by Pico Iyer
A woman called Noriko directed me towards an Immigration desk and a man called C. Chen stamped me into the republic; another man, one Yoji Yasaka, transferred my luggage to a domestic terminal. Around us, in the free-for-all chaos of the Customs Hall, beagles were sniffing busily (in coats that said agriculture’s beagle brigade on one side, and protecting america’s agriculture on the other), and a voice on the PA system was calling out for one Stanley Plaster; on a bulletin board, there was a letter from a child (bewildering, surely, to a person just arriving from Guangzhou) that began, “Dear Taffy, We liked your show. You are cute, smart and a good sniffer.…”
The minute I stepped out into America—walking past a large armed guard seated behind a desk and protected from the natives by ropes—I saw a sign being waved at me for a “Mr. T. Ego” (a limousine driver was doing his thing). A whole crowd of Japanese officials, with cell phones slung around their shoulders and faces whose hardness showed how far they had come from Japan, flourished signs that said JET TOUR, BEST TOUR, LOOK JTB. Behind them was the entire Cook Islands Dance team (complete with oars), and a troupe of seventy-seven girls, JTB stickers neatly on their sleeves, sitting in formation on the floor, their identically sized bags parked in perfect rows beside them.
SAFETY AREA. DO NOT BLOCK, said a yellow line on the floor, and the yellow tape cordoning off other areas came with the unpromising initials DOA.
“Don’t be Fooled!” cried the signs behind the Information booth. TAKE EXTRA PRECAUTIONS TO HELP US INSURE THE SAFETY OF AIR TRAVEL. Outside a bar, more warnings prohibited the removal of beverages from the premises.
To me, of course, none of this was unexpected (and I knew that LA was no situation comedy); yet I wondered how it would seem to someone who had risked imprisonment or death to come here, or who had saved up for thirty years for this sudden, unanticipated blur of security officers in Elsinor Airport Services uniforms, and people shaking tins on behalf of America’s Hopeless. In the men’s room, when I entered, I saw a chilling gangland message scribbled across one wall—SHARAZZ SPIRIT LINE—and when I came out, it was to hear a woman on the public-address system saying, over and over, “Paging a representative from the U. for Understanding program. A representative from the U. for Understanding program …”
In the whole vast expanse of the TBIT Arrivals Hall, there was only one snack bar to cater to the five thousand people who passed through every hour, and it was offering only nine items, of which five were identified as “Cheese Dog, Chili Dog, Chili Cheese Dog, Nachos with Cheese and Chili Cheese Nachos.” On the other side of the main doors, a panel told us we could rent a Payless or a King Cobra car, and stay in the Grand Hotel Cockatoo or the Banana Bungalow (FREE TOAST, it offered inscrutably. FREE BED SHEETS, FREE MOVIES AND PARTY AND BASKETBALL COURT).
Around us, the voices echoed over and over, in Spanish and Japanese and English that sounded like Spanish or Japanese, “Maintain visual contact with your personal possessions at all times” and “The white zone is for loading and unloading of cars only. No parking.”
Outside, on the sidewalk, I was greeted by a Van Stop, a Bus Stop, a Courtesy Tram Stop and a Shuttle Bus Stop, all elaborately coded with swirling colors and diagrams, the Shuttle Bus alone tracing circuits A, B, and C. I went to the Shuttle Stop and found myself confronted with forty-nine different offerings, from the Great American Shuttle to the Apollo Shuttle, the Movie Shuttle to the Celebrity Airport Livery, all waiting to take me to Vegas or Disneyland. Koreans were piling into buses that said TAEGUK AIRPORT SHUTTLE, which would take them to a Koreatown decorated all in Hangul script, and men in robes were disappearing under the Arabic lettering of the Sahara Shuttle to be taken to who knows what desert tent. All around, disciples of Louis Farrakhan, unsettlingly natty in their dark suits and bow ties (the Nation of Islam headquarters is just down the street), walked up to newcomers and asked for a dollar “contribution” for their magazine, called, with unlikely wit, The Final Call.
THIS TERMINAL IS IN A MEDFLY QUARANTINE AREA said the first sign to greet me as I walked. STOP THE SPREAD OF MEDFLY!
Across the street, in the parking garage, I walked into a chaos of sirens and beepers and alarm systems ringing, passengers zapping their car-door openers, antitheft devices wailing constantly, and a voice intoning behind me, “Do not leave your car unattended. Unattended cars are subject to immediate towaway.”
If I left my car here for thirty days, it would be impounded, I read; if I lost my parking ticket, I’d be liable to a sixteen-dollar fine. If I parked my car in the wrong zone, I’d have to pay fifty-six dollars. The man at the parking kiosk—a Tigrean, as I could tell by his tribal scars—held up fingers to show how many dollars I owed, on the safe assumption that I would not speak English even if he did.
I suspect that many visitors, by this time, might be half-unwillingly recalling that LA was the place where they’d seen that white Bronco on the 405 freeway nearby, and that man in the speeding car beaten up by police officers; and I think that many of the “homeless” and “tempest-tossed” invited here by Emma Lazarus might be coming to realize that the “last resort” of which the Eagles sing points in more than one direction.
Such thoughts would hardly be stilled by the building that stands at the very heart of LAX, its talisman and crowning trademark, the 136-foot parabolic arch Theme Building, as it is called, on 1 World Way, that “reflect[s] a futuristic vision” (as I’d just read in an airline magazine). These days, alas, the structure that must have looked all the rage once upon a time sits like a stranded jet-age beetle in the middle of the parking lots, symbol of a future that’s already distant past. Pictures of Saturn’s rings and Jupiter and its moons greet you as you enter, and a plaque laid down by Lyndon Johnson announces its status as an icon of American idealism, just as the Vietnam War was setting all that aflame.
Upstairs, in the Cultural and Historic Monument, there are a few Host International offices, and a Theme Restaurant, where a few desperately merry waiters serve cheeseburgers and nonalcoholic wines to a few sallow diners who look as if they’ve truly landed up at the very end of the road. HELLO ALL THE NEW PEOPLE OF LAX—WELCOME, says the bright graffiti in the elevator, but when I visited, there weren’t many new people in the “gourmet-type” restaurant, and they didn’t look as if they were very welcome.
“Does the building revolve?” I asked a waiter.
“Now it will,” he said chirpily, setting down in front of me a soft drink.
“That guy, Iglezi—what’s he called?—he was here once,” a man from the reception desk was saying in the distance. “John Travolta, he asked me a question.”
Recently, the “landmark building” was refurbished, so that the Theme Restaurant became the Encounter Restaurant, and its waiters were decked out in “Star Trek–influenced uniforms”—but still it looks like something from your grandfather’s science fiction nightmares, the Jetsons’ second home, and its ambiguous new title can only be equivocal about what encounters will ensue.
As you begin to pull out of the airport and onto Century Boulevard, a grand eight-lane thoroughfare that runs like an Everystreet through a long line of minimalls, tower blocks, and fast-food joints, you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve ended up in the definitive Malled City of the future. The streets are called Avion and Aviation, Airport Boulevard and Concourse Way, and they are filled with FOR RENT signs and anonymous houses, billboards for Nissan (LUXURY FOR THE PRIVILEGED MANY), and pictures of Las Vegas replicas of the Grand Canal. As you edge along, towards the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway and the Howard Hughes Parkway—the phantom campus of the University of Phoenix commuter college is just up the road—you can easily recall that you are in a place, as local writers estimate, of 2,000 street gangs, 40,000 minimalls, 20,000 sweatshops, and 100,000 homeless residents.
The people who stay in this nowhere zone—as I did for a while—seem to linger in some kind of never-ending layover between the half-life of the airport and the graves of Fo
rest Lawn a few miles down the road. They stay—as I stayed—at the Marriott, the Sheraton, the Hyatt, and the Holiday Inn (the whole Hyatt chain started in a coffee shop near LAX); they listen—as I did—to AM 530 Airport Radio, available around the clock, and enjoy “happy hour” spreads at the Proud Bird bar, where you can listen to air-control tower messages on headphones at every table. At the Adult Boutique next to the Airport Hilton (the only shop I’ve ever visited where you have to pay—fifty cents—just to enter), the businessmen of all five continents were silently inspecting Womb Brooms, Double Dongs, and Wind-Up Dirty Old Men; next door, at the live NUDES OUTLET, girls multiculturally called Sunni and Cinnimin and Trixie and Cherokee were offering private lap dances to a pair of phlegmatic Filipina matrons, and some Singapore accountants who looked pretty much bemused to be paying $14.25 for a compulsory Coke, while a Dancer’s Salad went for only $2.10.
I suppose none of this is any more impersonal than the trappings that attend any transit area or orphaned district catering to those from out of town. Bored, adrift, and far from home, every trader since Phoenician times has looked for the same ways to assuage his loneliness.
But there was something special about the amorphous orbit around LAX that marked it as the province of the airport. In the Gateway Sheraton, while I was staying—not far from Flight Avenue and Sky Way—one room downstairs was given over to the ringed confessionals and linked hands of a spiritual healing group called the Lighthouse, whose leaders had apparently realized that this was fertile ground for lost souls. The hostesses were dressed up in Halloween masks at Zeno’s Bar, and nearby another room was reserved for the Institute of Certified Divorce Planners. At the beginning of Michael Tolkin’s mock-Fundamentalist LA story, The Rapture, the last word in decadence is embodied by the swingers who haunt LAX’s look-alike hotels and bars, on the prowl for one-night thrills and other amoralists passing through.
In the room upstairs, next to my Gideon’s Bible and The Teaching of Buddha, there was a magazine for tourists that advertised “Beautiful Californian Girls” (“Show Your Hotel Key for a 50% discount”), and “Beautiful Dancers,” to be found in the “California Happenings” section, right next to “Psychic Consultant” (“She is 75 per cent accurate.… Mention Inn Room magazine ad for $20 reading (Regularly $50)”). The side doors in the hotel were locked at eight o’clock every night, and one could not even get the elevator to move without a room key.
Part of this, again, was simply because airports are danger zones, magnets for people in flight, quite literally, or anxious to move on, and airport hotels are notoriously meeting points for under-the-counter operators talking, in low whispers, of import-export, extradition, the shipment that’s just come in (which, comically, in the movie Get Shorty, is surrounded by “a zillion DEA agents” masquerading as regular people in the Bradley Terminal). The airport hotel gift shop was full of leopard-skin women and men with gold rings fingering mugs in the shape of five-hundred-dollar bills, and again I was in that classic modern venue: the tower block ringed by jungle. One wrong turn round LAX (as depicted in Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon), and you can be in the midst of lawlessness.
“Be extra careful in parking garages and stairways,” said my hotel room, in its official tone of bureaucratic nervousness. “Always try to use the main entrance to your hotel, particularly late in the evening.… Never answer your hotel room door without verifying who is there.”
Yet the biggest shock of all, ultimately, for the newcomer who’s issued forth at last into the place that calls itself a World Gateway Community, is that many of its brightest hopes look most feasible on paper. In its early days, California had more languages (all Native American) than all of Europe, and even now the archetypal home of the mestizo routinely refers to itself as “a global crossroads city” and a “modern Alexandria”; in the Airport Annual Report I picked up, the LA City Council was a glorious rainbow coalition of people called Woo and Goldberg and Yaroslavsky and Alarcón and Ridley-Thomas.
Yet the black men making money along Century Boulevard were doing so with T-shirts protesting O.J.’s innocence, and the writing on the rest room wall in the International Arrivals Terminal said “Yes on Proposition 187. Mexicans go home.” California was the place where affirmative action had just been repealed, and where the state university was forever embroiled in a debate about reverse discrimination. Airports more readily issue entry permits than welcomes; and, as a policeman at JFK told James Kaplan, with surprising nakedness, “We hate every ethnic group here. When the Third World flushes, it comes through the International Arrivals Building.”
Almost the minute you exit from the airport, along the main artery decorated with banners hanging from the lampposts, celebrating the town’s favorite Dodgers (at the time Nomo and Mondesi and Piazza and Karros, in case you’d forgotten multiculturalism), just past the signs for Postal Road and International Road, you come upon a large fortresslike structure that announces itself as the United States Post Office, Worldway Postal Center, Los Angeles, California 90000. The place, big enough to house an embassy, is open around the clock, 365 days a year, and for certain immigrants, just getting off the plane, must seem like a model of all the convenience and abundance they’ve come here to enjoy. Yet outside its entrance, when I visited, a clean young man with piercing eyes and short blond hair had posted himself, and was delivering a furious harangue to anyone who’d listen (and many who wouldn’t).
Henry Kissinger, he was yelling, “is the Bürgermeister of the New World Order, the poster boy of the March of Crimes.” Galileo, Bertrand Russell, the IMF had all conspired against the American way, partly with their notions of a larger order. NATIONALIZE THE FEDERAL RESERVE, the signs on his table cried out, and JAIL THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION.
“We ruined the UN Population Conference,” the clean-cut La Rouchite was shouting out. “Jail Ollie North, that son of a Bush.” He took pains to dress well, answer questions politely, and carry himself with as much dignity as any Mormon missionary (or the Farrakhan agents down the street); but for a Laotian or a Palestinian or a Salvadoran who’d just arrived here in search of a peace not available at home, he must surely have served as a reminder that global unity looked easier, as Bette Midler sang, “from a distance.”
And as my days at LAX began to stretch into weeks, and I found myself sinking into that nether state that marks the amphibian, the geographical equivalent of jet lag, I noticed something else about the airport: I was running into names here I’d never seen before—Hoa and Ephraim and Glinda and Hasmick, women called Roccio and blond Lorenas; in Terminal 5 alone, one day, I came upon an Ignacio, an Ever, an Aura, and an Erick, all in a single Host cafeteria, and many of them speaking native tongues I could not begin to decipher. Down the street and up the pecking order a little, at my hotel, I was helped at the reception desk by Viera from Bratislava (as her name tag, like those in Las Vegas, identified her), and Faye from Vietnam; Isabelle from Guatemala City, Khrystynne from Long Beach (by way, I’m sure, of Phnom Penh), and Moe from (unaccountably) West LA. Many of the people who arrive at LAX, so full of bright expectations, never really leave the airport, I was beginning to see, and find that the skills they’ve brought here are reduced to the simple ones—speaking Khmer, or knowing how to handle boisterous Croatians—that are most in demand around the airport. As is the immigrant fate everywhere, qualified doctors and professors at home find themselves janitors and bellboys, patronized by schoolboys as they struggle with their fourth, or seventh, tongues.
Darkest of all, they are surrounded by the people they came all this way to flee, not just the other exiles from impoverished countries with tangles of their own but the very people who drove them from their homeland.
One day, in the Airport Sheraton, I asked my Ethiopian waitress how she liked LA. Well enough, she said in elegant, reticent English; she’d actually been here now for seven years. She must miss her home, I said, knowing that the shopping centers of LA are thick with places like the Homesick Baker
y.
She nodded sadly; she missed it bitterly, she said.
“But I can’t go home.”
“Why not?” I said, still smiling.
“Because they killed my family. Two years back. They killed my father; they killed my brother.” “They,” of course, referred to the Tigreans, the friendly man down the street holding up fingers to show me how much I owed, the gracious woman collecting litter as I walked along the fourth-floor corridor.
THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE
Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places, they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.
—GEOFF DYER
In Hong Kong recently, staying with one of my oldest friends from English high school, I found myself in a flat furnished almost entirely with suitcases (a priority label around the handle of one, the stickers of hotels all over another). A Hewlett-Packard desk jet printer sat on the desk in the guest-room, and next to it I found some stationery from a Marriott Hotel, and a few postcards of the Imperial Hotel (in Bombay, in Bangkok?—I couldn’t really tell). Nearby were some pictures of Macao and some personalized stationery (for someone I’d never heard of) made up by the Oberoi Hotel, Bombay. Next to the bed, a Dragonair systems timetable; against the wall, a travel iron, together with some guidebooks.
My old friend Richard and his wife, Sharon, were as kind and individual a couple as I knew, but they’d set up their flat—like the city around them—for people passing through. So there was a box for a Worldwide Power Adapter in the room where I slept, a set of Chinese Standard Version 3.2 diskettes, and a box of matches from Rick’s Café down the street (where expats could collect a partner for the night). And everywhere, there were suitcases. When I arrived, two MBAs from Los Angeles, who’d just flown over for the weekend (on our hostess’s unused frequent flier awards) moved out of the guest room and into the functional living room.