TWENTY FREAKING YEARS AGO IN OH, FOUR DAYS FROM NOW-- oh my holy farting God has it really been that long? So old, yet I still feel young and stupid, or maybe just stupid, anyway, though I do LOOK young . . . but I digress -- Anyway, it was a few hours into Monday morning on January 17, 1994 (still Sunday night as far as I was concerned) when I called it quits after an eighteen hour work-a-thon, leaving two artist buddies still there toiling away. My house in West L.A. was about five miles from Activision's offices at the time, and I slammed the car into the driveway (top down, of course) at almost exactly four A.M. I figured I'd crash until ten-thirty or eleven then float back into work, which didn't sound fun because I was freaking tired but whatchagonnado. I had the pleasure of catching my roomdog awake at that hour sitting at my computer playing a game he claimed he didn't like and didn't intend to play, a new thing called "Doom" or something like that. Ho ho, you is busted, mofo. I staggered off to my bedroom, kicked off my shoes, flopped onto the bed ("I'll get into bed for real after I lie here a second" -- yeah, right), and that's all I remember. I was out instantly. "Tired" ain't the word for it.
I woke up almost exactly half an hour later, annoyed as hell that anyone would wake me up. Then some of the fog lifted and I realized I was alone in the room with the light off and door shut, but it'd felt like someone was shaking me awake with a gentle rolling motion that was still going on. Welcome to Southern California, land of the earthquakes. It felt like a magnitude three-and-a-half, maybe a four. They usually last no more than 20 seconds or so and then it's over, I always thought they were fun. I didn't see any reason to get out of bed, and had good reasons not to, chief among them I was still mind-obliteratingly tired and just wanted it to be over with so I could go back to sleep.
The rolling turned into kind of a sharper movement. Roll roll roll roll roll rolll roll roll roll wham wham wham WHAM WHAM WHAM and the room was lit up with the blue flashes of transformers exploding on power poles outside. There was a foot-high stack of floppy disks on a table by my computer that I heard hit the floor one at a time in a never-ending cascade. I remember thinking "
, a big one" followed by the blissful realization "I don't have to go to work tomorrow!" and stayed in bed. After it ran its course, I'd almost returned to a serene, relaxed sleep -- when I remembered that no sleep is truly satisfying if you get blown up by leaking gas appliances mid-dream. Grunting and swearing, I located my shoes (the power was out so: dark) and staggered out of my room to find my roomdog had the exact same idea first, which pissed me off because I'd really wanted to stay in bed. He also cheated and used a flashlight, taking some of the fun out of it. I staggered back to bed and slept the sleep of the just until about two in the afternoon, when roomdog awoke me by knocking on the door with news of exactly how bad the earthquake had been. Freeways were down (most notably the 10), the power was out everywhere, casualties, general state of emergency. We'd just been to the grocery store a couple of days before, had plenty of beer and other recreational substances on hand, lots of ice, and were able to kick back in idle luxury for several days. The phones stayed up where we were, but almost nobody could get through to bother us, which suited me fine.
Activision was completely and utterly trashed when I went back several days later. Not one thing remained on top of another thing. The office was busting at the seams with people by then, there had to be four times as many cube-dwellers as there were when I started, so Bobby had been thinking about moving anyway. We relocated next door to the tenth floor of what was then the World Savings tower (it's some other bank now) on the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. I was the last person to drag their gear out of the old shop.
There's more to the story, and I have to split so I'll post it later (or won't, depending on if I feel like it or not) except for a few notes: A few of my friends had their apartments trashed beyond repair and in the confusion following the quake we lost track of them. I took my other roomdog (roomdog #1's girlfriend -- I owned the house and rented the master suite to the two of them) into Santa Monica for a pharmacy run, and a TV store was being looted just as we passed (slowly, traffic was a nightmare) but somehow the Culver City cops made it through the jam and came booming into the parking lot, all sirens and lights. I later ended up being roomdogs with both the artists that were still there, at different times -- one of them had gone home to his apartment that faced the offices from right across Barry Ave., the other one stayed to finish up and was still there when the quake hit. The guy who'd gone home heard him leaning out the window yelling "I SAVED!!" He'd managed to shut down the render farm just before the power went out. What became of my then-roomdogs is pretty interesting, too.
Does anyone remember a scene in Terminator 2 where Ahhnold is riding a motorcycle down one of L.A.'s concrete-sided "rivers"? The waterway used in the shoot was Centinela Creek, and the backyard of my house bordered directly on it. Judging from the pattern left in the dust by objects on the shelves, the house moved three-quarters of an inch to the northeast. The only damage we got from it was that stack of floppy disks strewn all over, and a big silver cup-type trophy (won by a relative of roomdog #2's for winning the Elgin Road Race in 1912) fell down and got dented. Just a couple miles north, entire buildings were deemed unsafe to enter and had to be demolished. One of my friends that got scattered to the winds lived in the second story of an old house in Santa Monica -- I drove by there a few days later 'cause I was in town and thought I'd look her up, but the house was vacant. The whole front had fallen neatly off and was lying on the lawn, otherwise intact. Her furniture was all still there, looking like a diorama.
I am the only person I know of who went back to sleep when it was over. Everyone else in Los Angeles I ever talked to about it stayed up all night, for reasons I will never understand. One of the big aftershocks that hit several weeks later was pretty interesting, too, but I gotta cut this off before I'm late and/or bore myself and everyone else to death.
=s
I woke up almost exactly half an hour later, annoyed as hell that anyone would wake me up. Then some of the fog lifted and I realized I was alone in the room with the light off and door shut, but it'd felt like someone was shaking me awake with a gentle rolling motion that was still going on. Welcome to Southern California, land of the earthquakes. It felt like a magnitude three-and-a-half, maybe a four. They usually last no more than 20 seconds or so and then it's over, I always thought they were fun. I didn't see any reason to get out of bed, and had good reasons not to, chief among them I was still mind-obliteratingly tired and just wanted it to be over with so I could go back to sleep.
The rolling turned into kind of a sharper movement. Roll roll roll roll roll rolll roll roll roll wham wham wham WHAM WHAM WHAM and the room was lit up with the blue flashes of transformers exploding on power poles outside. There was a foot-high stack of floppy disks on a table by my computer that I heard hit the floor one at a time in a never-ending cascade. I remember thinking "
, a big one" followed by the blissful realization "I don't have to go to work tomorrow!" and stayed in bed. After it ran its course, I'd almost returned to a serene, relaxed sleep -- when I remembered that no sleep is truly satisfying if you get blown up by leaking gas appliances mid-dream. Grunting and swearing, I located my shoes (the power was out so: dark) and staggered out of my room to find my roomdog had the exact same idea first, which pissed me off because I'd really wanted to stay in bed. He also cheated and used a flashlight, taking some of the fun out of it. I staggered back to bed and slept the sleep of the just until about two in the afternoon, when roomdog awoke me by knocking on the door with news of exactly how bad the earthquake had been. Freeways were down (most notably the 10), the power was out everywhere, casualties, general state of emergency. We'd just been to the grocery store a couple of days before, had plenty of beer and other recreational substances on hand, lots of ice, and were able to kick back in idle luxury for several days. The phones stayed up where we were, but almost nobody could get through to bother us, which suited me fine.Activision was completely and utterly trashed when I went back several days later. Not one thing remained on top of another thing. The office was busting at the seams with people by then, there had to be four times as many cube-dwellers as there were when I started, so Bobby had been thinking about moving anyway. We relocated next door to the tenth floor of what was then the World Savings tower (it's some other bank now) on the corner of Wilshire and San Vicente. I was the last person to drag their gear out of the old shop.
There's more to the story, and I have to split so I'll post it later (or won't, depending on if I feel like it or not) except for a few notes: A few of my friends had their apartments trashed beyond repair and in the confusion following the quake we lost track of them. I took my other roomdog (roomdog #1's girlfriend -- I owned the house and rented the master suite to the two of them) into Santa Monica for a pharmacy run, and a TV store was being looted just as we passed (slowly, traffic was a nightmare) but somehow the Culver City cops made it through the jam and came booming into the parking lot, all sirens and lights. I later ended up being roomdogs with both the artists that were still there, at different times -- one of them had gone home to his apartment that faced the offices from right across Barry Ave., the other one stayed to finish up and was still there when the quake hit. The guy who'd gone home heard him leaning out the window yelling "I SAVED!!" He'd managed to shut down the render farm just before the power went out. What became of my then-roomdogs is pretty interesting, too.
Does anyone remember a scene in Terminator 2 where Ahhnold is riding a motorcycle down one of L.A.'s concrete-sided "rivers"? The waterway used in the shoot was Centinela Creek, and the backyard of my house bordered directly on it. Judging from the pattern left in the dust by objects on the shelves, the house moved three-quarters of an inch to the northeast. The only damage we got from it was that stack of floppy disks strewn all over, and a big silver cup-type trophy (won by a relative of roomdog #2's for winning the Elgin Road Race in 1912) fell down and got dented. Just a couple miles north, entire buildings were deemed unsafe to enter and had to be demolished. One of my friends that got scattered to the winds lived in the second story of an old house in Santa Monica -- I drove by there a few days later 'cause I was in town and thought I'd look her up, but the house was vacant. The whole front had fallen neatly off and was lying on the lawn, otherwise intact. Her furniture was all still there, looking like a diorama.
I am the only person I know of who went back to sleep when it was over. Everyone else in Los Angeles I ever talked to about it stayed up all night, for reasons I will never understand. One of the big aftershocks that hit several weeks later was pretty interesting, too, but I gotta cut this off before I'm late and/or bore myself and everyone else to death.
=s
