Truly, there's no place in the West where you can learn to be alone better than in Los Angeles. You learn, for example, that unless you look like--and I mean really look like--Sharon Stone or Brad Pitt, no one you don't know will look at you. (Why waste a good glance at a nobody when, sooner or later, a real somebody will happen by?) Even more formative is the sort of high-speed, lonely closeness you get used to if you spend any time on the freeways. (At 70 miles an hour, you don't really want to get very close to any of your ballistic neighbors.) As well, in a place where absolutely anything goes, you learn to project a certain cool detachment, a sort of "thanks all the same but I'm going somewhere else" that appears as a slight tightness at the sides of the mouth.
A Most Solitary Place
He'd Been Ignored Often Enough in L.A. to Know What Being Alone Felt Like. But It Wasn't Until He Worked on the Cojo Ranch and Experienced Its Isolation That He Understood How Exhilarating Solitude Can Be.
A VERY FIRST PERSON
Indeed, born and raised in the wide-open spaces of Los Angeles, I'd learned not just to accept but even, at times, to enjoy my aloneness. I was a city kid from a town of challenges
that stretched, horizontally, over an area half the size of Connecticut. So when I went one summer to work at a cattle ranch a little to the north of town, I thought the solitude would be the least of my concerns.
I was wrong.
I'd wanted to do something different, but I hadn't expected the differences to be quite so complete. There were, of course, the obvious ones. I knew, for example, how to enter a freeway and cross four lanes of traffic in a single move . . . but I'd never ridden a horse in my life. I knew how to wake up at the last minute and make it to an early morning (9:30!!) class at UCLA in an acceptable state of semi-sentience . . . but I'd never had to get up to the sound of a predawn breakfast gong and be thoroughly ready for a day of labor by 7--at the latest. I knew how to make a 10-foot jump shot in the middle of a crowd . . . but I'd never dug a series of 3-foot postholes in the middle of nowhere. These, however, were mostly mechanical challenges and so, with a bit of practice and a few calluses, easy to get over.
What wasn't so easy to get over--what became, in fact, an almost insurmountable challenge--was the terrifying, utterly inescapable solitude. Aloneness I knew. After all, I had done the freeways, had ignored the propositions, had been ignored by thousands of people every day. But solitude? That, I discovered, I really didn't know.
