Ash falls on your shoulders as you walk towards a salon for a manicure. You see the smoke. The air smells like your grandfather’s ashtray. It smells of other things, too, things that don’t belong in the air with palm trees and sunshine, like fear and sadness.
Less than ten miles away wildfire burns, but Los Angeles keeps going. There are deliveries to make, bills to pay, appointments to keep, items to sell. Time really is money, and capitalism keeps things moving, wildfire or no wildfire.
It is the first week in early January. A new year with all the renewal that change in the calendar brings. Champagne corks and confetti have barely been fully cleaned up, and already, multiple fires flare all around you, hopefully not an ending just as things are beginning. Some fires roar while others smolder, but all have the same goal: to consume. But it’s the wrong kind of consumption, not the steady beat of capitalist consumption that we all know, though like capitalism, wildfire is an insatiable hunger.
You live in an expensive city where every paycheck matters, and see the first wildfire driving home from work on Tuesday around 4:30 P.M., not only the billowing smoke inching towards the Pacific but real orange fucking flames reaching, reaching, reaching.
Wildfire.
Right there.
On the other side of your windshield, while you blast Madonna and dodge traffic trying to get to the grocery store before 5 PM.
You are now a witness to California history.
It has a name: the Palisades Fire. This fire will remain active for 24 days and burn more than 23,000 acres, reducing entire communities to charred husks. People will run for their lives, but not you. Your town comes close to an evacuation warning, but thankfully nothing happens. You need to keep working, like thousands and thousands of other folks who live paycheck to paycheck. That’s Los Angeles, a working-class city with beaches and McMansions. People who need to earn every day to stay where they are because most don’t have the privilege to leave when shit goes sideways.
All around these wildfires, everyone works or goes about their day or uses their paycheck in ways big or small that helps someone else’s paycheck, like getting a manicure at a salon because you feel anxious and don’t really know what to do with yourself on a Saturday afternoon four days into these wildfires where some people are evacuating and many others are hoping not to.
The ash that falls on your hair now–where did it really come from? Burning trees? Someone’s home? A life here in L.A. similar to yours? You walk into the salon and see other women doing the same thing you’re doing. There’s nowhere for us to go and nothing for us to do so we do this: we get manicures. We make our hands look pretty because our hands have nothing to do. We get coats of colors with names like “Como Se Llama?” and “Knock ‘Em Red,” and “Malaga Wine” (the one you chose), and “Living The Fanta-sea” and “Awe Night Long.” Who wouldn’t want to believe in such colors right now amidst all this gray? Who wouldn’t want to believe in the flirtatious possibilities of these labels on all these bottles of nail polish? Who wouldn’t want to step into and bathe in all these blues and pinks and reds or the bright neon party colors, the nail polishes reminiscent of one night stands and dancing till dawn? Because right now, as L.A. burns, a $25 fantasy at Lucky Nails is all you can afford to quell the anxiety.
At the salon, our hands on the table, our feet in the tubs, we watch the TV on the wall. No one says much. We have a glimpse outside of what is happening on screen behind the news reporters. We wait for bad news or good news. No one tells you how much waiting you do during a wildfire.
People joke online about the “102 days of January” because that’s how that month felt: an eternity of ash and smoke and uncertainty and the wildfire app going off every few minutes with updates and you sleeping in regular street clothes because maybe you’ll have to leave your apartment in the middle of the night. Throughout January, one wildfire after another barrels through Southern California, and no one sleeps. We’re all awake wondering, “What next?”
But is waiting survival? Not really.
Waiting at a salon is definitely not survival. Waiting at a salon is escapism. Outside, there’s a quieter survival all around L.A. that still haunts you.
Not the firefighters; they’ll be fine with all their skills and equipment. You’ve met them; they’re not fazed by anything. The smoke is so bad that many people are back to wearing masks like in 2020. What haunts you are the masked folks on the streets selling buckets of flowers while a masked traffic cop in uniform waves cars through the dystopia because traffic lights were blown out by the Santa Ana winds and no one knows where to go. This is another work day but with bad air. Everyone is masked up and working. All around you are construction workers and landscape workers and cleaning ladies and postal service workers and Amazon truck drivers and Uber drivers and vendors selling mango slices and masked nail technicians inside the salon with their tools and focus–there’s not a single empty chair. They hunch over women’s hands and feet applying nail polish so carefully because who doesn’t want to look their best when the apocalypse comes?
This is the survival that will continue, wherever the firefighters go, and you wonder if the American Dream is really a dream or an endurance test, the need to keep going, keep selling, keep delivering, keep earning despite the smoke. You live paycheck to paycheck but not like the guy selling mangos while ash softly lands on his umbrella cart, or like the guy delivering the mail or the woman sweeping the curb or fella who is praying that on this terrifying Saturday–where we’re all trying to act like it’s any other Saturday in L.A. and go about our business praying that these wildfires don’t destroy everything we’ve spent years building–this fella is maybe praying that someone wants to buy a bouquet of roses looking past their prime. Such a purchase would be an act of compassion, of charity. Acknowledge that the flowers don’t matter at all on a day like this and give the man money because that’s what makes this world spin even as it burns.
The woman painting your nails is grateful for your $25. She tries to upsell you on a spa pedicure and all kinds of things you don’t need or can really afford at the moment. You only want somewhere to pass the time, watch the news unfold in collective silence with strangers, and possibly appreciate a splash of color on your body. An hour where something feels as close to routine as possible because this dire need for money every goddamn day is the survival most of us can’t escape. Wildfires come and go, and more wildfires will come to L.A., but this, this twisted symbiotic tango between need and greed will push through regardless of what the earth and sky do. You have bills to pay. You can afford a $25 manicure on a Saturday but on Monday you’re back in the classroom and you’ve gotta make things as fucking normal as possible for students. Sure, you can talk about who lost what in the breakroom with other teachers, but in front of the kids, fake a little hope.
At school, many students and colleagues wear acrylic nails, some with jewels and elaborate designs. Manicured nails are social currency, and the small things matter, especially now. To have time to feel beautiful, to have time to oneself, to not feel pressured to be somewhere or do something you don’t feel like doing, but to look at your hands and admire what you see. Our hands reveal so much about us, what they can do or not do. Are they getting dirty fighting back flames, or are they soft, trim and as colorful as rainbows, ready to direct and wave and do the not-so-dirty work?
Gesticulate with beautifully manicured hands as you teach a lesson. Promise your students a bright future, especially if they feel scared and don’t understand how parts of their city became a hellscape. Tell them they are capable of changing the world because they are. Tell them you’re sorry about climate change and late stage capitalism and the oligarchy and the patriarchy and that you voted for Kamala and that you want a world where no one drives through ash and smoke to deliver Amazon boxes or mail or stand in shit air to sell limp roses and possibly overripe fruit but don’t say “shit” or cuss when you speak.
Clasp your manicured hands in that thoughtful way that teachers do, and tell your students with prepared optimism that it’s unfortunately another day indoors because of the poor air quality due to the wildfires but that you believe it will soon get better. That’s survival. Remind them the world will be okay, that they are safe, that there’s still happiness out there. Tell them colour makes us happy. Tell them to find new colours or rediscover old ones, that while the grey continues to smother us outside, the pinks, the yellows, the greens, the golds, the blues are lifelines, a way forward out of this destruction.
