Preparing for L.A.

            by Rose Fadem-Johnston

 

Over the winter break of junior year, I did the east coast college visits. My mother and I drove for one week, in a rented car far better then the one we own, moving from Rhode Island to Maryland.  We drove along the colorful tree lined highways, past endless retirement communities and exists bluntly named “Price lane,” and “Asylum road.” We dropped in on family just long enough for aunts to raise their eyebrows and say “you’re applying to those schools?  You think you have the test scores for that? Do you really think your good enough? We all know you’re not...” 

We ate their food, gave them the charismas presents we had forgotten to post last year, and continued to drift down the highways, school to school.  I sat in the brick buildings that never braved earthquakes. I observing the exceptional amounts of miscommunication in “a history of linguistics.” The riveting lack of debate taking place in “Economic Components of Globalization in Places where Children who You Aren’t Helping are Starving and How to Feel Guilty Enough About it.”  I got bruised by a hail storm. I lost my tan.

 Now- I am one of those who function under the theory that only sandals should be worn on rainy days, so as to give the feet an ample opportunity to dry once indoors.  It is a way of life that works in only select locations, and New England isn’t one of them. Thus I wore flip-flops and a rainbow knit mini skirt to my slightly damp tour of Harvard, and should have realized just about then that I was destined to stay in California. 

            Being a California girl, I never toured the California schools. It seemed redundant at the time.  So when I chose UCLA I had yet to see the place. Indeed, I had yet to visit Los Angles, abiding by the Nor Cal, So Cal rivalry I had adamantly avoided anything south of San Jose.  They were known for their pollution. We were known for our protests of man made objects. Yet, if I was about to live in Their city for four years of my life, I may as well visit it.

In New England we drove under green tree limbs bent over, speckling the highway with shade. We soared past red brick walls being slowly crumbled by ivy. The clouds hung low and blue.

Between Berkeley CA, and Los Angles, highway 5 lavishes upon any passing driver the scent of cow excretions.  Along this strip there are also an exceptional number of burger joints and steak houses.  Somehow customers don’t seem to find it challenging to eat an animal while smelling its refuse, but such are the people who chouse to move from Berkeley to LA.  And it is a strange person who would want leave the crisp, fog-shrouded bay area for the plastic, crashing, cliché of Los Angles.  That strange sort of person is officially me.

            After returning from a spring break camping trip, and a drive that took the better half of a day, my parents decided the wisest thing to do with their exhausted daughter would be to prop her back up in the front seat of a car. They put pillows on all sides of me, placed a Shasta Cola in one hand, the steering wheel in the other and pointed me in the direction of the city of angles.  And towards the city of angles I drove.

I drove for 7 hours, back awkward and butt numb, staring at the little dotted lines on a freeway which are specked with reflectors. The reflectors vaguely remind you of runway strips so your mind wanders and you imagine you’re an airline pilot taking off into the great abyss of sky. You fly around the world faster then anyone has ever before. You find terrorists that snuck onto your plane and you engage them in hand to hand combat, successfully kicking there asses. You save the world and are named president of the universe, even managing to avoid that jerk who tried to merge into you. You wonder if airline pilots have more comfortable seats. You try to wipe the sweat off of your hands which has gathered from the constant clutch on the plastic wheel. You wonder why you’re not getting paid for this.

I drove to LA.  A drive involving sweaty hands, a sore butt, and terrorist fighting. I was focused on the road, speeding around truckers and bikers, pushing down the gas, and somehow failing to notice the slow acceleration from sixty to ninety miles per hour, as happens on five.

We stopped for both lunch and dinner.  The restraints seemed to simply be attached to the rear end of the slaughter houses, conveyer belts must have run from gunning to gutting to grilling.  I gorged myself on onion rings and French fries. The thought had occurred to me that as I was about to spend 4 years in Los Angles, I was likely to lose a lot of self esteem in that time.  From the loss of self esteem would come an attempted loss of weight, and so I fattened myself up in preparation for my impending four years of anorexia.  If attending school in LA was going to give me a low self esteem, I was ready to prepare my body with the tools necessary to survive my education.

We arrived in LA later then expected, and when the doors opened I simply rolled out and fell onto the cement.  Flat cement…as to be expected. Flat street, all right, also an uninteresting fact.  Flat…everything.  As I looked up I realized the flat was continuous and unchanging.  “Flat” doesn’t seem like such a big deal.  No hills, so what?   But it was beyond a lack of hills. It was unnatural.  Houses were flat. Stomachs were flat. Lawns were flat. The stretch of streets is entirely flat until it drops you off a cliff onto a freeway and beach. LA is entirely flaty-flat-flat, no bump, no mole hill, no view, no compromise- FLAT.  The flatness was consuming. It was scary.  I got up off the sidewalk. Backed slowly into the flat house. Sat on the deco-modern-flat couch. Turned on the flat screen.  Felt better.

For our visit we were going to stay with family friends.  Or at least, in the house of family friends.  The family friends were in fact absent at the moment and were loaning us their exceptionally modern, exceptionally grungy home, which came complete with dog.

The family ran a book website, presumably from their home, but I will never know as they simply weren’t there to ask. My stepmother wasn’t sure how to show her support given that she couldn’t afford to actually buy any books from them, so she kept their sight as her homepage, on her home computer, and it always took an exasperatingly exponential amount of time to load.  All you really wanted to do was get online, check your hotmail, gmail, myspace, livejournal, facebook, xanga, and friendster, but instead you had to sit wasting your time waiting for this sight about books to appear on the screen. 

We trucked out early the next morning; I had a 9am class, and no idea which of the five billion buildings on campus it was in.  Let alone in what room.  I tumbled down into the car seat, convincing my mother to drive as I hadn’t yet managed to open my eyes.  The drive got exciting for a moment, the flaty-flat-flat street inclining for an onramp sent my heart racing and trills of adrenalin up my spine.  But soon the thrill was over as we merged onto the freeway and began to crawl. 

On the free way to LA, people like to drive 105. On the freeway in LA, people like to drive 5.  They have pollution and smog and hardly any green. They have fancy cars because they spend most of their lives in cars.  Just sitting in the drivers  seat, talking on the cell phone. Watching their asses double in size underneath them, then getting the fat liposuctioned out. They never realize that if they just flipped the key, turned off the radio, and got the heck out of the car, they could walk to their destination in under 15 minutes.

We drove to the campus.

It took to hours.

I missed my class.

But rather then wallow in the pain of missing out on two hours of economic strife Kyrgyzstan, I consulted the list of classes that were made available to the interruption of visiting students such as myself.  That’s when I found Jesus.

Row three column 5, Jesus was in room A204. The class “Jesus of Nazareth,” was taught in the history museum. And “Jesus of Nazareth” was my destination for the next two hours of wandering the campus, looking for the history museum.  But I knew it would be  worth it.

When I finally found the lecture hall it was already beginning to fill with students. History and anthropology majors all. Yamika wearing- one.  “Fact, Fiction, Fantasy” was written on the chalkboard by a graying, but buoyant professor.  And after talking about general history of crucifixion, (how long it took to die, where in the had you had to nail, ect.)  he moved on to give a stirring lecture on how every male in the BC world was named Jesus. “Just as many as there are “Jesus’” in current day Mexico city.”

  And at this side note his students, in their button downs, polo’s, and general pastel pallets, flipped open their laptops and began taking notes.  It dawned on me that I must be sitting amongst the highest concentration of virgins on campus. And then true to the atmosphere created by the class’ topic, I felt guilty for such thoughts.

According to the professor, the writer of the “Da Vinci Code,” made some good points about the nature of religion, and did so with a lot of bull shit. After this point was explicated on the allotted time of learning had run out. 

So now, I go to LA with a storehouse of information. Don’t drive on your way there. Walk, but don’t breathe once you get there. Bring your own Hills if you want scenic thrills. And, all religious retreats should be taken to Mexico City.