I went to secondary school in Massachusetts, which is in the chilly north-east of the United States. The unforgiving Massachusetts weather was responsible, some say, for the flinty and unsentimental character of its inhabitants. They were frostbitten malcontents who chafed under the yoke of the British king and were grouchy thorns in the sides of citizens from places with warmer, more gentle climates.
Icy weather, it is said, clarifies the mind.
Back when I was a student, often I would run to my morning class with my hair still wet from the shower. And more than once, in January and February, by the time I got to class big clumps of my hair were frozen together.
What this tells you is two things. First, that I’m old, and was in school before men routinely put what hair stylists call, for no apparent reason, “product” in their hair. Call it “styling gel” or “holding mousse” or whatever you like, it doesn’t freeze.
And second, that it’s cold in the northeastern part of America. From our sunny patios and breezy beach pathways in California, we call that part of the country “back east”. It’s back there, back in the cold and the wet and the snow. When we say “back east” it seems that we’re talking about a place in the past. And for many of us, it is the past. “Back east” is where we left, on our way to show business and sun and palm trees. “Back east” is where the uptight and hidebound past is. California – “out in California” is how people put it – is about freedom and licence and liberty.
“You’re from back east, right?” someone once asked me, which was supposed to signal from the tone and the phrasing that I was displaying some kind of east coast reticence about something. Which I was. The questioner was a writer on the staff of a show I was doing, and he and his partner were pitching an episode that was, to me anyway, on the wrong side of risqué and smutty, and I was squirming a little and saying something like: “Do we really have to go to that level?”
“I’m from out here,” he said. “I’m a Californian. We didn’t grow up with levels.”
Which isn’t really true, but the point he was making was that it does something to a person when their hair freezes, they have to bundle up and they step inadvertently into calf-deep puddles. The clichés about “uptight back east” and “laid back out here” have been rehearsed endlessly, but there’s no getting around the fact that there’s something bracing about the cold back east. The weather in Los Angeles – mild and sunny and totally unchallenging – has the opposite effect. Living in Hollywood can make you stupid.
I’ve lived in Los Angeles for more than 25 years. My head is soft and my brain has begun to droop and dull with the endless sunshine and the non-stop pleasantness. I wrote a script a few weeks ago that reminded me of other scripts I’ve written – and worse, of other scripts other people have written. That’s not a good sign. So, I’m heading back to the cold weather and the frozen hair for a little firming up.
I am moving, temporarily, back east.
I’m not leaving California permanently, of course. I’m not an idiot. On the day I left for New York, it was early January and I had lunch with some friends on a teak outdoor table under a big sun umbrella in my shirtsleeves. It was 21 degrees Celsius.
The next day, in New York, I walked around in the frigid sunshine, looking at different things, hearing different sounds, sidestepping puddles and patches of ice, and for the first time in a long while I felt sharp and tuned up. My fingers were numb, my toes were wet and cold, and I was aware that my ears were slowly losing their elasticity. It was near freezing, my lips were blue – and I loved it.
This is the kind of change I was looking for. So I spent the rest of the week working feverishly on a new script.
That was last week. This week, the entire city was expected to come to a skidding halt as a huge blizzard headed towards New York, incapacitating public transport, closing most businesses and making the roads nearly impassable. The city, in other words, would be a mess.
This, of course, is the other side of “back east”. These are the consequences of the bracing cold weather and the clarifying chill that I was so excited about.
So where am I?
I’m back home, temporarily, in Los Angeles. I caught one of the last few planes to “out in California”. I heard the governors of New York and New Jersey and the mayor of New York City warning residents about the blizzard shutting down the highways and the subway, and I did what rational people do: I headed for the sun.
As it turned out, the Great Blizzard of 2015 was nothing more than a few inches of dry snow, which – according to my friends who didn’t catch the last plane to California – has blanketed the city in dazzling white. I left at the wrong moment.
I’m still really excited about the script I’m writing. And eventually I’ll head back east to finish it. But right now I’m out here, in the sunshine, with wet hair, trying to get a seat on the first flight back east.
Rob Long is a Hollywood writer and producer
On Twitter: @rcbl