It Smells Like An Airport Runway
For our friends down south, we dig into the Mesh archives to bring you some thoughts on the City of Angels.
By Daniel Taylor
The thing about flying into Burbank—as opposed to the more upscale, metropolitan LAX—is that when it comes time to exit the aircraft, you don’t do it in the now-ubiquitous, sheep-through-the-chute fashion employed by pretty much any other airport I’ve ever been to. You get off that bitch like a foreign dignitary, like an international man of mystery: out the back door, down some steps, and into the open and sweaty tarmac asphalt. Though there were, unfortunately, no throngs of well-wishers or admirers waiting to greet me with waiving signs and screams of delight, there were still the looming, smog-coated mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley and the glimmering, toadstool high-rises off in the LA distance, welcoming me to, what the great 20th Century American Poet W. Axl Rose called, “The Jungle.”
One thing you notice about Los Angeles immediately upon arrival is how ugly you are. Unless, of course, you’re beautiful. But that’s very unlikely, given that 99% of the beautiful people in America live in the greater Los Angeles area. As some erudite Chicoan once explained to me “LA is just a collection the five hottest people from every small town in America,” a statement that, at the time, I thought was something of a joke, but now see is mostly based on fact. Getting a latte in a Santa Monica Starbucks, I found myself surrounded by people who 10 years ago were voted Most Likely to Get the Fuck Out of Here as Fast as Possible in the Bumblefuck High School yearbook and did exactly that, staking their claim in the Wild Westside of Hollywood and share-cropping copious amounts of effortless hipness and sheer natural beauty. And though it would seem that such concentrated physical attractiveness would give those amongst it a somewhat skewed idea of what beauty actually is, there are always a fair share of tourists, interlopers and passers-through, from which it can accurately ascertained that yes, they are indeed, still better looking and more fashionable than everybody else.
However, there was a certain amount of karmic compensation to be had for the abovementioned emotional distress. “I’m afraid the vehicle you reserved is currently unavailable,” the woman at the Hertz counter informed me, immediately filling my mind with nightmarish images driving around LA for a week in some pregnant rollerskate, stuck in traffic with a tape deck and an AM radio, getting laughed off the road by those beautiful women in their even more beautiful automobiles. I steeled myself for her offer, expecting the worst. “How about the Hummer?” she asked, in the same tone with which a waitress might say “I’m sorry we don’t have Coke. Is Pepsi OK?” Five minutes later, my esteemed colleague DJ Facials and I were cruising Wilshire in our silver Hummer H3 and though it seemed so wrong, baby, it felt so right.
Watching the gas needle creep steadily towards empty, while idling on the freeway, I slowly began to understand that poisonous, magnetic temptation that draws people to this place, despite all the obvious downsides, dangers and depressing shit that hurtles at you from all sides. The dying essence of the American Dream is hidden beneath this pavement, running in veins like quartz crytstal, beautiful and worthless. Even the infamous smog here blows on a pleasant ocean breeze, cooling you and killing you simultaneously. Thoreau once said “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.,” but it’s obvious that no one here agrees. They crowd themselves onto the spikiest, most misshapen pumpkin ever achieved by man, like maggots on a dead deer’s face. And still more arrive, every day, piling on top of the multitudes, creating new layers of writhing humanity and smiling all the while. Someone get me the fuck out of here.
