18 Years Ago Today

We were stepping out of the C&C club on Sunset Blvd in the wee hours of the morning after closing the club down.  We wouldn't normally go to a place like this but my girlfriend at time and myself had a mutual friend in town visiting from Colorado.  We all were fairly buzzed as sauntered down a very dark Havenhurst Drive to our car.  As we chatted and laughed at the night a white VW Golf rolled past and pulled into the drive way ahead of us.  Having your guard down in Hollywood is not a good idea especially in those days but its true enough today.  As the car stopped a young black man got out pulled a hood over his head and leveled a sawed off shotgun at my head.  He approached and demanded our money as he shuttled the barrel over each of our faces.  Its true time slows down and everything seems to get that much more clear and defined when something like this happens.  I handed him my wallet, the girls handed him the money they had in their pockets and no one said a word.  I had lost contact with the outside world at this point, there could have been a marching band passing during all of this and I wouldn't have noticed through the thumping of my heart beats and sound of air going in and out of my lungs.  The gunman started searching our pockets for anything we neglected to hand over.  Greedy son of a bitch.  My girlfriend had overlooked a $5 bill in her back pocket this did not please the hood.  He got the barrel in the face and a taunt of "Don't lie.  Next time it will get you killed."   Pretty chilling at the time.  As he was backing off I don't know why I did it but I asked him to give me my drivers license back as he wasn't going to be able to use a skinny white guys ID for anything and that he was just going to dump it.  He actually stopped and pulled out of my wallet and handed it back to me.  I couldn't believe I won that little victory in the situation.  That's what it seemed like a victory.  The whole incident only lasted a minute at the very most however it felt like an hour.  The adrenaline had dumped and nerves kicked in after the guy had left.  One of the girls started to lose her shit and started crying which is understandable.  We flagged down a cop who were amazingly all over the place immediately after the robbery.  We then had to wait for the LAPD and the West Hollywood Sheriffs dept. decide who's case it was as Havenhurst is the boarder line between the two jurisdictions.  We gave our statements to both groups and neither seemed to be very excited about taking on the case.  I remember the police lecturing us on late night Hollywood.  Yeah thanks.  After an hour I was able to get to a pay phone, yes a pay phone as cell phones were not in the picture for another 5 or so years, and cancel my credit cards and ATM card.  We were finally on our way home thinking we were having a really shitty night.  Little did we know that would be the best part of the night.
As we made our way down Santa Monica Blvd. back to our apartment in West LA we came to the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica.  We crossed the intersection at 4:31 am and world started to shake apart.  My initial thought was we had a blowout and that our luck was pretty shitty that night.  That only lasted about a second as I could see the car was actually bouncing sideways as it rode the waves of asphalt that were rolling down the road.  When I say waves of asphalt I mean the asphalt was rolling in waves just like the ocean without the white caps.  It was surreal and terrifying.  The power was awesome, it was all encompassing as everything was shaking.  The high rises of Century City were visibly swaying, the power poles were shaking so much the electricity was hopping the lines and arcing through the air in an incredible light show that would be entertaining if it wasn't so terrifying.   Transformers were exploding one after the other down the line.  And what made it worse is that it kept going and going and going.  It truly seemed like a very long time of  uncontrollable shaking and rolling.  Throughout the entire quake the vocal expression of terror grew as time went on.  The girls were full on screaming by the end of the quake I was cussing like a sailor then it was over as fast as it erupted.  The signal and street lights were all out as far as I could see down Santa Monica.  The building lights were all out.  The radio station was off air, nothing but static.  The only thing you could hear and it was almost as loud as the quake itself was a symphony of car alarms and building alarms from across the darkened city.
I floored the little Honda I was driving and got it up to 95 mph down the dark Santa Monica to get back to the house and what we thought was safety.  There were no other cars on the road in any direction down any side street, nothing.  It was incredibly creepy Night of the Commet type stuff.  As we pulled up to our apartment the neighbors were  all out walking around in the dark with flashlights, and this always sticks out in my mind, everyone had the same wide eyed open mouth expression on their face eerily lit up by the directional flashlights.  It was a solid 5 minutes after the quake before we were standing in our apartment building strangely enough the Melrose Place like pool was still sloshing around nearly empty as it spilling out most of its water during the violence of the shaking.  The ground apartments were swamped with water. As we made it up the stairs to our top floor apartment we noticed some large cracks in the building.  The apartment itself was a disaster.  Everything was off the walls, shelves and cupboards and scattered haphazardly across the floor in various stages of destruction.  A nail was stepped upon by one of the girls and needed to be addressed.  After that we just tried to clean up and get information.  The power was out, the gas was off, phones didn't work and the refrigerator was practically empty.  We were not remotely close to prepared to deal with this kind of disaster, no food, water, or as it would turn out money/credit cards due to the robbery.  We were truly screwed.   At least we could stay in our apartment that night.
After some very kind treatment from friends, coworkers, and Discover Card were were able to get money and food during the time it took to get our ATM and Credit cards straightened out.  You have to remember the business were all closed in our area, the banks and ATMs didn't have power, the phones were inoperable and there was no internet.  The grace of friendship is all we had for several days.  We were able to get our friend off to the airport once it opened up and it was there were able to contact Discover Card and tell them our story,  they forwarded us the money and if I remember correctly they removed the amount from our balance that next month without us having to pay it.  I could be wrong about that.  I remember they treated us like humans and I will always appreciate that.
The days after the quake were rough but once we had money to purchase food and water were better off than a lot other in Los Angeles.  The month of sleeping in shoes in the living room because the fear of aftershocks and building integrity sticks out in my mind as well.  It was very stressful
Oh and eight days after the Northridge quake my favorite Toyota 4x4 truck got stolen out of the parking garage.  So yeah it was not the best week of my life.