by Graham Storrs

LA is a big, flat, monotonous, urban sprawl. Seen from way away, it is a place of high glamour – it’s Hollywood, for God’s sake! – but when you get down to the reality of it, it’s just mile after mile of cramped little houses squeezed into meagre little plots.

Jerry lived in one of these houses. He was quite pleased with it. It was a bit less cramped and a bit less squeezed than most. Even though, from the air, flying over it on the way to LAX, you couldn’t really tell it from any of the hundreds of thousands of others, Jerry could feel the subtle differences and Jerry thought he was doing alright.

Jerry’s anonymous house was in an anonymous suburb far enough out from downtown that he could afford it but not so far out that the commute would kill him. Even so, the commute was a pain and he often wished he could be closer to work and closer to the city amenities. You know. Sometimes he thought maybe living so far out wasn’t such a great idea but then, hey, if he lived closer in he’d be in some crummy two room apartment or something and Maggie would go mad in a week.

Of course working long hours and all that commuting on top meant Maggie had a long, long day on her own. It didn’t help that they were out here in the middle of nowhere, either, Jerry thought. If Maggie would just get a job or join a club, or something, you know, something so she could get out and meet people, maybe she wouldn’t be so low all the time. Of course, Jerry had to admit, Maggie thought moving out West was the biggest mistake they had ever made. She’d had friends in New York. Good friends. Hell, even Jerry had had friends there. People were just wrong: New York was a real friendly place. People talked to you there, they approached you. People were genuine and open. Here, said Maggie, no-one wanted to know. They were aloof, cliquey, false. The only people at home during the day on the development were old people. Retired people. They’d raised families here when the first houses were built, forty years ago and they had each other and their devoted families and they didn’t need any new friends, thank you very much.

And, of course, Maggie thought that Californians were all barbarians. Well, she would, coming from Cambridge, Mass.. She thought everyone who didn’t speak four languages, who didn’t have the general knowledge of a game show champion and who couldn’t tell the difference between French and Italian opera just from the overture was a hopeless philistine. She’d drive up one of their long, wide, straight roads and sneer at the jumble of tasteless store-fronts heaped along both sides. She said it looked like they’d had to bulldoze all that technicolor crap out of the way to get down to the pavement and had then just left it there. She missed real buildings, she said, buildings that looked like they’d been built to last and not just thrown together from old electrical appliance boxes. She missed the history. She liked the idea that the things around her connected back maybe three or four hundred years and, beyond that to an ancient, European heritage. LA, she said, went all the way back to last Tuesday. Jerry smiled and nodded, of course, he knew what she was saying but it made him feel real bad that he was the one who’d brought her out here and kept her here.

From the window of the airplane, Jerry found it hard to pick out his own house from all the thousands of similar houses strewn across LA’s endless, flat landscape. Nothing special about it to identify it, he thought. And his thoughts ran off, like a trickle of water that leaks out and runs across a worktop. His life was all like that. His job, his achievements, his house. Nothing special. Nothing you’d see from this altitude standing out like a tall tower or a splash of orange. He was doing alright, his job was alright, the guys at work thought he was alright. Being in love with Maggie was special alright but, somehow, the overwhelming ordinariness of everything was dragging it down. Flattening the tower, painting gray over the orange. He knew he was special too. He looked at the sketch on his lap. He’d worked on it off and on throughout the trip. It was good. Real good. But sketches were all he had time for these days. Somewhere along the way, he’d decided that being special was too risky, that he’d settle for alright. Alright cost a lot but it was a cost he could cover. He hoped.

And there, in the hallway of their LA home, Maggie looks at Jerry and Jerry looks at Maggie and for two whole blinks of their eyes, the life they have teeters on the edge of total ruin. No-one screams. No-one cries. Their faces remain perfectly passive, as if nothing is happening. Then Maggie speaks:

"Are you hungry?"

And Jerry answers:

"No. I ate on the plane.