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Monday, January 19, 2009

Rejected II
Second in a regular series of rejected freelance pieces.

YOU CAN'T DRIVE ON THE 5

You – you, you most exquisite of all God’s creatures! – are an Angeleno. In the mythology of L.A., you live for your car. And yet somehow, that doesn’t mean you know how to drive it. You’re okay on the local highways. You are! On a particularly beneficent day, you even let people merge! And once, many years ago – and this is absolutely true – I witnessed with my own eyes a terrible rainstorm during which every single driver on the 405 slowed to a safe speed and kept extra distance between each car! To this day, the memory confounds me – confounds me with delight!

But get out into the hinterlands, the sticks, that area past the pastoral strip mall beauty of Santa Clarita, say, and you lose all the road smarts that are your birthright.

I speak of driving on the 5.

Maybe it’s because you’re on your way to San Fran, and you’re preemptively transforming yourself into the shiny pile of slug trail the upright burghers of that fine city already consider you to be. Or maybe it’s because there are fewer of us on that fine two-lane highway, and so I have more time to focus on you with special, and very personal, loathing.

It is a loathing I rarely let myself feel; in terrible traffic here to home, I drink my coffee and smoke my cigarettes and listen to the miraculously shrinking playlist on Indie 103.1. I budget an hour to drive 12 miles, and arrive 56 minutes later with no heartburn at all. But on the 5? There are 400 miles of open road just the other side of your shiny sedan, and you are keeping me from them with your all-consuming consideration of your navel. Who raised you? The Cheneys?

I don’t care if you are going 80. It is not nearly fast enough. You are in my way. Get over! Get over! The left lane is the passing lane! I don’t care how much you paid for your GMC Yukon, it does not entitle you to choose how fast others will drive. And what’s with pacing the car in the slow lane so that no one may pass? Are you in love with the car in the slow lane? Can you not bear to be without it? Do you have moody, vaguely tumescent thoughts of steel congress? Well, gross!

Is this how you get your thrills? Playing Clueless? I would like to do you violence, with a candlestick, and you have brought this on yourself. You have imperiled my immortal soul by inciting these un-Christian sentiments. You are a vile, selfish, thoughtless, self-absorbed, terrible excuse for a human, and you’re FAT and DISGUSTING and I HATE YOU. GET OVER. Oh sweet Jesus I’ll do anything, please.

Each time I drive the 5, I try to teach by example. This is how you do it, yokels. You drive your 90-plus in the right lane, swooping gently around each slower car and then touching back momentarily on the right before swooping gently again to the fast lane and back. You listen to thecowboy/Jesus/Mescun/Mescun/Jesus/
Cowboy/Mescun that comes in one lonely station at a time. You try to anticipate the next verse, and make up funny new lyrics. And you stay to the right except when passing.

As you do this, you will build up a caravan of likeminded folks, good people who also are going 90-plus and doing so from the slow lane. You will pass each other and smile, before landing again in the right-hand lane. You will keep track of each other until the gas station at the top of the Grapevine, if you’re coming home, or the heartbreak of Cowschwitz if you’re headed north.

You have formed a community, like DailyKos or the PUMAs, but with less talk of impeachment. It is sunshine and blue sky and terrible cracked landscape that you must escape as quick as you can.

There’s an Important Corollary to the Rule of the 5, and that’s the Law of 1. When driving to Big Sur or even more northward on the 1, you may go as slow as you please. It is not a straightaway; it is curvy and scary; also, you might see a whale, or a glint of ocean foam that looks like a whale, and need to pull over suddenly to one of the many fine turnouts. If you are behind someone driving deathly slow on the 1, you may not tailgate or make angry faces to intimidate them into a faster speed; they’re driving at a rate that makes them feel safe. Just chill out and see if those things sticking out of the surf in that pretty cove are otter heads or pieces of kelp (they’re pieces of kelp). The 1 is a pleasure drive (and curvy and scary); the 5 is for getting places, and also has two lanes. Keep yourself to the right of them, and investigate your navel from there.

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Rejected I
First in a regular series of rejected freelance pieces.

BAD SANTA

“I just got fired!” Sam is telling me, on my phone. It is within minutes of 9 a.m. “Come on over,” I tell him. “I have Dunkers.” Dunkers are the little chocolatey sconelike things I buy my son so he can have, for the sake of alertness, a midafternoon sugar shock before sixth-period science, which he is failing. My friends eat them all, even though I am unemployed and my son is failing science and they should not do that.
I pack Sam a preemptive bowl.

Sam is so lucky. He will get unemployment, which I will probably not get, because I am brilliant and so I quit. We are waiting for Joe to get fired too, and then we can all just hang out on my porch all the time instead of only after work, which we have been doing pretty much every night. It’s a really great porch, in a lovely and peaceful and awesome-diverse midcity neighborhood. There are jacaranda trees, and not too much traffic, and middle-aged black ladies in Obama 08 jerseys and Obama T-shirts and Obama sashes and crowns walk by and say good morning and we say good morning and then, good morning successfully wished, we all proceed to have one. I am in my robe and sash and crown and fleece pajama pants and pink slippers. Consider the lilies of the field. They neither sow nor reap yet even Solomon in all his splendor is not arrayed as one of these. I am a lily of the field.

My sister has updated her Facebook page. What is she doing now? She is “succeeded in getting the girls Medi-Cal!” The social services lady kept acting like she was trying to defraud the state by getting the three-year-old twins covered because her husband, who sells construction equipment, got laid off. What was that suspicious $1500 deposit? the social services lady grilled her. “That was his last paycheck,” my sister explained. You can see what it was right on the bank statement, since it was direct deposit. The lady still did not believe her and made her write an affidavit. Her husband got kicked out of the office for being snippy with the lady. The lady was an asshole.
“Your husband shouldn’t be voting Republican if you’re getting Medi-Cal,” I told my sister. She agreed, and told her husband just that. “You’re right,” he told her. He has had all the fight knocked out of him. Not even Sean Hannity can save him now.
My sister’s mom’s common-law wife has already bought the girls all their presents from Santa, so my sister won’t have to worry about that.

I have bought an i-Pod that fell off the back of a truck. Not for my son, just for me. My son is getting other stuff that fell off the back of a truck. But even though I am unemployed, I am going to make sure he has plenty of good shit. Last Christmas I was unemployed too, and even though I was making good money freelancing, I was vibing the coming recession fierce so I bought him, like, four movies and that was it. Our neighborhood stealers stole them all within a few months and I cried and cried because that was the only thing I’d gotten him (Scarface! Reservoir Dogs! Wedding Crashers! And something else completely inappropriate for a then-13-year-old boy, I forget what!) and he didn’t even have that anymore and I am a terrible mother and now my son is failing science. I hate stealers. My last i-Pod got stolen by the movers when we were moving from the neighborhood where the stealers were. Sam was going to get a skateboard for my son on trade, but I guess not now. Maybe one will fall off a truck.

I am thinking of going to Paris. I like the thought of it: quit your job and screw off in Paris for a week! It’s so devil-may-care! I would like to be devil-may-care! But the devil does care. I will not go to Paris. In Compton last week, the Guns for Toys thing they do every Christmas tripled its normal take. Most of the people trading in their guns asked for gift cards to the grocery store instead of Best Buy or Target.

I read Vanity Fair, and its article about the derivatives traders who have cut their maids from five days a week to four. Also, they have discovered $15 wine. Before I quit my job, I was living pretty large and buying $10 wine regularly. Sometimes $12 wine! It was awesome! Then I quit my job, and the first thing I did was ask the Trader Joe’s wine guy, Henry, to recommend a nice malbec or shiraz in the $5 range. Henry was super happy to help. There is a very nice malbec for $3.99, and Joe and Sam and I drink a bottle every night. They should probably bring it sometimes, since I am unemployed. Also, I am a single mother, and they’re not. Maybe I should make friends with Henry. Maybe some malbec will fall off a truck.

I sit on my porch, with my son’s laptop and the wi-fi I steal from the neighbors, and try to conjure up jobs, like in The Secret. Maybe I can freelance for Vanity Fair! I will look into it, except I won’t. I read some Facebook and MySpace updates. In very sad news for L.A., awesome local radio station Indie 103.1 just discontinued all its awesome shows (except for the Sex Pistols’s Steve Jones, who still has his lunch program, which you could listen to online; once, Chrissie Hynde was on and they were talking about how they’d done sex in a bathroom at a party in London when Jonesy was 17, which is about as awesome as a radio lunch program gets) because apparently they were in 46th place in the local market. Joe Escalante, a smart, funny, interesting morning host who used to be in the punk band The Vandals, is gone. Chris Morris, host of the beloved Americana/roots show “Watusi Rodeo” wrote in his MySpace blog post that Escalante hosted the only morning show that didn’t make you dumber. Chris Morris is gone too. I’d pack him a bowl, but he’s long-sober. I don’t know about Escalante. Maybe I’ll Facebook him and offer.

My sister is happy this morning. She has succeeded in getting her daughters WIC, the excellent program that loads you up with cheese and eggs and milk and other staples so your babies can have nutrition even if you are a poor. If you need an omelette, go straight to my sister’s.

Once, when my son was five, his school called me and asked if he could be the boy the other children collected Christmas presents for. I thanked them profusely and explained that we were just fine. But thank you, really a lot! The only thing I could think of was they’d gone through the list of kids who’d applied for the free lunch program. We had applied for it because, why not? Since he gets Social Security survivors’ benefits because his first mom passed away, we were eligible. Free lunch for everybody! From then on, I just paid for his lunch. He always wanted to apply for the free lunch program, especially once we moved to our lovely and peaceful and awesome-diverse midcity neighborhood where all the kids get it and he feels left out, due to richness. But no, I explained to him. I buy $10 wine. We are just fine and I can pay for your lunch. I sort of wish I hadn’t done that now. Maybe we will go to my sister’s, and let her make us an omelette.