Freeway Addiction

When I first moved to L.A., I avoided the freeways. But it only took me a week to realize that you can’t get around in a city this sprawled without accepting that the multi-lane monsters are the only effective way to travel. What I didn’t expect was that I would develop a freeway addiction. I’d speed onto the 210 even if I just had to go 10 miles down to road or, sometimes, I’d automatically drive onto the freeway without even thinking, heading toward the city when I had merely meant to drive up to the supermarket.

During my freeway addiction, I listened to Lou Reed’s Heroin at full blast. No song could have made a better driving companion, turning everything that passed by my window into a spine-chilling thrill. Even in traffic jams, Heroin worked wonders. Lou would be singing, “When Im rushing on my run/ And I feel just like Jesus son,” and I’d be thinking, “Look at all these people, stuck in traffic, not getting to wherever they want to go. Isn’t it great? Here we’re all stuck together in this mass of humanity?”

But I think that the main pull was that Heroin, just like the freeway,had every thing to do with mindless compulsion and danger. There are crazy drivers in L.A., which means that you have to be on the defensive at all times and listening to Lou Reed’s heedless voice put me on defensive driver autopilot, desensitizing me to everything but the motion of cars on the road. I still don’t know how I always managed to get off at the right exit.