Salon Wanderlust | Hollywood hangouts, page 2

This place has legs
By Catherine Seipp
In search of the perfect Hollywood hangout
Museum of unnatural history
By John McMurtrie
Myth and reality commingle at Culver City's Museum of Jurassic Technology
Mentally undressing autos in L.A.
By D. J. Waldie
Reflections on the odd relationship between walkers and drivers in L.A.
D E P A R T M E N T S
The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Weiner take all!
Mondo Weirdo
The meanest rat in Malaysia
Road Warrior
Business travel & beyond
Table Talk
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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Oct. 7, 1997

How Zurich invented the modern world
By Carlos Fuentes
A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

Walking in L.A.
C O N T I N U E D

seen from curbside, driving looks like a pathology -- a syndrome of sudden tics, cognitive agnosias and kinetic preservations akin to parkinsonism.
A driver preparing to turn right on red swivels his head to the left when he's a hundred feet from the intersection. He fixes his gaze on the flow of oncoming traffic. He barely slows (in California at least) at the leading edge of the crosswalk, his head still rotated 90 degrees to the left. If a break in traffic is approaching, he begins to turn, taking his car through 50 degrees of arc, before his head jerks through a full 180 degrees and he, for the first time, sees me on his right as the light turns green and the "walk" symbol of a striding male figure shines ghostly white.
I've been watching him, because traffic safety trainers suggest that pedestrians stare at drivers who've turned away during a right turn maneuver. The theory is that human beings are quick to sense when someone is staring at them -- a common primate threat behavior -- and a driver who's stared at will react unconsciously as if the pedestrian is real. My belief that staring actually works is my only protection.
I've noticed that the habits of driving are structured to preserve momentum. Some patients with Parkinson's cannot walk voluntarily. If a light touch pushes them from behind, however, they'll walk forward, but they won't stop unless they collide with something. They'll stop with another light touch, this time on the chest.
If the lights have been timed properly, if the number of cars doesn't exceed the carrying capacity of the highway and if the drivers are skillful, the flow of traffic through the intersection is almost lyrical. The preoccupied drivers automatically surrender to the momentum of driving. Trust passes from driver to driver in a wheel of cars. A pedestrian in the intersection is like a fan strolling across the court during an NBA game. That's why the National Highway Capacity Manual defines a pedestrian as a "traffic interruption."
The driver making the turn is alone. His windows are rolled up; the air conditioning and radio are on. He's cocooned inside, but he's also extended a phantom skin to the surface of his car. A neurologist would say that the driver has enlarged his proprioception -- the background sense we have of how we're oriented in space and where self leaves off and not-self begins.
If a driver should ding his car in the parking lot or thump the roof going under a low branch, his expanded proprioception will make him grimace as if his real skin, not the amplified surface of his car, were at risk.
Though I've not yet stepped off the curb, some drivers slam on their brakes when our eyes meet. The rear of the car humps slightly while the slack goes out of the driver's shoulder belt. Other drivers swerve imperceptibly as they complete their turn through the intersection, their eyes averted from mine. I've lost my place in the musical chairs of momentum, and all the cars stacked in a right-turn-only lane will use the opportunity I've forfeited. Some drivers come two-thirds through the turn before our gazes lock. Then they stop, as if I'd be fool enough now to step out in front of their car.

I don't drive, but I imagine that I can. It's not a skill you forget, I tell myself; it's like riding a bicycle. Standing at the curb waiting for a bus, I sometimes think of situations in which I might need to take command of a car.
A woman pulls to the curb. "Please, you've got to help me! The baby! I think it's coming now! You've got to help me!"
I slide into the driver's seat, putting the car into gear. "I'll drive you to a hospital; don't be afraid. Just hang on." Buried habits surface. A quick glance over my left shoulder, and I pull smoothly into a break in traffic.

"No car is just a car," David Cronenberg (the writer/director of "Crash") has said. He's right. A car is always a special kind of place, just as driving is a relationship to a place in which I'm a complete exception, an obligatory passenger.
I'm a good passenger. I don't reflexively apply a phantom brake if the driver doesn't respond fast enough to slowing traffic. I don't presume to know the directions to where we're going. I don't question the driver's choice of lane, speed or offramp. I don't ask to have the radio or air conditioning on or off.
Single women keep the best cars. They vacuum the interior and dispose of takeout drink cups. News photographers and reporters (male and female) keep the worst cars. A news photographer will have a month's back issues of the paper she works for in the seat beside her, under a box with a half-eaten pizza. She'll have assignments stuck to the inside edge of the windshield with Post-it notes. Her dashboard will be crumbling into tufts of foam rubber padding.
The interior of a guy's car will remind you of what he was like in high school -- obsessively careful about a few things and oblivious to the rest.
In Los Angeles, more than three-quarters of freeway commuters drive alone. In one study of the Hollywood Freeway, 75 percent of the drivers couldn't think of any inducement to take public transit or carpool. They are the "hard-core solitary drivers," according to researchers. Driving alone is its own anesthetic. Studies show that drivers regard any time spent inside a car as less onerous than walking by a factor of three or four. Drivers say that waiting for a bus is worse than waiting in gridlock by a factor of 10.
Even going nowhere, a car is the room you may not have had as a child, one where your parents can never intrude. It's one of the few places in which you're alone by choice.

I'll never know the concert of speed and solitude in which drivers commune. I don't have another skin of steel and high-impact plastic made for the pleasure of driving.
I walk to work and collect the "car allowance" that other management employees get. I wait for the block-long gap in traffic that poorly timed signals create and jaywalk across the empty boulevard. I stare at drivers waiting for me to cross an intersection. I rarely make out the driver's expression through the tinted windshield, but sometimes I see a face that shows irritation and occasional anger. Driving is performed in public, but it's a private act, removed from the spectacle of the street. My gaze has gotten under the driver's second skin. I've brought the sidewalk inside his car, and he, in momentary discomfort, recognizes what I am.
SALON | Oct. 14, 1997
D. J. Waldie last wrote for Salon about the Cold War. "Holy Land," his memoir of suburbia, was published by W. W. Norton in 1996. He reminds you to look both ways before crossing the street and to always wait for the light.
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