No Labor-Saving Machine

"No labor-saving machine, nor discovery I have made, nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found a hospital or library, nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America, nor literary success nor intellect, nor book for the bookshelf, but a few carols vibrating through the air I leave, for comrades and lovers." -- Whitman.

No greater ignominious remembrance of high school--save the can of deodorant that was left in my band locker to suggest I shower more often--mines the depths so deeply as the lack of my own car to park among the throng of Chevys, Fords, and Chryslers that idled in the dirt field beneath the eucalyptus trees outside Granada Hills High School. Instead, I walked a half mile every morning, marching to the cadence in my head of surf music, sweet soul, or skiffle to the blue-and-white irregular buses of the Los Angeles Transit District.

In my junior year I climbed in the back seat of a rumbling Bel Aire filled with clandestine cigarette smoke and the intimidating, anti-social rant of the Blue Cheer's Summertime Blues or Jagger's incandescent Under My Thumb, riding with neighborhood seniors in a carpool arranged between our mothers. At least now my commute ended in the dizzying tribal pulse of the dirt lot where guys revved their engines and girls finished up their make-up in so many rear-view mirrors.

To be a senior and not have a car in Los Angeles was to fall into the grimiest category of loser, yet my own parents, first-generation New Yorkers who lived a near lifetime on subways, buses, or on-foot along canyons of glass and concrete, saw us as obnoxious postwar babies with a never-ending belief in entitlement. And, my mother was quick to note, we listened not to the moonglow swoons of Vaughn Monroe nor the torch songs of Eydie Gorme, not to the dulcet pop sounds of Rosemary Clooney, not to the tasteful zariba of notes stacked up in the glissando of Artie Shaw--but in the screaming, distorted sex-calls of Jan and Dean, white boys from the beach who were the pre-British invasion harbingers of the Pat Boone sound wrapped around Gibson guitars. Sigh.

So in my senior year, I rode proudly around in the Dodge Coronet that belonged to the mother of my girlfriend Martha Louise. It was a dangerously fast car with a four-barrel carb and a radio with bristling muscle, and we drove up to the top of Tampa, where concrete slabs were laid out for the booming subdivisions that today look out over the twinkling lights of the San Fernando Valley, and we fogged up the windows with heavy breathing. We listened to Sam Cooke and Jacklie Wilson. Or the Ronettes. Ronnie Spector's voice conjured up the beehive hairdos of Chicanas at the school who--rumor had it--hid razor blades in their tight sprayed coronas in case it came to violence over their guy. Just thinking of it made me weak, not like the dizziness of the tilt-a-whirl, but a magical, sudden plunge in the lower belly that felt like falling in love with the wrong girl.

If there was a god, he lived in Marty Wynhoff's soul-rattling kisses, in the glowing Los Angeles sky where it bubbled up over the slumbering housewives and worker bees, blotting out the stars themselves, the light aglow on the dashboard radio dial, a tangible god in the Temptations', Just My Imagination, Running Away With Me.

In that year, Marty and I won tickets to appear on Ninth Street West, a dance show on Channel 9 in LA where teens would pack onto the narrow stage, wheeling around bulky cameras while the DJs spun the Top-40. We took the Coronet over Cahuenga Pass and drove the Hollywood Freeway across Sunset Boulevard to the studio, the radio pulsing out Paul Mauriat's Love is Blue, and I Wish It Would Rain, and Love Is All Around, and Reach Out Of The Darkness. The show theme was sleep-overs, and Marty and I put on red-felt sleep hats with white puff-balls at the peak, and we spun around the floor, stealing kisses under the hot stage lights.

Finally, toward the end of my senior year, I inherited part-time privileges of my mother's Rambler American. It was not the '55 Chevy of my dreams with a wide profile and chrome trim, not the mad Buick with fins or woodie surf wagon, or modified, lowered Plymouth that throttled out its song through glass-pack exhaust, but a tinny, narrow, ugly straight-mobile that looked like you dropped your feet through the floor like some cartoon character and wore the car around you like a naked-man's barrel. But, temporarily, it was mine.

On Wednesday nights I parked it at a friend's house and we took his blue El Camino cruising along Van Nuys Boulevard, blasting out The Chambers Brothers and Clarence Carter and The Rascals. People Got to Be Free. And then came the turning point. Late one night we pulled into the parking lot behind the Muntz audio store and found a four-track tape player cast away into the dumpster.

Russ had a spare set of speakers, and plenty of stereo wire, and the four-track (apparently hidden in the dumpster by a Muntz employee who hoped to return for it later) went into the Rambler. After he neatly tucked the speakers into the rear deck, Russ flocked the firewall with white angel hair.

It was not the car I would proudly back into an open space in the dirt lot at the high school--I parked it in the paved lot where the students with sadly uncool cars hid themselves along with the rides of faculty members--but it had sounds of its own, and I could disappear into Ike and Tina Turner's cover of We Can Work It Out and, later, after Marty broke it off, I could slide into a deep veil of sadness to Carole King's It's Too Late, with all the attendant self-pity and adolescent gloom as the nation bellied deep into its fiery crash landing in Vietnam, not the chirpy hope of Surf City, but the dark torment of In My Room, not the portentous Sunshine of Your Love played out the windows of the Victorians in the Haight, but of the cloud-swept broken tenements across the bay in Oakland where the Temptations crooned, I Wish It Would Rain.

At the end of that shadowy year now clouded by decades, the head gasket went out on the Rambler and the oil pan filled with water, killing off the engine with a sudden flood.

Marching Orders

If there was anything I feared and hated in childhood more than having to climb the metal ladder up to the roof it was the rare, but impressionable sting of my father's belt. Considering how few chores I was asked to perform on a regular basis, it makes any rant about weeding, clearing the table, mowing the lawns, and taking out the trash cans an awfully telling detail about how well I had it.

But my father lacked--shall we say--essential communications skills when it came to issuing directions, which made every small deed into a fully evolved emotional trauma. On weeding day, he would march up and down the driveway, pointing at the ivy, indicating which sprouts you missed. He'd supervise as my brother and I would descend into shame. We'd pout and toss weeds and cuttings on the driveway and dad would ensure that we'd rake them into neat piles, stuff the piles into bags, and carry them to the street. No matter how you did it, you did it wrong. And dad, former chief petty officer, would make sure you knew about it. "Move out!" he'd say, as if we were shouldering our packs and rifles and making our way up Mount Suribachi.

But the order I dreaded most was the one to climb up that miserable ladder to tend to the swamp cooler. We had moved into the house on Gaviota Avenue in 1963, and my mother and father never had adequate air conditioning until 2003. Homes in the San Fernando Valley were chilled by central air conditioning or by swamp coolers. The cooler unit was a metal box that sat on the roof. Cold water was pumped in and showered down over bales of straw. A fan drew air over the moistened pads and the cooled air would feed into the house. In theory.

Pads dried out, pumps failed, and the cooler would stop in the middle of a 103 degree day and everyone would share the misery. There was plenty to go around.

That was when dad would ask me to head up the ladder and help him diagnose the problem. I was good on the way up. The last rung of the ladder was well over the eave and you could step down onto the roof. The roof was covered with white rocks. I couldn't look down, so I focused on the metal cooler.

I don't know exactly how I developed a fear of heights. Perhaps from my mother's genetic contribution. Once we vacationed along the northern California coast and while my dad drove along scenic Big Sur with towering cliffs over the Pacific, mom turned green and refused to look out the window. (I even took hang gliding lessons to get over my fear of heights, but quit after the instructor killed himself in a wicked dive. It's not flying that scares me; it's the dying part that rankles.)

When we were done swapping out pads or clearing the pump on the swamp cooler, dad would be the first to the ladder and over the edge. Once safely on the drive, he'd hold the ladder and issue his orders for me to descend. If I looked at the top of the ladder, I managed to make it to the side. But if I looked down, it was impossible to step off to the ladder. And the white rocks would slide around, weakening what little resolve I could muster to make the edge.

"Move it," dad would say. "Let's go!"

For years I'd hike the Sierras, the Olympic Range, volcanoes on three continents, stand in the wind atop the Hancock Towers, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building. I'd close my eyes on looping roller coasters. I'd fly in small planes and tolerate rolls and stalls. I've survived near misses in heavy commercial jets. Last year, I took the small cable car up the interior leg of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and peered out the slat of a window at the ground below. But little has changed. It's sad to have been trapped in so much angst when you consider I never fell, or came close to falling. It reflects some discredit today to confess to being an adult roof wuss.

Ask anyone in my life and they'll be delighted to recount the many ways in which I am brave. I can say that with utmost confidence.

Axminister and Esplanade

The first telephone number that my mother had me memorize began with the word Axminster. In Brooklyn, phone numbers belonged to a number of exchanges, and ours was Axminster, shortened to AX when you added the last five numerals that combined to make our home number. Axminster is a town in Devon, England. After our family moved from New York to California, our exchange was Esplanade, shorted by the telephone company to ES.

In those days, there were no such contrivances as call waiting, voice-mail, or text messaging. If you weren't home, the telephone rang until the caller hung up. Our rule was if we were eating dinner, you let the phone ring its brains out. If it was an important call, my mother would say, the party would call back. The other rule was that if the phone rang, my father would wait for someone else to get it.

We had one phone and it sat on a counter-top in the kitchen. Later, when the phone company offered a slender rotary model that offered revolutionary back-lighting on the dial, my mother put one on the nightstand in her bedroom. Now we had twice the number of phones that my father would let ring themselves out.

The technology was screwy: sometimes you could pick up the phone when it was idle and listen to the nearby country western radio station. In those days, the San Fernando Valley still had horse ranches and orchards scattered between the creeping subdivisions, and a listening audience that preferred Gene Autry to Gene Pitney. I'd listen long enough to recognize that the announced was ethnically and aesthetically as far flung from my Russian-Jewish roots as a Martian, then hang up the phone.

Sometimes the phone would ring but no one would be on the other end. Or, when you were lucky, you could pick up the receiver and eavesdrop on the private conversations of unknowing parties. When I lucked into those, I hung on as long as I could, turning the handset to the side in case they could hear my breathing.

When the man from the phone company came out and installed our first push-button phone, it took a while to get used to it. But you were less likely to dial a wrong number with it. I hated when you were dialing a number on the rotary model and your finger slipped out on the last digit, forcing you to have to re-dial the entire sequence again.

Those days, you made every call away from home at a public phone. I hated it. In my youth, you actually went into a Plexiglas booth, closed the door, and the light went on inside. It gave you a false sense of privacy as traffic sped around you and people walked to and fro on the sidewalk. But the booths smelled of urine or vomit and the mouthpiece reeked. You hated to imagine who had used the phone before you. There was always a half-empty soda bottle crawling with ants on the counter or a crumpled cigarette box.

More than half the time, the phone was out of order, left dangling on its metal cord by the previous user. Sometimes the connection was lousy and you'd reach your party and try to understand what they were saying between the static hiss or pop, shouting atop your lungs to be heard.

Phones had no slots for credit cards in the day, so you had to walk around with a pocketful of change, or visit a shop or gas station attendant to cash out paper money. Often, the phone would gobble up your coins and refuse to connect to your number. If that was all the money you had, you were screwed. The booths had white and yellow-page phone directories, but someone had always ripped out the page you needed to find your number. And men--for women would in no way do this--drew profane expressions or near-anatomic renderings on the glass. It was tough to take refuge of a phone booth in a rain storm.

When I was in Italy, you went into an office, gave the receptionist your long-distance number, and then sat in a quiet, clean, comfortable booth--in which no one had apparently urinated--until the phone rang with your call home.

Later, in Los Angeles, the booths gave way to half-booths, plastic kiosks that covered the phone but provided no shelter for the user. You often found a handset missing one part or another, having been slammed in rage by a previous caller. Sometimes you'd pass by the kiosk and the phone would ring. I could never let it go. Usually it was the operator asking for more money and you'd explain you had just picked up the phone, that you were not the guy who tried dialing Romania on a quarter.

The first cell-phone call I ever received came from Bobby Dubois in 1991. He was sitting in his four-wheeler truck, idling outside my home, yakking into a phone the size of a walkie-talkie. It made his day.

I held out, long after cell phones were in-vogue. I had a recorder on my home phone and if anyone needed to talk with me, they could leave a message. If I was late for an appointment or broke down on the highway, I'd find a phone at the gas station or convenience store. But my employer--a trendy web consulting firm--required that I have one, and they bought a cell phone for me to carry in my car. I hated it.

When I finally bought my own, I still hated it. I was pretty sure I had a small number of friends, but the damn thing rang day and night. For a while I was getting calls at 2 am from a woman in China. She kept calling until I asked a friend how to say "Wrong Number" in Chinese (Dwei Bu Chi , Ni Da Tswuo Le). Later, when I moved to the mountains, I found a cabin out of range of service and was forced to pay the company $200 to get out of my contract.

Last year my niece, Jess, graduated from college. I sat in the rows of well-wishers with my brother, his wife, and their two boys. Jess was in the long line to receive her diploma. My brother swapped text messages with her throughout the entire ceremony. The two boys swapped text messages with their pals. I was sitting in a row of constant typists.

Recently, my friend Joey advised me to sign up for a social networking website where people publish their sudden thoughts to hundreds of followers. Say you're in your car at a stoplight and suddenly understand the String Theory. You text your brainstorm into your phone and it instantly sends it to a website and the telephone's of your buddies. The entire world is texting the quality and frequency of its bowel movements to minions of foot soldiers in the army of insignificance.

Count me out. Many days I leave my cell phone home when I go out. If it's important, they'll leave a message or call back.

Today, when I call my parents at the old number, I can imagine the same phone they've had all along, hanging on the wall in the kitchen. It's a few steps from the sink and the mini-greenhouse window where my mother tends the houseplants she's collected over the years. If my father answers the phone--a rare occurrence--he can't waste more than a sentence or two before he hands it over to my mother.

Every so often my mother calls to alert me that I haven't been calling. She says the same thing even when I do call. So I tell her then, "This is me. This is me calling right now."

You want the honest-to-god truth? I have never, ever answered my own phone and heard the voice of my father calling.

Give Us This Day

On days my mother wanted bread, rolls, or cakes, she'd put a sign in our front window for the Helms Bakery Truck. It was a blue and white sign printed on cardboard emblazoned with the letter "H" in gold. Each weekday morning, the Helms truck would make its way slowly along Longridge Avenue, stopping at every drive where residents showed the sign in their windows.

The Helms man, in his fresh-pressed white uniform and sporty cap, would toot his horn, hop out, and open the side of the truck revealing tray after tray of freshly baked donuts, glazed and plump in the bright Southern California sunshine, sheets of white or chocolate iced cakes, and loaves of bread still warm from the morning ovens.

On days after mom had placed a specific order--say for rye bread or rolls--the driver would have it ready when we went to the curb. The smell was heavenly. On days I was home from school, I'd wait outside on the lawn for the Helms man. The trucks had no air conditioning and if you we lived near the end of the route toward the end of a hot summer's day, the Helms man would hand out free donuts to neighborhood kids. Was this going on all across America, or just our street?

The Helms bakery was established in 1931 near Culver City with 31 employees and 11 delivery trucks. Before the freeways carved ribbons of poured concrete from the sea to the inland deserts, Helms trucks would drive for hours each day along city streets and over the winding passes of the coastal range to deliver the bread to Angelinos, sometimes extending their routes several hundred miles north to Fresno in the hot San Joaquin Valley, or southward to San Diego and the Mexican border. Even the Apollo astronauts who first landed on the moon packed Helms bread along, crumbs floating like leavened snowflakes in orbit.

To have been a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to witness the end of personalized service by hard-working merchants and professionals. My father and mother tell stories of horse-drawn ice trucks of the 1920s and 1930s, clumping along the cobbled New York City streets bringing blocks of relief to hot and woozy residents. We still called our refrigerator an "ice box", and when I use the expression today, people tilt their heads and laugh.

The last vestiges of those days expired with my coming of age. But well into my adolescence, we still had a dairy man, who left bottles of milk and cubes of butter on our doorstep, taking away the empties in a metal carrier that jingled like a glass xylophone. Then one day the glass bottles gave way to plastic jugs. My sister, barely a year old, had her photo taken and put on a carton of milk that the Adohr Farms delivered to our door. She had been named an "Adohrable Baby". Adohr was founded in 1916 by Merritt and Rhoda (spelled backwards, it's Adohr) Adamson on acreage dating from the California days of Spanish land grants and grew for a while to be the world's largest milk producer.

Then, one day, the milkman stopped coming. Whether mom had canceled the route or if the dairy had gone out of the delivery business I don't know. But after that time, we began to visit a drive-through dairy up on Chatsworth. It was spanking clean, with shiny washed driveways, and you pulled your car to the door and picked up buttermilk, margarine, sour cream, and cottage cheese.

I date myself, but those were also the days, in the early 1960s, when you telephoned the doctor when you were sick and he came to your home. I remember him coming after I had my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was eight. I had been looking forward, of course, to the promised, endless bowls of ice cream that were said to soothe the ache. But I couldn't eat any of it, I was so sore. Then the doctor came to the house, gave me an injection with a needle so large it would make most present-day patients faint, and I fell asleep.

Of course, in summers the Good Humor truck would roam the streets every afternoon when school let out. The driver would play the familiar tune through a loudspeaker atop the truck and when you heard it coming, you raced from the street where you had been playing, into the house to beg for money.

The Good Humor man also wore a clean, pressed white uniform and cap, and opened heavy freezer doors at the back of the truck that smoked with cold and held Sidewalk Sundaes and King Cones. Good Humor was founded in 1920 after Ohio candy-maker Harry Burt created the first ice cream on a stick. After he patented the Good Humor Bar, Burt assembled a fleet of twelve chauffeur-driven trucks, all with bells that announced the pending opportunity for a sugar high. Even the company name reflects the ancient medical notion that body "humors" could be adjusted to make a person happy. And I was plenty happy after eating my Sidewalk Sundae, at least for a little while.

You got to know your milkman, your Helms driver, and the local Good Humor man. You gave them small gifts at Christmas. Like a good bartender, the Good Humor man would remember your favorite ice cream and have it ready from the freezer as you ran up with change in your hand.

But those were the days when the world came to you, and even the visitors to your neighborhood had familiar faces and names, were part of the fabric of your life, and promised that comfort and prosperity would flow like human kindness to your door.

The Hearts of Soul

“If you ain’t got no money, ain’t nobody calls you honey,” Bo Diddley.

Granada Hills High School still stands at the north end of Zelzah Avenue, the same street where the first oil well in the San Fernando Valley was drilled in 1916. Granada Hills had been home to the Sunshine Ranch, where farmers tended well-manicured orange groves and grew apricots, walnuts and beans. In 1959, the same year my family moved to California, that Soviet shoe-thumping demon Nikita Khrushchev visited Granada Hills. He had wanted to go to Disneyland, but U.S. security forces were concerned for his welfare, so they chauffeured him instead to witness suburban splendor on Sophia Drive.

You'd hardly find a whiter place to live. Driving up and down our block on Gaviota Avenue, you'd see tidy lawns, each dotted with an orange tree spared when the orchards were paved for subdivisions. A Japanese-American family lived across the street. But other than the Kotas, every family resembled characters from 1950s situation comedy shows--in other words, bland beings of varying shades of white.

Over on Zelzah, we had two Blacks in our high school class. The boy ran track and the girl was a cheerleader. Among our massively huge graduating class of nearly 1,000, there were many Hispanics, reflecting the bussed-in students from neighboring Latino communities of San Fernando and Sylmar, but just our two Blacks. It would have been insane then--one year following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.-- to even think that America would ever elect a Black President.

Raised in a progressive Jewish family--my mother loved Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Jackie Robinson--I had great love for Black players on the Dodgers and Rams, and loved Elgin Baylor. But we were frightened of "Negros"--or as my father called them in unbridled Yiddish racism, "shvartzers". During the Watts Riots in the mid-60s, ash from the burning Los Angeles neighborhoods wafted over the hills and dropped like heavy snowflakes on our lawn. It snowed hatred for weeks. My parents locked the doors at night and worried that the burning would come to Granada Hills.

I had a sense of excitement for it, hoping something grim or powerful might explode into the vanilla calm of my staid adolescence. In my senior year, I took serious action: I joined Rinn and the Hearts of Soul.

Rinn wasn't very Black at all. In fact, she was Armenian. With her kinky Afro cut and wide nose, she may have passed for Black if you closed your eyes when she sang. Her two brothers played guitar and drums. But if they wanted to complete their soul band, they needed brass. So they recruited me to play tenor sax and heavily nordic Bruce Classpill to blow trumpet.

At first, we sounded like disparate parts of a rusted farm implement. But Rinn could belt out the standards. What we needed was rehearsing--and rehearsal space. Rinn said she'd look into it, and we were stoked when she picked us up at the high school band room and drove us to a house off of Chatsworth Street. It was a swell house for the neighborhood, on a large lot, with a cast-iron gate where we entered the yard. Rinn led us to a small studio that stood just beyond a wide, glistening swimming pool.

I was amazed to find myself inside a recording studio with sound-baffles in the walls and ceiling, an array of tape-to-tape equipment, microphones, mixing boards, and a genuine wonderland of guitars, saxophones, drum kits, and amplifiers. Rinn said we had the run of the place, but we had to take loving care of the instruments.

We'd work for hours on our set list: Knock on Wood, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Tracks of My Tears, My Guy, Chain Gang, In the Midnight Hour. Rinn had worked out choreography, too, so when we were playing, Bruce and I would kick our legs in a Slauson rhythm or Mashed Potato, raise our horns, and end with a two-step shuffle. We were Black as ignorant whites could be.

There was a baritone sax in the studio and I found a way to work it into the repertoire, especially during Do You Love Me and Come See About Me. The bari took all the wind you had, and when you played the low notes, your entire body vibrated with the pitch. You were part of the instrument.

When we broke, we usually went out through the iron gate, but once we went through the house, having been invited inside for lemonade. The owner was a tall, strikingly handsome Black man with gigantic hands that wrapped all the way around when he shook mine. His name was Bo Diddley.

I had no idea he lived in the Valley. In fact, he kept the house for two more years before moving to Florida, where he passed away in June 2008.

Sadly, Rinn and the Hearts of Soul never performed a live gig. We played to friends at Bo Diddley's backyard studio, but eventually fell apart.

During that senior year, our student newspaper was invited to interview members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers. But no campus organization would host them, and the principal forbade a visit on school grounds. I'm not sure I asked their permission before volunteering my home, but my parents were great sports about it, and one evening toward the end of the semester, four Panthers drove out from Watts and held forth in our living room before a group of students and teachers.

I can't remember the details, but one of the Panthers said something that terrified my parents. My father left the room and disappeared into the den. He later said I shouldn't "try a stunt" like that again. My mother said something about their suggestion that my parents give them our television and jewelry, but I wonder.

During my first semester at college in San Jose, I was asked by the Spartan Daily to cover a meeting of the Panthers on the east side of town. It was held in a small house, packed with Panthers and revolutionaries. The speaker was Angela Davis, and when she spotted me in the crowd--which must have been easy for her--she pointed to two bodyguards and they ushered me outside. They were polite and insistent.

I am certain today that if those misguided men had only known that I had blown bari for Rinn and the Hearts of Soul they would have let me stay.

Rocked

It began with a bang and ended in a series of distressing whimpers.

The Russians had finally bombed Los Angeles. It was not so much as a deafening boom, but a long tympani roll that gained power, then curled off to the distance in a series of decrescendos. The official report reads like this:

The 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as Sylmar earthquake) struck the San Fernando Valley near Sylmar at 6:00:55 a.m. PST on February 9, 1971, with a magnitude of 6.6.

Six-point-six...hardly worth a bother in the arcana of bad hands dealt humankind by our living planet. There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and my parents were forced to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But in the dark on this day, in my first semester of college, two minutes before my alarm clock would have gone off--except that there now would be no electricity or water for two weeks--I was lifted from bed, tossed like yesterday's pair of socks against the opposing wall, and then the bookcase fell down on me, raining a small stack of volumes, then more and more like an argument against illiteracy.

The roar had not abated when I crawled across the darkened room to the closet door, cutting my kneecaps on a mosaic of debris. Isn't that what the atomic disaster drill said: crawl to a small space without windows and sit patiently for your skin to melt.

As I sat in the closet, arms braced against the jambs for the inevitable end, you could hear the groaning of the earth as it rolled, the creaking of beams in the ceiling--hundred-pound monsters that could come down on you--glass shattering in the kitchen as cabinet doors opened and dishes cascaded to the floor, and members of my family, in their darkened rooms amidst whatever was truly happening and what their senses led them to believe was going down, screams of "Oh, God, let it stop."

The rolling stopped, along with the loud cry of the earth, and then we made our way in the dark to the front door, stepped out into the morning light that was beginning to rise up over the San Gabriel Mountains. My mother sat on the front step and fished for a cigarette. My father walked to the end of the driveway and, seeing little evidence of why any of this had happened, came back and shrugged. Up and down Gaviota Avenue people came out of their homes in their pajamas and bathrobes, hair disheveled, faces ashen and grim. Dogs, cut loose when the masonry walls of the neighborhood came down, raced up and down the avenue in packs, barking madly, tongues streaming from gritted jowls, their eyes fierce and searching.

The earthquake ruptured a segment of the San Fernando fault zone, a set of north-dipping, high-angled reverse faults along the southeastern margin of the San Gabriel Mountains. It caused more than 10 miles of discontinuous surface ruptures with average displacements of about 3 feet both horizontally and vertically. A strong aftershock sequence followed the main shock and included four quakes in the Magnitude 5 range. The quake claimed 65 lives and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, including the destruction of two hospitals, two freeway interchanges and the Lower Van Norman Dam. Damage to the dam caused concern that the dam, of the earthen bulwark type, might collapse, in whole or in part. Much confusion ensued as various agencies declared a need for the mandatory evacuation of 40,000 people, or voluntary evacuations of various portions of the San Fernando Valley below the dam. This depended on which agency was consulted, and often the evacuees were not able to be informed of the status of an evacuation in a timely manner, often returning home just as the police arrived to notify them of a new evacuation order, or evacuating at a moment when officials decided not to evacuate. Communication was made difficult by disruption of telephone, water, and electrical service.

Twenty minutes, a half hour after the quake, we had our first aftershock where we stood in the driveway waiting for the sun to warm us up. I was sitting on the hood of my dad's Dodge and it fell beneath me, then bounced back up, and kept bouncing for half a minute. There would be two week's of these, spacing themselves out, diminishing in strength, but their unpredictable intrusions at all hours made sleep nearly impossible. With each, you experienced the trauma of the first blow that morning.

It took a while for the police to send a motorcycle down Gaviota. The officer spoke into his handset as he drove along slowly, advising us to get in our cars and drive south--preferably out of the San Fernando Valley entirely. By now it was fully light and people went back into their shattered homes to gather their belongings. If the quake had lasted two seconds longer, there would have been no motorcycle; there would have been the thunder of waves, then silence.

It was hard to think of leaving in such a hurry, but we were terrified of the consequences of remaining. There was no power in the house; it was strewn with wreckage; and somehow water from the backyard swimming pool ended up in the living room.

There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and they had to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But this was our first quake, and as we found flashlights and searched for essentials to pack into the car. The second of the four-successive 5.0 aftershocks rocked us again and as we dropped our lights, we were plunged into darkness again.

I was in my first semester of college, so it was important to me to pack my books, in addition to my toiletries and a few days' change of clothes. My parents and siblings packed their own satchels.

Moments later we walked back into the sunlight and put our belongings in the trunk of the Dodge. As we backed out of the drive, you could see everyone in the neighborhood--up and down Gaviota--lugging their essentials to their cars. Apparently I was the only one taking books. People carried huge televisions, armloads of rifles, cargo boxes the size of pirate's chests, skiis, power tools.... It astonished me how many of my neighbors owned rifles.

Even as rescue and firefighting efforts continued, police arrested three looters in Newhall and reported others stealing form quake-damaged stores in the desert community and sporadic looting at shops along Hollywood Boulevard.

The giant tremor swayed Los Angeles' new forest of high-rise buildings. Jutting Occidental Towers three-building complex has been closed as building crews check for structural damage.

Olvera Street, a picturesque tourist attraction adjacent to the Plaza in the heart of old Los Angeles, is a shambles of collapsed stalls and strewn merchandise.

The quake was so intense it briefly knocked out some voice communications at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, according to a spokesman. The agency said that it lost telephone contact with the Long Beach control tower.

Buildings swayed and cracked from Los Angeles west to Santa Monica, northeast to Hollywood and Burbank, then throughout the San Fernando valley and the Saugus-Newhall area.

Up the street we drove, along the shops on Devonshire where looters had already found the shattered windows on supermarkets and drug stores and were racing out with armloads of food, radios, appliances, whatever they deemed valuable and entitled to steal. People on street corners sold huge jugs of water at insane prices.

That night we tried to sleep without success at my cousin's home at the farthest end of the valley from the damaged reservoir. The morning paper ran a photograph of a small pickup truck that had been crushed when a freeway overpass dropped on it, killing the two occupants. Nine people died in their beds at local hospitals when the walls collapsed. Statues toppled off their bases and three-hundred-year-old adobe walls crumbled at the Mission San Fernando.

Once, during the week, I was allowed back into my home with police escort, to recover my asthma medication, and walked the dim halls strewn with wreckage. In the middle of the afternoon, the house shuddered under the lash of another aftershock and I braced against the walls as they wobbled.

My world had been rocked off its foundation by the power of the earth, the stupidity of its petty residents, and the end of what had been a magical suburban existence just miles from the where they filmed the television shows that portrayed simple, funny, and normal families residing in tidy homes on clean, orderly lanes lined with palm trees and manicured lawns.