Black Beauty

I have a very good track record of losing my job and then immediatly going on a life altering adventure. When I lost my job at Midwinter I got on a plane to San Francisco for a moped rally hosted by The Creatures of The Loin - in the process riding a moped over the Golden Gate bridge and experiencing the feeling of crossing over into Heaven but that's another blog post for another time.

This week's adventure was 6 months in the making. Out of the blue my good friend Ben, *LOWERS SHADES TO LOOK YOU DEAD IN THE EYE* who lives in LA by the way, said that he got tickets to Masayoshi Takanaka's LA concert and said I could have the second one if I could make it down to LA. 

In the week that my job was collapsing I was planning what to do with my spare day in Hollywood. It occured to me that I needed to rent a car if I wanted to make it to Bob's Big Boy in Burbank and make it back to my Hotel, and visit other shit, in a timely manner. Scrolling through the list of options I discovered Enterprise lets you rent convertables, and I have never ridden or driven one, and it suddenly felt like it was a thing I needed to make happen.

I had settled on the idea of driving a Mustang the entire week, maybe going up Mullholland Drive, and parking by the beach to stare at the ocean. Enterprise in LA would probably only have white ones, but it might be good for me. 

After rolling off the plane and into a rental car shuttle bus, I got to visit LAX's city sized rental car complex which gives one a view of what 100% employment looks like as every 200ft or so there's someone in a uniform asking what company you're renting from and telling you where to go. The guy at the counter complimented my choice, and wrote down "STAR" on the rental sheet - the internal code for a convertable. 

Through a vast parking lot I was directed to the very end of, which contained The Convertables. That's when I noticed that, nestled between the Mustangs, was a black Mazda Miata RF. Suddenly my weekend was going to take a very different tone.

The ND Mazda Miata has been around for almost 10 years and pretty much everyone has agreed that it's the best car they make currently, and probably one of the best cars you can buy right now. The engineers made the ND weigh as much as the orignal NA Miata, but now if you roll it over you won't get crushed to death. In addition to the convertable is the Retractable Hardtop, or RF model. This is the version Enterprise has. 

I sit in the seat of the nicest car I've ever driven - and I press the big Go button. I adjust the mirrors and the seat and get my bearings. Then I hold the button that opens up the roof, and the clockwork like mechanism unlatches, folds up, and shuts itself into the rear of the car - like some kind of transformer. The next thing I do is tell the GPS where I'm trying to go because there's no way I am going to try and figure out how to get around LA. The third thing I do is I put on Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" because I saw the VW commercial where a car full of young people are driving a VW Cabrio at night with the top down listening to Nick Drake and I kept thinking "You'll never drive a convertable at night and Listen to Nick Drake" well who's the asshole now? 

Driving the Miata is hard to describe. It's a softer and more plush version of my 1993 MR2. The car is very complient, and despite being equipped with an automatic transmission responds every time I say "giddyup" in my head. The car has standard equipment that I'm not used to - such as blind spot warnings (I look anyway) and a transponder key fob so I don't have to take my keys out and turn the ignition - and a GPS system so i am not looking down at my phone at all times - and bluetooth connections so I can...listen to KEXP like I'm back in Seattle. 

My hotel is in West Hollywood because I thought it would be fun to go to one gay bar while I'm in LA. After dumping my clothes I get very hungry and decide I'm going to go to In-N-Out in Hollywood. Seattle doesn't have one and the clostest one is 150 miles from the city, and this feels like an appropriate thing to do. The drive thru line goes around the block and i laugh at how long it is. In the process of positioning myself I rub the curb with one of my wheels like an idiot. Behind me a Waymo automated cab gets baffled by the line for In-N-Out and stops in the middle of the road and puts it's hazards on - which causes absolute chaos as the Waymo does not respond to horns honking at it. 

Despite the line going around the block I was only waiting about 12 minutes. It didn't occur to me In-N-Out would let you eat in the car and give you packaging just for this as they hand me a paper to put on the seat and then a tray full of your food. I circled the block and was so hungry I parked behind a dumpster to eat everything as quickly as I could. I feel like eating food in your car quietly is a uniquly American thing and speaks to the fact that there's no 3rd spaces for people but plenty of parking spots.

Ok yeah now I need to stretch the Miata's legs, and on my map is a very curvy road called Laurel Canyon Blvd that looks like it could be fun. I point the car down Hollywood and take a right. The walls of the hills start to enclose me and the road goes down to 2 lanes, which is when I realize this used to be a donkey trail hundreds of years ago because it is a gnarled knot of a road. Laurel Canyon Blvd is a series of tight hairpin turns on broken and splintering slabs of concrete and required my entire concentration in order to navigate upward. I was noting when the road was wet due to underground springs, the location of stoplights, and other landmarks. The Miata would go exactly where I asked it to go and was totally in it's element. Because it was night there was nobody else on the road, except for people that use it every day and are very annoyed I am not going 10 over the speed limit around the endless series of blind hairpin turns. 

On the return trip I opened the canopy again and put the car's transmission in "Manual" mode, this would let you use the tiny flaps on the steering wheel or the gear shifter to go up and down a gear, like a "real" manual transmission. I was quickly passed by a hulking SUV and then let some local traffic by - a humble Subaru Crosstrek - and tried to keep up. The entire time my brain was on fire and the car was in 3rd gear as I was reaching into my decade of night moped riding skills and concentration. In these conditions you only keep your eye on the road, scanning my vision from where I think the corner's apex is all the way to the exit. I get into the zone a little bit, I had the top down and only the music in my head. The roads tight turns and broken surface rumbled underneath the wheels. All the way back to West Hollywood where I could take a breather. 

The next day I drove up a mountain. When I had considered getting a convertable I was imagining going to the beach and staring at the waves while brooding about my future. Once I was sitting in the Miata I knew I had to drive up the mountain. 

Angeles Crest Highway is a road that snakes through the mountains north of LA. I became familiar with it because a car "content creator" I followed for years would use the road to test cars on. But really it's a playground for rich people in their supercars, motor psychos of various stripes, and commuters.

The road itself is some aged tarmac that's tan colored. Periodically on the way up there's turnouts for people who are slower to pull over, or for people to gawk at the mountains. Most of the locals use them for burnouts as they are all marked up with tire skidmarks. 

Then the rain started. I saw a bunch of dark stormclouds circling the peaks and thought "huh that probably won't be a problem" as I pulled over to close the canopy top. The road was slick with rain and I was mainly worried that fresh rain would wash away the accumulated oil on the road, making it incredibly slick, so I drove slightly slower. 

It was a Monday afternoon and so I had the road to myself, except for a little bit of traffic - Two cars passed me on the way up. The first was a Toyota Echo from someone who had the entire road memorized and was probably rather annoyed at this tourist lazily crusing up their daily commute route. I pulled over for them. Eventually another car, a Toyota GR86, started following me at a polite distance. After letting them pass they disappeared instantly. A few miles later I saw their car as a speck in the distance. On the way down a Honda S2000 flashed their lights at me as a friendly wave and I waved back. There was also a purple McLaren supercar of some kind followed by a brown BMW M2. 

At times I wasn't sure if I wanted to turn around or go all the way up to the road closure, the road just kept going on and on, twisting and climbing at a terrifying rate. My eyes would every once in a while dare to dart at the mountains around me for vistas, but I didn't want to fall into one of them so I never looked for long. 

The car performed excellently, I would wait for a turn, mash the throttle in the middle, and the car would trace the lines of the road perfectly. The snaking highway is unpredicable and I was going up for the very first time, so each turn was a new surprise. Most of the turns are obscured by the surrounding cliff, and while there are some guardrails they aren't everywhere. 

The road was closed at 3 Points. At the top was a massive parking lot with a single bathroom. It felt cold and I realized I was at maybe 5000 feet or so elevation and wearing a tshirt. I was a bit tired after a solid hour or so of mountain driving. But I looked at the swirling black clouds that were ahead of me and thought that maybe I should start making my way down.

Then the rain really started.

But I wanted to take some photos. I was anxious to find a scenic enough pullout spot, and I eventually found a very large one. The concrete was still warm from the sun, and the sudden rain meeting it was evaporating off the surface - steam rising from the ground. I parked the Miata in the middle and took a very cool photo

 

Then the rain really really started. I wasn't particularly worried even as the rain turned into small hail pellets, the road got wetter, and the automatic wipers went faster and faster to keep up with the deluge. I also wasn't particularly worried as I went lower and lower in elevation, the rain getting thick enought to come down in sheets, obscuring my vision for a second or two at a time as I was still above 3000 feet. What I was really concerned about were the motorcyclists who were going UP into that mess. I also started to wonder if I was using the brakes too much, which would lead to brake fade and eventually flying off the cliff. 

Even with the downpour, traffic behind me was eager to get ahead. I pulled over for some kind of SUV that was in a hurry, only to catch up to them later. I stopped one last time to take a few more photos. The rain pelting my skin as I saw the rain clouds part in the distance over LA. A few miles later I would be back in Glendale at a mall, trying on pants. 

"Nothing can go wrong" became my sarcastic mantra as I nosed the car through unpredictable LA traffic. I worry about everything, and suddenly being thrust into a crisis of unemploytment and housing instability during an undeclared great depression would make anyone want to crawl into bed and never get out. I felt like a certain level of delusion was needed for me to endure the unpredictability. It worked. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was the clean air. I've havent felt blind optimism like this in a very long time.

People treat you differently in a Miata. My entire time in LA nobody honked or flipped me off. Sometimes people would even wave me through or past traffic. I wonder if this was because I had the top down the entire time and they could see the person inside. Or maybe it was because I was in a "nice" car and was therefore "important". And because of the rain the air was a lot cleaner the two days I was there. I experienced a fake version of LA where people treat you nice and the sun is always shining and the air is clean. 

I thought about moving to LA before dropping off the Miata. I maintain that my one mistake was not taking the Miata to Mexico and starting a new life. It was a cloudless Tuesday afternoon and I had just filled the car up with Costco gas. Google maps was sending me through random side streets to get around traffic, and I was stuck in place for 5 minutes before it was revealed that I was stuck behind 3 Waymos. I dropped the rental car off with 3 minutes to spare and gave it a loving pat on the quarter panel for a job well done, like I do with all my machines.

It's going to take a long time to recover from the burnout, find a new place, find a job. And in between there's going to be even more mini disasters. And through it all I'll keep repeating the phrase "Nothing can go wrong" because it's funny to me.