SteakSauce

When, when will New York come back? It’s a city of energy. Energy defines New York. And how will that energy reconstitute itself? What about the tourists? What about the restaurants, the bars, the museums? Broadway, businesses — everything.

It was a day or two after that, that that I woke up with this line in my head, and I started writing:

I forgive you, New York.

I forgive you your snarl, your aggression, your hustle and hassle.

I forgive you LaGuardia and your summer stench of uncollected garbage.

I forgive you no cabs in the rain.

I forgive you the crusty, deceptive puddles of slush at curbside.

I even forgive you the Mets and no place to park and delivery trucks in the bike lane.

All is forgiven if you will only return:

the subway soliloquies of the homeless, the trains that never come, the trains that stop in the middle of the tunnel, the traffic,

the garbage trucks blocking cross streets, the jackhammering of construction, the hiss of smoke from a manhole cover,

the idling stretch-limo S.U.V.s, the drone of a million air-conditioning units, the drivers leaning on horns,

the city hum that never ceases, until it did.

I forgive you.

I forgive you now and forever.

How could I ever begrudge you your restlessness, your relentlessness, your lip, your effrontery, your appraising glance, your pushiness, your impatience, your disregard for social niceties,

when I knew all along that your great secret was that an extreme degree of ambition coexists in your streets with the empathy every New Yorker feels for a fellow New Yorker?

Only come back and all is pardoned: the tourists meandering in the theater district, your roads pitted with potholes, your crazy prices,

your dinner parties ending at 9:30 because tomorrow is another New York day and theres money to be made,

your awful basketball, your restaurants that have a table maybe in a couple of months,

your overcrowded sidewalks, your iPhone addicts gathered at the exit of a subway station,

your way of never ever relenting until you turn every one of your workers into a zombie by nightfall.

I forgive you the rats yes, even the rats and Ill throw in the roaches.

The swelter of August, forgiven.

The icy winter winds off the Hudson and the East River, forgiven.

The impossibility of getting across town, forgiven.

I forgive you the crowds, the craziness, the cruelty, the cursing, the complaining customers, the impatient merchants and the most uncomfortable cabs in the world.

I forgive you your kale salads, your restaurants that sell only oatmeal, your trends.

I forgive you your street preachers, your sanctimonious parents who drone on about their childrens schools.

I forgive you Macys during the Christmas season and Times Square always.

I forgive you your ticket-holder lines, your throngs blocking out the paintings at MoMA, your rush-hour subways crammed with humanity.

I forgive you the holding of subway doors, your drunks peeing and puking on the street.

I forgive you Penn Station.

I forgive you the Port Authority, yes, even that! I forgive you the brutal division of haves and have-nots.

I forgive you the bus to the cabs at LaGuardia-in-construction and the recording that tries to persuade you that the bus is really great news.

Look, I’ll pardon the madness of having AirTrain JFK start in Queens rather than Manhattan.

I forgive you the whiff of urine on a Sunday morning, the broken glass in Central Park and the way you persuade people that saying I may have a window next month is OK behavior.

I forgive you for driving me crazy at times, for making me want to scream, Get me out of here!

I forgive you everything without exception if you will only promise to reappear.

Please, do not be proud.

I know, we cursed you with irresponsible abandon.

Forgive us, as I forgive you.

We did not imagine the silence that could fall, the sirens that would fill the night, the sick and the dying, the doctors laboring on the 10th circle of the inferno, the ghostliness of shuttered stores, the empty skies, the canceled events, the post-apocalypse latex gloves scattered here and there. We took you too much for granted.

Yes, forgive us for not giving daily praise for the miracle of New York.

I know I did not thank you enough for those clear winter mornings,

for that dive I love on West 26th, for your tolerance, for your open arms,

for the sun glinting on the Empire State Building,

for your ampleness, for New York Noodletown,

for your secrets slowly revealed,

for your endlessness, for your boldness, for your churn,

for the Met Cloisters, for your humanity, for your wit,

for Coney Island, for the water towers, for the Staten Island Ferry being free,

for banking over the city into LaGuardia or J.F.K. and seeing you and thinking this is home,

for taking me in as no other city ever could.

Being a New Yorker, I was in a hurry.

I was forgetful.

You get that.

Please forgive me. Please forgive us all.

Ill throw in the pigeons.

Forgive you for every one of those awful birds.

Just come back, just return, please.

I know we can make a deal.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.  What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.  For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.  I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too.  We know it because we feel it.  The baby frets.  The maid sulks.  I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.  To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew.  I could see why.   The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf.  The heat was surreal.  The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.”  My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete.  One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight.  Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.  Anything can happen.”  That was the kind of wind it was.  I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.  The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel.  There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics:  it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.  Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.  In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime.  Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.  A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions.  No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances.  In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.  One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

Easterners commonly complain that there is no “weather” at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland.  That is quite misleading.  In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes:  two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.  At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.  The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.  In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place.  The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4.  On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour.  In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects.  On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control.  On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths.  On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself.  On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car.  On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour.  On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.  The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.  Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires.  For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.  Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.  The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.