“Maybe Just a Little of That Light Will Reflect on Us”:
Writing Los Angeles
In January of this year, America watched fires rip through LA, forcing 150,000 people to evacuate, incinerating homes, killing thirty-one people directly, torching hiking paths and ridgelines, and soaking the air in toxic chemicals. With horror and sadness, I took in posts on social media of Altadena and Malibu before the fires—days before—the sky a now-ominous blue, the palms backlit by a brilliant orb of sunlight. And then there was the after, the orange sky, the hillsides raked with orange and red flames, and then the blackened buildings, the lines of evacuating cars, communities gone, displaced families, grief. When I was asked to guest curate a nonfiction feature for West Branch, my mind immediately went to Los Angeles. Who is writing about the city and all of its complexity now? How might the personal essay do interesting things, formally, with the story one tells of place and of memory? How does the tone that the “I” brings to each essay also tell us a story about Los Angeles?
I know and love Lynn Melnick’s writing about LA from her memoir, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, and her poetry books Landscape with Sex and Violence and Refusenik. And I knew she was working on a new project. Would she share an LA essay? I was elated when she said yes and offered this piece about celebrity culture and artifacts, growing up in the ‘80s, misogyny, the poetry scene, memory, and so much more. You will never think about a sneaker the same way again! Barret Baumgart’s writing about California and the environment from China Lake and his latest book, YUCK, led to my query about his work. I am excited that he shared this meditation on fires, national secrets, danger, and the project of a project—a self tangling with a subject—in this piece. I love his use of tone, humor, and syntax and how he approaches the tensions between celebrity, disaster, and the limits of the “I.” How do you tell a story you aren’t allowed to tell? Can you? And I love Jessica Abughattas’s poems about LA and know her work through her book Strip. I heard she was writing about Altadena and am so grateful that she shared this breathtaking essay that hums with lyricism. I feel like I know Altadena from her elegiac account, and I feel the immense loss in how this beautiful and richly layered place has been so quickly taken away. Her essay explores the duality between narrative and lyric modes while offering different vignettes of East and West Altadena before the fire and what it means to be displaced now.
The three writers featured here, Lynn Melnick, Barret Baumgart, and Jessica Abughattas, write about LA in all of the city’s sunshine, grief, love, grit, and complexity, as well as the recent fires, in individual ways. Taken together, these essays tell a story of the city, of the self, and of the art of nonfiction: what the “I” can do with language while telling the story.
—T.M.
Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024). Her poetry books and chapbooks are City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and Low Budget Movie (co-authored with Kendra DeColo, Diode Editions 2021). She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
California Dreamin’
Lynn Melnick
“I got Chevy Chase’s sneaker!!” Melissa cried, running out of the high school gym.
It was 1986 or 1987 in Los Angeles. I was in middle school, my hair enormous, such as we did then. A group of my classmates and I had gotten free tickets to a charity basketball game at the nearby high school, and I went, for reasons I don’t remember, but probably just to be a part of things. The game was kind of boring, and I didn’t recognize many of the celebrities playing, and if I did, they were the kind of celebrities my parents’ generation cared about. We were waiting outside for someone’s parent to drive us home, when Melissa came running out of the building, waving her arms in the air and carrying her trophy high about her head.
Melissa was one of those girls who always existed on the periphery of the popular kids, probably because she was so guileless she could never keep up with the superior mind-game skills of the middle school popular girl crowd. Still, she was pretty, smart, blond, sporty, so she hung out nearby because on paper she was supposed to be one of them. She was thisclose.
“I got Chevy Chase’s sneaker!” she said again, panting, as she approached us, and there it was, with a signature in Sharpie. To be honest, I can’t remember if it was one or both sneakers, but I think it’s funnier if it’s one sneaker, it’s even more completely useless that way. But, no, my classmates would tell me, it’s not useless. It’s Chevy Chase’s sneaker. He was, at the time, anyway, a famous actor.
To grow up in Los Angeles at that particular time—and maybe still; I suspect still—was to be always a possibility away from a brush with celebrity. Who did you see around town? I saw actor Henry Winkler on the escalator of the Century City mall, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabar in the supermarket, taller than the shelves. In grade school, when our drama teacher directed our musical tribute to the 1960s show Gilligan’s Island, one of the kids had a family connection to one of the cast members, I can’t remember which, and she came to see our production. I was excited but only because everyone else seemed to be. In Kindergarten one of the members of the 1960s doo-wop group The Tokens was a classmate’s dad and so he came in to tell us about “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and the music biz and it was all very over our heads, but the teachers and staff were into it, and his son, I would imagine, felt proud. I was just happy to snag the triangle from the box of kid instruments—the most beautiful of the kiddie instrument options, I have always thought.
If you were a 1980s kid in Los Angeles, the world seemed to start and end in Los Angeles. Even on TV, the locations were so often in Southern California—even if they weren’t supposed to be in Southern California—that it really seemed like those vistas were simply where existence happened. I’d recognize familiar landscapes, locales, and flora in places that were supposed to be elsewhere. Little House on the Prairie, my favorite after-school rerun, was supposed to take place in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, but was actually filmed in Simi Valley in Southern California, and that deeply confused me as to what the Midwest might be like. My brother’s favorite after-school rerun, the original Star Trek, supposedly set in outer-freaking-space, was filmed forty or so minutes northwest of Simi Valley, in Agua Dulce, California. Even the furthest landscapes imaginable looked like California. Even the future! No wonder I was so confused about life outside my own horizon. The U.S President through most of my childhood was Ronald Reagan—a former actor, for crying out loud.
The California Dream is an idea as slippery as the American Dream, but with a much stronger sun and an intense light I’ve never been able to capture in any genre. “The sun is a joke,” author Nathanial West—a Jewish man from New York City—wrote in his classic Hollywood caution tale of a novel, The Day of the Locust. Lured for its gold and then its climate and then its possibility for stardom, the California Dream might have hit its peak in the thirties, where the novel takes place, but the 1980s did a really studious job of keeping it alive. Like the sun, the dream was a joke, and a deep wound to indigenous populations from whom the California Dream was stolen. But decade after decade, people kept showing up and keep showing up, to reinvent themselves, to make it big, to dip their toes in the ocean.
In the opening chapters of West’s novel, we meet people who are always dressed for their next close-up and then we meet the underdressed, the underbelly, the “people who had come to California to die.”
I moved with my New Yorker parents to Los Angeles when I was in kindergarten and by the time I got to high school, I felt deeply jaded about celebrities. I didn’t fucking care, or at least I didn’t want to fucking care. I’d imagine Melissa kept Chevy Chase’s shoe and wore it around the house, hopping, feeling so close to fame. A senior I knew was in a band with the son of a rock legend and the legend’s son would get drunk at parties and not let anyone forget it. “Do you know who I am? Do you know who my father is?” he’d slur. I found that disgusting, and it was, but also: I was so self-righteous! The truth was, I found it sad and enviable in equal measure; I wasn’t immune, as much as I wanted to be immune. It seemed mysterious, what happens when you are allowed into a celebrity’s orbit.
Before even the first semester of high school was over, I’d lost track of Melissa and most anyone else except the burnouts I’d hang out with at lunch or while skipping school. I drank, I smoked weed, I had just discovered cocaine; I was enamored of the Sunset Strip scene where you could get famous for being a high musician or a high groupie. Suddenly fame made a little sense to me—you were cooler than other people, you had artistic gifts, you had a charisma that made you both insanely compelling and completely unreachable as a mere mortal. My friends and I tried to dress like the groupies did, although it got to the point where I was too wasted to care what I wore.
I was kicked out of high school and then kicked out again and then I landed at another high school, where an aging folk rock star of a popular Laurel Canyon-era 1960s band visited for a school-wide assembly concerning our saying no to drugs. This effort seemed to be tied to his drug arrest and the resulting punishment of community service, but even the most eager and upstanding kids seemed in awe of being in the same room as a notoriously fucked up celebrity. As one of the “at risk” students—at this point, besides my substance use issues, I was also flunking everything except English and Dance—I was selected to meet him before the presentation began.
I guess the aging folk rock star was supposed to look into my eyes and impart the wisdom only midlife can bring and poof! I’d correct myself. I’d thank him and the school for bringing me this magic in the form of a paunchy white guy. He was in his mid-40s, younger than I am as I type this, but at the time he seemed ancient to me, then 14. The school’s drug counselor waved me over to where they both were standing. The aging folk rock star didn’t look into my eyes, surrounded by their taped-up pink eyeglass frames, so much as my chest, and then down to the floor, and not a drop of wisdom came through. I was handed no sneaker to take home. My takeaway? Amusement. I can safely say we were both high as balls.
Shockingly, the “just say no” bit from the assembly didn’t take, and I was sent to rehab just weeks after the musician’s visit to my high school. It was pretty basic; not the kind of place an aging rock star would go to, definitely not where the children of celebrities went either. There were cinder block hallways and haphazard kitten posters. The teen ward was a floor above the adult ward, but we had group therapy together, and some recreational activities, which became mostly a place to find myself cornered by relics from the 1960s who had terrific stories of Laurel Canyon’s heyday and all the action on the Sunset Strip decades before I showed up.
Staring at my tits or holding my waist with their gnarling hands, the older men both scared and fascinated me. They’d lost everything and yet seemed to idolize their own youth that brought them to losing everything. Any brush with celebrity was told to me like an actual achievement. Oh, you shared a joint with David Crosby once? Amazing. I mean, to be fair, we were all conditioned to care. In LA you were often defined by your proximity to star power and in the music scene in the 80s, the 60s were like the glory days (they’ll pass you by, goes the Bruce Springsteen song) and the men from the 60s were the shit. Until they weren’t, and all they had was boredom and regret and maybe a drug addiction.
I once read that when you start to abuse drugs or alcohol, you stop growing, and so your emotional age stays at the number you started at until you stop for good. I also once read that something similar can happen with celebrity, that you stop growing when you become famous, maybe because, like drugs, stardom does its best to hide the pain and problems.
About a year and a half later, long out of rehab, I was using again, but not nearly so desperately. I had found my thing: poetry. I was going to be a poet! I enrolled in community college and soon took my first poetry workshop with a woman named Cathy. The class was overenrolled and the room bursting with aspiring writers, perhaps because my new passion intersected strangely with a moment in Hollywood where stars were really into writing and performing their own poetic work, and that new interest trickled down to the masses. Poetry was briefly cool!? Sitcom actress Justine Bateman published a poem in the Los Angeles Times which, honestly, wasn’t so bad. I still remember its first line more than 3 decades later (I don’t have the copyright but ask me and I’ll recite it for you).
One evening, I took the Big Blue Bus down Pico Boulevard to a coffee house that held open mics—I was sixteen, maybe seventeen—and my friend, who was also an aspiring poet, stood me up. Before cell phones, there was no way to know the if, how, or why of a no-show, and so I stayed to listen to the poetry anyway, and I ended up chatting with an actor pushing thirty who was sort of famous at the time, though no one I have mentioned him to seems to remember him now.
The actor told me he loves Jewish women because they have “pussies that pout” and that “beg to be fucked.” I could tell he was really proud of the word “pout.” I smiled like you would smile at a kid who said a very big word correctly, and boy did that make this guy feel like a million bucks! When I said I had to go, he asked me if I wanted to go to a poetry reading with him, he said actors would be there. He listed off some names. Actress Katey Segal, then known as the sexed-up housewife on Married… with Children, was the only name I recognized. He said he’d put me on the guest list, and maybe he did, but I left the coffee house to catch the bus, and didn’t go to the reading.
The Los Angeles Times would cover that recurring poetry event breathlessly in a 1989 article, on an evening when a ton of famous actors—Justine, and Katey, and Robert Downey, Jr, and Harry Dean Stanton, and Alfre Woodard—were in attendance. Author Hugh Selby, Jr is quoted saying, “Most of the time, poetry readings are in less than hospitable surroundings. This makes it available to people rather than keeping it in some academic classroom,” which is especially, delightfully absurd because a few paragraphs up we’ve learned that the readings take place at an elite—and private—supper club, not exactly for the people.
Still, I do think I might be too harsh on the lure of celebrities and the average mortal’s wish for a proximity to fame. It’s human nature; it’s animal nature to gravitate towards the alpha, and it’s sort of like having a very extended friend group. If you ran into someone you and a friend both know, you’d tell your friend, right? “Guess who I ran into?” you’d ask, conspiratorially. If you ran into someone you both knew of but had never met—the new boyfriend of a frenemy, maybe, or the wacky aunt your mutual is always telling hilarious stories about—you’d say, “They were really nice, actually!” or “Oh my god, that was insane, they were wasted.” Maybe running into a celebrity and having a great story is basically that mutual friend who is friends with everyone; the wacky aunt we’ve all heard about.
These days you don’t even need proximity to fame to become famous, you just have to have cultivated an air of fame, you just have to live like how people drool over living—the right clothes, house, breakfast smoothie, plastic surgeon. The California Dream is there for you on your socials, no matter where you are, and you don’t even have to do anything, not even a reality show, you just have to post your curated lifestyle. It’s like the LA of my youth took over the virtual world and suddenly, again, everywhere is Los Angeles, we are all in some proximity to fame just by opening our phones.
I’m friends with Melissa on Facebook, but we are not actual friends (I don’t think we’ve spoken since the 1980s), so I don’t know if I should ask her if she still possesses Chevy Chase’s sneaker, but I prefer to remember her with her arms and legs splaying as she ran towards us with the good news and her special prize. Her house now—from what she posts, anyway—is spotless, in neutrals, her nails perfectly manicured, hair perfect, wearing skinny jeans and mom flats. Standing just outside the cool crowd, but so close—soclose—she is ready for her own close up. Any day now.
I left Los Angeles in 1992—the year the actor from the coffee shop had his biggest movie and the child of the rock star released his first album, which failed to chart—but it’s still where a part of my heart lies, its bizarre, glossy, aggressive sunlight touches a part of me nothing else can, this light that indicates, always, that something sinister is underneath it.
In August of 2024 I returned with my family for my father’s eightieth birthday, and my younger daughter wanted to go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and my older daughter wanted to go to Erewhon, where the celebrities grocery shop. I’d never been to either but off we went, me a tourist in my hometown. The Hollywood Walk of Fame was, to quote my husband, “an even worse Times Square.” The sun was searing, the tourists slow, and maybe I never felt so disconnected from Los Angeles. I don’t know who all that was for, but it wasn’t for me, by me, or from me. In Erewhon, I had to chew half a Xanax in the paper goods aisle just to approach the frenzied line for smoothies. The Venice boardwalk nearby boasted vendors selling shorts about eating ass and lighters with sketches of boobs on them. Just, well—stay classy, LA.
And then, 6 months later, it burned. Suddenly, the locations of my youth were gone. Hiking trails I’d walked dozens of times, a state park where my family would go on picnics when I was a kid, much of the commerce near the beach. But did I have any jurisdiction over this pain? I’ve lived in New York City far longer than I ever lived in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is my hometown, I think, but it’s not my home. It’s home to millions, though, and thousands of their homes, and so much land was gone in a flash, land belonging not just to celebrities but to the mere mortals, and not just to the rich but to the middle and working class. Yet you’d barely know it, given the headlines: “Paris Hilton said she ‘built precious memories’ at her destroyed Malibu home,” “Mel Gibson said his house burned down while he was away recording ‘The Joe Rogan Experience,’” “Joan Rivers’ daughter says she saved her mom’s Emmy.”
In The Day of the Locust, “the sun is a joke” and hope is a lie. The main character spends his free time working on a painting he calls, “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and the final chapter of the novel takes place outside a movie premiere in Hollywood, where the crowd grows restless waiting for the stars to show up, the masses gone bored with the promise of the California Dream. “Once there,” Nathanial West writes, “the sunshine was not enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time.” Maybe it’s this restlessness, and its concurrent need for metaphorical sunshine, that keeps us scrolling and scrolling these days, praying for a chance “like” by a celebrity on one of our comments on their post, waiting just outside the popular crowd hoping one day, one day we will get in, one day we will grab the sneaker of fame. Until then, maybe just a little of that light will reflect on us.
Lynn Melnick is the author of the memoir, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton. She is also the author of three poetry collections, including, most recently Refusenik, winner of the Julie Suk award, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family. You can find her at: https://www.lynnmelnick.com
LA: Stranger Than Fiction
Barret Baumgart
The recent Los Angeles wildfire apocalypse stirred up a lot of emotions and memories for me—mostly of Kim Kardashian. She was to be my ticket out of Los Angeles and into the top slot of the New York Times bestseller list. But not anymore. I watched with sinking dread, a sickening feeling of déjà vu prickling my skin this past January as the flames of the Kenneth Fire—one of multiple blazes that broke out in the days between January 7th and 9th—began a rapid ascent toward the irradiated hills of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Hadn’t I been down this road before? I pictured the road, Woolsey Canyon Road, which dead-ends at the gates of the laboratory, behind the big Boeing sign, and I thought of the death threats—those months of death threats that had derailed my second book, a book that has destroyed my life . . .
But this time around, this past January, thank God, or Satan—depending whether you believe the dreaded Santa Ana winds derive their name from Satanas—the winds decided not to steer the fire over the site of America’s largest nuclear meltdown…
That hadn’t been the case on the afternoon of November 8, 2018 when, at the top of the Woolsey Canyon Road, the Woolsey Fire was ignited by a spark from an electrical substation a mere few hundred feet from the literal ground zero of the largest nuclear disaster in US history.
“Shocked and furious to learn that smoke from the #WoolseyFire started at former nuclear testing site, Santa Susana Field Lab, and is potentially radioactive,” Kim Kardashian Tweeted.
It sucks to find out your $60 million mansion backs up on a nuclear meltdown site nobody ever bothered to tell you about or clean up, as Kim Kardashian discovered November 14, 2018. The Woolsey Fire went on to burn past her and Kanye’s house, crossing 97,000 acres, an area more than double that of the combined total acreage of the recent Palisades and Eaton Fires, before exhausting itself at the beach in Malibu.
Kourtney Kardashian chimed in a few hours later, updating her 25 million followers: “Our family lives ONLY 20 miles from a nuclear disaster site, Santa Susana Field Lab, and we didn’t even know it – the #WoolseyFire started there, and smoke could be carrying radioactive chemicals.”
While the Kardashians reconsidered their real estate investments, I sat inside Château Westmoreland, my crumbling hundred-year-old brick hovel near downtown LA, frantically emailing my former agent, my mind incensed in a wildfire of certain speculation…
A year and a half before, in the summer of 2017, I’d started writing a book about the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history. I was younger then, optimistic, and the book was going to be big. No one had yet written a book about the 1959 nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. There was no film or documentary, no devastating five-part miniseries as HBO produced for Chernobyl. No big podcast or headlines splashed across the New York Times. No full cleanup was ever funded, attempted, nor yet planned for the radioactive waste still blowing around behind the suburban bungalows.
I’d give it the old Erin Brockovich try, I told myself in the summer of 2017.
Interview a few hundred people.
Hike around the hills with the Geiger counter I got on Amazon.com.
And by the time the book went to press, complete with blurbs from Oprah, the lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and a harrowing half-page write up in People magazine, the bidding war between Netflix and Hulu would have boiled over, Tom Hiddleston would be texting me to try and learn more about his character, and whatever brutal prison bail I’d had to pay for Trespassing on Boeing property would be but pesos by the time Biden or Michelle Obama summoned me to Washington to present me with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and those families I interviewed with children dying of leukemia, they too would pardon me like the president, because my vast millions had made just as many people aware of their story, and perhaps now that everyone had heard of the 1959 nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, no one would have to suffer the same fate they had: no hard-working American family would ever again move into a brand new McMansion at the head of the San Fernando Valley only to find their suburban dream shattered by an increasingly inexplicable number of obscure physical maladies—particularly not my family because I’d be taking the cats and Christina to Joshua Tree, her perennial dream, and I wouldn’t be buying her that crappy bungalow complete with a rescue burro she’d always dreamed of but something big hidden in the boulders with ample room for horses, which isn’t to say that there was anything particularly wrong with buying a whitewashed faux-Tuscan-style villa in the rustic outlands of the San Fernando Valley, not since all the radioactive waste would finally be cleaned up to background levels thanks to the resounding success of my second book, a book that never got bogged down in the long sentences or stymied by any masturbatory artistic posturing but instead proceeded like a steam roller right up Woolsey Canyon Road to the gates of the lab with its big Boeing logos and No Trespassing signs and barbed wire fences, the latter of which I would climb with my Geiger counter before proceeding straight to Area IV, as it’s officially known, a plot of leveled land upon which the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE), the first nuclear reactor in America to supply power to the public grid, melted down in 1959.
Yes. I would do it all.
As one one-time resident of the San Fernando Valley, a Valley Girl named Christina, once told me: “Your book could be… like… really big.”
It was the ultimate suburban nightmare. A story so improbable, so wicked in its particulars it would read contrived as fiction, cliché, lazy if it had been invented. But as nonfiction it was uncanny, creepy, crazy. Of course, what made it even more surreal back in summer 2017 was that no one beyond those immediately affected seemed to have ever heard of the disaster—not even Kim Kardashian.
It was this ignorance that allowed the SRE’s imperfect design—if you are to believe the claims of several government contractors I interviewed—of a pioneering nuclear reactor that melted down in SoCal in 1959 to be smuggled out of the United States and used to build nothing other than Chernobyl. Such a claim, outlandish on the surface, remains perhaps conceivable when you consider that for 20 years the federal government intentionally covered up the SRE’s 1959 meltdown. By the time evidence of the disaster was finally unearthed in 1979 by a graduate student digging through random boxes abandoned in the basement of a UCLA engineering library, Chernobyl had already been online for two years. Of course, then, in Southern California, the real disaster was just getting started. Previous Santa Susana workers exposed to radiation yet sworn to secrecy had begun to develop cancer, and Los Angeles, itself like some unstoppable metastasis, continued its own monstrous growth, with the city’s suburban sprawl eventually swelling all the way to the far edge of the county where it stopped only a few hundred feet below the laboratory where the meltdown had remained hidden for the past two decades… hidden just beyond the elite subdivision of Hidden Hills, the site of Kim and Kanye’s mansion in hills at the head of the Valley.
“This thing sounds like it could be really big,” my agent said back when I still had one in the summer of 2018, echoing the proclamations of that one-time Valley Girl when I eventually got around to distilling it all for him over the phone. “I could see this going to Oprah’s Book Club or something,” he said as I paced the living room, watching the back windows, eager as ever to catch the next dumpster fire on film for my 103 Instagram followers. “How soon can you send me chapter outlines?”
A few weeks I told him.
Of course, there was just one problem—the first of many that has ultimately helped turn my would-be second book itself into a disaster fit for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
The problem?
Death threats.
I’d been threatened before. Once, while writing my first book, the public relations officer at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a woman named Peggy, told me flat out, “I’m going be honest with you and ask you to respect my words. If I find out that information is published that should not be published, we’re going to put a stop to you.” Before that I’d met a nice girl in graduate school. “If you ever write about me, I’ll tell everyone about your micropenis.” And there was Christina, too, her continual refrain back in the day. “You just want to render me in fiction.”
“Worse!” I used to call after her bike in Berkeley, never certain if she’d answer my texts again. “Nonfiction!” But as far as I knew, up until the summer of 2018, no one had ever threatened my life.
The threats, when they started, were both terrifying and titillating and I took them to mean that I was on the right track. Certainly it isn’t every day that you embark on a book about a patch of land owned by a little $122 billion company called Boeing only to find it communicated, in no uncertain terms, that if you continue any further along the road upon which your research is heading you will be killed.
That road, of course, was Woolsey Canyon Road. And a fair amount of people actually die on it. It isn’t their desire to expose the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history that does them in so much as bad brakes or booze. Other times it’s the view.
The road rises eight-hundred feet from the far west end of the San Fernando Valley to the top of the Simi Hills, a narrow ribbon of battered asphalt burrowing into the western border wall of LA County, and on a clear day, as the view unfurls behind you—the entirety of the Valley’s 235-square mile gridwork stretched out below like some monolithic printed circuit board, the blinking diodes of its roads, the humming transistors and resistors of its homes, strip malls and hospitals rippling in a haze of heat as the one program our species can never unplug, Growth, runs on unsupervised toward oblivion—it’s hard sometimes, rowing the steering wheel round the bend, not to want to continue straight off the cliff.
But I managed to be a good boy that summer, to stay mostly sane, and stay on the road. It was only in appearance that I’d made the catastrophic mistake of moving to Los Angeles. In reality, the megatropolis was just an ephemeral little fling, a tryst with dystopia that would yield much bigger things. Or so I told myself…
A more brave, ambitious writer would have told the person threatening their life to fuck off and die. Instead, I asked the person to marry me.
It was Christina, the Valley Girl, my girlfriend, who said, “I swear to fucking God, Barret, if you write this book about Santa Susana, I will fucking kill you.” She phrased it other ways. “I swear to God, Barret. If you write this book, I will cut your dick off and masturbate with it while you bleed to death.”She had grown up in the bland lowland suburban sprawl beneath the Boeing-owned lab, and all the women in her family who’d lived in the shadow of the lab had contracted breast cancer. I wasn’t my book to write. It never was. I just wanted to render them all in nonfiction, she saw. Imprison them all between the pages of some document that would flaunt a detached, masculine transcendence. Sell off all their sores to Knopf and Oprah. Get myself a super yacht. Profit from the pain. And what was most insane: she was right, and she would write the book, so she said—she who had never written a word. It took only the intro of Julia Cameron’s famous New Age manifesto, The Artist’s Way, to convert her to the cause of memoir. It was all so cliché and utterly uncanny.
Any my solution? I loved her. It was time to finally pull the trigger.
The night I proposed to Christina, an uneasy evening of heavy Santa Ana winds, it was her birthday—November 7th, 2018—and the very next day, as we sat inside Château Westmoreland celebrating, a fire broke out at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory a few hundred feet from the site of the 1959 SRE partial nuclear meltdown, a disaster that released 400 times the radiation of Three Mile Island, and to this day has never been cleaned up—and that every afternoon, November 8, 2018, nearly sixty years later, lofted some untold quantity of radiological material into the Los Angeles atmosphere and our apartment, which we inhaled ferociously, fucking all throughout that afternoon, certain the future was sunny.
I was thinking of that day during the most recent fires as the flames climbed toward Santa Susana. And I was thinking of Kim Kardashian and how I was supposed to cash it all in, move to the desert, among the Joshua Trees (which I just wrote a book about, so it turns out) and how I have nothing now but a nuclear meltdown book that sounds like conspiracy and misinformation and is even more freighted now by a series of statistically far-too-improbable coincidences—chief among them that proposal—as though my ongoing engagement with irradiated hills of Santa Susana placed me into some kind of quantum entanglement with the mystery and meaning of that most maimed and amazing site above the San Fernando Valley: Santa Susana.
The coincidence of my marriage proposal and the eruption of the Woolsey Fire was but the first in an expanding web of impossible synchronicities surrounding Santa Susana that have gradually impelled me to question the wisdom of my materialist reductionist paradigm. And in this bow to the wretched New Age woo-woo, I suppose I have become something like a true Angeleno.
Stay tuned for a book about Los Angeles, a nuclear meltdown, and a synchronicity storm fit to raze, much like a Los Angeles wildfire, the foundation of even the most firmly built faux-Tuscan McMansion of dogmatic Scientism. That famous quote from Mark Twain keeps twitching through my brain more and more these days—particularly the second part, which nobody seems to remember. “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” It is an adage that might as well describe the monstrous, unsustainable, and impossible expanding monolith that is our flammable, ungodly, and often lovely Los Angeles.
NOTES
1, “the flames of the Kenneth Fire”: See the below screenshot from my phone on the Watch Duty App, January 9, 3:51pm.
2, “Satanas”: “Etymology of the name ‘Santa Ana winds’, as revealed in the archives of the Los Angeles Times newspaper,” Robert Fovell, UCLA Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, January 2008. Viewed online at https://people.atmos.ucla.edu/fovell/LATimes_SantaAna.html
2, “America’s largest nuclear meltdown”: “Experts: 1959 meltdown worse than Three Mile,” NBC News, Oct. 6, 2006. Online at https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15158753
2, “a few hundred feet”: “Massive Woolsey fire began on contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory, close to site of partial meltdown,” Denise Duffield, Melissa Bumstead, and Dan Hirsch, Monthly Review Online, November 12, 2018. Online at https://mronline.org/2018/11/19/massive-woolsey-fire-began-on-contaminated-santa-susana-field-laboratory-close-to-site-of-partial-meltdown/
2, “Kim Kardashian Tweeted”: “The Kardashians Are Furious After Learning the Alleged Cause of the California Woolsey Fire,” by Shannon Barbour, Cosmopolitan, Nov 15, 2018. Online at https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/a25127362/kim-kourtney-kardashian-california-woolsey-fire-petition/
2, “$60 million mansion”: “Kim Kardashian ‘doing major renovation’ on $60M mansion she shared with Kanye West,” Sameer Suri, Daily Mail, Nov. 12, 2024. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14073069/kim-kardashian-major-renovation-mansion-kanye-west.html
2, “97,000 acres… double that of the combined total”: Data online at fire.cal.gov
2, “Our family lives”: Barbour, ibid.
2, Château Westmoreland: Read about this stunning property and the unique ambience of its back alley on my blog Dumpster Fires, dumpsterfires.substack.com
4, “to supply power to the public grid”: Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE)”, US Department of Energy. Online at https://www.energy.gov/etec/sodium-reactor-experiment-sre
5, “intentionally covered up… 1979”: “LA’s Nuclear Secret,” Joel Grover and Matthew Glasser, NBC News, 2019. https://media.nbcnewyork.com/assets/editorial/national/legacy/national/KNBC/la-nuclear-secret/
6, “Peggy”: I was threatened while reporting on the second annual Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival for Vice. “How Ancient Native American Rock Art is Tearing a California Town Apart,” Barret Baumgart, Vice, Jan 5, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-ancient-native-american-rock-art-is-tearing-a-california-town-apart/
7, “actually die”: “Man Dies After Car Crashes 50 Feet Down Cliff In Chatsworth Reservoir—
The cause of the crash is still under investigation,” CBS Los Angeles, Aug 2, 2022. https://patch.com/california/northridge/man-dies-after-car-crashes-50-feet-down-cliff-chatsworth-reservoir
PHOTO CREDITS
Boeing Sign photograph belongs to Elleni Sclavenitis, and her artist blog, Industrial Los Angeles. https://industrial-los-angeles.com/santa-susana-field-laboratory/
The photo of the black tarp at the meltdown site is my own photo from 2018.
Barret Baumgart is the author of the books China Lake and YUCK. His essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Vice, LitHub, The Seneca Review, and The Literary Review, among others. He is from Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
California Gothic: An Altadena Story
Jessica Abughattas
February 8 — a month since we answered the call and learned our neighborhood was on fire. A month of irritation, disruption, and sleeping in so many different beds. This is how we’ll measure time now: a month since the fire, two months since the fire, three, and so on. As time passes, I keep expecting to wake up from this nightmare.
When we packed our car and left on January 7, I was sure we’d be back the next day. Even when the sun came up, and we watched the town burn down on live television, the ramifications were unclear to those with homes still standing.
There are side effects of this trauma. Phantom smoke smells. Forgetting I’m not just visiting at my mom’s house. I live here in my childhood bedroom now, mapping days in my recent past in the form of to-do’s: pickup coffee beans at Café de Leché, wedding stamps at the Lake Post Office. Places evaporated. Farnsworth Park, where I voted. The amphitheater where I sat on a Saturday morning and talked on the phone with my mom for hours the day I bought my wedding dress. Altadena was special. Everyone thinks their town is special. But Altadena was something else.
***
This is a story about everything just beginning, the first week of the first month of the new year. I spent the first week of January counting down to my wedding in exactly five months. On January 4, I had a date with my fiancé at Bernee. Good wine and candlelight. We marveled at how far Altadena had come. It was a clear night. Outside, a man was parked on Mariposa with a telescope. I looked through it and saw Saturn’s rings. The restaurant was open for about four weeks before the Eaton Fire closed it down.
On January 6, we framed an illustration of our wedding venue at the local print shop where they let me pick up prints without paying. “Put it on my tab, I’ll be back.” We hadn’t hung it on the wall yet.
This is a story of two Altadenas, and I lived them both.
West Altadena: Hundred year old oaks, a coffee shop, a liquor store, a prepaid mobile, a piñata shop, a Mexican chicken place, the Super King—a Armenian-owned market where all nationalities shopped. Where they tried to steal the tires off my car. Where they siphoned gas out of it. Where someone threw a fifth of vodka at the intersection of Woodbury and Los Robles, the bottle shattering my headlight. Where fireworks polluted the air and pissed off the dogs, ducks, and coyotes from June to September—reserves of fireworks that ignited in the houses on January 7. All the January Sevens past, their timid knowing ghosts.
East Altadena: a luxe duplex my friend called the palazzo, where I cosplayed the rich girl I never was. A country club where I felt like the entitled high schooler I never was. A charming bottle shop, mostly unharmed. A restaurant with a name and no sign, where once—during a seven-second July earthquake—I held eye contact with John C. Reilly. A tiny Armenian grocery with a perfect deli, untouched. Running on their own generator. Blocks of quintessentially Californian Spanish houses—leveled, evaporated, reduced to toxic waste.
This is a story of two Altadenas, and I loved them both.
In the West, a wholesome goth walked by my side in combat boots and perfectly disheveled black clothes. Cherry pie and black coffee. A man who smelled like a man — like sweat, sawdust, and foot cream. My match in intensity, and destructive tendencies. A Palestinian scorpion. My shadow, brother, and twin.
In the East, I loved a private school educated All-American athlete. A handsome grandson. Apple pie and blue eyes. The purest truest heart. The soul I could sink my trust into, follow over any mountain, into any plane. The one who drives me deeper and deeper into safety. My soulmate.
In the West, I was wildness personified. The girl who could not be contained, controlled,
or anchored. Who ran from love and hurt everyone in her way.
In the East, I was a privileged daughter. Allowed myself to be held, served, and protected. I was a teenager at camp learning to trust fall. Who bowed to the wind and wonder of it all — to be loved, to finally be safe.
I was Inanna, descending into the underworld to retrieve something I’d lost—a photocopy self, stripped bare of my old clothes and pretense. I was Ereshkigal, the banished sister wallowing in the pain of loss forever. I was both halves, forced to look down the barrel of my deadness. And I saw that I could breathe new life into myself. A sober reality. I met the demons that took hold of me, saw them for what they are, and I wanted to live. I chose life.
This is a story of two Altadenas, and I lost them both.
***
Let me tell you about the hollow behind my ribs. It aches at all times. Through every sleepless night. It feels like demonic butterflies that hate me. It feels like I’m going to throw up. Every second of every day, my solar plexus aches and aches. I open my mouth to scream. There’s no sound. I’m numb for nearly three weeks.
Three weeks of stoic anger. Three weeks of It could have been so much worse.
We’re the lucky ones! Snap out of it! When I finally cry it comes from somewhere deep within,
an underworld I had yet to unearth. A cavernous sound. Grief is stuck in the lungs. Haven’t our
lungs been through enough? The butterflies are ceaseless. They never dissipate. They never
scatter, never tire. Only tears appease them. I cry for 24 hours straight. They’re always
with me. Like every sleeping monarch lodged its cocoon inside my body, each one a signal from
heaven, alarming at once. Give me a sign I’m on the right path, I used to say, gliding through
neighborhoods of green. This one’s a sign my grandmother is with me. This one means fate.
I used to walk these vaporized streets looking for signs. Send me a butterfly so I know.
***
This is a story about a girl named lucky, my favorite Britney Spears song starts.
In high school, a friend would come over after school and eat my food, go home wearing my clothes. Then she stopped hanging out with me. “Because you’re rich,” she said. “No I’m not!” I fired back. Nobody ever thinks of themselves as that. There’s always someone wealthier in relation to them, which relieves of them of recognizing their status.
As the soot settled, headlines ignited new conflicts. Everyone looked to lay blame, to present a new hot take. Writers who live on the East Coast published think pieces about Altadena. The comments section decreed we all deserved it, for being rich. On Instagram, comments accused: the firetrucks were in East Altadena protecting wealthy homes. But over on Allen, there were no firetrucks, and those neighborhoods burned down too. The cruelest of social media activists wrote that it served us right, so we could finally sympathize with Gaza—never mind that Altadena is home to a significant number of Palestinians who have now lost their homes.
A UCLA study found Black families were disproportionately affected by the fire. Residents west of Lake Avenue weren’t warned to evacuate until 3 a.m., and many never received the text. All the fatalities were west of Lake. On April 3 — three months after the fire — the discovery of human remains in Altadena brought the death toll to thirty total in the LA County fires. In July, the thirty-first victim was found in the ashes of an uncleared lot—the remains found only because the property failed to meet the city’s deadline for cleanup. I grieve my neighbors left in the rubble. I grieve the missing and unaccounted for.
***
We are the survivors of the Eaton Fire.
Some of us had our houses and everything in them eaten by flames.
Some have homes still standing, where we can’t return.
Some watched as their multi-generational homes went up, to that place of no return.
Some are renters who lost it all.
We are all the survivors of the Eaton Fire.
Some evacuated at 8 p.m. Some never got the call.
Our neighborhoods abused by scatters of embers, consequences of an angry wind.
A triggering wind. A wind that warned of its strength for twenty four hours.
The fronds of palm in the streets. The shattered terracotta. The neighbor’s tarp flying away.
We are the survivors of the Eaton Fire.
We carry our clothes in garbage bags from place to place.
Places we’ve slept:
A friend’s childhood bedroom.
My mom’s spare room.
Brother’s second home casita.
The Langham Hotel for two nights, in two rooms, where we cried for 48 hours straight.
In our own guest room, hiding out from the ash.
Mom’s again.
Adam’s family Palm Desert condo.
Best friend’s ADU, on a pull-out sofa bed.
Guest bedroom of a friend’s adobe in Taos, NM.
***
If you’re lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, an incredible privilege, you know Lynch’s light. It’s an aesthetic I carry forward in my writing — California Gothic. Altadena was this exactly, perhaps even more now considering its demise. It was a fabulous canvas with exaggerated strokes. It was a cemetery where Octavia Butler is buried. It was a wilderness of parrots, coyotes, ostriches, squirrels, possums, and skunks. Each place — the diner, post office, coffee shop — was the dollhouse version of that thing.
It wasn’t a movie set of an idyllic small town on the fringe of Los Angeles. It was the real deal. Cool, undiscovered, ungoverned with no sidewalks in the west. Mayberry, adorable with a 4th of July parade in the east. Fireworks at the country club. Native wildflowers growing in place of a lawn. Encouraging notes written on a chalkboard for the entire neighborhood. This was Altadena. It was the most perfect place in Los Angeles to me, for the six years since I lived there.
The day I arrived in Taos, Julia buried the neighbor’s cat, which was run over that morning.
She dug a hole under a tree on their property and said a few words. Adam helped but I wouldn’t.
Later, when Julia finally got a hold of the neighbor, he demanded his cat back. She told him what had happened, that the cat was dead and buried, but he kept insisting.
“I could dig him up?”
“No,” he said. “I never want to see that cat again.”
Lynch dying in the aftermath of the fires was apt. Lynch died with Los Angeles. Los Angeles died. Islands of toxic debris replaced the dolphins off our shores. Our American dream of horror.
***
Last night, I drove back to my mom’s from LA in the pouring rain. Forty-five miles per hour, gripping-the-steering-wheel rain. Couldn’t it have rained four weeks ago?
Why, God?
Why are you, God?
Who is this cruel God who sends a windstorm through our mountain town, and then the hard showers that could stop it, only a month too late?
Damn you, rain.
Damn you, Los Angeles.
I never want to see that cat again.
I think of the houses in their various states of disarray. Toys on the floor. Wet towels draped over the tub. Dishes still in the sink.
I will myself to be strong. This isn’t the last hard thing that will happen to me, I tell myself to push through. We push through.
Jessica Abughattas’ debut book Strip (University of Arkansas, 2020) won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in Kenyon Review, POETRY, The Nation, Guernica, The Yale Review, Orion Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the poet laureate of Altadena, California, from 2020 to 2022.