Just the Right Lights

"Just the Right Lights"

     The plan was to eat dinner outside.  After a rather tepid summer, we’d been laid upon by unseasonably hot weather for an early November.  Our son had a friend over to the house, and it was decided that we’d dine el fresco.  The kids were all playing croquet and Pig while the parents readied for dinner.  Impromptu lighting was set-up, cover for the fact that we’d never really solved the Rubik’s cube that was getting our backyard exactly how we wanted it.  The grass was in, the electricity had been brought out to the far side of the patio via underground wires, but the lighting for the table had never been set.  We gave a couple of battery-operated candles a try, but they were placebos in wax.  Long forsaken table lamps were dug up from the garage, along with an abandon paper Chinese lantern.  Soon, light shone on our tidy faux-wood table, ready for a delivery of pizza.

     I ordered the pizza from the car, giving myself time to stop for gas.  I usually have to stop for gas at the most inopportune times.  I always find myself without fuel when I have to take someone else’s child home, in so turning what would normally be an uneventful ride into an absolute nail biter. Will we make it to their house in one motion, or will I end up stranding my child and theirs by the side of the freeway while I call AAA?

     I don’t usually stop at that particular station, but I hadn’t stopped at my usual place either.  My usual place was closed for several months while it was defrocked, the familiar Chevron signs and colors being stripped away and replaced by something gaudy and unprofessional.  Apparently I have a hard time buying my fuel from gas stations with amateurish graphics.  What the possible connection is between quality of petroleum products and the professionalism of their logo design is beyond me. Sometimes I don’t understand myself, I simply recognize my insanities and press on.

     So, I didn’t go to my usual filling station.  I went to the 76 station on the way to the pizza place, where I turn off of Sepulveda and cut through a light industrial area of El Segundo to get to the corporate park where the pizza place is hidden.  It’s a depressing filling station, but it’s on the way, and I have always thought of the orange “76” spherical signs as one of the pinnacles of modern American logo design. 

     Apparently, all over that part of town, the gas stations are allowing sales people to set up tables outside their little mini convenience stores from which to sell spray-on snake oil, claiming it’s what NASCAR teams use to clean the cars before races.  I’d bought a couple of cans the month before, being caught in a weak, pre-migraine moment by a burly woman at the Mobile station on the way home from the kids’ school.  Apparently this concoction of Carnauba wax and god-knows-what (Linseed oil?  Elbow grease?) is meant to be sprayed directly onto your dirty car and wiped with a clean cloth, miraculously leaving your car with a perfect shine, guaranteed to be water proof, smudge proof, dirt proof, you name it.  I want my car to be smudge proof, so I bought two cans.  Of course, I can’t bring myself to spray this mystery mist onto my brand new car, so it sits, untouched, in the trunk. 

     The reason I bring this up is that at the 76 Station, there was a NASCAR spray cleaner table.  Luckily, the guy selling the spray believed me when I insisted that I had a can in the back of the car.  It might have been that I was so obviously reaching for the trunk latch as I said this, making it clear that I would rather take the can out of the trunk as proof than discuss NASCAR again while trying to fill my tank.  He complimented me on how clean I keep my car, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I use a special 20th Century method that includes water.

     Eventually left to my own thoughts, my gaze fell upon the sky.  The sun had been going down for a while, and the sky was speared with pinks and light blues, a his-and-hers baby blanket drawn over Los Angeles.  There was still enough sunlight for the passing cars to be well light, if slightly blue, yet it was late enough for the streetlights to have come on.  I actually took a moment to soak it all in, wondering to myself who would win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for this wonderful scene.  The lighting work was exquisite, and whoever was responsible was a master of his craft.

     I had to wait for the pizza.  I never understand this.  If I call and order a pizza, and they say it’ll take 15 to 20 minutes, and I show up 15 to 20 minutes later, how can it be that my pizza isn’t ready?  You knew I was coming.  You had the dough and the sauce and the oven.  Yet when I show up to pick up the pizza, you explain that you got a big rush of delivery orders.  What exactly does that mean?  That my pizza ended up being delivered to someone else?  No.  You guys just can’t manage a simple pizza parlor, that’s what it means.  It’s made even worse on those occasions when I call and ask for wheat crust and you tell me you’re out of wheat crust.  How the hell can you be out of wheat crust?  You make pizza.  They need crust.  People offer wheat crust.  If you sold out once, I could understand.  That’s how you figure out how much to order.  But over and over and over?  You’re idiots...

I digress.

     When I finally left with my pies, I noticed the light was still in that Golden Hour movie crews stand around for hours waiting to catch.  The MetroTrain glided by on the tracks above the corporate park, seeming to pierce the buildings as it appeared and disappeared. 

I got stuck at the light where the tracks go over Maple.  I watched as the train approached, passing in front of that surreal sky, the light still as perfect as a fine film.  Not a comedy, but maybe something foreign.  Almadovar, perhaps.  We see the train glide by in this perfect glow, the one the cosmopolitan crew waited and waited for, sipping espresso under the overpass until the light was just so.  If I let my foot off the brake, my car slides slowly forward, dollying the camera of my eyes so I can feel myself slipping underneath the train.

      All I saw of the pick-up truck was the door.  White.  It was a flash.  I don’t remember if I slammed on the brakes, or if I broke at all.  There was another flash; a single frame of film, a cliché from a student project that showed the traffic light was still red.  The truck glided by, perhaps a breath away from my bumper, moments from me slamming him or him slamming me.  The crew fell silent. 

     Maple was empty for a quarter mile after the intersection in both directions.  I crept toward the 76 station, waiting.  I expected the white pick-up truck to spin around every corner, it’s furious driving looking for blood.  He would pull from under his seat a baseball bat, one he keeps there in case of an impromptu pick-up game or a race riot, and he would use it to crush my skull.  I would do little to try and stop him; I would just lie down, to sleep under the shimmering baby blanket of pink and blue.

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