Earthquake Weather

Book by Lankford Terrill Lee

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 we had all been waiting for. I had experienced hundreds of earthquakes over the years, most of them small, a few of them sizable, but I had rarely moved to a doorway for any of them. This sucker was intense. It felt like the entire building was going to tear itself apart. We could hear glass breaking everywhere, in our apartment and outside, in the dozens of apartment houses and office buildings that surrounded us. The shaking did not seem like it was going to stop. I had a brief aerial vision of the entire area, along with half of California, heading out to sea.

The quake abruptly came to a halt. Nine million car alarms filled in while the rumbling earth took a quick cigarette break.

"That wasn't so bad," I said.

The woman around Jeff's neck let go and bolted for the front door. "I'm outta here!" she screamed, seemingly unaware of just how naked she really was.

Jeff stayed in his doorway and yelled, "Don't!" as loudly as he could, but she ignored him.

I smiled at Jeff and said, "She'll never make the door."

We braced ourselves for what we knew was about to happen. The first aftershock hit with almost as much force as the earthquake itself. It was enough to turn the apartment into a Salvador Dali landscape. Everything became liquid. The girl was tossed into the air and catapulted into the front door with a resounding splat. Luckily her shoulder was leading or her head probably would have gone right through the wood panel. The vibrations were on the gentle side by the time Jeff and I decided to apartment surf out of the place before the next shock wave could hit. Jeff reached into his room and grabbed a bathrobe and a towel. I made my way gingerly through the darkened minefield of fallen items and broken glass, snagged my leather jacket off the kitchen chair, and slipped it on. I was wearing boxer shorts, so a jacket was all I'd need. I grabbed Jeff's lady friend by one arm and started to pick her up off the floor. Jeff, dressed in his Hugh Hefner robe, grabbed her other arm, and we hoisted her to her feet. She looked like a dazed raccoon that had bounced off a car fender. Jeff had the flashlight in his free hand. He swept it across the apartment and we saw that everything was on the floor. Everything. He bounced the light into the kitchen where pots and pans were still gently rattling against the thousands of pieces of broken glass that had been our dishes. The place was thrashed.

The apartment stopped shaking for a few seconds, but it continued to rock and sway gently, its beams and girders singing out that this was not the way things were meant to be. The place was old, and part of it appeared to be older than the rest. We had two front doors, almost side by side, one in the kitchen, the other in the living room. An open arch separated the two rooms. The arch looked like it had been designed in the forties and I had a feeling that the kitchen area had been an add-on. I hoped the place wasn't going to split at its seams.

We got the living room door open and piled out onto the balcony. The hammock, strung diagonally between two opposing beams of the balcony, was still swaying from the aftershock and the wood floor was creaking as if it wanted to collapse under us. We negotiated the darkened stairwell with the girl. There was another door at the bottom of the stairs. I turned the knob but the door would not open. Jeff shined the flashlight around the edge of the door frame. The building had settled on the door slightly. Jeff and I looked at each other for a moment of Butch and Sundance bonding, and then we both kicked the door hard, knocking it open and sending splinters everywhere. Luckily the building had been standing for more than fifty years. The wood was soft, practically rotten.

We dragged the naked actress into the large parking lot next to the building and received a standing ovation from our neighbors, who were gathering in clusters in the safety zone, shining flashlights wildly about in the dark. Beams of light danced all over the stunned girl's naked body until Jeff wrapped her in the towel. He held her close as another large aftershock rocked the ground.

Even over the earth's rumble I could hear someone in the crowd say, "Hey, isn't that? . . ." referring to Jeff's dazed actress girlfriend. The great thing about natural disasters in L.A. is that they are star-studded events. An Irwin Allen Production made flesh.

In the hours, days, months, and years of earthquakes and aftershocks that would follow, we would never again trust the ground on which we walked in quite the same way as we did before this quake (which, at a magnitude of 6.8, was impressive, yet far short of the Big One), but at least we were finally going to get to meet the neighbors.
From the Hardcover edition.