One thinks of Los Angeles as a city having a bad dream, dreaming of an earthquake so powerful, so violent, that the coffins of the war dead are coughed from the soil like large chunks of unswallowable meat.
Inertia will lose; dynamism will win. And suddenly the land breathes and begins to grow houses, mini-malls and roads.
In the end, it was the freeway that captured the world’s imagination, not the players, so much (though they were good), or even the play, as old as the hills.
It was the capture of the freeway that captured the global imagination, Simpson’s profound and superb monopolization of the Los Angeles freeway system. Around the world it is Los Angeles we think of when we think of freeways. And when its freeways are sick or damaged by earthquakes, we mourn for Los Angeles.
In a vacuum, the only possible recourse is to become a part of the vacuum: the Nembutals on the bedside table; the Magnum .457 held underneath the chin driving along the San Diego Freeway; the Menendezes shopping for Rolexes before the blood had even dried.
With a hindsight look at Brentwood, it seems inevitable that what happened did happen, if not with O.J. then with some other cataclysm reconfigured. Brentwood’s is a landscape where too many unraveling and overpowering factors collide; it is a municipal and psychic bevatron, a smashing together of fame and paranoia and desire and bodies and money and power, and race and denial and media overload and all of the machinery of late-twentieth-century living.
NIGHT
Around 8:00 P.M.—the time at which estimators state that Monroe began to die—the light on the bark of the lemon-scented gum tree, a eucalyptus that dominates 356 Rockingham, is pearlescent and Maxfield Parrish-like, a bark that shimmers with the promise of magic beings and gold doubloons contained within. This is a tree that was probably planted back in the mid-twenties, around the same time Monroe was born, a tree that is around the same age of Monroe had she survived.
Monroe died just past the end of what photographers call “magic hour” with its “magic light”—the end-of-day golden glow in which all skin looks vital and all colors seem hallucinatory. She died just at that point when grays and blues become indistinguishable. Today, August 4, 1994, the day that has already begun receding into memory, memory that may or may not be forgotten.
Perhaps nature builds into us and into the world a sense of amnesia, and maybe this is our saving grace as humans, our ability to seemingly forget on cue. We are blessed and cursed with an amnesia that is so large that it frightens us while it protects us both while we sleep and while we dream.
And yes we still do dream of cities where there is still no past and where the future remains entirely unwritten, of cities where there are grassy canyons and water glazed by the sun into gold, of a billion butterflies floating through a billion coral trees, of water piped in from heaven and where there are limitless gleaming wide white freeways that will lead us off into infinity.
Archive Photos
About the Author
DOUGLAS COUPLAND was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden Sölligen, [West] Germany an December 30, 1961. He grew up and lives in Vancouver Canada.
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Other Books by Douglas Coupland
Generation X
Shampoo Planet
Life After God
Microserfs
Credits
Cover design based on a design by William Graef
Cover photograph courtesy of Springer/Corbis-Bettmann Film
Copyright
The following essays first appeared in slightly different form in these publications: “Polaroids from the Dead” in Spin (April 1992); “Lions Gate Bridge” (originally titled “This Bridge Is Ours”) in Vancouver Magazine (March 1994); “The German Reporter” in Tempo; “Letter to Kurt Cobain” in The Washington Post; “Harolding in West Vancouver” (February 1994), “Postcard from Los Alamos (Acid Canyon)” (February 1994), “Postcard from Palo Alto” (May 1994) and portions of “Brentwood Notebook” (December 1994) in The New Republic; “James Rosenquist’s F-111” in Artforum (April 1994).
POLAROIDS FROM THE DEAD. Copyright © 1996 by Douglas Coupland. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Coupland, Douglas.
Polaroids from the Dead/by Douglas Coupland.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-039149-9
1. Grateful Dead (Musical group) 2. Rock music fans. 3. Rock music—Social aspects. 4. Music and society. I. Title.
ML421.G72C68 1996
813'.54—dc20
95-5764
MN
ISBN 0-06-098721-9 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-210594-3
05
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Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories Page 14