99 Miles From L.A.

ONE

He sings along when he drives. His voice won him awards when he was young and it’s far from unpleasant now, but he learned long ago that no one was going to pay him to be a professional musician in life. Still, he loves to sing. He holds the notes on the vowels because that’s the way to sound good. You can’t hold a consonant. In the car he always tries to imagine an audience because it makes a difference. You sing better.

The oncoming traffic becomes the blinding foot lights in his mind’s eye, the rain on the windshield stands in for that faint murmur of the crowd, the wet tires are cocktails being served. Even though you can’t see the people, you look straight ahead and you sing, outward, at all of them and to each one of them, simultaneously.

He had those dreams, yes, but he has had a lot of dreams that did not come true. This current one, though, this one’s going to work. Because it isn’t a dream, it’s a plan. And this is the very last part of it now. Everything else worked. All the three of them have to do is come together, keep their heads, and not fight.

He’s pretty sure she’s gonna be mad she was hit so hard, but it had to be done to make it look real. Ramon though, Ramon will be glad to see him, he’s damn sure of that. If he’s there. He said he’d be there.

Ninety-nine miles from L.A… He hums the words he doesn’t know.

She also could get mad because he was already planning how to see Ramon without her being there. Anyway, she doesn’t know about him and Ramon, so she can’t be mad. Even if she is, who cares. He’s spent his whole life trying to please people. No more.

He was supposed to drive to the desert tonight. Ramon’ll be out there too, but not at her Palm Springs house. They can’t risk that one of them has been followed. But who would follow them for a hundred miles without picking one of them up? If the cops were on to them, they’d’ve stopped the car by now. And if her husband somehow figured it all out, he’d be dead before he hit the 111.

Ninety-nine miles from L.A…

You know why the movie stars all went to Palm Springs back in the day? According to local lore, they were salaried and under contract to the studios who wouldn’t let them go further than 100 miles beyond the Studio Zone when they were engaged on a film, so they could be called back to set.

The Studio Zone started in the 1920s as a six mile radius from Rossmore and 5th street and slowly elbowed its way into a thirty-mile circle emanating out from La Cienega and Beverly. Literally, a circle on the map, drawn as if there were a compass anchored at that street corner. To this day, anything inside the circle is fair game to ask actors to come to set for filming without paying them for travel. Once upon a time, the scuttlebutt was that it also dictated how far they could stray on their down time. The furthest thing out west, just outside of the thirty-mile Studio Zone, is the Forest Lawn cemetery in Covina. And 99 miles from there? Palm Springs. Well, really you were still inside of the 100 all the way to Rancho Mirage, which is why some say so many of the Frank Sinatras and Bob Hopes had houses out there.

In time, it came to be known as the two-hour rule, but that’s likely a modern interpretation because before the 10 freeway was installed circa 1965, it would have taken a good three-plus hours to get from Los Angeles to the celebrity playground that was The Desert Inn. There’s an oft repeated rumor that the real reason the likes of Rock Hudson and Jayne Mansfield skipped out of Hollywood to spend weekends in this little sin city had more to do with morals clauses in their deals that restricted them from engaging in various and nefarious activities, and so getting that far out of town unofficially meant they were off duty. Even the gossip columnists let their hair down and joined the party.

He read all of this history right after she told him Palm Springs would be their getaway town.

Another weird fact: did you know you can’t make someone testify if they live 100 miles away from the location of the trial? It’s called Rule 45. A subpoena can only command compliance within 100 miles of where a person resides, is employed, or regularly transacts business in person.

That’s neither here nor there, though, since her husband would never let this thing end up in any kind of court.

Funny when you’re driving and you’re thinking and a song comes on and it’s got all the right lyrics. Well, almost right. He always thought the song was about being ninety-nine miles up the coast, driving towards L.A. and of course right now he’s driving the other way.

If you skip the middle verse, the lyrics could be about going ninety-nine miles away from L.A. But there’s no place that you would see a white sandy beach as you drive to Palm Springs. He thinks on that for a second. It could be that you live in Malibu somewhere off of the Pacific Coast Highway, so to get out of L.A. you would be driving south towards the 10 East, and the first thing you see as you are pulling out, off to your right, is the white sandy beach, which sparks the first memory, and so then you are turning the radio on and fantasizing about this place that is ninety-nine miles from Los Angeles.

Because, yeah, all of his dreams now were wrapped up in being far away from that godforsaken shithole, not going towards it.

He shook his head and slapped himself. Driving alone at night is always hard. You get mesmerized by the dark void. That’s why he likes to sing. It puts your mind on something else. The meaning of the lyrics. The sound of your voice. How you would sing it versus the rendition you’re listening to. How you could make it a hit. Maybe it should be the first song on your record. Or maybe it should be buried, a deep track and they discover it.

He hit replay so he could sing it again. He knew the cadences a little better so he was sure to do a better job this time.

The live Johnny Mathis version is really the only version. Art Garfunkel’s is muddy, and Dionne’s a goddess but her rendition of this one came late in her career so it’s comparatively over-produced. Albert Hammond wrote it so you’d think his was the definitive recording, and he had the #1 Adult Contemporary chart topper. But hits don’t mean a thing when it comes to judging quality—not in music, not in movies, not in art.

Hammond’s also the guy who penned and performed It Never Rains in Southern California which everyone thinks is an anthem about how pretty it is in the land of fruits and nuts, when really it’s about how crushing it is to dream of fame and success, and that’s the problem with Hammond’s singing. His writing, devastating. His voice? It lets you off the hook, you ignore the tragedy, remember the catchy part and forget there’s a whole goddamn song behind it. You can blame the audience, but that’s the singer’s responsibility. On second thought, maybe that’s Hammond’s genius. If you can make people sing happily along to your words that are damning their whole existence, well, that’s quite a trick.

Anyway, the point is when Mathis sings it, you see it. His hands are on the wheel. The rain is on the windshield, like tonight. It’s there.

He’d gotten ahead of the song, though, because the intro is long and there was nothing to imagine yet, but that’s normal when you’re a singer. When you’re a singer, the intro is the part where you have to feel what’s coming. You don’t just sit there, waiting for your first note. You picture the whole thing. You see it all laid out before you, like how he could see this whole deal right now, coming together the way it was planned.

What she’d say is that he could have found a way to apologize if he wanted to. But he knew not to get caught by that, he knew the answer to that trap. He was playing it safe. He was sticking to the plan. Which is ironic considering what he had already decided to do on arrival.

TWO

The way they met was sad. He liked to walk through the UCLA sculpture garden when he was in between classes or academic responsibilities. An adjunct professor of vocal coaching and music performance, his student s admired him and he’d often find one of them hanging out, maybe under the Rodin. Le Homme Qui Marche. Or leaning up against Zuniga’s Desnudo Reclining.

A self-described bi-sexual, he always felt this next admission marked him as cliché but he’d tell any one of them who asked that he liked the Henry Moore the best, the one called Two Reclining Figures. If he was going to picture himself inside any one of these sculptures, he’d tell them, he’d join the party on that one. That usually got a laugh and at least a raised eyebrow out of either sex he was talking to.

He vowed: never sleep with a student. Too easy of a mark and too depressing to think about why they want to be with you. It’s unethical, he would tell himself. But lunch conversation was ok, even if it got a little flirty.

This particular day he was in a mood and he didn’t care if he did something he shouldn’t. He’d just walked up the hill from Schoenberg Hall, after suffering through the professorial version of a prisoner going up for parole: Academic Review. Imagine sitting silently before a group of yahoos who hold your future in their hands. A gaggle of losers you wouldn’t talk to at a party, much less listen to their opinion on how you should conduct yourself. You know the type, with dandruff and bad suits. And those are the women.

These days the whole thing is made worse by a common practice that should never have been allowed in the first place: student evaluations. Not evaluations of the students, mind you. Written evaluations of the professors, by the often disgruntled and now fully empowered undergraduates. Towards the end of the term, some impartial emissary from administration interrupts your class, unannounced, and tells you to leave the room while they pass out forms that encourage constructive criticism of the instructor and the course itself. Imagine paying customers (the students actually refer to themselves as such) leaving Yelp reviews all the while knowing they are about to get a B instead of an A for their lackluster performance and middling talent that deserved no higher than a C minus, at best.

No one questioned his popularity with the students but, in Academic Review, the good notices get summarized and the bad ones get read aloud to you. After a couple of niceties, the Board of Yahoos who know nothing about you other than your name and the classes you teach tear in. Often rude, they call you, based no doubt on a remark from that idiotic kid who always sat in the front and interrupted you to say he knew better so, yeah, you told him to