At the end of 2012, Los Angeles and I broke up. As befitting the end of a relationship that
has lasted 49 years, I had no desire to write about my city anymore. I was too angry, too traumatized.
I was on my way home from the office one November Tuesday
(election day, it was), when an elderly woman made a left turn immediately in
front of me. I struck her car at the
right front tire and fender, spinning her around to smash into the driver’s
side of my van. The impact sent me up
over the sidewalk and into a cinderblock wall.
I walked away with sore muscles.
The elderly woman was transported to the hospital in an ambulance.
In the days following the
accident, I developed some problems. I
now had panic attacks in traffic—heart racing, sweating profusely, unable to
breathe, wanting to jump out of the car and run for my life—and since my
commute is nothing but traffic, I felt my sanity slipping. I became severely claustrophobic and
frantically depressed. Often, upon
arriving home, my hands ached from gripping the steering wheel, and I needed
quiet time in a dark room deprived of sensory input to get a grip. I began to hate this city, not that I ever
truly loved it to begin with.
My car was declared a total loss, a blessing to be sure
because it was showing its age, and I would have kept it until the wheels fell
off if I was not forced out of it. Even
though it was nine years old, I had logged only 49,000 miles on it (go figure
in L.A., a commute-by-car city). So I
collected my check from the insurance company and scraped together enough to
buy a new car. In the end, I came out
fine: no injuries, new car, and I lived
to tell the tale.
However, my anxiety level was
still through the roof (moon roof, actually; in the new car I like driving with
it open) because now I obsessed about having another accident. Indeed, my first day on the road with the new
car, an eighteen wheeler locked up behind me and stopped within inches of my
rear bumper. My entire back window was
grill and large letters spelling out “Peterbuilt.” The nightmares, awake and asleep, were
prodigious and horrific. I could hear
the crunch and feel the impact of the imagined accident. I was beset by visions and sounds of metal
crashing into metal, even though I know cars today are made of plastic and
aluminum foil. I drove everywhere in a
hunched position, visibly cringing. I
made my wife walk five miles so that I could park at the edge of the universe
at the supermarket to avoid dings from errant shopping carts. I was a mess.
Recently, we came out to go
to an evening event at the college where I work to find someone had scratched
the trunk of my car. I believe the term
is “keyed” my car, meaning they took a sharp object like a metal key and dug
into the paint down to the metal. And
here I was only beginning to piece my nerves back together.
We thought about moving. We tried to be philosophical. The police told us to install video
cameras. The lawyer said to forget about
the perpetrator and file a claim with my insurance. Some days you get the bear and some days the
bear gets you. The bear won big time. In the end, we added more light to the area
where we park and went in for strategically placed video surveillance. We alarmed, booby trapped, and got up in the
middle of the night to check on things.
We went to war. The only good
thing was I forgot about the accident because now I was too stressed looking
for the mystery scratcher. And as for
that scratch-heard-round-the-world, I have filed no claim and made no effort to
repair the damage. What if the scratcher
returns one dark night? I’m leaving my
options open for the future. I also do
not want my insurance to go up.
I have lived in this area of
the city for 26 years. My wife has lived
here her whole life. Like many parts of
Los Angeles, this used to be a good neighborhood. Now, Friday and Saturday nights we have
constant foot traffic from the bar up the street. The patrons drink and smoke and shag on the
street in front of my home and leave behind a detritus of empty cans, cigarette
butts, and used condoms come Sunday morning.
A few weeks back, gunshots rang out at two o’clock in the morning. We rolled out of bed and onto the floor like
Navy Seals. By the time the police
arrived, the shooters were gone. No
harm, no felony.
To move means higher rent for
a smaller place. And Los Angeles and its
neighborhoods have all experienced problems even as the LAPD keeps insisting crime is down. How many times on the
news do we hear some poor sap say, “Stuff like this never happens in my
neighborhood,” as the body is being wheeled away by the coroner. Yeah, guess again!
If we’ve learned anything
from Boston, Aurora, and Newtown, bad, horrible things can happen in our
neighborhoods to us. And these things
are often much more devastating than a scratched car.
A recent study determined
that Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the country for 2012, and we’ve won
the award in previous years. “The
average Los Angeles driver spent 59 hours sitting in traffic in 2012,” says the Los Angeles Times. That’s two and a half days. It seems in any city in this country, we take
the bad and the good, the squalor and the beauty. These are desperate times and panic attacks
might just be a normal response to living in America. Maybe we all need an Ativan cocktail and a
stiff shot of Everclear.
So unless I win the recently
added Powerball lottery, we’re staying put.
The panic attacks still happen occasionally, but when my chest tightens
I practice the Zen of tranquil breathing, and if that doesn’t work, I turn on
the comedy channel on Sirius/XM. Nothing
beats back attacking panic like a good laugh.
As for Los Angeles and me,
we’re no longer on speaking terms, but we still see each other quite
often. We have no choice.
