Escaping Los Angeles Down The 405 of Shattered Dreams

To get to my future, I have to relive my past

“I left my laptop at home, we gotta go back.”

“Goddammit. Hang on…” my Mom said as she executed a no-point turn on a local street.

I had a plane to catch tonight. This evening’s trip was different from previous plane trips. I had a one-way ticket and no intention of coming back to Los Angeles.

I’d packed two huge suitcases to their limit. My chihuahua was in a carrier able to fit under the seat in front of me. But I’d forgotten my personal carry-on item and likely a few other critical items back home.

After retrieving my laptop bag, we still had 3 hours before my plane took off. In Los Angeles, a three-hour time gap is no guarantee of getting anywhere on time. It was Friday and we still had to go over The Hill.

The Hill’s proper name is the Hollywood Hills. It separates the San Fernando Valley from the metropolitan Los Angeles. It’s where all the new rich live. When the onshore winds blow the smog inland, it’s beautiful.

For people in Los Angeles who live in the valley and work in LA, it’s the bane of our existence. There’s only one highway over it. The 405.

Before we started driving up The Hill, we had to drive across the valley.

Off the first exit was my high school, where I learned the difference between a dime and a nickel bag of weed.

We drove across the overpass that fell in the 1992 Northridge Earthquake. The damage to our house was enough that our family moved to a house a few miles away while it was being repaired for the next two years.

My Mom drove past the Northridge Hospital exit, where my father passed away twenty years ago. I remembered being a lifeguard at a waterslide park during summer. When they called me off the stand, I was told by the park director I needed to go to the hospital now. My father was in a coma for over three months before he mercifully passed. I resolved if I was ever diagnosed with brain cancer, I would off myself.

The next exit was where my weed supplier, Deicide Damien, lived. We called him Deicide Damien because his name was Damien and he was in the band Deicide.

“Does her family know you’re Jewish?”

“Yeah.”

“And how do they feel about that?” asked my Mom.

“Beats me,” I said. “Probably about the same as you feel about her not being Jewish.”

The Hill was visible on the horizon. There were no red brake lights in sight and the traffic reports were all quiet. Too quiet…

Off the next exit was my first meth dealer’s apartment. Her roommate was Joseph Gordon Levitt’s brother. We called him Burning Dan. For his name was Dan and he liked to go to Burning Man. He died by asphyxiating in a sleeping bag.

Making a left instead off the same exit will bring you to the apartment building where I met my first wife. She slid into my DM’s on Myspace back in 2004 and asked if I had Xanax. Of course I did. She moved in about a month later.

The first day I came home from work, the front door was open, all the lights were on, and the stereo was blasting some terrible twangy pop-country song. She was in the bathroom worshiping the porcelain god buck naked with a bag of BBQ Baked Lay’s and an empty community size bottle of Ten High whiskey beside her.

Five years later, I would marry her. Six years later our relationship was dead and over.

The last exit before The Hill was the bar where I had my first going away party. The woman who would become my wife was accepted to UC Riverside, which was ninety miles outside of Los Angeles. I relocated to the Inland Empire to be with her.

This trip was my fourth attempted escape from this town. Every time I tapped out on Los Angeles, a new opportunity would materialize bringing me back to tinseltown.

We began our ascent up The Hill on the 405. Quiet on the Southbound 405 for a Friday.

Too quiet.

Five years later I moved back to Los Angeles for an IT job paying almost double the most money I had made before. It was a 10-mile commute into the office. The drive took one hour to traverse at best. Three and a half hours is my record for worst.

On the other side of the freeway was where I had almost caused a massive pileup not long after my return.

I’d been up for a handful of days doing speed while working on a big project at my employer’s cage at our LAX data center. I was past the point where more speed had any effect.

On my drive home I kissed bumpers with two cars because I fell asleep. The taps were so light the drivers kept driving. My mind was in a fugue state but I kept driving too.

A few miles further down the road, I woke up to me going about thirty and the car 30 feet in front of me at a dead stop. I slammed on the brakes and yanked on the wheel to send me skidding into the emergency lane, missing the car in front of me by inches.

You would think that would be enough to scare me off the road to rest. Nope. The adrenaline rush woke me up enough to stay awake for the remaining three miles.

“Wow, it looks like traffic…”

“Ssshhhh!!! Don’t jinx us!”

“Right, sorry,” I apologized. The rules of Los Angeles dictate if you say traffic seems light you will hit a wall of it.

We had reached the zenith of The Hill and began our descent.

The funny thing about the town of Bel Aire is that you can’t see any houses from the freeway, but they are everywhere. I had taken and sold ecstasy in many of these hidden homes at the end of the millennium. Bowling in the basement of the Spelling mansion at 3 am is one of my favorite memories.

Past Bel Aire at the bottom of the hill was the exit I worked off of. It was likely the busiest off-ramp in Los Angeles, if not the world. An engineering marvel that had recently been completed. I was working off this exit while the construction was being performed.

Literal days of my life spent sitting in unmoving traffic listening to MP3s that I had thousands of yet had heard them all a million times. Occasionally catching the glance of another driver who was slowly dying during the daily crawl.

The job was with a company doing online marketing research. The owner had sold his first company to IBM for 500 million dollars. He didn’t need to work, but he did. His new company was Bel Aire hobby shed to him. Our office was in the penthouse of a 19 story building. Everyone had Herman Miller Aeron chairs and Artemide Tolomeo desk lamps.

The company promoted me three times through no merit of my own. My bosses kept quitting so I wound up with a Director of IT title by default. I had the title but not the compensation. I was recruited by another company one off-ramp down the freeway for my first six-figure salary.

My new employer a mile down the road was a true startup. Working for a startup can go one of two ways. They either go public and make so much money with stock options you will never need to work again or one day your paycheck bounces and when you go back to work on Monday there’s a padlock with a chain around the doors. This would be a case of the latter.

It was while I was sucking off the teat of unemployment, my girlfriend who lived off the upcoming exit would die. Though I can’t call her my girlfriend. At the time of her death she had a boyfriend who wasn’t me. There’s some people who thought I knew more about her death than I said. Some people thought I was responsible.

I was the last person to see her alive. Her autopsy proved I had nothing to do with it. What fucks with my head is if I did things different, I wouldn’t be telling this story.

Then we hit the wall of traffic. Later than expected but still a spectacle. Six lanes plus the carpool lane of unmoving iron and aluminum. We were five miles away from the airport exit, but if history has taught me anything, we were in for another hour.

The next exit held the memory of another dead girlfriend. Barbara inherited her father’s condo only blocks away from the beach. Anywhere else in the country it would have rented for six hundred bucks a month, but due to its location it was worth millions. Her father had done a reverse mortgage and unless we figured something out she was going to lose it.

We considered getting married as a way to get a loan to save the condo. Barbara was 14 years older than I was and had a daughter closer to my age. I wasn’t doing it for the money. I genuinely cared for Barbara. She was better known under her stage name Duchess DeSade. She was a Bonafide rock star and sex symbol in the 80’s when that sort of thing was frowned upon.

The relationship was toxic. I was so high on Heroin during our relationship it was never consummated. The Duchess and the 2 jugs of Carlo Rossi she consumed a day were not impressed.

During one of our splits, Barbara called me from the hospital and told me she had been bleeding from her rectum for the last nine days. She asked me to bring her some vape juice. I told her I’d be there in a few hours. Instead, I got high and nodded out. I got a call the next day from our mutual friend telling me Barbara was dead.

The giant torus-shaped structure off the freeway with Randy’s Doughnuts printed on it meant the airport was one exit away.

The last time I escaped Los Angeles, it was to get away from Heroin. The day before I left, I stopped by a friend’s pad, a block away from Randy’s giant stucco doughnut.

I had been clean from Heroin for over a month. When I walked in, he was hitting something that wasn’t speed or Heroin off the dull side of a rectangle of tinfoil. I salivated at the thought of getting high.

Seeing the lust in my eyes, he asked if I wanted a hit of fentanyl. I knew the risks. Fentanyl can be 100 times the strength of Heroin. But I had been mainlining Heroin and this was smoking. I hit the dope like Reginald Denny got hit with a brick 25 years ago a block away to kick off the LA riots…

I awoke on the floor what felt like moments later, but the sun was down, meaning it had been hours.

My friend told me he had to Narcan me twice. He assured me if he hadn’t you wouldn’t be reading this story right now and I would have been another statistic in the opioid crisis.

We both made it out alive. We haven’t spoken since as we are terrible influences on each other. But wherever he is, I wish him well and know he feels the same.

Ten million people inhabiting four thousand square miles. Los Angeles County is massive.

I was nine years old when we moved from San Diego to Los Angeles. The two things I remember from the drive are seeing Disneyland’s Matterhorn and Randy’s big ass donut.

I had to leave Los Angeles to get sober in early 2019. In Santa Barbara, I needed to occupy my time with something other than drugs and started writing again.

Through my writing, I met a girl I fell for quick and hard. My first trip to her was delayed a month because I caught Covid-19. After we spent a month together, we went full 90 Day Fiancé minus the “I love you so much I want to get the government involved” part.

Los Angeles is the city of angels. It became a city of ghosts to me. Every freeway off-ramp unleashing another flood of memories. Some good, some bad. Most somewhere between. LA chewed me up and spat me out.

This wasn’t defeat though. I survived in the city for decades. I thanked Los Angeles for all it gave me. I resolved to never forget the lessons it taught me and to be grateful for all it let me experience.

I said goodbye to my Mom and made my way to the plane, holding my ticket into the future and my luggage in my hands. I hoisted those with my dog’s carrier along with the almost forgotten laptop onto the ticket counter.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I’ve never been so optimistic about whatever comes next.