Earthquake Weather

Chapter 1 PART I There was a desert wind that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. -Raymond Chandler "Red Wind" Earthquake weather makes the Santa Ana winds look like pussies. -Clyde McCoy ONE I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, but on any given night Los Angeles can do a pretty good imitation of either locale. In the early morning of January 17, 1994, L.A. slipped into Hell mode in a big way. At the time I was living in an apartment in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Despite the early hour, I was still awake when the event occurred, having been unable to nod off due to a strange mixture of listlessness and unfocused anxiety: It's said that dogs experience similar precognitive distress prior to seismic events. I had just closed the book I was reading, Rudy Wurlitzer's Hard Travel to Sacred Places, and reached for the light when I heard a terrifying rumble in the distance. Something big was about to happen. It was an incredibly loud noise, yet it seemed to be emanating from a distant place and moving closer with great speed and violence. I realized it could only be a few things: an earthquake, a comet striking Earth, a nuclear blast, or some other big-ass explosion, maybe from a stunt gone awry on a movie set filming in the west Valley. It was four thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King's birthday and the idea that anybody, even Joel Silver, might be blowing up buildings at this hour was somewhat unlikely. I had only a split second to consider these possibilities and I quickly circled number one-earthquake-just as the first shock wave hit. The entire apartment complex was lifted into the air and brought back down hard. The halogen lamp fell from the top of my bookshelf and shattered. Glass hit me in the face. A rip of plaster tore straight up the wall directly behind my head. When the crack reached the ceiling, it zigzagged across the surface out of the bedroom. The streetlights in the alley outside the room flickered and went out, followed immediately by the flashing lights and neon trim on the marquee of the La Reina Plaza on Ventura Boulevard a half block away. My bedroom was plunged into darkness. The initial shock wave seemed to last an eternity. It was probably only twenty or thirty seconds in reality, but that can be an eternity if you live on the second floor of an apartment building that feels like it has turned into wood-and-plaster-flavored Jell-O. When the huge bookshelf itself fell over and crashed six inches from my head, I decided that this was an earthquake worth getting out of bed for. I scrambled over the fallen bookshelf to the doorway, got the door open, and stood in the arch. Five feet across the hall I saw my roommate, Jeff, standing naked in the arch of his doorway. A vaguely familiar TV actress, also naked, dangled from around his neck, looking up into his stoic face as if she were seeing the face of Jesus in the gloom. It was easy to see how she could have been confused. Jeff had his arms outstretched and pressed against either side of the doorjamb for support. A flashlight at his feet bounced illumination up against the rubber walls, hauntingly lighting his face from below. He looked like he was suffering on an invisible cross. "It's the fucking Big One!" Jeff screamed in an un-Jesus-like fashion. He seemed to take little notice of the girl carving her initials into the back of his neck with her fingernails. I nodded approval of his assessment. It did indeed appear that this could be the notorious "Big One" that weLankford, Terrill Lee is the author of 'Earthquake Weather', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345467775 and ISBN 0345467779.