Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories

by Douglas Coupland

  One is reminded in a way of Las Vegans, endlessly pumping their life’s dividends into the computer poker units, willfully forgetting their own tired, boring, statistically average personal narratives, narratives so average that they are worthy of self-contempt, in the hope of achieving a random transcendence. Denarrated, like pensioners gambling away their checks somewhere in the nicotine-soaked carpets of Fremont Street, Brentwooders hope to win back their lives, their stories with randomness.

  From TV Guide (August 6, 1994, issue, on stands August 4, 1994) cover story:

  DOES TV NEWS SNUB GOD?

  A profile of Peggy Wehmeyer: “Ninety percent of Americans believe in God, why is this woman the only religion reporter on TV?”

  Peggy Wehmeyer, ABC’s hot new religion reporter, starts her day with an hour of exercise, meditation and prayer. “My spirituality has to do with how I live my life,” says the buoyant blonde hired last January by Peter Jennings for World News Tonight’s “American Agenda” segment. “I’m definitely on a spiritual journey, but my church is not the focal point.”

  There is a blurring of denominations and attitudes in Brentwood. At one point in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Christians and Jews in Brentwood, Santa Monica and nearby Mar Vista shared the same Mar Vista church building. The L.A. Times reports: “the indoor crosses are covered up for the Jewish services and the Torah scrolls required for the weekly reading from the Hebrew Scriptures are stored in an ark on wheels.”

  A sense of spiritual communality based on a ZIP code is truly an act of faith, and so perhaps a broader definition of faith is called for here. Let faith represent the location in which we, as citizens, locate our faith for a better tomorrow—what one believes in as opposed to what one merely wants to get.

  Brentwoodians basically agree on good infrastructure, good land values, high security, goodwill toward neighbors (up to a point, after which social atomization sets in), the rewards of rational behavior and increasingly, the payoff of random jackpots.

  Henry Gris/FPG

  Brentwood’s mood is noir, that particularly Los Angeles phenomenon. One definition of noir (again, from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz) is of “the moral phenomenology of the depraved or ruined middle classes.” Is it possible to see Brentwood as the municipal embodiment of the crisis of secularism?

  HOUSE OF WORSHIP TALLY

  Synagogues 4

  Christian 2

  Christian Science 2

  On Sunday mornings at Bel Air Presbyterian on Mulholland Drive, the other side of the street from Brentwood’s northern edge: white-gloved, tan-shirted, brown-pantsed LAPD officers guiding the crush of traffic in and around the church. Infrastructure meets the transcendental.

  Driving down San Vicente, past five kilometers of coral trees (erythrina caffra) planted in the center median, one realizes that this is the land of the fatted calf, the secular nirvana, the citizens of whom Bennie and the Jets invoked to “plug into the faithless.”

  Psychology Today (July/August 1994) cover story:

  ON THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS: WHAT IT IS, WHO HAS IT, AND HOW TO GET THERE

  Reports Ed Diener, Ph.D., U. of Illinois, “Put simply, frequent positive experiences are both necessary and sufficient to produce the state we call happiness, whereas random [my italics] intense experiences are not.”

  John Reich, Ph.D., Arizona State U. says, “Winning a lottery may make you happy for a short while, but a random [my italics] event, occurring without input, will not create long-term happiness.”

  Both doctors demonize randomness, in flagrant defiance of the lifestyle of a good many of Brentwood’s rental class, comprised in good part of a never-ending flow of actors who spend their hours gigolo-ing, dealing, auditioning whatever all in order to garner the magic scratch-’n’-win lottery ticket of media fame.

  Later on, reference is made to Vice President Al Gore’s statement that “the accumulation of material goods is at an all-time high, but so is the number of people who feel emptiness in their lives.”

  Brentwood is a place that has never thought of itself as even existing. That is part of its charm, its attraction. Brentwood has no published written history as do neighboring Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Westwood (the municipal egg containing the yolk of UCLA) or Bel Air or Beverly Hills.

  Its entire paper archives fit snugly inside a cardboard Kinko’s box inside a librarian’s Buick Le Sabre trunk.

  From We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills by Ned Wynn (Penguin).

  He looked at me and made a face. “Is your dad Van Johnson or not?” he demanded.

  “He’s my stepfather,” I said. “Keenan Wynn’s my father.” I waited for the awe, the homage.

  “Never heard of that guy. My sister’s big on movie stars, but I don’t care about them one iota. They’re all phonies, anyway, not real people.” I felt my skin prickle.

  “They are so real,” I said.

  “Sure they are,” he said. I swallowed and my eyes started to sting.

  “My dad is real,” I choked. “He lives in Brentwood.”

  The Economist (August 6, 1994, on stands, August 4, 1994) cover story:

  DOES IT MATTER WHERE YOU ARE?

  To express an interest in Brentwood is to try to express interest in an entity unsure if it even possesses any memory.

  Most people’s first reaction is, “But there is no history.”

  This is followed by “Really?” followed by a suspicious “How come? How can you care about a place that doesn’t even exist?”

  It could be that the citizens collectively are involved either in self-deprecation or amnesia. “You mean this counts as a place?” or “How vulgar to talk about oneself.”

  Brentwood has never dreamed of having a profile and possesses a concomitant need to disassociate itself from the ever-encroaching Los Angeles on the east. Citizens migrated to Brentwood for the express luxury of inhabiting a place where there is no “here.” Brentwood, unlike higher-profile sister suburbs Bel Air, Westwood and Beverly Hills, has willfully engineered a transparent profile. It is as though to live in Brentwood, one signs a covenant of invisibility. The suburb’s existence is a consensual denial of civic randomness and chaos.

  If people here are annoyed with O. J. Simpson, possible double murder aside, it is only because he broke the covenant of invisibility. The corner of Rockingham and Ashford is going to be a tourist attraction for the next one hundred years, like it or not. Will this affect land values? Yes. But in which way, who is to know? Michelle Pfeiffer, although she lives below Sunset, has already chosen to move away to avoid the hubbub.

  356 Rockingham will become a tourist destination the way the Menendez house in Beverly Hills never will. (Ironic footnote: Eric Menendez and Simpson share adjacent jail cells. To O.J.’s noisy proclamations of innocence, Menendez allegedly retorts, “Save it for someone who cares, O.J.”)

  Seven weeks previously, on June 13, 1994, arrived the shocking eruption of infrastructure’s trappings into an until-then Edenic locale: helicopters, news vans, uncontrolled crowds, images of the freeway system monopolized by a single car, megaphones, police cars, satellite dishes, everything that had been wished away and paid extravagantly to avoid had exploded over them like a 1950s Bikini Island test.

  Infrastructure: this is a key:

  Imagine viewing North America as terra virginea almost utterly uninhabited as it was four centuries ago. A continent of shelves and ridges and deltas and arroyos and plains. An unlikely place for a city would be Los Angeles, located almost nowhere, with nothing.

  One must never overlook the fact that Los Angeles is an entirely manufactured city, assembled, piece by piece, largely during the early- to mid-twentieth-century Fordist heyday. Los Angeles without sci-fi-caliber infrastructure is not only unimaginable but impossible.

  Freeways, their signage, aqueducts, graveyards, electrical grids and telephone poles—the sexy enormity of these infrastructural intrusions are often a visitor’s largest takeaway memory of the place. How many
grids overlap other grids overlap grids? Aqueducts, power lines, freeways, signage…

  And as the city’s economy goes post-industrial, its psychic ecology contorts correspondingly.

  The dream of American Arcadian livability for Brentwood was actually generated by a Canadian from New Brunswick, Robert C. Gillis, who led a group that in 1904 purchased what is now Brentwood and much of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. It was Gillis who ensured tree-lined boulevards and rigid deed restrictions to maintain the area’s livability in an era when restrictions were few. Automobile travel was eagerly fostered with oiled roads, which were then paved as soon as possible.

  Brentwood’s infrastructure is seamless. Its invisibility and fail-proofness all add to the utopian claim of the place.

  In Brentwood, infrastructure is present precisely through its lack of presence. A strong component of Brentwood’s identity is that the area acts as a temporary respite from the infrastructural omnipresence of Los Angeles. Brentwood was designed to emulate the country, seen as a retreat from a too-rapidly growing city, with ample setbacks of houses and “massive plantings of trees” ensuring relief.

  Entering Brentwood is like reading a book where the capitalization periods and commas suddenly vanish.

  It is a suburb in denial of technology, yet all-demanding in its need for technology to provide illusions generated by denial.

  “A butterfly should be able to fly through any properly kept tree,” is the local axiom.

  Trees are a huge issue in this community.

  Trees separate the rich from the poor and sustain a bucolic illusion, which in turn sustains land values. Most important, trees mask the power poles, transformer boxes and all other infrastructural blights.

  Most are maintained with due precision: Bower Wattle, Peppermint Tree, Bunya-Bunya, Avocado, Carrot Wood, California Pepper, Loquat, Weeping Chinese Banyan, Jacaranda, New Zealand Tea Tree, Olive, Victorian Box and Lemonade Berry. Cumulatively they add up to one meaning: Heaven is manufacturable.

  But trees, like the citizens of Brentwood, are facing the problems of Los Angeles “the encroacher.” Trees regularly die due to heavy construction, grade changes, overwatering, strangling ivy, smog, drought. There are limits to how much change can be absorbed.

  And not just the trees, but the plants! Brentwood nurtures an almost infinite array of plantings: grassy Low bullrush, chive, Shamrock, spinach-like Acanthus, succulent Stonecrop and Houseleek, feathery Gru-gru palms, flowered Choreopsis and the omni-present Delft-blue Lily-of-the-Nile such as those that lined Nicole Brown Simpson’s condominium walkway, technically called agapanthus, at their height in July and August.

  Michael Tamborrino/FPG

  There is a growing notion in academic circles and perceived viscerally in the chakras of Brentwoodians that cities—Shanghai; Mexico; Lagos; Los Angeles—can simply grow forever, that there are no real limits yet found as to how many people may agglomerate in one place. As Brentwood is increasingly encircled, will it remain an island or will it be strangled?

  Infrastructure highlight: Monday nights, garbage night, when tight clusters of Wedgwood blue and gunmetal gray Rubbermaid “Bruiser” 32-gallon wheeled refuse containers huddle at driveway feet. Some households have up to 18 containers at a time. There are also City of Los Angeles recycling containers: red for metal; yellow for glass.

  INFRASTRUCTURAL HIGHLIGHTS OF BRENTWOOD AND BRENTWOOD PARK (NEIGHBORHOOD OF O. J. SIMPSON)

  1907 Ads in the Los Angeles Times extol Brentwood’s virtues.

  1922 Brentwood’s lands are only one-quarter sold; the firm of Shipley, Harrell and Trapp takes over.

  1942 Brentwood Park’s homeowners association formed in response to the threat of subdivision and lowering land values.

  1963 Lot subdivisions are limited to 20,000 square feet.

  1970 Caesar Romero, actor, and June Lockhart, actress, shear apart a ribbon, inaugurating the new post office at 137 Barrington Avenue. Romero wears his trademark cravat and a carnation in his vest; Lockhart dons a pre-wedge/post-pixie hairdo and wears an A-line linen dress.

  1975 There is a momentary burst of fear when San Vicente Boulevard is possibly to be renamed a highway.

  1977 Further panic when plans for a freeway along Sunset, straight through the center of Brentwood, are proposed. Plan eventually killed by coalition of homeowners associations and environmental groups.

  1978 A vote among Brentwood Park Homeowners Association members allows, by a narrow margin, a limit of two on-location film shoots per residence per year.

  1980 Mace instruction classes are formed.

  1984 A mailing is sent out on how to conceal trash cans.

  1985 Underground wiring is left as a block-by-block decision.

  1990 A general survey is held regarding “undergrounding” of utility wires.

  1991 Water rationing.

  1991 Leaf blower noise limited to 65 decibels.

  1993 Magnetic fields in nearby Kenter Canyon are halved by the Department of Water and Power owing to possible leukemia health risk.

  All of this is history, but then the past is something Brentwood seems somewhat indifferent to, even with the near one-billion-dollar J. Paul Getty Center, an elegant monolith atop a hill halfway between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive west of the 405.

  Designed by Richard Meier, scheduled for a 1997 opening and surfaced with travertine, the center is the largest project in cost and dimension currently under way in the United States, and possibly, after the cancellation of the Texan Waxahachie supercollider, the most complex.

  But the Getty is not yet a part of the lives of Brentwoodians and maybe never will be. It does not collect twentieth-century art, and it is too remote from the inhabited suburbs to lend any warmth of presence.

  The physical presence of the Getty atop its hill acts as a stunning metaphor for the weight of history placed in a location that is silently and willfully antagonistic toward recognizing history’s flow.

  Most Brentwood residential structures were built between 1950 and 1979. Fewer than 10 percent have been built since then. Most of the houses built in the neighborhood’s Brentwood Hills subdivision were built in the 1960s and 1970s by Art Linkletter.

  A drive in any portion of Brentwood reveals a chocolate box of architectural styles:

  MGM-Colonial-Scandalbox

  San-Diego-Public-School-System-post-and-beam

  Marcus-Welby-Sonorous-Tudor (the Simpson house)

  1941-white-stucco-Pearl-Harbor’s-just-been-bombed-Cocktail, Darling?

  Doris-Day’s-in-the-house-holding-a-lobster-claw-and-dish-of-melted-butter-

  Cape Cod

  The-future-Whoosh!-Apollo-17

  Kim-Novak’s-Love-Nest-Ranchero

  From We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills by Ned Wynn (about the house of his stepfather, Van Johnson).

  The house itself was a sleek Deco/Moderne cube that my friend Jackie Hathaway called Uncle Scrooge’s money bin.

  On September 14, 1993, the Los Angeles City Council passed the Hillside Ordinance by an 11 to 2 vote preventing the “mansionization” or the creation of what is known in other cities as “monster houses” by land developers who, throughout the 1980s, would tear down smaller houses, carefully examine local building codes and then build the largest possible structure legally allowed on the same property. The not-often-pleasing-to-neighbors result was then flipped for a fat profit.

  One particularly popular style for these new “monster houses” is one that might be called “San-Fernando-Valley-mini-mall”: a fevered dream of the Mediterranean, a house where Barbie might live, hugely overpedimented, grossly and arrogantly disproportionate to all surrounding structures, cake-frosted with stucco and lacking only a Plexiglas sign saying Ralphs or Tower Records or Glossy Nails.

  Monsters.

  In the 1960s, monsters were googly-eyed, Rat Fink, Revell model chummy things, anonymously designed folkloric terror, and lovable at the core: Incredible Edibles; Wacky Packs; Herman Munst
er. But what is our vision of monsters now? There no longer seems to be friendliness attached to them; they are now merely out to kill (just visit any video rental shop), either that or they’re out to—*shiver*—devalue our neighborhoods.

  If the monsters we create as a culture reflect our deepest terrors temporarily focused into one entity like Frankenstein, killer robots, pod people, then with the monster house, Brentwood has spawned monsters of a new toughness, durability and sublimity.

  The Hillside Ordinance against monster houses might then be likened to “stuffed monster,” something given to children to help them objectify and reduce their fears. By giving children beasts small enough to manipulate, it makes them feel as though they are really in charge.

  Sample ad from the real estate section of the Brentwood News:

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