A Long Night’s Journey Into Day

Never before have I known sheer terror. I’ve seen fire, I’ve seen rain and I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end, but until my bedroom began bucking and buckling in the pitch-black darkness of Monday morning, never before had I honestly believed that my life had just gone into sudden-death overtime.

I had not left a 4:30 a.m. quake-up call. Walls were swaying. Lamps were wiggling. I did not get out of bed. Bed got out of me.

Being alone didn’t help. (When does it ever?) There was a ka-foomp and then a rude little rumble from the pit of my house’s stomach that rose in volume, like a jumbo jet about to lift off. Man, I remember that rumble. It was the last sound I would ever hear. It was the last company I would ever have. I pressed my palms against my chest to keep my heart beneath the flesh. Nostradamus had dropped by for breakfast. He was laughing.

Earthquakes and I are strangers. We did not grow up together. I’m more of a tornado boy. For most of the earthquakes in California, I was out of state, out of mind. Even missed the one in San Francisco. Best World Series I never saw.

Lucky, I guess. Fear hasn’t paid me many visits. Nobody has ever pointed a gun in my face. Nobody has pulled me from a car, or from a fire. The most afraid I ever was, Steven Spielberg made me that way with a mechanical shark. True story. The last thing that made me chicken was seafood.

Until this manic Monday. Until my furniture was coming toward me and my cabinets began opening by themselves and until my floor made me feel I had planted both feet on a skateboard. My life did not pass before my eyes. Good thing, too, because then I would have had to watch the Buffalo-Dallas Super Bowl again.

Somewhere, glass was smashing. Turned out to be the kitchen, where, from the shelves, drinking mugs had leaped to their deaths. From the top of a staircase, my hands gripped a banister’s rails like a child’s on the handlebars of his first bike. My eyes zoomed in and out of focus. I was Jimmy Stewart atop a tower in a Hitchcock movie, desperate to save Kim Novak, but some camera operator kept twisting the lens.

Then the rumbling quit. Somebody later swore that the whole thing had lasted, oh, 10 seconds. I swore back that the whole thing had lasted, ha, 10 years. I was grayer now and eligible for retirement benefits. My son was in Little League and my daughter was dressing her Barbi doll. No, wait. My daughter was in Little League and my son was dressing his Ken doll. I was hazy on these details. I have no son or daughter.

The longest day of my Los Angeles life commences. I roam, room to room. A sanitation truck has clearly mistaken my domicile for the city dump. There is trash where before there had only been rug. There is junk in the sink. The quake has thrown everything into the kitchen sink but the kitchen sink. The microwave has moved two feet. The refrigerator has slid three feet. Together they have done the dance of the appliances.

Power, gone. Water, gone. No TV. No radio. (None that runs on batteries.) No news from the outside world. No outside world, for all I know. At 4:30 in the morning, you do not look out a window to see if any cars have gone into ditches. You look out a window and all you see are the ditches. Hell, you need a flashlight to find the window.

I begin a long night’s journey into day. First come the aftershocks. Then come the after-aftershocks. I feel as though some auto mechanic with his name embroidered on his pocket keeps connecting his battery cables to my wrists and zapping me with the juice. Morning becomes electric. I am AC, I am DC, see me glow.

Sunrise illuminates the room. Finally, I have vision. My palms are speckled with blood, from retrieving particles of glass from a floor. A phonograph is on the floor, its lid split in two. A rear exit door is sealed tight, the house’s structure evidently having shifted. I cannot budge it. Had another door shut likewise, I theoretically could be trapped inside. An unpleasant thought, my not being fireproof.

Bit by bit, I discover details. My friend Randy Harvey phones to utter the magic number 6.6, which is seismologistese for Almost But Not Quite Our Journey to the Center of the Earth. He lives six blocks away. His window pane has exploded. His television has toppled. His dog is so scared, he doesn’t have the strength to bow, much less wow.

My friend Steve Springer is speeding in his car on a desolate stretch of road, quarter till five. His daughter has narrowly escaped a building in Northridge that is so badly damaged, it will have to be condemned. My friend Mark Heisler is not far away, evacuating his family, taking them to safer ground. My friend Tommy Bonk is not far away, reassuring a small child. My friend Chris Dufresne is farther away, hurrying after the big noise to comfort his own son. His son needs only the comforter of his bed, having slept through the whole thing.

My friend Ron Rapoport is in touch with his place of work. He no longer has a place of work. His office building in Woodland Hills is a jumble of burst water pipes and fallen ceilings. His wife’s pottery is in pieces, all over the house.

I drift through my neighborhood. Lines extend from the doors of stores, like Russians in queues for coffee or shoes. Shop fronts along Ventura Boulevard are without windows. A bakery gives us this day the last of its daily bread. A hardware store sells water-heater compressors like they were hotcakes. A liquor store rations bottled water instead of booze. Employees from an office-supply store dispense double-A batteries to the needy, like crumbs to birds.

The jumbo scoreboard at Anaheim Stadium has tumbled. The stadium is 65 miles from where I am. Such is the reach of this beast, so long and so lethal. Such is the wake of this quake.

It is the day after and I am not afraid anymore. Nothing that surrounds me is burning, drowning or shaking. Much of what surrounds me is surviving and reviving. My house seems to have chosen to remain in the neighborhood. The toaster and the coffee pot have talked things over and have returned to where they were. We drank to the deaths of a dozen cups.

The TV’s on. I can watch a basketball game, a hockey game, whatever. I have no water, but I have hockey. I smell like yesterday, but I have life. The state of California is almost normal. The state of almost normal is California.

It is safe again to go indoors.