The movie had barely started, and my back pocket was buzzing. I typically don’t condone the hum of a phone in theaters, but much of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames as the Tuesday evening showing of Better Man began. It felt prudent to maintain some tether to the outside world while I attempted to watch Robbie Williams’ life re-enacted by a computer-generated chimpanzee.
Full disclosure: I’d have never found myself alone at the Century City AMC on a school night had I not moved from Venice Beach to the sleepy foothill community of Altadena in 2021. An “unincorporated area” — yes, that is an official designation — just past the northeastern edge of known L.A., Altadena is nestled between Pasadena and Angeles National Forest. Selling points include spacious lots, lower housing costs, friendly neighbors, spectacular hiking trails and, perhaps less appealing, the kind of ungodly long commutes into the city that validate the most tired Southern California stereotype. (I swear I’m going to get into the fires and tragedy and perspective and personal revelations, but we must first address traffic. This is an L.A. story and will be treated as such.)
On a typical weeknight, the rush hour drive from West L.A. to Altadena takes upwards of two hours. Such precious time! No reason to squander it on gridlock when there’s an equally long film to watch starring the convincing primate avatar of my favorite British pop star. So, as I had so many nights before, I chose to wait out peak traffic with some distraction until I could endeavor my pilgrimage on clear roads.
Chekhov’s iPhone knew better. The buzz was Amir, my partner, informing me that the minutes-old Eaton Fire a mile from our home was burning out of control. Oh, L.A, even your classical elements love the perennial pissing match between the east and west sides. This had to be some existential rebuttal to the fire obliterating the Pacific Palisades across town. So with the safety of Amir, our eight-pound mutt and my rice cooker top of mind, I walked out of the theater to endure rush hour. It was a speedier drive than usual, albeit much more harrowing on account of the wind pulling branches off trees and into the middle of every street and freeway.
Once close enough to see the orange mountainside and the parade of white headlights fleeing it, I did question the point of this trip. We each had a car. There was no real point in my going back, other than to maybe grab a few things should the then-mandatory evacuation last more than a couple days.
Inside our powerless building, ash already raining outside, reason escaped me. I went for the first things that fell under the flashlight’s gaze: a jar of moisturizer, a charge cord, three comfortable sweaters and a half-empty bag of dirty clothes I’d been meaning to drop off at the dry cleaners and mistook in the moment for my worn college sweatshirt. That’s it. Sorry, rice cooker. I hope you didn’t suffer.
Turns out I’m not good in a crisis … or at predicting them. By my naive estimation, our home sat at least three blocks south of the street no wildfire could realistically cross in any event other than the biblical apocalypse. The chances of genuine threat were so incredibly slim, there seemed no point in pulling Amir’s irreplaceable sculptures and paintings off their mounts or taking even an extra half-hour to think about what we’d want most if we never came back. But later that night — while I enjoyed my peaceful, Xanax-assisted sleep in the guest bedroom of our friend’s Mar Vista house — the fire and its unpredictable embers crossed my arbitrary safety line on a course for our home, my in-laws’ home of 32 years just up the street and a still-untallied number of destroyed or damaged residences and structures that will likely top 5,000.
We didn’t realize the extent of it when we woke up the next morning, the media’s preference for the sexier Palisades destruction offering no help, but the writing was on the wall. Word arrived that the local hardware store, a 90-year-old business in an even older building, was gone. Our friend’s pizzeria at the end of our block completely vanished. Our personal confirmation came from X, of all places, when a friend on the East Coast forwarded a video of someone surveying our neighborhood damage from their car. About 15 seconds in, there was our unrecognizable rubble situated between the unmistakable landmarks: a street sign and charred but familiar tree. It was almost like the good old days of Twitter when useful information could be shared and disseminated in real time, only all the responses to the post were from purchased blue checks blaming the fire on liberals and something about how the hydrants were empty because of fish.
Fish are not responsible for my modest misfortune or the much greater devastation still impacting families across Los Angeles every hour — not to mention those in other parts of California, other states and other countries who’ve all lost homes or, unthinkably, loved ones to wildfire. It’s a mix of circumstances, some inevitable and many preventable but ignored, that come with living on this planet that seems intent on entering the cosmic transfer portal.
Almost all evidence of our home’s existence is gone, save the growing text record of hundreds of messages of concern, condolences and offers to help — and my grateful responses, each one punctuated by jokes and deflecting. It’s bad enough that I feel like crap, no need to bring anybody else down with me.
And that’s part of what’s so tough to digest in all of this. My brief tenure in Altadena was marked by an unflattering shift in personality. I’ve spent too much time letting concerns about money pickle an otherwise dream of a life. This is a universal issue, but it is particularly prevalent in L.A. where so many of us constantly compare ourselves to those who have more money, bigger homes, cooler ZIP codes and, at least ostensibly, better careers. I worry about how an increasingly obvious wealth gap colors my longest and dearest relationships. In reality, none of the countless people now reaching out — and helping in ways that are redefining my idea of generosity — have ever considered it.
My friends didn’t care that Amir and I rented an apartment owned by his dear and generous parents. But I took my misplaced insecurities out on that apartment. I complained about not having a yard. I complained about the lack of natural light on the first floor. I complained about all of Altadena’s inexplicable leaf blower fetish. And sweet baby Jesus did I complain about my commute. I’d bitch about its flaws more than I’d admit that, despite all of them, I loved our home and the unincorporated area around it.
The Sunday before the fires, packing away Christmas decorations, I really considered my affection for that apartment. I loved that it’s where we hosted Thanksgiving every year, that our friends so often drove from their bigger, more conveniently located houses to share a meal. Even after the most exhausting treks home from the office, the airport or the beach, I was only ever grateful and happy to walk through its door.
At some point, I’ll drive back and sift through what remains, looking for some artifacts of a previous life like the countless others I’ve seen do the same on the news for time immemorial — though I’m not sure what I hope to find. My late grandfather’s ceramic ashtray. The pants that haven’t yet shown up on my American Express statement (and will be out of fashion by summer). A thumb drive clogged with grainy photos from college. The damn rice cooker. Individually, none of these are worth my tears or a whole lot of my time.
I’ll remind myself of this whenever I second-guess what little I took with me or the extra hours I could’ve spent packing. No lost material possession meant anything on its own, and that shouldn’t change just because they left me en masse. I’ll think about how much I loved that home and how lucky I am to know there’ll eventually be another one to love after it — maybe even in inconvenient Altadena. And the first time this strategy inevitably falters, I’ll head back to the theater, watch that CGI chimp sing and have a good cry.
English (US) ·