Excerpt from my first novel

I flew to San Francisco and back today, and while making the descent into Los Angeles - the late afternoon sunshine tinting the carpet of fog deceptively merry hues of melon and tangerine while miles of tightly compacted urban sprawl spread out in all directions - I thought of a passage I wrote and subsequently cut from my trunked novel O'Donnell With Two L's.

Yes, like the O'Donnel from my post on Sydney Owenson.

Anyway, since I cut this passage (an agent who subsequently did not offer representation referred to it as "unnecessary travelogue" *sniff*) I thought this was a great place to let it live on.

For anyone of you who have spent time in Los Angeles, specifically West Los Angeles, this excerpt might make you smile. For those of you who haven't, well, in the bastardized words of Ralph Edwards: "This is my life."

West Los Angeles is a pressure cooker. From the foot of the Santa Monica mountains down to the airport, from the beach to Beverly Hills, the tightly packed eight-unit, two-story apartment buildings and newer, larger (though equally as crammed together) condos units fill the unvarying grid of streets and back alleys with a throng of humanity which, while it does not rival Manhattan for sheer numbers, definitely holds its own in the arenas of cacophony, stress and all around bedlam.

In the afternoons, it is not uncommon for a drive of four miles to take forty-five minutes. The main streets leading to the freeways seem to hardly move between light cycles, although they do, at a pace that makes paint drying seem like drag racing. If you think it can’t get worse, you are sorely mistaken. It only takes one major incident on a Westside freeway (and not just the 405--PCH, the 10 or even the 105 will do) to bring the entire neighborhood to its knees. Normally stoic rush hour drivers suddenly transform into the gun-toting granny psychopaths from Steve Martin’s L.A Story, swerving up and down surface streets, trying to beat the land-speed record in a sort of a Lewis-and-Clark-discovering-the-Northwest-Passage exploratory frenzy.

Morning rush hour ends at half-past eleven and afternoon rush hour starts at three, and in between there’s the lunch rush, leaving your average motorist about an hour and a half of relatively unclogged roadways during daylight hours. Any sane person attempting to get to the 405 on Olympic Boulevard, having missed the light at Bundy for the sixth straight cycle, should want jump from their car, strip naked and go prancing down the green-lawned median belting out "The hills are alive with the sound of music" at the top of their lungs.

Throw a protest at the Federal Building into the loop? Fuggedaboudit. Film and television crews closing down streets? Armageddon. A celebrity admitted to Cedars for a drug overdose, media vans clogging the streets from Beverly to Third? Game over.

Think you get a respite on the weekend? Try again, Gomer. Saturday and Sunday traffic on the Westside is even more mind-numbingly frustrating because, logically, it shouldn’t be there. But by eleven in the morning, gridlock has descended, leaving the discouraged motorist to think “Where the hell are all of you people going?”

And that’s just one sliver, one wafer-thin slice of what’s inclusively termed “The Greater Los Angeles Area.” Hundreds of these neighborhoods stretch from the coast to the mountains creating eighty some odd miles of uninterrupted humanity. Places like Yucaipa and Rancho Cucamonga seem like exotic foreign locales to Westsiders, but people commute from these distant outposts of civilization everyday. These commuters patiently wait in line as they inch towards metering light freeway entrances, knowing only too well that once on said freeway, they will have miles of bumper-to-bumper drive time with a minimum of two or three additional freeway interchanges where they wait, again, to take their place on yet another roadway from the numerical soup of the Los Angeles Thomas Guide before they finally reach home.

But Westsiders, they are the ones who won’t wait. You can tell the “locals” during a traffic debacle--they’re making illegal U-turns on Wilshire Boulevard because they know they can whiz through Veteran’s hospital, then cut up through the UCLA campus, popping out on Beverly Glen before winding through a multi-million dollar residential neighborhood and finally arriving at their intended West Hollywood destination a whole ten minutes earlier than if they had just stayed on Wilshire.