A Presley tale, O.J. and the apocalypse: ’90s harbingers of Trump’s America

It felt comparable to a 30-year school reunion. Except that it was familiar landmarks, freeways, customs and right-side driving, not old faces, that were rediscovered.

In my brief return to America and Los Angeles, I felt the comfort of familiarity, as when you reconnect with school chums. Yet, there were telling changes that revealed our divergent paths.

In middle-age, I’d become less inclined to risky choices than my freewheeling, 20-something self.

Los Angeles had remained cavalier, an edgy place that people converged on to score bit parts in TV shows, to hawk screenplays, sell something or gamble everything to cross the border at Tijuana, just to wash dishes or clean for the rich in Bel Air.

No big city has such telegenic waiters. Or as many augmented physiques.

Returning to a place where I’d spent a few years in the 1990s triggered vivid flashbacks of the sheer weirdness of California/USA, of improbable incidents that I’d stumbled into that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Three strange events, almost worthy of LA’s dark noir novelist James Ellroy, flooded back in full colour. They were:

1. Getting evicted from Graceland (summer 1994) during Elvis week in Memphis. I’d gone there to write a piece centred on Elvis fans and their reaction to the (fleeting) celebrity marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson.

I quizzed visitors at the King’s underwhelming former mansion, seeking their thoughts on the nuptials of Lisa Marie and the gloved one. The security goons soon approached me. “Sorry, you’ve been asking about Michael. You’ll have to leave.”

I left the building, as per Elvis. Security escorted me to the hallowed gates. I didn’t remonstrate or raise First Amendment, freedom of speech rights.

2. Being detained and shaken down at the Mexico-USA border.

I’d driven to a Tijuana slum to file a story to Hong Kong about the assassination of the man slated to be president of Mexico, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta (killed March 23, 1994). Locals at the drab scene smelt conspiracy. They were grassy know-alls, to a man. “This is like [John F.] Kennedy,” a few said. Mexico ain’t a lone gunman-type of country.

In the rush, I’d taken an expired passport, only realising the blunder on the trip home. American border guards took me aside and plonked me in a room with a couple of hundred fellow detainees.

“That’ll be 100 bucks,” said the border control official, after the computer confirmed I had a valid visa to re-enter the USA. “Cash,” he added, slyly.

Me: “Did you say uhm, cash?” Subtitle: “Are you really soliciting a bribe (from a journalist, albeit a lowly one).”

Brief hesitation. “We’ll let you go this time.” How often does this happen, I wondered.

3. Before a 1993 interview with David Nilsson, the star Australian catcher for baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers, I inadvertently sat in an outdoor team meeting at Scottsdale, Arizona, with the Brewers’ triple A farm team (storyline – Nilsson was soon to team up with Australian pitcher Graeme Lloyd, the first time one Aussie would pitch to another in MLB). “We’re having a meeting. Can you wait?” Nilsson requested.

Addressing the meeting was Bill Wegman, senior starting pitcher for the Brewers. He began by explaining how he’d been blessed, as a baseball pro with a wonderful family etc. “But there was something missing.”

What followed was a pitch, as it were, for these young players to turn to Jesus – as in the saviour, not an outfielder from the Dominican Republic. It was astounding – imagine Patrick Dangerfield peddling Christianity to youngsters at Geelong.

LA wasn’t nearly as Godly as Indiana or the south, though cults and self-help gurus flourished. It was a sinful, multiracial, liberal enclave separate from “real” America. Like New York.

LA of the ’90s was at the vanguard of urban dysfunction, beset with gang violence, air pollution and non-existent public transport despite endless sprawls and malls. LA was so disorganised that both NFL teams fled (the Rams, who hosted my visit, returned in 2016).

I still liked it, moving there from San Francisco just after the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney King verdict, when south-central LA – the postcodes that birthed gangsta rap, Ice Cube, and co – burned. We felt a sizeable earthquake (1994) in which my apartment building bounced, as if on a trampoline, without collapsing.

The aforementioned Michael Jackson, whom I saw perform at the 1993 Super Bowl in Pasadena, was subsequently investigated by the LAPD for child sex offences (not charged then, large settlement paid to the accusing child). My housemate and I watched the police helicopter buzz past from our balcony as the cops chased O.J. Simpson down the freeway in his white Ford Bronco. I was mesmerised by O.J.’s trial, a circus that encapsulated America’s primal sins – race, gendered violence, a shonky legal system, celebrity/success worship, car chases and police excess.

Ava Gardner’s oft-quoted quip about Melbourne of 1959 – “the perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world” – gained currency, despite the actress never saying it when filming On the Beach in Victoria. Why? Australia was viewed as a backwater then.

I’d venture that Los Angeles is the metropolis of the apocalypse. It genuinely felt as if civilisation could end there, considering the fires, earthquakes, race riots, Hollywood’s amorality and LA’s role as epicentre for the Trump 2.0 border enforcement, when people were taken off the streets by ICE agents.

Many are lured to LA by the siren call of high stakes. Hit the entertainment jackpot, and you can vault the ladders of fame and fortune. But fall and it’s a long way down. Not much net below, either.

The parlous, punitive nature of American life was evident outside our hotel at Venice Beach, which, like marginally more upmarket neighbour Santa Monica, had been a hub for the homeless, the drug-addled – and for artists, hipsters and lycra-clad yuppies – even in my LA days. What other beach would have a statue of Jim Morrison (who founded The Doors at Venice Beach), as a point of civic pride, alongside a colony of body builders?

In Venice, you could literally smell one significant social change. It was difficult to walk more than two blocks, especially on the boardwalk, without whiffing a pungent scent of marijuana.

Our visiting party had noticed the dope smell in Woodland Hills, where we spent the first two nights, a sturdily middle-class suburb in the San Fernando Valley rather than a nest of Bohemian depravity. Clearly, the 1996 legalisation of cannabis brought a new aroma. Hitherto, air pollution in California was predominantly from car exhausts.

Dope wasn’t the only notable shift in the LA lifestyle.

Coffee was super expensive – costing the five to seven dollars we pay for a large latte, but in US currency – so 35 per cent dearer. Eating out was relatively costly, too. Rent, reasonable in the Clinton years, was unreasonable. I bought a decent electric shaver for $US13, though.

The post-pandemic cost of living is as much an issue there as here. Trump’s 50 per cent tariff on Brazilian coffee cannot have helped latte prices.

Friends had recommended wiping my phone of any content that could be deemed vaguely anti-Trump (subscription to The Atlantic?), to avoid the administration’s crackdown on designated dissenters. My instinct that these travel warnings were prematurely alarmist proved right; there were no more than regulation checks at LAX, no interrogation or phone seizure (mind you, we were shepherded into LAX by an NFL team, owned by a billionaire property developer). We were not post-modern gender studies professors brandishing Foucault.

Surprisingly, no one I encountered mentioned Donald Trump during those six November days, except for an Aussie friend I met for lunch.

This lack of Trump talk might have been seasonal. A lull between storms? Or because Democratic California is Trump-averse? My take: most Americans, even Californians, don’t engage in political matters as much as media, which now covers the United States (understandably) through a prism of Trump’s shock and awe outrages and dominance of the attention economy.

The America of my stint was replete with the same pathologies that became drivers of Trump’s takeover, and of the dis-United States. Note that my three strange incidents contained harbingers of Trumpism – the Mexican border, celebrity obsession and Christian evangelism. Fault lines – their cultural San Andreas – found political expression decades later.

Crucially, we did not have social media in today’s divisive, pervasive form.

The most dangerous activity came when one of our group, which included ex-NFL punter Ben Graham, called a car to transport four of us down the Pacific Highway to a Mexican restaurant.

Instead of an Uber, we stepped into a Waymo, the driverless taxi owned by the Google oligarchs of Silicon Valley.

The voice from the car’s system sounded very Google Maps – female and Grace Jones monotone. The steering wheel turned by itself, as if gripped by The Invisible Man. We laughed uncomfortably, hoping that the car would stop at the lights.

One might find a worrisome metaphor for the warring ’20s in the Waymo ride – is it machines and oligarchs, not free and engaged citizens, driving Americans now?

They’ve let go of the wheel.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.