A 1999 LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK DELUXE EDITION, WITH NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN RECOVERED CHAPTERS
Los Angeles 1967
With gleaming detail and blinding precision, Lou Mathews freeze-frames a hidden corner of L.A.'s outlaw culture in the moments before it becomes extinct. The heart of the culture is the drive-in, where street racers meet to challenge their rivals and place their bets. This world comes to life after dark, lit by headlights and street lamps, a moveable feast of drag races, peopled with its own lost generation: oung men and women who have left high school but have no thoughts of college.Drifting from one dead end job to another, supplementing their income through thieving, doing the occasional stint in prison, and reluctantly entering the armed services when there is nothing else left, they live, and sometimes die, for the excitement, the danger, the money of racing. In the world of drag racing--fleeting and bittersweet, like the end of summer--the stakes the stakes grow higher and higher as, one by one, each player spins out and disappears from the scene: Here, we meet Vaca, crippled in soul and body, prefers the armor of his car to a wheelchair. The ex-con Brody--Vaca's driver--is the best street racer in town. Reinhard, a loner who has no one and nothing but the exquisite machines he builds and races. Charlie, the race organizer who tells the story. And Connie, who rolls her eyes at the whole parade, never without a sarcastic riposte, but who can't stay away from the boys and their toys.Stunning, bleakly beautiful, and laugh-out-loud funny, L.A. Breakdown paints a riveting portrait of 1960s Los Angeles, frozen in time yet disintegrating before our eyes with all the reckless speed of romantic era.
Lou Mathews
lives in Los Angeles below the Hollywood sign and is a fourth generation Angeleno. Married at 19, he worked his way through UC Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic and continued to work as a mechanic until he was 39. Since then he has worked as a freelance journalist, restaurant reviewer, and contributing editor at L.A. Style magazine. His journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Tin House, Mother Jones, and many other outlets—from underground newspapers and airline magazines to corporate house organs like Bob’s Big Boy Family News. Mathews has published short stories in more than forty literary quarterlies, including the New England Review, Short Story, Witness, ZYZZYVA, and seven issues of Black Clock. The stories have been included in more than ten fiction anthologies and two textbook series. He has received a Pushcart Prize, two Pushcart Special Mentions, A Best American Mystery Stories Special Mention, A Katherine Anne Porter Prize, as well as a California Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowships. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1989 and is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Teacher of the Year and Outstanding Instructor awards. L.A. Breakdown, was first published in 1999, when Mathews was 53, and it was picked as a Best Book of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times. His latest novel, Shaky Town, was published last year by Tiger Van Books.
Praise for L.A. Breakdown
"Mathews keeps the reader so firmly focused on horsepower, hand-rubbed black lacquer paint jobs and custom pinstripes that the small epiphanies that unfold here really do sneak up, as surprising and pungent as burning oil."
— Los Angeles Times
"What Lou Mathews delivers here is the perfect ethnography of Los Angeles hot rod worship culture in its golden era. His people are the errant working-class knights of the stylized tournaments of street drag racing and the drive-in damsels they adore and neglect, often in about the same breath. The way they talk is dazzling--funny and heart-rending by turns--and always completely real feeling. Among his other great gifts, Mathews possesses an ear as original as Harold Pinter's or David Mamet's."
—Carter Wilson, author of Crazy February and Treasures on Earth
"In his elegiac tale of illegal street racing in the late '60s, Mathews captures the essence of working-class Los Angeles. This is the beautiful and uncompromising work of a native son, an eastside hood who knows the score. In L.A. Breakdown, Mathews offers up a love letter to doomed knuckleheads everywhere."
—Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of AMC's Lodge 49
"Having grown up in the Valley myself in the fifties and sixties, remembering well the Bob's Big Boy and the Van de Kamp's, and having even cruised Van Nuys Boulevard even as I was never part of the culture Lou Mathews has caught so evocatively, I nonetheless can attest to how well he caught the feel of the landscape--the way there seemed to be big voids in the psychology of the geography, voids into which you could drive your life, sometimes to dead ends, sometimes off psychic cliffs, as Mathews' characters have done. But just as impressive to me, really, is the array of vivid characters whose destiny seems both defined and betrayed by their wheels--the juxtaposition, for instance, of Reinhard's 'fastest flathead Ford in Tulsa' with a future that just naturally seems fated for incarceration of one sort of another--as well as the developing nuances of all their relationships--Fat Charlie's parallel bonds with Donna and Connie, each trumping the other in some telling way, all while a world of upheaval seeps in around the edges and washes away all the meanings and codes of an experience shared in common for the last time. L.A. Breakdown is a very skillful and assured piece of work, moving and insightful and observant."
—Steve Erickson, author of Arc d'X, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Zeroville