Walking in L.A.

I know, no one walks in Los Angeles, kingdom of the car, empire of the freeways. No one takes public transit, either, judging by the empty orange Metro buses and Rapid Rail commuter cars pulling out of the Mariposa/Nash Street station near my hotel. But I had a couple of hours to kill in the morning before my flight so I headed out for a walk.

After a 70-minute stroll I return, having passed all of seven people on the street. Now this is in a district of L.A. far from the movie dream factories, Hollywood Boulevard, the beaches, Rodeo Drive or Santa Monica pier. I’m a seven-minute shuttle ride from LAX in El Segundo — “the most business friendly city” — according to banners flapping from lampposts. In other words, another concrete commercial no-man’s land no different from what you’d find in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Buffalo or Boston.

In L.A., you could call it paradise interrupted. There’s nary a palm tree in sight.

Starting about 9:30 on a cool, overcast Tuesday morn, the last week in November, my jaunt takes me a few blocks north on Mariposa Avenue to Sepulveda Boulevard, where I turn left and head west. Sepulveda is an eight, sometimes ten-lane flat, straight-arrow highway that’d pass for an interstate with stop lights back home. Crossing it on foot is worth your life. I didn’t try.

The sidewalk along Sepulveda serves a purpose I know not. It’s a long, lonely stretch of cement block dotted with empty bus shelters and randomly-placed brown metal benches that make no sense whatever other than effecting El Segundo’s “friendly” vibe. I’m naked out here, there’s not a person in sight. And it’s beyond me that someone would or could relax on one of these benches, reading a paper, the traffic roaring by.

This is L.A.’s back, back, back lot. On the blocks of Sepulveda I cover I pass by the Powerlight Solar Electric Energy compound and 20- to 25-story glass-paneled office boxes housing the likes of IBM, NCR, Xerox, Raytheon, Mattel, Oracle, SAIC, Sun Microsystems, Continental Datagraphics, Malaysia Airlines, Air New Zealand, Thai Airlines and Boeing.

Across the boulevard sits the mysterious International Rectifiers office, a hidden think tank for Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger wannabes? The nearby International Garden Center has rows of fresh-cut Christmas trees and “snow flocking,” which seems absurd of course to a northerner. But this is L.A. after all, with its facades and facelifts and history of nifty film fakery.

Katmandu Bedding and Furniture is in the middle of a mattress sale. Next door the Just Massage studio works you over for $45 an hour. In the parking lot of Ralph’s, a supermarket chain, Rebek’s Juice in a small squat building sells Energy Berry with mega-antioxidants for anti-aging.

If you look, you’ll find clues that yes, this is L.A. and not Houston. Like the little “L.A. Yoga” magazine stand outside Rebek’s. Or the pink, orange and purple flower bushes that pop up along the sidewalk. Or all the black or silver Hummers and Beamers and Lexuses on Sepulveda. Come to think of it, all the cars seem either black or silver. Or the young dude behind the counter at Border’s with the two steel studs protruding from each side below his lower lip and the shoulder-length black hair and the shaggy beard and the black tee-shirt with “think” on the front, while Elvis sings Christmas tunes from the ceiling and a black guy just in from Atlanta who says he’s a stand-up comic hits up another long-hair employee, apparently a guitarist in a band, for tickets to his upcoming gig and the café in the back serving Seattle’s Best has five or six people with open laptops setting up shop and it’s ten in the morning.

But the idea as I see it is not to notice. Not on Sepulveda with the obligatory McDonald’s and Starbucks and Subway and FedEx Kinko’s and strip malls and the Chevron station and food mart and the Public Storage row of sheds and the 24-hour Walgreen’s that just had its grand opening and the five-minute Express Car Wash and the Grand Café Bar and Grille. In the hour-plus I’m out and about I don’t see a single home, an apartment, a condo, not one sign of people going through their everyday living except for The Lakes at El Segundo golf course with middle-aged guys and women toting their clubs and a series of steel towers planted across the course carrying 20-30 slightly sagging power lines.

The sheer boredom of this barrenness dulls the senses. Which is fine I think with the sales grunts and grinders staying at my Hilton Garden Inn or the Marriott Courtyard next-door or the Homewood Studio Suites down the street. The idea is to get on with your business; get in and out, hopefully on an earlier flight or an upgrade to first class.

I’m out here for two nights, having spent $946.80 on airfare, 11 hours in the air, 6,000 miles roundtrip, $183.76 a night lodging, for two meetings, one lasting 90 minutes, the other maybe a half hour. The first meeting boils down to Bernard, the small, thin pleasantly determined Brit, asking and getting the same rates for his ads next year, $80,000 or so. The second is a bullshit session with Craig, cranky partner of a small agency out in the farmlands by Oxnard 60 miles from our first appointment, who drives a pickup to his office, wears jeans, a tee shirt and a ball cap. It’s a bullshit session because the contract between our magazine and his client was a done deal last week and the wiry, mustached, southern drawling Craig, who loves to drop “Fuck this” and “Fuck that” and “I remember that fuckin’ rep,” and many references to “Fuckin’ Charlotte” his client likes RDG, the magazine’s publisher, and RDG always gets a kick out of Craig and wants to drop by to thank him for the business.

I’ve been out to L.A. ten or twelve times in the more than 25 years I’ve been on the magazine. RDG, who was 8 years old when I started editing the magazine, might do that in 18 months. Completely shaved of head with a goatee and an easy grin, overweight and given to wearing ill-fitting suits and no longer a tie, he’s on a plane every week selling two magazines and 300 or 400 accounts. Do this for ten or twenty or thirty years, depending on one’s endurance and income expectations, and why not persevere comfortably numb and rather blind to where the road’s taken you this time out?

With RDG in the over-sized silver Lincoln Towne car rental, “grandpa’s car” he calls it, driving up I-405 and then Highway 101 through the San Fernando Valley suburbs to Ventura County and Oxnard and Craig it’s all business. From 9:30 in the morning till 5:30 in the evening when on our day is done and then RDG always, always calls his 8- and 5-year-old girls at his ex-wife’s home in Detroit. Otherwise, there’s no radio, no music, no news, no idea that off to our left a Super Scooper is dive bombing into Malibu’s Corral Canyon, dropping thousands of gallons of water on the remnants of a fire that destroyed 53 homes over the weekend with 2,000 firefighters battling the blaze at its height. The rental Lincoln is a sealed-tight sales mobile bubble; no noise, no smells, no notion we’re passing through canyon country with its cactus and coyotes and bobcats. Not when RDG has a list of 20-30 customer phone numbers on his lap as he drives and he makes call after call on his wireless headset and scrolls through emails on his Blackberry. “Did you get my proposal? Do you want me to send another?” “Is Jeff in?” “Have you made any decisions?” “We’re closing January next Monday.” “How about I call you in another six weeks?”

He’s in a zone, 35 years old, at the top of his game, his only apparent distraction a live-in girlfriend with two kids who’s pushing for marriage. His resistance is bound to crumble, he knows it. But most of all, he loves the game, chasing and closing deals. “I’ll sell anything,” he says over dinner. “A $750 ad, classified, it doesn’t matter.” From what I’ve seen over the years with sales reps, he’s in a definite minority. First sales trip I ever did the rep took the afternoon off to tour old mansions on Rhode Island’s coast. RDG bitches about one of our reps who he can’t get on the road enough, about former reps who wouldn’t travel or answer his calls, about competitors who don’t travel. “Frank, fuck, he just drives everywhere and sends accounts two-line emails. Jackie, you think she gets on a plane at her age? She just chats with her girlfriends on the phone. I’d be bored out of my mind.”

So if you’re doing something like RDG’s routine week after week, a place like our Hilton eases you along with its clean, simple, tan and brown, tile and brick fake fireplace in the lobby, a free water bottle and cookies at the counter, a gracious Mexican waiter in the restaurant — “Sorry to interrupt your reading sir, but I have a delicious dish for you” — a flat screen TV that swivels any which way you want in your room, five pillows piled high on your king-sized bed, a Cardio-Theatre 12-inch TV monitor attached to the treadmills in the fitness center and of course a USA Today at your door every morning.

Being dulled out and disengaged helps some when the inevitable occurs: flight delays, mechanical failures, missing crews, ice storms or clients who blow you off, stand you up, or take their money to a competitor. Here’s a for instance: “Bravo!” yells a guard as I go through security at LAX heading back home. “Freeze. Back against the wall, sir,” another guard instructs me. All the commotion instantly stops. Silence. Everyone stands in place, bewildered. “All clear!” someone yells 67 seconds later. One of the guards kept count. As in a game, the start button is pushed and all the travel players are off and running again. “She wants to get back into consulting,” I hear a guy say in passing. “When I’m back in the office tomorrow…” says a woman on her cell. Moving through the first-class cabin to my seat a gentleman by a window has this to say on his cell: “My heart’s not really into telling you how you screwed the thing up but that’s my assignment so for future reference please say I was an asshole, OK? Thank you.”

Taking care of business, as Elvis used to say.