by A M Homes
“What can you do for me?” an agent says, and I wonder if he’s really asking or if it’s a rhetorical question. “What can we do for you? What can you do for me that I can’t do for myself, that’s the question you should be asking,” he says. “Well, we can set you up, we can put you in a room with people. You’re special, you’re different, you’re what they want, you’re the thing they’re looking for, even if they don’t know it yet. Even if they don’t know who you are, don’t worry about that—that’s my job. Not everyone here is a reader; we’ve got to tell you that, but your reputation, your name alone is recognizable. You’re the kind of person they love—a smart novelist from New York, but remember they might be a little scared of you. Our job is to let people know who you are, to prepare them, to lubricate the system. Your job is to come up with ideas—do you have any ideas?”
“Have you written anything?” another agent asks.
“Do you want to write for a TV show, do you want a staff position, because if that’s what you want, if that’s what would do it for you, if you’d be willing to move to L.A., I can do that for you, I can get that for you right now while you’re sitting in that chair. I can pick up the phone and it can happen, over and out, a done deal. What do you say—wanna sign?”
One of the agents I meet with is a young guy with an office in Beverly Hills. We walk out together—it’s the end of the day. We take the elevator down to the underground garage. The garage guy pulls his car around.
“Nice meeting you,” I say, shaking his hand. “Great car.”
“You like it?” he says, “I’m ready to sell it, do you want it?”
“No, thanks.”
“Low mileage, still under warranty, it’s a Beemer, for chrissake.”
I shake my head. The valet pulls up in my white Ford Focus.
“Why don’t you want to buy my car?” the agent whines. “It’s certainly better than that.”
“This is a rental,” I say. “Remember, I don’t live here.”
“I think you should buy my car. If you bought it you would live here and I would get you work. Buy my car and you will be rich.”
“What is it, like a magic genie lamp?”
“Hey, all I do is drive it on the freeway. It’s good miles, highway miles.”
I get into my Ford Focus. “Have a nice day,” I say because I can’t think of anything else to say.
He calls the next morning, “I just wanted to follow up, not so much about the meeting, you should do what feels comfortable, but about the car—are you going to buy my car?”
After every meeting, just as I’m leaving, the receptionist says to me loudly—“Do you need to be validated?” And I think this is what they do to detoxify you after these encounters. The receptionist, the lowest person on the totem pole, sees you on your way out and says a bunch of nice things to make you feel better, to make you feel like it’s not really all that strange.
I look at her blankly—Do I need to be validated? I’m tempted to say more, I’m tempted to say, no frankly I’m fine, I’m really quite all right, but all of you really seem to need to be validated, seem to need a lot of attention, a lot of recognition. Everywhere I go, all of these talent agencies, all they do is ask—Do I need to be validated? It’s pathetic.
“Your parking?”
“I’m doing what?”
“Your parking ticket—do you need your parking ticket validated?”
“You mean, all along I’ve been paying for parking? I’ve been paying to come to these meetings, I’ve been drinking your lousy bottles of water, thinking, well at least I should get something out of it and all along I could have been parking for free? God, what an idiot.”
“Don’t feel bad about it,” the receptionist says, “you’re not from here.”
“That’s right,” I say, slapping my ticket down on the counter—“validate me.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Desert Oasis or Dry Spell?
I am only in Los Angeles for a couple of days and then I do what every one does—I leave. Already it is too much. The phone has been ringing like crazy—strangers, friends of friends all calling, offering me their Los Angeles, the real Los Angeles, the better Los Angeles. It’s become a competition—the actor’s Los Angeles, the realtor’s Los Angeles, the immigrant’s Los Angeles, the artist’s Los Angeles, the magician’s Los Angeles, and each is entirely interesting and a world unto itself, but I am reminding myself, as well as my callers, that I am not writing the bible of Los Angeles, that in fact I am the most unlikely person to be writing about Los Angeles at all—I’m not even sure I like Los Angeles.
I get in the car—grateful that I never really unpacked, that I’m able to pull myself together with fire-drill swiftness. I take off for the desert, imagining I am moving like a cartoon character, I am moving like Road Runner, hightailing it out of town, like Fred Flintstone, feet sticking out from under the car, getting a running start.
It is cold and raining and that’s one of the things that no one wants to talk about—the unnamed season. In other parts of the country, all over the world, it’s called winter, but in L.A. they insist they have no winter.
My plan is to drive into the desert, take a couple of days and collect my thoughts. After all, California is about cars, about driving, about long overlapping highways. I am in the car, on the road, and I begin to notice there’s absolutely nothing interesting about the drive. It is all highways, connective tissue, dotted with shopping malls, car dealerships, mini storage facilities, and suburban housing developments. There is nothing interesting about any of it except that wherever I go—gas station, coffee shop—the wind blows icy rain in my face and every person between the hotel and Palm Springs apologizes, “This never happens here.” “I don’t know what’s got into the weather, it’s that global storming thing.” “What can I tell you, we all have bad days.”
Even the desert—which I imagine as hot and baking, which I imagine as desolate and lonely with long stretches of empty road and hawks circling over the car—is crowded, cold, and wet.
I am here during the energy crisis of 2001, Pacific Gas and Electric is declaring bankruptcy, there is the threat of a Writers Guild strike, followed by the threat of an Actors Guild strike, and the entrepreneurial explosion in Silicon Valley technology is starting to look like nuclear fallout as dot-com and tech stocks implode. Rolling blackouts sweep across the counties and in general the Golden State isn’t exactly looking buff and sunshiny at the moment.
In most of Los Angeles when you talk to people about energy, about the need to conserve energy, they take it personally, not in the same way that they take recycling personally, making sure the newspapers and the plastics get out to the curb, but personally in that they think you are referring to their own energy level—their personal energy. “I have to conserve—my trainer comes to me, my yogaist comes to me, my masseuse comes to me—that way I’m not living in the car, not wasting time.”
It is about doing what comes easiest, it is about the lifestyle, about living life the way you imagine it should be—Los Angeles is so much about fantasy that it constantly verges on breaking from reality. “I’m going to wait until my planets align before I make any big decisions,” someone confesses to me poolside at the hotel.
“Are you a guest here at the Chateau?”
“No,” she says, “I live down the street; I’m crashing.”
The drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs is unremarkable until, coming up over a hill, heading into the Coachella Valley, I see something amazing. At first I’m not even sure what I’m seeing. Graceful, elegant, like twenty-first century prehistoric fabrications, like long necked swans, like dinosaurs, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty, and two hundred feet high, they are windmills—in a postapocalyptic landscape. With blades like airplane propellers, each windmill spins at its own speed and some not at all. A stunningly conceptual installation, these oddly beautiful, man-made machines stand tall against the increasingly unearthly ground b
eneath.
The story of the Coachella Valley is the tale of an ancient ocean, a river that overflowed, and a lake that rose above sea level and emptied back into the river. This is where the Pacific and North American continental plates meet—the San Andreas Fault cuts right through the valley. And it is the story of the Native Americans who lived here—the Cahuilla tribes still in existence—the Spanish explorers and the coming of the railroads and the pioneers, all of which happened long before the rich and famous discovered it and seemed to think they’d found someplace new, someplace just for themselves.
The windmills belong to Wintec Energy, a wind farm. Utilities lease the land from the owners, buy the equipment, and set up. On this farm there are nine companies operating different variations of windmills.
As wind sucks through the pass and into the Coachella Valley, the wind machines take a bite out of it, and then farther down another set of blades takes another bite, all of it dependent on nature—on a wind season from February to September, all of it renewable, clean, regenerating.
It is about aerodynamic lift—the same thing that makes airplanes fly, the very thing that terrifies me. The idea that the technology that ground grain and pumped water in ancient China and spun the cloth sails of the Dutch tower mills of the 1400s is now producing the electricity that lets me turn my computer on and off is thrilling. I stand watching the transformation of air into electricity, watching as the pitch of the blades varies, as a breeze is turned into megawatts. Knowing that electricity can’t be stored—it needs to be constantly manufactured—I am awed by the effort.
There are public tours of the wind farm, which give a history of the technology and then a ride out into the fields. I get a private tour, a wonderful rich explanation of the wind, of the issues in wind farming, and a history of the Coachella Valley itself.
In a truck we ride out to the field; rain splashes hard on the windows and roof. “Sorry about this,” the fellow who’s taking me on the tour says. “Sorry about the weather, it’s not usually like this.”
We are in a valley with hills all around, rocky, hard-packed dirt/sand—the Earth’s crust—is the floor of the field. The tall towers surround us and the fellow is explaining the process through which the wind is actually transformed into power.
“Step out if you want,” he says. I open the door, not knowing there is something more. The sound is overwhelming, like seagulls or whales, haunting, mystical, magical—a kind of mournful hollow bleating, seesawing squeaky call and response. This is the sound of air being bitten by blades; it is sexy and profound. If it weren’t raining I could stand here forever. For the first time all day, there is something wonderful about the rain, the unrelenting grayness, and the weight of the sky, something wonderful about the sound of man and nature mating in the desert.
The wind farm makes other kinds of farming look silly; apple orchards look like kid stuff. The guys who work here couldn’t be nicer, more patient, as they attempt to explain everything to me—the California power grid, transformers, gears, turbines, laminar flow. They invite me to lunch, but I decide I’d better get on with it—I’ve got places to go and besides I’m shivering now.
Someone in the gift shop—and of course there is a gift shop, this is America, after all—overhearing that I’m interested in the history of the Coachella Valley, says, “Well, it’s the methamphetamine capital of the world. All these boys are in their basements with barrels of who knows what cooking up, a batch of the recipe, the hooch that burns your brain.”
Thanks for sharing.
I leave the wind farm and head into Palm Springs. If you paint it gold they will come. As a hotel fanatic, I’ve been looking forward to what comes next: Merv Griffin’s Resort Hotel and Givenchy Spa. High luxury, the best of Palm Springs, the descriptions in its literature make it sound great.
All day, in this rainy raw land, I’ve been dreaming of a long hot bath and a treatment of some sort, a massage, reflexology, or maybe even something a little more unusual, like the hot stone experience I keep seeing in spa catalogs. I will give myself a gift, in an attempt to seduce myself into telling the story of California’s physical culture—hands-on.
Maximum pampering is how the spa describes itself, offering the standard treatments and newer things like watsu—where you are held in a pool of water and the therapist moves your body in various gentle, relaxing, stretching ways. After driving for hours, it sounds incredibly good—and I’m already sopping wet.
From the moment I arrive, the staff seems surprisingly uninterested in my need for a “treat.” I pull into the driveway and it takes ten minutes before I can find someone to take the car.
The main building is faux gaudy, celebrating excess but not even real excess—rather, it’s perceived excess, excess for those who don’t see very well anymore, for those who mistake the color yellow for gold leaf. The spa building is a cross between the White House and a European villa.
There is a strange culture in Palm Springs, a culture without culture, a blending of all styles and aesthetics where the organizing idea is that everything colored gold is good. It is also a town of retired decorators, of men who call themselves boys, men who are obsessed with and constantly celebrating that most boyish part of themselves, men who prefer the company of other boys who even at fifty, sixty, and seventy are happy to be referred to as boys. Gay retirees are in many ways the lifeblood of this town. Conservative, closeted (only in that they never told their parents), they congregate in the local antique shops among objects of gold—gilded mirrors, fountains with boys peeing. The gay women, a slightly wilder and younger set, descend annually for the Dinah Shore golf tournament and for drinking and topless dancing by the pool. For whatever reason, there has long been a measure of acceptance of gays in this otherwise deeply conservative insider’s outside place. There is also a large community of swingers—you know, wife swappers. Just a few years ago the annual Lifestyles Convention was held in Palm Springs, and the local devotees regularly gather for a barbecue and what can only be described as a sex fest. All over the town there are “gay” guest houses and clothing-optional motels and resorts that advertise “single women welcome” and “Playroom,” meaning sex dens for swinging couples looking for action.
Either way, it’s still raining at Merv Griffin’s. I check in and am shown to my room. It’s a golf cart ride away from the main building, where the spa facilities and restaurants are. It looks out over a parking lot and has a notably low ceiling. All this can be yours for four hundred twenty-five dollars a night.
“Wow,” I say, otherwise at a loss for words. Before the bellman brings the bags up, I am on the phone to the front desk. “What else have you got?” I hold while the manager flips through the “pages” of his computer.
I look out onto the parking lot—even the cars aren’t terribly interesting or luxurious. The whole facility—the low-key two-story buildings, the ubiquitous golf carts—reminds me of a retirement facility, of assisted living.
As I step out into the hall, the door across the way opens and a worker comes out holding a tank, a green pressurized canister, like something a scuba diver might carry or an exterminator, with two hoses and a gauge.
“Freon,” the man says to me.
Just beyond him in the center of the room, an older woman sits sternly upright in a chair, reading a book. How often do you see a woman, sitting by herself, in the middle of the afternoon in a hotel room, reading? There’s something about the sight of her and the man with the freon canister that allows my mind to conflate the two, that lets me for half a second think that the worker was in the room, filling the woman with freon, helping her maintain the crisp chill of the vegetable bin, as she sharply turns the pages.
The door closes.
The second room they show me is worse than the first—it’s like a Motel 6 on steroids, massive furniture, tasteless, but no doubt expensive. It reminds me of the kind of high-end, but ugly, furnishings my grandparents had in their apartment in Coral Gables, Flo
rida. And it is dark, very dark. My aesthetic allergies are kicking in big-time; my stomach is growling.
I pick up the phone again and apologetically excuse myself from the hotel register. “It’s not what I expected, not what I had in mind. Unfortunately, I’ll need to check out, immediately.” Within thirty minutes I have had the full Merv Griffin’s Resort and Givenchy Spa experience.
As my bags are golf-carted back to the main building, I wait and chat with the bellhop. I ask if he’s ever been to the wind farm. “Amazing, isn’t it?” I say.
“Incredible,” he says. “an eyesore, a blot on the landscape.”
From my cell phone, I call the next stop on my itinerary, La Quinta Resort and Club, and ask if they can accommodate me a day early. I drive there, reminding myself of the sound of the windmills, the baleful bleating of wind turned to wine.
La Quinta is one of a few towns named for a hotel. The hotel itself, built in 1926 as an ersatz fountain of youth, offered desert sun, quiet, privacy. It quickly became a favored Hollywood retreat—Greta Garbo liked it here, as did Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable. Frank Capra came here to write It Happened One Night. He thought of it as an incredibly lucky place and returned to write several other films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
La Quinta incorporated in 1981 and is among the fastest-growing cities in California. And the La Quinta resort is no longer just a desert hideaway, it’s one of the prime spots for high-end business conferences. The last time I was here, one of the largest brokerage houses was holding its annual conference on technology. The CNBC trucks were there, satellites up, broadcasting live. Watching it all on cable TV from my room, I had the strange sensation of seeing some sort of closed-circuit, on-site surveillance channel. It’s a peculiar experience to think you’ve escaped for a few days of deep R & R and then right there outside your window, and in fact your window itself on certain occasions, is being broadcast live around the world—welcome to the twenty-first century. As I watched, both in person and on the tube, the heads of major companies made their appearances, names like Jobs, McNeeley, Ellison. Between sessions, the plaza was flooded with the best of minds on cell phones, working their two-way pagers, sucking down warm chocolate chip cookies, freshly popped popcorn, and Häagen Dazs bars, all of it being handed out right and left like it’s a carnival, a great party celebrating growth, prosperity, and the American way, whatever it was or hopefully would become. They would talk turkey at these meetings in the morning and then head out onto the links and make deals in the afternoon.