The Other Side of IT

The Other Side of IT

I’ve been watching coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires, which has no doubt transfixed so many people in the last couple of weeks. Although it’s been fifteen years since I called Los Angeles home, I lived there for almost exactly twenty years, so many connections remain. The majority of my friends live in areas affected, in one way or another, by the fires and evacuation orders. They have lost homes and their places of employment have been destroyed. Or maybe their homes have made it through somewhat undamaged, but the local grocery store is gone and their children’s school, too. It’s certainly not the first rash of wildfires to hit the L.A. area, but it is most likely the worst. It’s hard to process the scope of seeing familiar places involved. Just to give one example, I used to ride my bike up Mandeville Canyon all the time, and also all along the Pacific Coast Highway. Imagining being on the other side of things, on the other side of IT, especially when one might not have a home or job to go back to, is almost unfathomable.

All of these scenes, from a place that was such a part of my life for so long, are painful to look at. They’ve also brought back memories of another L.A. disaster that affected me and many, many others in a major way: the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. This disaster, almost exactly 31 years ago today, still ranks as one of the costliest in the United States, both in terms of loss of life and property damage, with approximately 70 deaths and more than 9,000 injuries attributed to it, tens of thousands of structures damaged, and as many as 145,000 people displaced.

A Whole Lot of Shaking

The week before the Big One, there had already been a whole lot of shaking. Some smaller quakes and at least one bigger roller that I recall. These were all earthquakes that most people would notice, but after a week, the frequency had become almost an annoyance. At the time, I lived in a location that makes most people who know where it is drool with envy: 4th Street in Santa Monica, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Arizona Avenue. A few short blocks from the beach and one block over from the Santa Monica Promenade, I had somehow lucked into an odd, rent-controlled apartment in an old, two-story brick building. Up a long, narrow flight of steps, I joined an eccentric mix of people, all of whom lived in studio apartments above the businesses downstairs. Aside from a young woman who lived next door to me, the other neighbors were elderly, and included a man who never let anyone look into his apartment, lest his pack rat tendencies be on full display (I remember stacks of things like papers, magazines, and documents stacked up at least five feet high on either side of his hallway, the one time I saw inside), and an Asian woman who was almost blind and spent most of her time in the apartment. Two or three other neighbors, who I never met, rounded out our small cohort.

A place that made me feel like I was in some other world, far from the “motel style” apartment I had lived in at one time in North Hollywood, and a planet away from the new building where I had lived in Hollywood, the one with the hot tub on the roof and police helicopters flying overhead on a nightly basis. Built somewhere around 1910, the only unenviable thing, in my mind, was the parking situation, as the sole option was a city parking structure across the street, one for which I had to (gasp!) pay a monthly parking fee.

My Warped Logic

During the run-up to the Big One, the fact that the building had been around for about 80 years somehow functioned, in my warped logic, as a reassurance that nothing was going to happen to that place. It’s been here this long, it can take it. This logic, alongside my need to reduce expenses, led to the extremely regrettable decision on my part to cancel the portion of my renter’s insurance that covered earthquake damage a mere 17 days prior. Can you imagine? Even more regrettable was the phone call from the insurance agent, a day or two after the Big One, asking me, “What do you think about that coverage now?”

One great thing about the apartment was that, despite its small size, it seemed much larger than it was. This was owing to a long, narrow hallway that ran from the front door, passing the bathroom and kitchen, before opening out into the main room. The bathroom was small and only had a shower, an oddity by that time in the L.A. area (but how my apartment is now). Large and square, the kitchen contained my new used fridge. Think a retro Smeg but shorter, light blue and actually really old. The main room had a space on the opposite side of the kitchen wall that originally had a Murphy bed, but was now a good-sized closet. I had everything I needed: a futon (new, and something I was strangely proud of), which pulled out into my bed at night; a stand with a TV on it; and a desk pushed into the corner to the left of my futon, next to the young neighbor’s wall and the back wall of the building. That side was where we each had a couple of sash windows.

I Loved that Place

I loved that place. The location, the strangeness (to me) of the set-up, the low rent. I don’t remember the exact amount I paid, but I’m going to say it was about $230/month, maybe slightly less. The only negative incident I had to deal with was when some repairmen left a hole in my bathroom wall. After that, night after night, I heard strange noises coming from the kitchen. One morning I woke to find a plastic container I had left on top of the stove with a big hole in the bottom and what were clearly teeth marks from what must’ve been some kind of giant rat gnawing through it! Property management came to patch the hole in the bathroom wall while at the same time leaving glue traps in the kitchen. I was so afraid I was going to walk into the kitchen after work only to find some poor creature stuck there. Luckily, I never saw a sign of any animal again.

The Big One

But I digress. We were at me and my cavalier attitude about the building. That Night, I fell asleep without a care in the world, totally unconcerned about any kind of Big One. Pshaw, the Big One!

And then it hit. One single, forceful jolt woke me. I looked around and my mind quickly went to the default “oh, it’s just another earthquake.” Closing my eyes, what felt like a millisecond passed, then BAM! IT was nothing to sneer at, nothing to roll over and ignore. IT was run-into-the-street-naked-and-screaming strong. Only that wasn’t possible. My feet hit the floor and I ran down the hallway to the entrance, where I was met with a door that I was absolutely, totally unable to open, it was jumping around in its frame so much. As I screamed and the young woman in the apartment next to me did, too, I turned back the two steps to the large, doorless archway that led to the kitchen. I held on to the sides of the archway as the whole place moved, and watched in amazed terror as the doors to my refrigerator slammed open and closed, open and closed, and the contents of all the cupboards fell out onto the worn maroon linoleum. Imagine being inside a giant washing machine at the beginning of the spin cycle while the loudest train you’ve ever heard rolls over your head, and that will be somewhat close to the noise level.

Eight Seconds?

Wikipedia tells me that the quake lasted a mere eight seconds. While the actual earthquake may have only lasted eight seconds, the shaking definitely lasted longer than that in our poor building. My estimate at the time was thirty seconds, but it’s possible it was only twenty. Although the epicenter was in Northridge, many places experienced violent shaking. Once things came to a halt, there was utter silence. I mean complete and total silence, along with absolute darkness…for about a minute. Then from everywhere the sirens started and all I could hear were police cars and ambulances.

Down the Staircase

Once I was able to open the front door, I walked to the top of the staircase. I couldn’t tell what was happening and it was very, very dark and dusty. Remember, this is before cell phones became common, and I didn’t have a flashlight handy (I do now. I also always sleep with my glasses right by my head in case I need them, something I learned after a different earthquake left me flailing and unable to see.) Something felt odd and I couldn’t tell if the stairs were actually still there. Scared that I might step into oblivion, I turned back to my apartment. Inside, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Totally dark except for a few streetlights, I just stared out across the city. It took me a couple of minutes to realize the reason everything looked so strange was because our cool, modest building had been irretrievably converted into a giant, rubble-filled doll house, open on both the front and back sides. Absurdly, I wondered if this was something they would be able to fix, and how long would that take.

A Mad Dash

After I had gathered my wits about me, at least as much as I could given the circumstances, I ran down the staircase, which turned out to be undamaged, just full of large plaster flakes from the walls. Crossing the street to my car, I made my way to the parking garage. Inside, I marveled at the elevators, which had clearly been left off-kilter, but otherwise the building seemed okay. Then I jumped into my car and did something incredibly stupid: I made a mad dash, in the dark, onto the 10 Freeway and headed east. Lucky for me, the exit I took was a couple of miles before the section of the freeway I later found out had collapsed.

Sifting Through the Rubble

Despite the extensive damage in Santa Monica and other places on the Westside, we weren’t on the radar as much as Northridge and other neighborhoods in the Valley, which took the brunt of the hit. Or maybe I should say that there was so much damage in Santa Monica that our building didn’t receive any particular attention? I’m not sure. Immediately red-tagged by authorities, they had posted big red signs on the front door saying that entry was unsafe (and also not permitted), but I never saw any officials in the albeit brief time I spent there in the aftermath. Scared shitless that everything was going to collapse around me, but determined to try to salvage what I could, I managed to go back later that same morning and retrieve a few things. I spent the shortest amount of time possible sifting through the rubble, carrying small bankers’ boxes of things down the staircase. I got some clothes, things the dust hadn’t completely ruined, and a few books and photo albums.

Now I can’t remember how or when I got the futon and desk out, but I did, and then somehow got them to a friend’s place, where they stayed, stored, for at least a few months. I had to leave the fridge, with the food still inside. The food that had fallen out of the cupboards also remained for someone else to deal with. Other specifics I can’t remember very well anymore. Although I worked quickly, at a certain point I found one of the unsheltered beach guys doing his own sifting…through my things. I quickly shouted down from the top of the staircase. He stood, apologizing. “Sorry, I thought this was trash.”

Grateful

Keep in mind, I was young, recently graduated from law school, but not employed at a fancy law firm with a high-paying job. I had tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and my primary assets were my 1988 Nissan Sentra, the futon, a TV, and a simple desk and used fridge. And now I had a futon and my car, but also an apartment that I was probably going to be on the hook for in terms of rent, despite its wrecked status (it turned out the property management company didn’t hold us to our leases, although who knows? Maybe that was a way to make it so that we tenants didn’t have a legal claim to the place in the future.). But I was alive and uninjured and had a place to go, temporarily, even though that turned out to be another shitty experience (the words that come to mind are What am I now, fuckin’ married? Ah, good times!). Nevertheless, I did have somewhere to go, and I was grateful for that.

A Permanence

Those physical objects – the sturdy desk I really liked even though the falling bricks permanently scarred the top of it; the fridge I fretted over but had to leave behind; the law school books I paid so much money for but which I had to leave because of the dust damage – are long gone. The memories of those things, though, remain, along with the time I spent in that apartment. For something that can seem to be so transient, especially when put up against a physical object, our memories, whether good or bad, have remarkable staying power. There’s a permanence to them and they persist even if only in snippets as the days, years, decades pass. Things that were once so clear fade into the background but still linger, meanwhile objects circulate in and out of our lives with comparatively little constancy. After a disaster, there may be a dearth of many things, but one thing we have to comfort us — and torture us — is time, time that can be spent sifting through the mélange of emotions and memories even though we may have few physical objects left.

A Wounded Happiness

It took me months after the Northridge Earthquake, with all of its aftershocks, physical and mental, to get to the other side of IT, and to get fully resituated. It was even longer before I felt better mentally and physically. Now, reading the stories of those who have been displaced by the fires, my heart goes out to the people who have lost what they thought were their forever homes; their prized possessions; or, God forbid, their loved ones. I know they face a morass of legal wrangling and dealing with insurance claims, and mountains of financial worries alongside seas of grief. Even now there are more fires burning in the L.A. area. I can only hope wildfires don’t destroy any more neighborhoods, and that those already affected can pick up the pieces and start to move down the new path they’ve been involuntarily thrust onto.

I also hope they can eventually reach a state of what Salman Rushdie, in the closing of his memoir, Knife, describes as a “wounded happiness.” Left blind in one eye after a knife attack in 2022, he and his wife returned to the spot where the violence occurred. “Yes, we had reconstructed our happiness, even if imperfectly. Even on this blue-sky day, I knew it was not the cloudless thing we had known before. It was a wounded happiness, and there was, and perhaps always would be, a shadow in the corner of it. But it was a strong happiness nevertheless, and as we embraced, I knew it would be enough.” (p. 209)

Book Cited

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder. New York: Random House, 2024.

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