by Lee Goldberg
“Why are we stopping?” Marty asked.
“Rodeo Drive is dust, we can’t pass that up. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire!” Kent hopped off the bike and motioned the Skipper and Gilligan to park alongside.
Marty sighed, resigning himself to the inevitable. Even with the occasional stop for filming, he’d still move faster with Kent and his motorbike than without him. He sat down on the edge of a large, concrete fountain in the park to wait Kent out.
Kent looked at ruptured asphalt and crumpled storefronts of Rodeo Drive through the frame he created with his hands and yelled at the Skipper. “Get a couple wide angles from here.”
The Skipper spit a gob of tobacco into the stagnant water in the fountain. “Without a crane, we aren’t gonna see much from here ’cept the barricades. We gotta get closer. Those are the money shots.”
“Just get the damn wide angle. I’ll have a chat with the local constabulary.” Kent took a deep drag on the small stub of cigarette he had left and exhaled slowly. “When I’m done sweet-talking them, they won’t just welcome us onto Rodeo Drive, they’ll help you carry the equipment.”
While Kent sauntered across the street to work on the cops, Marty glanced at the fountain he was sitting on. It was a round pool about a foot deep, surrounding a cracked statue of a stout, naked nymph holding an armful of squirming, open-mouthed fish. According to the plaque at the base, the antiquity was a gift to Beverly Hills from Cannes, their official “sister city” in France. They’d probably been waiting 400 years for someone to unload it on.
The Skipper peered through the eyepiece of the camera, then set it down on the ground, abandoning the shot in a huff. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to shoot anything with him standing there like that. He’s right in middle of the shot.”
Marty glanced back at Kent, who was waving his arms around, animatedly articulating a point to the stoic policemen. Kent didn’t seem to be making much headway, which meant they could be here a while.
The thought made Marty look over at Kent’s motorbike. The director had left the key in the ignition.
“You work at the network?” The Skipper asked Marty.
“Uh-huh.” Marty’s gaze hadn’t left the motorbike.
“I worked a camera on The Tortellis in ’87.” The Skipper spit a gob of chaw and watched it arc through the air until it plunked into the fountain water. “Some people confuse that with The Torkelsons because they were both NBC sitcoms that started with a ‘T.’ But they weren’t in the same league.”
Marty nodded like he was listening when, in fact, all he wanted to do was jump on the motorbike and speed off. A couple things stopped him from acting on the impulse. For one, he’d never driven a motorbike. For another, it probably wasn’t a bright idea to steal something in front of a camera and two police officers.
He shrugged off his pack and dropped it on the grass. Might as well get comfortable.
“ The Tortellis was from the guys who did Cheers.” The Skipper spit at Gilligan, just to see if he’d jump out of the way. He didn’t. The gob dribbled down Gilligan’s shirt, but the dazed assistant didn’t seem to notice. “It could have been Frasier, but it wasn’t. It sure as hell wasn’t The Torkelsons, though.”
The Skipper jammed some more tobacco into his mouth and watched Kent argue with the cops. Marty watched, too.
From the irritated look on the cops’ faces, it seemed if Kent tried to press his point any further, they’d gun him down. In a pique of anger, Kent flicked his cigarette stub at them and turned away.
The street exploded.
Marty toppled face-first into the fountain as a gale force wind of flame blasted through the cracked asphalt of Rodeo Drive and blew in all directions.
He felt the agony of the searing caress and heard the unearthly roar of the firestorm as it passed over him. His screams drowned in the water.
And then, only moments after it was ignited, the firestorm was gone, totally extinguished, absorbed into the air like a fine mist.
Marty immediately rolled over, his burning jacket hissing in the water. His back smoldered, red-hot needles of pain piercing deep into his flesh. He lay half-floating there for a long moment in shock, listening to the crackle of fire, astonished to be alive, trying to reconstruct what had just happened. He guessed that Kent’s cigarette stub ignited gas that had accumulated under Rodeo Drive from a leak somewhere. The jolt of the blast knocked Marty off-balance into the fountain, and the ring of concrete and the foot of water saved him. The firestorm passed right over his back, scalding his flesh.
It felt like someone tried to iron his shirt while he was still wearing it. But it could be much worse. If it hadn’t been for the two layers of wet clothing, he probably wouldn’t have any skin left on his back at all. Marty sat up slowly, grimacing in pain, and looked around.
After all the destruction he’d already seen, he thought he was past being stunned by the epic scale of the devastation, by the familiar rendered into something altogether different and nightmarish.
He was wrong.
Beverly Hills was a blazing wasteland. Buildings and cars and trees were consumed by fire. Flames licked out of a huge crater where the pavement once was, feeding on the last wisps of trapped gas escaping from below.
There was no sign of the Suburbans, or the police officers who once leaned against them, or of Kent Beaudine, the casual wreaker of the city’s doom. Marty assumed they were at the bottom of the crater, entombed with countless movie-star baubles.
The lavish houses and tall trees fronting the park were on fire, the ravenous flames jumping to the surrounding homes. It wouldn’t be long before the whole neighborhood was burning. He’d have to move fast if he didn’t want to get caught in it on his way home.
Wincing with pain, Marty lifted himself into a sitting position on the rim of the fountain, swung his legs over the edge, and was about to stand up when he froze. He’d nearly stepped on one of the smoking chunks of asphalt that covered the park like pieces of a meteor.
But that wasn’t what made him stop in mid-motion.
The Skipper was lying on the ground, his body scorched naked by the fire, his skin black as charcoal. But he was alive, smoke curling from his nostrils, his lungs seared.
“I don’t want to die,” the Skipper squealed, looking at Marty with imploring eyes, smoke pouring out of his mouth.
Marty crouched beside him but couldn’t bring himself to touch the man. “You won’t.”
But a few moments later, the cameraman did.
Marty didn’t even know his name. All Marty knew about him was that he spit tobacco and worked on The Torkelsons.
It wasn’t much of an epitaph.
He rose up slowly, unable to take his eyes off the horrifying sight of the dead man. Somewhere deep inside, the Skipper was still burning, thin wisps of smoke drifting out between his charred, dead lips.
Marty looked around for Gilligan and found him in pieces. The camera assistant had been decapitated by a piece of Rodeo Drive, his headless corpse slumped over the smoldering battery pack.
He looked away, repulsed and terrified. In a war, Marty thought, there must come a time when a person becomes inured to the carnage and violent death, when the experience changes from something unusual and shocking into something commonplace and expected.
That time hadn’t come for him yet. He wished it would hurry up and get here or, if it didn’t, that he could be spared any new variations on the theme. Marty didn’t know how much more he could take.
His sanity felt almost physical, like a joint that had already been flexed too far. He knew it was about to snap, but unlike with a torn ligament or broken bone, he had no idea what consequences to expect if it happened.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Maybe it would be a pleasant numbness, a blissful separation from direct contact with reality.
Or maybe not.
It could mean losing all sense of self, all intelligence. He could end up a mewling idiot,
staggering mindlessly through the rubble.
And then he would never get home.
Stop being a pussy. So people are dying horrible, grotesque, and painful deaths right in front of your eyes. Big fucking deal. Be glad it’s not you and move on.
Lately, the voice in his head was sounding more and more like Buck and yet, strangely enough, seemed to be making more and more sense to him.
The way to deal with it, he decided, was to look at death clinically, the way a coroner does. When a coroner looks at a corpse-whether it’s been hit by a train, torn apart by sharks, mutilated with an ax, mangled in a car crash, or left decaying in the sun for a week, infested by maggots-it doesn’t sicken or terrify him. Why? Because it isn’t a human being any more. It’s an object, a by-product, a thing. A fleshy sack of organs and bones that just resembles a living thing.
Marty would just have to get in the right frame of mind.
But it occurred to him that coroners had an advantage he didn’t. They rarely witnessed the killing, the moment when a person stops being a person and becomes a corpse.
Then again, millions of soldiers over tens of thousands of years had come to grips with that moment on the battlefield. And most of them didn’t lose their minds. How hard could it be?
Be a fucking man.
Yes, Marty thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll be a fucking man.
He turned and faced north on what was left of Rodeo Drive. For the first few blocks, houses on both sides of the street were aflame and charred bodies were scattered on the sidewalks.
Be a fucking man.
Marty took one flap of his wet jacket, raised it in front of his face like a cape, and trudged across the blackened grass into the smoke.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Over the Hill and Through the Woods
2:42 p.m. Wednesday
The statues had pubic hair.
It wasn’t some artist’s chiseled interpretation of pubic hair, but actual hair of some kind glued to the carved crotches of a dozen stone nudes. Beyond that, the row of gaudy statues that lined the top of the wall around the Sunset Boulevard mansion would otherwise have been unremarkable.
When Martin Slack first saw those statues twenty years ago from the front seat of his over-heated Chevette, arriving from Northern California for his freshman year at UCLA, he knew for certain he’d arrived in Los Angeles.
The wall was still there, only now it was riddled with fresh cracks and surrounded an empty lot full of tall, dry weeds. The statues and the mansion were long gone, but they undoubtedly lived on in the photo albums of a thousand tourists.
The homeowners on Sunset wanted their properties photographed, not by Architectural Digest but by busloads of tourists, and would go to extreme, and expensive, lengths to get those snapshots taken.
The fervent competition for tourist eyeballs often made Sunset Boulevard look like a residential version of the Las Vegas Strip, only without the budget buffets.
To become a sidewalk attraction, it wasn’t enough to have lavish architecture and lush landscaping, or to park shiny limousines and Italian sports cars around a sparkling fountain. Extravagance, opulence, and gratuitous displays of wealth were merely starting points.
Some homeowners made their blatant grab for snapshot glory only on the holidays, festooning their lawns and eaves with hundreds of flashing lights, elaborate floral displays, and animatronic dioramas that Walt Disney would have envied.
Others were in it for the long run, striving to become a permanent stop on the Hollywood Star Tour and yet, at the same time, maintaining the charade that they valued their own privacy with small “no trespassing” signs staked in their lawns.
One such homeowner decorated the circular drive in front of the white walls that sealed his property with incredibly life-like bronze statues-albeit clothed and presumably without pubic hair, real or otherwise. He began with only a uniformed security guard at his gate, then quickly expanded his repertory company of statuary to include a gardener, a painter, a jogger, kids at play, and in case anyone missed the subtle intention behind his efforts, a tourist couple taking pictures of it all.
Marty sat in front of this house, resting on the homeowner’s sturdy, wood-carved “private property” sign. He didn’t know or care if the house behind the walls still stood, the tall trees behind the wall hiding it from view. But he was glad the statues had survived because now, in his mind, nothing was more authentically LA than this.
Except, perhaps, for the statues with pubic hair, but sadly they were already lost. He thought somebody should have lobbied to give them protection as a historical landmark. They were significant to him, if no one else, even if he didn’t really miss them until now.
Even though he’d traveled on Sunset countless times over the last twenty years, somehow this time it felt like he was retracing the path he took when he first came here from San Francisco, when he was full of dreams and plans that still hadn’t come true.
His melancholy was compounded by his physical state. He’d never experienced so many different kinds of discomfort at once. His back burned, his cuts stung, his shoulder throbbed, and his skin itched under his charred, damp, dirt-caked clothes. Every muscle in his body was sore, and his feet felt as if they had swelled to twice their normal size. He was hot, thirsty, and sweating all over.
And then there were all those dead faces that wouldn’t stay buried in his mind, flashing in front of his consciousness like commercial breaks.
The memories, the weariness, and the pain became an almost palpable weight, carried all over his body. This must be why so many elderly people stooped, Marty thought. Seventy years of this shit must weight a lot.
So he’d stopped to rest, to clear his head, to marshal his strength for the next leg of his journey over the Sepulveda Pass. He knew the hills were ablaze, even from here he could see the smoke. But he was going to take the Pass anyway, because the alternative, trekking twenty or thirty more miles further west and inching into the valley from the coast, was unthinkable. It would take days in the condition he was in now and there was no telling what hazards he’d face there-mudslides, forest fires, deranged mountain lions, swarms of locusts.
The locusts seemed like a stretch, but then again, Marty never would have imagined running into a tidal wave in the middle of Hollywood, either.
He figured the Sepulveda Pass wasn’t too big a risk anyway. He was planning on walking straight up the center of the San Diego Freeway. The ten lanes of concrete plus the two lanes of Sepulveda Boulevard should make a nice, wide fire break.
Marty took a deep breath, got to his feet, and started walking again. To distract himself from the pain, and to make the time pass, he sang TV themes to himself, beginning with fifties shows and moving forward from there.
He began with Have Gun, Will Travel and was up to Green Acres a half-hour later as he approached a guy near the ornate gates to Bel-Air, sitting in a lawn chair beside a sandwich board that advertised “Maps to the Stars’ Homes(Only Five Dollars!” The “five” had been scratched out and replaced with a hastily scrawled “two.” The man was going through his maps, spreading them open on his lap and X-ing out homes with a fat magic marker.
“Doing much business?” Marty asked.
“Some,” the man said, intent on his work. “News crews, mostly.”
Made sense. It didn’t matter much to Americans if Los Angeles was destroyed, Marty thought, but God save Jay Leno’s garage, Brad Pitt’s sun deck, and Meg Ryan’s tennis courts.
“How do you know which homes have been destroyed?” Marty asked.
“I have my sources,” he said mysteriously and started marking up another map.
Marty headed off again, picking up where he left off in the sixties with Branded. He was in middle of the seventies and Good Times when he passed the northern fringes of UCLA. The jogging track, like most open spaces he’d seen since the quake, was clogged with people in make-shift shelters and tents. Above them, to the west, the ruins o
f the dormitories lay across the stands like fallen stacks of Legos.
His first home in LA was gone. Scratch that one off the Martin Slack Historical tour.
Although there might be food and water on campus, he decided not to stop there for fear he’d never get started again. He walked on, reaching the San Diego Freeway just as he was entering the eighties with Gimme a Break.
The freeway stretched up into the hills, towards a pall of smoke a few miles north that blotted out the sun. The ten-lane roadway was riddled with fissures, ripples, and sinkholes and littered with mangled, wrecked, and overturned cars. The only traffic was a small handful of living dead, either heading into or out of the valley. Surprisingly, the people walking south stayed in the southbound lanes to the left, while those heading north remained on the right, as if those rules made any difference now.
Marty supposed they instinctively clung to the habit for the same reason he was singing TV themes. It grounded them, allowing them to forget what they’d seen, to move like zombies on a pre-destined course. So he headed north into the Pass and dutifully stayed to the right, belting out The Greatest American Hero with all the passion he could muster.
3:25 p.m. Wednesday
After the Getty Center Drive exit, the hills on either side of the freeway seemed uninhabited, except by flames, which swirled amidst the acres of dense, dry scrub-grass, sending plumes of dark smoke into the sky, turning day into night.
He’d read somewhere that an acre of brush was equal to 5000 gallons of gasoline. It didn’t give him much comfort.
The fire had a sound, deep and heavy, like a waterfall only without the water. Glowing orange cinders swirled around him like red-hot snowflakes. Waterfalls without water. Snowflakes on fire. Walking through the Pass was surreal.
Marty’s journey was getting much harder now, not so much the walking, but finding TV themes to sing. He was discovering that the eighties and nineties were mighty lean years for TV songwriting. That, and it was increasingly hard to concentrate on distraction with an orange-black curtain closing in on him from both sides.