Fire

At 8 o’clock last Tuesday morning I arrived at my exercise class in the local park to find a wind blowing. This was not just any wind. It was a mean-spirited, sullen blast, crashing from a liver-colored sky, raising dust and leaves in devilish whirling circles and angrily scattering our exercise mats clear across the area. It was a wind that had mischief on its mind.

“This wind is not our friend,” a couple of us said.

“That’s crazy,” scoffed the more down-to-earth. “Winds aren’t people, they aren’t our friends or our enemies. They’re just winds.”

Photo by Anna Popović on Unsplash

Eyes were rolled, shoulders shrugged. The term “space cadets” was used. We all laughed, and set to warming up with the cobra stretch.

Two and a half hours later, Los Angeles began to burn down.

This is clearly not a week for a light-hearted post. It is a week for a shout-out to the people of Los Angeles, and in particular, to the 180,000-odd who last week were forced to leave their homes, sometimes at the very last moment, not knowing, unthinkably, if they’d see any portion of them – not their walls, their sofas, their vinyl records, their kids’ artwork, the scuff on the kitchen floor where crazy cousin Larry tried to move the refrigerator, the stain on the coffee table where Debbie laughed so hard she spilled her wine and no one got around to mopping it up – ever again.

I’m not just thinking about the celebrities, the Paris Hiltons and Anthony Hopkins’, whose homes, yes, were every bit as destroyed, and every bit as heartbreakingly, as those of lesser mortals; nor even the sports stars like Olympic swimmer Gary Hall Jr, who lost all ten of his medals in the blaze. I’m not thinking about the mega-rich or the business moguls, whom you will read about on the Internet. This is about the smaller, more obscure people, who make up the bulk of this sprawling and eccentric and wonderful city in which we live.

I’m shouting out to the local radio newscaster, newly evacuated and driving to a safer location while calmly and methodically reporting, on-air, from her car, a description of the chaos that surrounds her.

The struggling actor, hastily grabbing his Monologues They’ll Remember You By, whose hard-negotiated, much-delayed lunch with the powerful and impossibly busy agent, now indefinitely re-scheduled, might just, had it happened, have changed his life.

The hairdresser, whose borderline famous client’s one-off red carpet appearance at the glitzy awards show at the weekend was to have given her a calling card to the big leagues, except the show has been delayed until later in the month, when the client will be filming a reality show in Romania and so unable to attend.

The musician, despairing of fitting all of his instruments into the back of his truck, forced to perform a heartbreaking Sophie’s choice on which guitar he will, and which he will not, have room to include.

The psychic, throwing her tarot cards, crystals, and Book of Changes into a case and bracing herself for months of sidesplittingly witty speculation on why she hadn’t seen this coming.

The yoga teacher, rolling up her mat, asking herself how she’ll manage to keep her clients now that she doesn’t have a studio.

The house cleaner, driving away from her own home, wondering how many other homes will remain for her to clean when all of this is over.

The green card applicant, desperately stuffing every single piece of paper, filled-in form, and proof of identity into a carrier bag and praying to God that the one item she will inevitably forget will not be the essential one.

The home gardener, picking a last bunch of her rainbow chard and newly sprouting paperwhites, still hoping she’ll see her freesias flower in the spring.

The bride, folding her diaphanous, long-dreamed-about dress and all its excitedly-acquired accoutrements into a suitcase, not knowing if the wedding will happen this Saturday now that the church has burned down.

The woman struggling to be a mother, whose in vitro injection has just been canceled, and next month she’ll turn 42.

The screenwriter, throwing his laptop and lucky baseball cap into his trunk, and surreptitiously, irresistibly, thinking, “Maybe a disaster movie …”

This is a salute to all of those people and more. It is also a celebration of the everyday heroes who have leaped into action to help during this nightmare time.

First, and of course, the firefighters and first responders, more and more of them pouring in as the week has progressed, a sizeable portion of them concurrently serving prison sentences but also voluntarily employed by the Conservation Camp Program of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, all of them working around the clock, all of them risking their lives for the public safety.

The police officers, who have also worked tirelessly, going door to door in endangered neighborhoods to check to see who might be still stuck inside because of age or mobility issues, and assist them to safety.

The ordinary citizens who have quietly, instinctively, sprung to help wherever they were needed. The passers-by who grabbed water hoses to attempt to douse their neighbors’ flames. The neighbors who delayed their own escapes to help corral each other’s cats and dogs into pet carriers. The actor Steve Guttenberg, puppy-eyed star of such disdained lowbrow comedies as Police Academy and Three Men and a Baby, who spent much of Tuesday helping to clear abandoned cars on Palisades Drive in order to make way for the firetrucks to move through. “There are people that really need help,” was his simple comment.

The countless generous souls in safer parts of the city who have unquestioningly opened their homes – to friends, to friends of friends, to friends of neighbors, to associates, to colleagues, to anyone who needed them, many of whom are still providing shelter and will continue to do so for as long as is necessary.

Do not ever try to tell me, after this last week, that Los Angeles is a city that lacks heart. The city I live in right now has a heart as big as a lion’s, and warmth as radiant as the Southern California sun.

It has courage too – and lord knows, this town of ours, filled to the brim with dreamers of glory, facing constant knock-downs, and nursing high apple pie in the sky hopes in spite of them all, has learned to have resilience.

It’s true that Los Angeles is down this week. It’s beyond down – it’s devastated, wrecked, broken. But it won’t stay down. It never does.

Billy Crystal, quintessential New Yorker by origin and longtime Los Angeles denizen by choice, who lost his Pacific Palisades home of 46 years in the fire, spoke for us all. As he told People magazine, referring at the time specifically to the Palisades, but he could as well have been speaking of the whole city, “(It) is a resilient community of amazing people, and we know in time it will rise again. It is our home.”

I could not be prouder to call it mine.