Story: Midwestern Thoughts During 40 Hours in LA

I was in Los Angeles for the first time in twenty years the day after my first trip to Iceland. One day it was gulf-stream snow and volcanic rock, the next day it was Anaheim, California about a block from Disneyland. North Atlantic snowfall, blowing in sideways between me and big fuzzy mountains, is what I'm built for. Palm trees, yellow-green skies, and warm Thanksgivings are for other people and my brother.

Outside of a convention center and hotel rooms, I spent most of my time walking around Burbank, which is abnormal. I went to one Starbucks and one independent coffee shop, because that's how I thought you sample the local flavor in LA.

I got only one chance to refresh my opinion of LA, and I did it while driving through Beverly Hills and Hollywood at night. I saw Universal Studios, lit up but empty, from the back. I saw the glowing circuit board of LA from Mulholland Drive. I didn't see a single film crew.

This is what went through my head during the 40 hours I was mobile in LA:

• Everybody's windows are open. Everybody's curtains are open. People in LA want to be seen.

• Newsstands hang out with their magazines open to the sun and the wind, without fear of weather, which they don't have out here.

• Two people with scripts are sitting next to me in Starbucks. One holds his practically under the table, the other way up in the air, where everyone can see it. Three other guys have a meeting; one of them uses the word "preproduction," really loudly, in the middle of an otherwise normal-volume sentence. It's like a birdcalls and plumage.

• Weird to consider what's modern and what's not modern. Things don't age the same way here. Lots of early twentieth-century architecture is still around, from stucco storefronts to mid-century marquees.

• My brother says, "You get lost while driving in LA. You find yourself at an alien intersection and glance out your window where you spot Michael Chiklis and a camera crew shooting a scene of THE SHIELD and you know you're in a bad neighborhood."

• The grocery store in Malibu where the tabloids go to harvest photographs of stars dressed badly — that is, like you and me — and carrying bags of ordinary groceries looks like a mere grocery store, not a gold-plated celebrity grocery store. Around here, south of the high-price stores and ubiquitous LA Christmas lights, the streets are dusty plebian hills marked by Kentucky Fried Chickens, In-and-Out Burgers and sun-cracked, chunky parking lots. I'm only here at night on a Sunday, when it's all shut off and it all leads to the deep black nothing of the ocean, where Sunset Boulevard sinks into the west and America drops off into oblivion.

• Staying, over the course of one week, at the Hotel Klopp in Iceland, the Marriott in Anaheim, and my brother's place in Burbank reminds me how much I like living off the ground floor. Somehow, I feel a little more plugged into a city when I can look out the window and watch it breathe and move, and it can look back at me. Here, it's all short apartment buildings, spiny trees and decorative carports.

• Everybody knows I'm from out of town because I'm not wearing sunglasses.

• When I walk down the street with two cups of coffee or a bag of food, I just assume that everyone else assumes that I'm somebody's assistant.

• They say Scarlett Johansen screwed Benicio del Toro in the elevator at the Chateau Marmont. That's where John Belushi died. Whether it's true is less important than the fact that it's rumor here and, somehow, nowhere else. I thought all gossip echoed out from LA, across the globe.

• Hey, I think I saw that place in an episode of ALIAS.

• I am eating alone in a stylish, but not posh, pseudo-Thai fusion place, trying to look like the kind of professional writer who, properly disheveled under pointy hair and between headphones, belongs in LA. The hope is that I'll blend in enough to hear "real talk." The dream is, despite all my mockery and discomfort, to be discovered. Like the kind of producer who'd "discover" a strange writer in a Burbank fusion restaurant during the lunch hour, just because he's writing, is anybody I'd want to work for.

• 100% of the people that I have known or heard of called Shane live in LA. Growing up, I didn't realize this was a real name. As an adult, I understand that it is a real name only if you are, or will be, living in LA.

• My brother tells me about the fake houses on the Universal lot. They're built without backs on them, and without insides. They're just three convincing walls. Windows and curtains. He says this while we're driving through residential Hollywood near midnight on a Sunday. I can't see the backs of any of the houses. Most of them are dark. I don't know if they're real or not.