THE fires have come to Los Angeles again and there is only one thing certain, and it is an obscene horror: there will be a spike in the sales of books by Joan Didion.
Dante’s “Inferno” will also register upticks, as will first-season DVDs of the drama “Rescue Me” and, one would hope, of James Baldwin’s long-forgotten “The Fire Next Time.” The newish movie “Things That Got Lost in the Fire” is being anxiously watched by its distributors, who fear box office receipts will be nothing but embers.
Urban folklore also holds that the only true sign of fire containment here — the “groundhog indicator” — is an annual onslaught of October Netflix requests for the tear-jerker “Like Water for Chocolate.” When online queues for “Water” reach, oh, the 150,000-waitlist point, it is safe to return to charred residential areas.
During the months in which the Santa Anas precede Santa Claus, I have a friend who secures venues for galas to celebrate the heroes: not just firefighters — although she said this year’s “hunky bulldozer operators” and “Blackwater-sexy” DC-10 water-drop pilots will collect most of the honors — but newscasters too, those men and women in the field who showed their usual amazing stamina and restraint.
Surely an award awaits the AM talk-radio host whose elegant outburst went, as I recall it, something like this: “Have you ever tossed kindling into a fireplace and watched it explode? Well, that’s what’s happening here in Southern California. The firemen call eucalyptus trees ‘tall matchsticks,’ and I can assure you, they don’t say that with affection. They’re not so much fighting flames as dodging projectiles while shouting, ‘Please don’t hit me! Please don’t hit me!’ ”
The new problem, my friend said, is that there are so many fires she’s going to have trouble nailing down actual dates and that many of the auditoriums and clubs will soon be unavailable, having already been booked for parties and movie premieres. Such are the vagaries of this unpredictable time.
Yet none of the thousands of people I know on a first-name basis had even heard of the events that led to what many, nationally, were calling a “state of emergency.” At first, hearing the CNN drone of the “three-quarters of a million” who were apparently dislocated, I thought it must be another report from Sudan; especially when I saw Anderson Cooper (who was hot hot hot in what, to my jaded eyes, looked like a fire-retardant hoodie and Lululemon Kung Fu yoga pants). When I read on the scroll at the bottom of the screen that the evacuation was happening in San Diego, I was stunned.
Naturally my first thought was, How can I help? I’d never been to San Diego, or if I had, I couldn’t remember the actual visit — I think there is a shipyard and an aquarium there. Then, I remembered: a big zoo. It came back to me that our family was on the way once, but we had to turn around because (it being October) a fire was raging. I’ll never forget the ride back to Beverly Hills, and my mother’s quavering voice as she read aloud to the children from “Play It as It Lays.”
Last week, with that eerily familiar sense of non-déjà vu common to Angelenos, I turned on the television and waited to hear reports about familiar places (by then, the “Malibu Fire” — the only name I recognized throughout the whole media conflagration — was sadly under control) but the geographical loci of the maelstroms was strangely alien: the “Witch Fire,” the “Santiago Fire,” the “Harris Fire,” the this and the that canyon- or unincorporated-area- or upscale-neighborhood-fire — madness!
I thought: Where am I? Who am I? What are these places and is someone just making them up? I kept waiting for the “Brentwood Fire” or the “Palm Springs Fire” or the “Coldwater Canyon Fire,” something I could at least relate to. I wanted to put the faces and names of those whom I knew to this tragedy, I wanted friends and business associates — even passing acquaintances — to be burned out of house and home, or mildly injured. But alas, nothing recognizable was conjured.
Disconsolate, I went to the penthouse club of Santa Monica’s Huntley Hotel in hopes of seeing flames in the hills, but there was nothing, only that orange, pseudo-apocalyptic lighting in the smoke-riven skies that merely reminded me of the annoying “skyspace” installations of the artist James Turrell. I thought surely this would change as darkness descended, but it was more of the same mundane cityscape lights and errant sirens — no brazen flecks of orange in the unaccommodating hills.
Someone nearby mentioned that Owen Wilson used to hang out at the bar here before his “mishap.” Desultory talk returned to the news at hand; when my server said the fires seemed to be happening in places called “Poomacho, Poway and Jamul,” I felt a sudden sympathy for Mr. Wilson. I never felt more dispirited, more disappointed and disconnected from this city that I love in my entire life.
I wandered into a Borders at the Third Street Promenade. The shelves were cleared of books by Joan Didion, nor did I see any “Like Water for Chocolate” DVDs. I left with only a copy of Dante’s “Paradiso” and Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” (the latter didn’t even have an Oprah sticker). On the way out, I saw a grimy couple with a cardboard sign that said, “$$$ Please — Lost Home to Fires.” Maybe they were from Poomacho. I gave them the “Paradiso” instead.
Then I went home, and threw some kindling in the fireplace — the “Wagner Fire” — and was soon fast asleep beside its soothing crackle.
Bruce Wagner is the author of the novels “The Chrysanthemum Palace” and “Memorial.”
