river was flooding, there was no shortage of exciting film to be shot. Inevitably, somebody would fall in, despite the fences and steep concrete banks and would spark a dramatic rescue effort which, more often than not, failed. It made great TV nonetheless.

The flood basin beneath the spillway, so rarely filled with water, was now overflowing with people. It was one thousand acres of open space and that was the only place anyone felt safe now.

As Marty came down from the Sepulveda Pass, he could see the dam, and the flood of people, just beyond where the San Diego Freeway merged with the Ventura Freeway. He wanted to avoid the tangle of unstable overpasses that converged there and so he climbed off the freeway as it came down the base of the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains.

He trudged down the embankment onramp alongside the freeway, then followed the street below to the stately, ranch-style homes along Woodvale and Haskell, with their collapsed chimneys, crumbling stucco, and fractured wood siding.

This was where most of the valley money was, in the gentle foothills above Ventura Boulevard and up the hillside to Mulholland. While Hancock Park and Beverly Hills was mostly old money, as old as money could be in Los Angeles, the valley was where the newly-minted TV, movie, sports, and software millionaires built their modest estates, at least by old money standards.

The old money felt when the valley rich had real money, and actually mattered, they’d move to one of the Bs-Brentwood, Beverly Hills, or Bel-Air. Until then, they deserved the valley.

Marty reached Ventura Boulevard and, having seen the thoroughfare after the Northridge Quake in ’94, felt like he was looking at a rerun. The buildings on either side of the valley’s “main street” had lost their faces, revealing their plaster sinew and iron skeletons. The sidewalks were buckled, the roadway rife with fissures. Broken glass, chunks of mortar, and loose papers were everywhere.

Ventura Boulevard, which ran along the entire southern edge of the valley, was one long, charm-less stretch of fast food franchises, gas stations, grocery stores, car washes, and countless, bland strip malls, with their interchangeable mix of hair salons and donut shops, dry cleaners and locksmiths, liquor stores, copy centers, and video rental places. Culturally and architecturally, no one would miss what had been destroyed, yet again.

The devastation here seemed different to Marty somehow from what he saw on the other side of the hill. It was if he was seeing it all in more detail, under more intense light. He thought perhaps the flatness of the valley and the paucity of tall buildings had something to do with it, allowing the light to spread into corners and cracks it couldn’t Downtown or in Hollywood.

Or maybe it was because, unlike the LA basin, he considered this home. Maybe he saw more because he knew the landscape better. As he moved slowly westward, he was aware of so many details that he’d missed before: The sour smell of rotting food. The broken parking meters lying on the street, leaving a spray of glittering change. The concrete bus benches flung into the center of the street by the force of the quake and broken in two. The layer of dust coating everything like powdered sugar. The steady stream of liquor, milk, juice, and soda flowing from shattered mini-marts. The flies swarming over the dead. The overturned mailboxes and the hundreds of letters blowing in the breeze like leaves. And, most of all, the silence.

Everything that had been wailing in the hours immediately following the quake, the car alarms and the injured people, had long since died. All he heard now was the buzz of flies, the rhythmic chopping of a helicopter in the distance and the gentle flap of banners advertising the “Circus Valdez” that fluttered from tilted street lights up and down the boulevard.

Something made him stop suddenly, just west of the intersection of Reseda and Ventura, and he didn’t know what it was.

He looked around. A woman stapled a hand-written “Lost Dog-Reward” flier to a listing palm tree.

No, that wasn’t it.

About fifty people, some of them barely able to stand because of their injuries, were lined up outside a Tobacco-For-Less store, where cigarettes were being sold out of cardboard crates.

The pathetic sight was worth a glance, but not a full stop.

What the hell was it that grabbed him, instinctively or subliminally, and forced him to halt?

Marty scanned the street. A guy sat on the curb outside a travel agency, flipping through a Hawaii brochure. Someone had nailed a piece of plywood over their falafel place and spray-painted the words: “Welcome to Tarzana, Some Assembly Required.” A couple kids were carting a big screen TV out of a crumbled storefront.

His eyes went back to the plywood sign.

Yeah, it was kind of clever, but it was more clever when he saw the same joke after the ’94 quake. That couldn’t be what caught his attention. What else was there?

People had dragged some couches out of a furniture store and were sleeping on them in the street. A realtor in his bright orange jacket was sweeping up the broken glass outside of his office, as if he was actually expecting some business. A woman was picking through the rubble at a dry cleaners, carefully sorting the clothes, no doubt looking for her own. A guy was getting his wife and kids to pose in the street for a picture, something to remember the earthquake by in case they forgot.

His gaze returned to the plywood sign. Again.

What was it with the sign? “Welcome to Tarzana, Some Assembly Required.”

Yes, he was in Tarzana, formerly author Edgar Rice Burrough’s country estate, long since sub-divided and divided again. A city named after a fictional, tree-swinging, raised-by-apes hero. Tacky, but so what? It was just a place he drove through on the way home, an exit off the freeway, he didn’t know anybody here.

Yes, you do.

Then he remembered and he knew why he stopped.

Marty reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph Molly tried to give him. The photo of her five-year-old daughter, Clara. And he remembered what she said, as she was bleeding to death in her car.

“ She’s at Dandelion Preschool in Tarzana, you’ll call the school from the hospital, let them know what happened?”

And she showed him the photo. The same one she tried to give him when the shaking started again. The photo he wouldn’t take because he was running away, leaving Molly to die. She screamed for him.

“Angel!”

He was almost home. Dandelion Preschool was out of his way. Clara wasn’t his responsibility.

Marty looked down Ventura Boulevard. He was so close to Beth now. Five, maybe six miles, then his ordeal would be over and they would be together again. That was the whole point of the journey, wasn’t it? To get back to his wife, to fight for her, and their marriage, again?

No, it was to get home. It wasn’t about their marriage, about fighting for anything, at least not when he started.

But he knew it was now. Somewhere along the way, the destination of his journey had changed.

Now that he thought about it, Marty could almost pinpoint the moment. It was when he met Buck. Almost from the start, Buck challenged him about who he was, how truthful he was with himself and with his wife, forced him to all but admit that he was a lousy husband and that his marriage was falling apart.

And now Marty knew why. He supposed he always knew, he just never admitted it to himself. Their marriage was dying because he gave up his dream of writing and hers of being a mother. He knew the reason he stopped trying to have a kid was the same reason he stopped writing. The obstacles were too much. He couldn’t deal with the failure.

But in the last two days, he’d overcome obstacles he would have found impossible to face before. Now the blank page and the empty semen cup didn’t seem nearly so frightening any more.

He wasn’t the same Martin Slack that he was before, he knew that now. And if he was going to prove it to Beth, he had to prove it to himself first.

5:11 p.m. Wednesday

The page Marty tore out of the phone book said that Dandelion Preschool was on Kittridge, which meant that technically it wasn’t in Tarzana at all, not that it made any difference now.

He didn’t have a map anymore, but he headed north on Wilbur because he vaguely remembered seeing a Kittridge street sign before, on his way to Costco, the warehouse store where Beth liked to buy things in bulk, not because they needed that much of anything, but because she couldn’t resist. It was like asking her take one potato chip from the bowl when she could have a handful instead. They were still using the same five-pound container of seasoned salt they bought there two years ago, and they probably still would be for years to come.

They didn’t take Wilbur to Costco, they took Tampa several blocks west, but this was the first north-south street he came across and he knew that if Kittridge crossed Tampa, and you could say the school was in Tarzana, then it had to cross Wilbur, too.

Marty didn’t know what he was going to say or do when he got to the school, but he knew he had to go there. Molly’s dying wish, even if it was implied rather than said, was that he save her girl. If Clara was even alive. And what if she wasn’t at the school anymore? What would he do then? How long and how far would he search before going home?

He didn’t have a chance to answer those questions right away, because he was immediately distracted by two things. First, was the Los Angeles River, which he could see to his left and right, which meant that he was over it and that the street he was on was actually a bridge. He’d been so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t even realized he was walking on a bridge. But he considered his alternative. The banks of the river were nearly vertical slabs of concrete. If he didn’t take one of the streets over it, he’d have had to back-track all the way to Balboa Park near the Sepulveda Dam, scale the dry river bed, then come back this direction. He probably would have chosen this route anyway.

That’s what he thought, and tried to tell himself, in the split second between his first distraction, and the second one, which made the first all the more horrifying:

The aftershock.

The center of the overpass collapsed, turning both ends into immense, concrete slides. Marty rolled and tumbled, along with a dozen other people, two cars, and one motorcycle, down towards the concrete river bed below.