1st Person - Will Beall

We're asking writers with day jobs to send us essays about their work and their art. This is the first installment. Check out Will Beall. The essay contains some rough images, so proceed at your own risk.

It's not easy to write wild fiction about Los Angeles because the city just won't be outdone. L.A. mocks magic-realism and one-ups even the most fetid fabulation. This whole place is like a living organism that feeds on phantasmagoria, digests daydreams, and manifests nightmares. I mean, this is a town where Crips and Bloods vie for walk-ons on The Shield. Outlaw bikers hold an annual toy drive to improve their public image. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California.

       In 1995, in Michael Mann's movie Heat, a ruthless crew of bank robbers holds the entire Los Angeles Police Department at bay with automatic weapons in one of the most spectacular shootouts in cinema history. It's an audacious action set-piece that strained audiences suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. A lot of people just didn't buy it. Then, in 1997, a ruthless crew of bank robbers held the Los Angeles Police Department at bay with automatic weapons in one of the most spectacular shootouts in history. The shootout lasted over 40 minutes in broad daylight. More than 1,100 rounds were fired. The North Hollywood bank robbers, Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu, had supposedly studied Mann's film in preparation for their heist, but I suspect the North Hollywood shootout was more than life imitating art. I think Los Angeles is alive, preening and jealous. And like a hoary old vaudevillian, L.A. hates to be upstaged.
       Every week, this city conjures car chases that would send Bruckheimer quivering to his stunt coordinator in despair. I've been in a few of them, crashed my black and white during one recently. The wreck was very cinematic, suspiciously so. It's as though L.A. has come to believe its own Tinseltown hype. I guess it's the same with a lot of celebrities. Over the years, you could almost feel Los Angeles straining to live up to the legend of itself. And lately I fear, like a lot of celebrities, Los Angeles has gone utterly bonkers.
       Case in Point: About a year and a half ago, in a wildlife sanctuary just outside of town - a kind of retirement home for movie monkeys - St. James Davis and his wife Ladonna threw a birthday party for their pet chimpanzee, Moe. "Pet" might be the wrong word here because the Davises had raised Moe like an adopted son. The thing had grown up wearing children's clothes and eating cereal in the Davises' home, but they'd been forced to place Moe in this sanctuary after he'd blown a gasket, run amok in their neighborhood and bitten a cop. Gloria Allred, the same attorney who represented Amber Frey during the Scott Peterson trial, represented the long-suffering Davises in an unsuccessful suit to free Moe from the sanctuary. The Davises still dropped in on Moe almost every weekend, the way you'd visit a relative in prison.
       At his birthday party, the Davises had a little cake for Moe. Candles. They might have had party hats. I mean, why throw a party for a chimpanzee if you're not going to put him in one of those conical hats? Anyhow, some time during the party a couple of Moe's cellmates got loose and attacked St. James and Ladonna. The chimps ripped off St. James' nose, plucked out his right eye, gnawed off his fingers and part of his foot. There were heartbreaking rumors that one of the attackers was Bear from BJ and The Bear.
       I want you to think about that for a moment: This dude had his face eaten off at a birthday party he threw for his wrongly-imprisoned chimpanzee. Now, if I put that in one of my novels you'd say it was preposterously far-fetched and gratuitously grisly.

Last year, Sheriff's Deputies took down a Siberian tiger in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. The cat had allegedly escaped the home of a Tierra Rajada couple, but the creature might as well have materialized from out of a Vedic dream, like sacred perfumes coalescing into solid form. The tiger weighed in at 352 pounds. But how would I write a 350-pound tiger into the middle of San Fernando Valley without sounding like Gabriel Garcia Marquez on angel dust?
As I write this, there's at least one caiman alligator loose in the City of Los Angeles. His name is Reggie. He's six-feet long, probably 150 pounds. When Park Rangers first discovered the creature, some kids who'd wandered away from a picnic were trying to coax the thing out of the water with tortillas. I wouldn't dare touch a scene like that. You don't want to know what I'd do with it. The Croc Hunter went on the Tonight Show and promised Jay Leno he'd return to LA in the spring to catch Reggie, but then a stingray sent him home to Australian-For-Jesus and Reggie's still out there, getting fat on ducks and the hapless winos who wash their chonies in the lake.
Reggie was allegedly dumped into Machado Lake by an ex-LA cop turned alleged tweaker. When the LAPD raided this dude's pad, officers found three more alligators, a rattlesnake, piranhas and six, err … tomato plants. Now, if I tried to put those piranhas in one of my novels, you'd say it was, well, a little over the top. Come on, Will. Piranhas in LA? Please. Get real.

There are strange fish showing up all over Los Angeles, an invader species from Southeast Asia called snakeheads. They're vicious, alien things and they can walk on land, wallowing across the road like commandoes slipping under razor wire. I'm not making thisup. It's getting so I'm afraid to get into a black-bottom pool.
And what is the fiction writer to do with O.J. Simpson? The guy has a brief cameo in my novel, L.A. Rex. I'd even toyed with the idea of having O.J. pull one of my main characters aside at a party to confess to the murders. Outlandish, you'd say. Nope, no way. Sorry, Will, I'm not buying it. Then the Juice pens a book winkingly titled: "If I Did It" and gleefully confesses to the whole world.
And allthis time I'd thought Faye Resnick, well-known coke kingpin of Brentwood had led a Columbian kill squad to the home of the Juice's ex-wife, then framed the unsuspecting Heisman laureate for the murders of Nicole and Ron with the help of the entire Los Angeles Police Department. Okay, okay, even I find that one a little far-fetched.
But I won't be surprised when Michael Jackson returns to Los Angeles from his exile in Dubai drunk on manatee's milk, hijacks the Goodyear blimp, and crashes it into the Matterhorn at Disneyland. And I won't be disturbed when Animal Control captures a chupacabra. For an LA cop, the fabric of reality is coarse, but for an LA writer, craziness is a warm blanket.
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat. "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

- Read Will Beall's first installment
- Read Will Beall's second installment

Buy L.A. Rex

(Cover and author images: Riverhead Books)

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This entry has 1 comments: (Add your own)

#1 Comment from ccgifts3
11/27/06 8:17 PM | Permalink

Will, You hit the nail right on the head.

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1st Person - Will Beall