02/16/2024
When published in 1973, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was possibly the most ecstatically reviewed novel of the second half of the 20th century. I read many reviews of it but never bought the book. I did, however, once pick it up in a bookstore and randomly opened it up toward the end of Pynchon’s memorable set of stereotypes about my native Los Angeles freeways, which are now known, more logically, by their numbers, but were then known, more evocatively, by their destinations:
The Santa Monica Freeway [the 10 west of downtown; the 10 was the San Bernardino Freeway east of downtown] is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego [the 405], nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena [the 110 north of downtown Los Angeles], nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor [the 110 south of DTLA]. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks.
Similarly, the last line in the movie version of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 quasi-novel/quasi-journalism Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Dr. Raoul Duke plotting his escape from punishment for his transgressions in Las Vegas:
There was only one road back to L.A. — Route 15. Then onto the Hollywood Freeway, into obscurity. Just another freak, in the freak kingdom.
Whether the Santa Monica Freeway or the Hollywood Freeway deserves the crown of the Freak Freeway I shall leave to Pynchon and the shade of Thompson to debate, but I must say that Santa Monica versus Hollywood seems like a more fun argument than one over whether the 10 or the 101 deserves that title.
Similarly, naming freeways after beach towns like San Diego and Ventura gave them a certain glamor even as you sat in traffic jams in L.A. suburbs. That the town of Ventura didn’t quite live up to its gorgeous name
wasn’t too bad because it led to Santa Barbara, which does.
The problem, of course, with the old names was that they were not very definitive. For example, sometimes the San Diego Freeway’s northern sections were described as the Sacramento Freeway. After all, the signs on the 10-Santa Monica Freeway for northbound on the 405-San Diego Freeway in West Los Angeles read “Sacramento,” which must be baffling to newcomers to L.A. who aren’t sure and don’t care which direction is the state capital 425 miles away.
I can recall thinking at the time, decades ago, that “ghetto-suicidal” was an overly harsh description for the Harbor-110 freeway through the South-Central hood. Were blacks really that bad drivers? They didn’t seem that bad in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s.
But then Pynchon was a brilliant novelist and I was not, so it appears he has won in the end.
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