IT'S RAINING ASH ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
Like most things in LA, the horror of the wildfires didn’t reveal itself immediately—I had to go find it
I missed the LA wildfires thanks to a stroke of dumb luck, if that’s what we want to call it. On the morning of January 7, as the Santa Ana winds ripped off my apartment’s fences and left a shock of splintered wood, I boarded a flight to Brazil. Three weeks later, I landed back at LAX on the afternoon of the first rainfall. Dramatic scenes of billowing infernos and torched skylines had dominated the news. But watching the city through my Lyft’s window, I was struck by how La Brea Avenue looked exactly the same as when I’d left: neat rows of palm trees framing streetside taco stands and neon-lit strip malls, vintage convertibles in auto-shops and mid-century Craftsmen blurring into a postcard of the California dream. Like most things in LA, the horror didn’t reveal itself immediately—I had to go find it.
Only after I started looking closer did I begin to perceive the layer of trauma rippling in the air like a band of hot air, bending reality in its wake. The cute girls walking down the street carrying bags of groceries weren’t coming from a local Erewhon, but a FEMA fire relief donation station. In a city characterized by a pervading sense of social alienation, everyone was suddenly connected in a new network of loss and devastation through first degrees of separation: my friends had lost their homes; their friends and their friends’ friends had also lost their homes. Behind the closed doors of cars and living rooms, I heard all kinds of horror stories: friends spiraling into mania as they scrubbed toxic ash from their windows, or returning to their former neighborhood and learning that an elderly neighbor had burned alive, waiting for help that never came. My boyfriend biked to the top of Mount Wilson, and found himself surrounded by miles of blackened trees. Instead of smelling like burnt pine, it reeked of a trash fire—generations of plastics, fabrics, and other synthetic matter reduced to a nauseating chemical stench.
The fires had also altered the cultural landscape of the city. Every party, art show, and public event quickly shifted into mutual aid mode and drove donations to fire victims; artists raised funds for friends and loved ones. At the same time, the fires’ paths of destruction were localized to a few neighborhoods, leaving the rest of the city relatively unscathed. Thus it was also entirely possible to wake up every morning under baby blue skies, and continue cosplaying in the insouciant fantasy of perfection that Los Angeles affords. Despite the surreal disappearance of entire swaths of the city, life marched on.
This strange sense of a double consciousness—catastrophic devastation existing alongside picture-perfect normalcy—made me question what mental gymnastics are required to continue living in a hotspot of climate catastrophe. (Literally as I wrote this sentence, the room I was in started to shake—yet another reminder to Angelinos that the Big One is coming.) While wildfires are baked into the ecology of the earth in California, with the scraggly chaparral landscape depending on these infernal cycles to recycle nutrients and germinate seeds, my friends who grew up in LA said these fires felt several magnitudes more intense than anything they’d ever experienced.
Accelerating climate risk is also making many homes uninsurable, and many insurance companies are leaving the state entirely. For those who can’t afford the sky-high rates of the remaining carriers, there seems to be no other choice but to remove emotional attachment from personal property—a practice that borders on spiritual philosophy. My favorite LA partygirl Eve Babitz knew there was no point owning anything in Hollywood. “It’s a morality tale of the unimportance of material things,” she wrote in Slow Days, Fast Company. “Though there are those who will say it’s about how awful LA is.”
Here’s a question that could be easily dismissed as cringe: is there a spiritual angle to losing everything you own in an instant? One morning, I posed the idea to my friend, an editor at a psychedelic magazine, as we drove home from a rave. She rolled her eyes and told me that LA’s wellness influencers are already on it. “I’ve seen them on social media advising people who lost their homes to scoop up the ashes and put them on their altars… because the ashes ‘hold the energy of their ancestors,’” she said. “The ashes that literally contain asbestos!!!”
Thanks to its proximity to the inanity of wellness culture and Hollywood, LA’s response to the crisis was full of these sorts of absurdities. The Chateau Marmont, for example, offered free stays in their $800/night cottages to first responders—a move that earned them headlines in glossies like Vanity Fair and the Hollywood Reporter. But when I snuck into the cottage area one afternoon, I was disappointed not to find a single shirtless firefighter lounging by the sad-looking pool. The whole thing was likely just a savvy publicity stunt.
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The sad thing is that LA will probably come back as a whiter and more affluent city, with the fires deepening inequality and gentrification. Many families in Altadena, one of California’s oldest historic neighborhoods of Black-owned businesses and multi-generational homes, will struggle to build back their generational wealth, while people with the most social media clout have been receiving disproportionate amounts of donations due to the laws of the attention economy. Extremely wealthy people have also been asking for aid online, leaving out mentions of their bulging bank accounts. According to a well-connected friend, a certain nepo baby created a GoFundMe where she described losing the home where her “elderly father” would come to stay—that father, she failed to mention, also happens to be one of the most famous celebrities on the planet.
One month after the fires, a light rain caused stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway to shut down as fire-ravaged neighborhoods piled up sandbags along the streets to prevent a mudslide. On that drizzly afternoon, I visited Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. It was a drab scene, with the rain doing little to conceal the sharp aroma of piss piercing through the air, and few visitors to the garish wax mannequins offering cheap proximity to fame.
The irony of this iconic destination is it only takes a couple steps on the star-studded street before you realize that the Hollywood dream is dead, and its glamor exists purely in the imagination. These days, nobody comes to the heart of Hollywood but tourists who don’t know better, and even they get bored and clear out by evening when the streets are taken over by the real scene: drug fiends, sex workers, and colorful vagrants that rule over Hollyweird’s underground.
I was on assignment for Bloomberg to find out how tourism—an industry that is uniquely susceptible to crises and disasters—was recovering from the fires. The luxury hoteliers and real estate experts I spoke to on the phone had told me that business was already back to normal, citing the upcoming Olympics and other major multi-million dollar events as reasons why LA is too big to fail. The capitalists also praised the influx of capital from private investors like billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who, in a blatant power grab, had recently launched a nonprofit with corporate America’s biggest CEOs to rebuild LA. (You can read the rest of my findings here.)
On the streets of Hollywood, however, the narrative was murkier. The men working the bus tours looked bored and leered at me as I walked by, asking if I wanted a ride as though they were catcalling me. The only business on the block defying the slowdown was a Mexican sports bar—further evidence that bars and booze do well in down times. “Oh, people have been drinking here all the time,” said the bartender over the blare of a football game. “Even during the fires, they were ordering margaritas with ash literally falling from the sky!”
It became clear that the fires were just another crisis in a litany of pressures that were causing the bottom to fall out for the working and middle-class. At the tourist shops hawking identical rows of golden Oscar statuettes and stoner license plates, the Latina women working behind the counters debated amongst themselves why business has been slow this month. “Is it because of the fires?” one woman said. “No, it’s because of ICE,” the other replied, referring to raids by the government immigration agency that had been keeping undocumented workers off the streets. They turned to me and concluded, “It’s both.”
A manager at a vintage store had never heard of Bloomberg, but still begged me to write about his shop. “We don’t understand why people aren’t coming,” added one of the young workers, gesturing at the impeccably organized racks of clothes. “Look at how nicely color-coded everything is… you can’t find that anywhere else.” The hunched-over owner of a dusty emporium selling elaborate wigs and costumes—the whole scene a relic from a bygone era of Hollywood freak—squinted up at me and put it more plainly: “Business is DEAD!” he barked. “If you write something, say that if Amazon goes down, the world will come up.”
Over and over, the people I spoke to had the grim looks of those who knew their days of steady employment were running out. A man dressed in a Jack Sparrow costume who I ran into at a traffic light lamented that for down-and-out mascots, the line between unemployment and homelessness is often nonexistent. “Tourists think we get paid by Disney, so they don’t tip,” he said, resting his hands on the sword against his hilt. “At least I do acting and modeling to make some money. But a lot of these other guys, they don’t take care of their costumes, and they start to smell really bad.” His charcoal-lined eyes narrowed. “It’s hard out here in Hollywood,” he said. “The Joker and Batman? They just moved to Vegas.”
Some of my friends are now making plans to leave the city for good. The severity of the fires had shaken them out of a repose, and helped them realize that with the increasing inequality and climate risk hitting LA, the cost of continuing to live here—emotional, financial, spiritual—is just too great. The hyper-competitive post-fire housing market alone is enough to push people out. A friend who lost his house in the Eaton fire told me, “It’s fucking insane. At every rental I’ve toured, there’s like seven other people whose houses have also burned down.”
Another friend, who is making plans to move back to Canada, told me that he realized during the fires that he didn’t even know the names of his neighbors, and had nowhere to turn for help. Watching flames lick the black horizon, he suddenly understood that the city’s fractured sense of community is a liability in an era of climate collapse. “I want to live in LA, but I don’t want to die here,” he said.
Those of us who remain are left wondering how to brace ourselves for the future. The night after my Hollywood Walk of Fame stroll, I attended a meeting for artists and cultural organizers to process the crisis—and prepare for the next one. A circle of people from all walks of life gathered around plastic containers of salads from Erewhon in an artist’s neon-lit studio. A man sitting next to me at the table shared that he’d spent the afternoon filming artists as they returned to their burnt-down studios in Altadena—a neighborhood once housed a vast network of artists and musicians, and has now been effectively eradicated.
In the (still in-progress) documentary, a sculptor wearing a white hazmat suit, respirator, and goggles points out pink, polka-dotted ribbons tied to twisted pieces of iron in front of former homes. The ribbons look like something you’d wrap presents with, but are actually markers that dead bodies have been searched for here, she informs us. Then, she bends over and sifts through the remains for broken pottery that surround her caved-in kiln. Like many other artists, she’d lost decades of work, her complete archive wiped out overnight. “So much of your autonomy as a person and an artist is taken away. I wanted to control what [happens] to this artwork,” she says. Then she smashes the pottery into tiny pieces, destroying them with her own hand.
This scene still lingers on my mind. It seemed to clarifying a truth, or a lesson: in the doomsday-like future that has already arrived, the best we can do is to scrounge around for a sense of agency in the dust of what remains. “I wonder what it’s like to realize that you have nothing left after the fire—except, maybe, the people around you?” I asked the filmmaker. “Does it feel like an unbearable lightness?”
“I think that when you’re freed from everything you’ve been collecting, you’re left feeling completely rudderless, without an orientation to the world,” he replied. “More than a lightness, it’s a void—a black hole.”
Donate to Los Angeles’ artists in need, as well as displaced Black families impacted by the fires, by buying Leaving Records’ 98-track LA wildfire relief compilation, Staying. It features tracks by André 3000, Laraaji, Julia Holter, and many more.
great piece of writing