Speculative Los Angeles by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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PART III

A TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF REALITY

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PURPLE PANIC

BY FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK

Studio City

In the San Fernando Valley where I grew up, the blossoms—on the trees and purpling the sidewalks and streets so they seem to glow—intoxicated me like jacaranda wine, but also stirred in me a sense of fear I could never quite explain.

There are different theories about why the term “purple panic” is applied to jacaranda trees. For one, it’s supposed to be because they bloom during student finals. Or the pollen makes it hard to breathe? Your bronchial tubes swell, you feel a pressure in your throat, difficulty swallowing. You try to cough up the scorched rags in your chest. Sometimes you swallow your own phlegm and wake, gagging and wheezing. Another theory about purple panic has something to do with paganism—panic as in Pan the nature god with his cloven hooves.

The Valley in the seventies was an apocalyptic place in its own suburban way, and I think it damaged all of us—my friends, Veronica, Beth, Tamara, our parents, and me. If you looked down while flying out of Burbank Airport, you saw the smog laid out over everything in a furred gray haze. Lowriders cruised down Van Nuys Boulevard. Hells Angels, Satan’s Slaves, and the Diablos biker gangs fired weapons into the air. Police arrested hundreds of drunk drivers. The city rationed gasoline and water. A prostitute’s body was found in a dumpster behind a Sizzler where, once a week, my parents and I used to order baked potatoes, garlic bread, and rare steaks served on metal plates with sharp carving knives that scratched like nails on chalkboards. A 6.6-magnitude earthquake killed sixty-five people and caused more than five hundred million in damage. I remember the shards of glass carpeting our floor and how my feet bled.

At school we feigned oblivion. But in my seventh grade typing class, Juliette McFee—doughy, acne-spotted face and football player shoulders—was sent to juvie for selling angel dust and eventually died of an overdose. Miguel Santiago—pre-Raphaelite curls and weirdly transparent green irises—sold himself for sex on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood; he was one of the first to die of AIDS. My friend Veronica had been so in love with him. A kid named Ryan Rice—red-haired and small for his age—crashed his moped in Laurel Canyon and we always wondered if it had anything to do with my friend Beth who turned down his invitation to prom. Stacy Stanton—bony blonde with braces—whose father spied through holes in the wall on her and her friends changing their clothes, passed away from anorexia before it was a common term.

And then there was Tamara.

Mostly I remember the darkness inside Tamara’s house—night or day. It smelled of chlorine from the swimming pool, rotten lettuce, pee, and sweat; and her little brothers and sisters with their tangled hair ran around shirtless, the shadows of their ribs showing bruise-like through their skin. The mom wasn’t home much and the dad wore sunglasses in the house. His greasy hair hung to his shoulders around a face as gaunt as Munch’s Scream.

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