"I fell in love on the freeway this morning," a friend of mine says, proving that spring in Los Angeles goes deeper than the shock of the jacaranda. "I stared and stared but he never looked up. And then my exit came and now I'll never see him again."
It is a local hobby, the drive-by crush. Occasionally, you see attempts at connection in classifieds or on the Internet -- "You: hot in a red Camaro with the bashed-in left taillight; me: staring from the cream-colored Cooper" -- but the chances for follow-up are pretty small.
The real dream machine in Los Angeles is not Hollywood, it's freeway culture and freeway culture is not big on follow-up.
Freeway culture is not about speed or billboards or fast-food joints or the mall-ification of America although it has somehow become synonymous with all of these things. Nor is it about cell phones or tricked-out cars or the SUV wars or even, when it comes down to it, transportation.
Freeway culture, like drug culture and art culture and culture itself actually, centers around achieving an altered state of mind. In this case, the high is derived from participating in two opposing actions. I am moving faster than I could ever run, but I am sitting still; I am in a crowd, but I am completely alone; the world moving by is often cruel, but I control all that surrounds me -- the temperature, the sound, the reach of the sun and rain. Anything is possible.
Can you feel the rush?
For all its purported body worship and collective gym memberships, Los Angeles is not a physical city. People visiting here are struck by the lack of direct contact required by daily life -- unlike in New York or Paris or Tokyo or Rome, you can go about your business for days in Los Angeles without touching another soul or even bumping shoulders.
The car makes this possible, but it is our concept of space that makes it desirable, necessary even. We believe in personal space and we mean it. We want backyards and front lawns; we want tables in restaurants to be far enough apart to walk between; we want stores the size of airplane hangars and malls as big as Levittown. Even our corner markets must be large enough to accommodate shopping carts, which we wield like body armor.
The secret to Angelenos is that many of us like to be left alone. If that seems a strange preference for citizens of the second most populated city in the country, then you haven't quite grasped the meaning of freeway culture.
