Ghost Ships Of Los Angeles

Los Angeles, as I have stated elsewhere, is a city that might have been designed by eighth grade girls. It favors quick satisfaction and temporary interests: hamburgers and pink stucco, boy singers of fleeting reputation and illusory talent, overwrought Dr. Seuss blossoms as big as a gramophone’s trumpet, drugs that cost a week’s salary and disappear within 20 minutes. When I was learning to drive I was amazed to find that major routes terminate at brick walls or stands of scraggly palm trees, as if laid out by a city planner working in crayon. Throwing my Alfa into reverse upon the sudden dwindling out of a broad thoroughfare, I mentally picture a 12 year old, who, bored with laying out highways, rises and goes to dangle her legs in her parents’ pool.

The lack of direct routes to the things one wants in Los Angeles is made up for by the fact that seemingly anybody can be in charge here. It is possible to control Los Angeles by being the one with the most vivid fantasy about it. You might be from the planet Venus and have been sent down as the heir apparent to the Queen of Los Angeles throne. And okay, if you say so. Because not only will not many contradict you, you will find people ready to believe it. The people of Los Angeles are often without neighbors they know or close friends or even a regular coffee hangout, but in this age of surveillance, moderation and nuclear family busy bodies, there is still a strange thrill to living in what may be the most unsupervised city in the United States. There’s no one around to see that the grand and historic Ambassador Hotel is preserved, let alone an empathic eye in the sky watching every sparrow fall.

Over the last few years I have heard many lurid, unrelated stories about businesses around the city whose owners were murdered. I was amazed how these places just hummed along even before the chalk line was sponged away. I don’t recall a story like this that stuck in my mind while I lived in New York, but here there’s The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, whose owner was shot behind the candy counter. Also the swank restaurant Michel Richard on Robertson where diners emitted not so much as belch and kept showing up to sit on the outside patio to drink and chat while the chef’s body was barely cold. And the summer of 2003 saw the Zankou Chicken chain massacre, where the crazed Zankou patriarch gunned down all the female members of his family and then turned the gun on himself.

Each one of these stories worked its way into my mind and stayed there. I was disturbed by my own preoccupation with these locations—often going out of my way to drive by the purple neon façade of the Silent Movie Theater in particular—until finally I realized what these creepy landmarks meant to me. An enterprise where the boss has vanished, but still the lights come on, the “Open” sign is put in the window, and the customers file in is a vessel with no captain, a Ghost Ship like Los Angeles itself.

There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now that perfectly describes the vertigo of Los Angeles’ postmodern power vacuum: Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard happens on a surreal nighttime firefight illegally taking place upriver in Cambodia. “Who’s in charge here?” he asks a stoned soldier amid the colored smoke and palm trees and psychedelic tracer rounds. The soldier barely turns to look at him. “I thought you were.”

*Thanks to "RCL" for correcting a couple points in an earlier version of this article.

Comments

[RCL]

Well, the Silent Movie Theatre was closed for about two years after the shooting, so it didn't exactly hum along. The Zankou murder-suicides were in 2003, not last summer. Andre Coffyn's murder (1989)took place right as the Patissiere was closing--the place was virtually empty. So, I hate to spoil a good riff, but there's tich too much urban legend in tying these incidents together.