“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.”
That’s the first line of Less Than Zero, written by Brett Easton Ellis in 1985. When I read it in high school, I’m not sure it meant anything in particular to me, but the line stuck and I’ve never forgotten it. Looking back now, the parallels are clear between the city, its traffic, and my life. Sixteen years old, a misguided mishmash of intellectual and rebel, stuck between the town I was born in and where I went to high school, already afraid of joining anything. I didn’t join teams, or groups, or even schools for very long. I just sort of bumper-cared through things, like the on-ramp to the 110 South.
Ellis’s Los Angeles wasn’t the postcard city of a David Lee Roth video. While the light was just as beautiful with the 405 at dusk, brake lights that smeared into red neon and the turquoise glow of Bel Air pools at night, beneath, everything was numb. His characters drifted through the City trying to feel less. However dark it sounds now, it was glamorous to me back then. So we’d sneak down the hill, across the spiderweb of freeways, searching for a glimpse of it. I remember the Anti-Club on Melrose, the sticky floor, the smoke haze, and the plywood stage that looked ready to collapse when the singer hurled himself into the crowd. In the book, it’s Club Lingerie, X onstage. For me, it was Melrose. Either way, the music was alive, but we weren’t.
Where I lived, down in the South Bay, flashes of that world would show up on our doorstep. A girl might end up on the wrong side of a custody arrangement and spend her weekend in Palos Verdes, leaning against her black BMW at the cliffs, smoking alone until you dared talk to her. She longed to be back on Sunset, bragging about a world you weren’t sure she even knew.
The movie version of Less Than Zero in 1987 was a betrayal to readers. Directed by Marek Kanievska and written by Harley Peyton, it turned Ellis’s hollowed-out Los Angeles into Tipper Gore’s glossy warning label on an NWA album. It stripped away the drift and alienation, trading them for warnings of an after-school special with high cheekbones. Ellis has said he didn’t even recognize his own story on the screen. He admitted Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Julian was better than anything in the novel, but even that couldn’t save it. The book was about numbness, but the movie was about Nancy Reagan.
I hadn’t thought about LA freeways back then. How they cut into neighborhoods but connected others that never really belonged. Much of the city’s character is revealed through Ellis's streets and buildings. Billboards on Sunset bigger than the buildings they shadow, and strip malls on PCH, where you can get your dry cleaning, your liquor, and your tarot cards in one stop without ever looking anyone in the eye.
All the hours we spend in cars can make this city feel lonely. You’re pressed up against millions of people, all feeling the same things you are, and yet you never touch anybody. Ellis was right, people are afraid to merge in LA. But in driving, merging should be simple, like a zipper, one car then another, left-right-left-right. But here the teeth never line up; they grind and gnash and get stuck in some inelegant snarl.
Maybe merging is supposed to be terrifying. In driving or in life, Herculean objects are hurtling toward each other, and you have to decide. Throw on the blinker, maybe make eye contact, but nobody’s looking back anyway. At some point, you just have to go, and then pray that the world makes room for you.
On some level, alienation is Los Angeles’s operating system. Nothing comes easy here, and you don’t get it by asking. You get it by stepping on the gas.
xAP
I especially lived the Club Lingerie & X reference. I’ve turned several of my friends on to you. One emails me every Thursday after reading and comments. He’s a huge fan and says you should write a book.
You had me Less Than Zero. But when you dropped the David Lee Roth video, I was suddenly transported back to a convenience store in the '80's, ordering "A bottle of anything, and a glazed donut...to go!"