A slash indicates overlapping dialogue.
1
101
2
405
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1.0.1.
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4! 0! 5!
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101! 101! 101!
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Fuck I spilled wine all over my work dress.
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101! 101! 101!
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Are you listening to me.
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101 101 101 101 101
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This isn’t just about our least favorite freeways in LA is it.
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101 101 101! 101.
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That’s what I thought.
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101101101101
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Can you get the wine-off.
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Like the product Wine-Off or use any means necessary name brand or otherwise.
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A-ha! Words, not numbers.
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(Fast.)
101101101101101101101101101
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No!
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101 101
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Not just freeways!
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101 101 101 101 101
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You said words before! I love your words!
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101
… …
101 haha
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Oh come on!
This is about more than just freeways isn’t it. It’s about us / isn’t it.
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101 101 101
2
Oh so it’s like us-101 like we’re a class and this is the intro.
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101
(Performative inhale. Then: pitying.)
101.
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Yeah. Yep. Yeahyeahyeah…
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(Inflected like a sentence.)
101101!101101101101101. 101.
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Oh oh oh! Okay I get it. You think the 101 is a metaphor for how we can’t get through to each other so you keep saying it instead of what you really want to say to me which is probably something mean.
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101!
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I see. The freeway stands in for many memories.
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101.
2
Oh, okay. So this is about geographic distances and the emotional weight they carry.
(Wondrous, fast.)
It’s about how, in the early 20th century I think it was, there was a proposal for LA to get the best public transit system in the world. And how, if that proposal went through, we’d all feel so different!
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101
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But instead we got freeways, like the –
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(Sounds like “no.”)
101.
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Yes.
I remember when I was a kid, whenever we were stuck in traffic, my mom would always tell me the same story. She’d look around at all the cars and say to me, “this was never supposed to happen! Freeways were supposed to make you feel free. I feel like a captive!” So dramatic. She’d tell me that we’d be on the world’s best subway system if only Big Car wasn’t in bed with City Council. So the Council voted against the subway and councilmembers lined their pockets with car and freeway money. Rich people with cars, I wonder if they called them automobiles, that sounds like a rich person thing to do, anyway back then they would just soar from one end of the city to another. No traffic, ever.
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101!!
2
Gosh you’re so right. Why stop at the city? If you had an “automobile” in the early days of the freeway, my mom used to tell me that you could fly from one end of the county to the other! Or, when they built the 101, the state!
You know something, I’m just realizing this now, my mom told me this story so many times that I haven’t even checked to see if it’s true. Feel like it probably is. I don’t know.
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101 101 101 101
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Can you even imagine LA? Without cars? Or way fewer cars, anyway?
I mean what a cliche thought for a lifelong Angeleno, right? But still.
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101.
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Hmm.
(Pause.)
This is and isn’t about our least favorite freeways in LA.
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101!
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No, I picked 405. / I picked it because–
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101.
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Fair, but I don’t usually like to lead with the bad. You know me.
I had a thought but it’s not completely fair to the 405, I think.
Like on the 405 I also once saw something good, I saw someone pass a blunt around her car in the middle of rush-hour traffic.
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101
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True, it’d be best if they drove sober, but in fairness rush hour sucks, you gotta cope somehow—I don’t blame them.
Anyway, blunt, car, where was I, oh right! I was wearing those / work clothes
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101!/
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Right, these work clothes, I knew you were going to say that, I’m wearing my work dress right now, anyway we were stuck in traffic, and yeah I think I’m a square in this dress and I felt a little weird saying hi to these people who were clearly more chill than I am. But they seemed so happy, to be in the sun, to be driving, to be listening to music, to be smoking. And so I smiled at them. And the person holding the blunt kind of shook it at me a little as if to say cheers. And for that moment, even though they were cool and I was a square, we were together. On the 405. Or at least I felt together, um, with them.
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101?
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How do I cope with traffic?
Me, I prefer podcasts. What can I say. Words soothe me.
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101.
2
I’m gonna come clean. My least favorite freeway is the PCH. I’ve been saying the 405
2 (cont.)
because it’s low-hanging fruit and I thought you’d believe me. But the truth is I can’t stand the PCH. It’s my least favorite freeway.
I don’t like the PCH because it makes me think of my high school ex isn’t that so stupid. I’m so much older! I should be over this! Well, it’s not just about my ex. Anyway right after we broke up I drove the stretch of the PCH between our houses and cried my eyes out. This is about how, by the PCH, I see the mountains crash against the waves crashing against the shore. No? Okay, more on topic. It’s about how I look at the PCH and I see the concrete barriers separating all of us and our two-ton metal deathtraps and the ocean, and I think: if I wanted to, it would be so easy for me and my car to break that concrete barrier. It’s about how I see bikers decked out in gear that makes them look so stupid. And bike shorts are back in fashion now? I’m getting sidetracked. Where was I? My ex, sometimes I have to drive the stretch of the PCH between our houses and yeah it’s like a special street, the PCH, that stretch, it’s not like the other streets, it’s iconic, so it’s become an icon of my breakup.
I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the sadness I felt when we broke up ever again. Not the degree — that sadness, not other sadnesses. The one where I felt like my ex was my world, and I blew up my world. Just by growing. The sadness of me changing, and that change driving us apart, but no misdeed, so no clear redemption arc possible. No resolution, just difficulty. These are the things I think about when I think about the PCH, fuck. I’m so much older! I should be over this!
There is no getting over, the PCH tells me.
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101
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Yeah. And you must have all this with the 101.
1
(A “101” of recognition.)
101.
(Long pause.)
101.
2
It’s funny, there are so many places in LA where I’ve spent more time driving through them than, you know, there. Minutes, maybe even hours, cumulatively, just clocking glimpses of a place out the window, noticing more about the light and the sky and what kind of nature encroaches on the freeway than I notice the places themselves. There’s so much here I don’t know.
It’s weird. I love music but I listen to podcasts because I feel like music constitutes a
2 (cont.)
whole world, like some songs you want to just live in those songs but then I’m driving, right. And it hurts, the world around me doesn’t look like the music.
Every time I drive that stretch now, where my ex was, I remember that sadness but I can’t seem to feel it again which is its own kind of sadness, the sadness of change, of feeling different from your former self. I feel it, I’ve changed — and these roads.
I wish my memories paved them, that with each new layer of black street I felt me somewhere, the me that drove across that layer. But the truth is it’s just asphalt. They’re just roads, they’re just freeways and the people who are displaced by them, like I know what that’s like. It’s not just about freeways. They’re just roads and they’re… they’re just cars but the roads and the cars are nothing without people who drive them.
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101.
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You’re so right! And the passengers.
405.
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101
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…
PCH.
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Thank you.
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I used to imagine that, once you broke through the surface, underneath the roads everything was lava, fire.
A car alarm goes off. End of play.