She was sleek as night wind, painted red, with a peanut-butter interior, a tuned-port motor with a factory four-speed.
Oh, man, said Danny Robinson, the things that 1986 Corvette might have done. He had been working on her for a while, ordered an ignition switch and was awaiting registration. She was a wrench-turn away from being road ready, and Robinson, a well-known tinkerer on Harriet Street in Altadena, could imagine himself behind the wheel, racing beneath the evening crows that flew westward above the San Gabriels.
“That was my dream car,” he said. “It’s gone.”
The wildfires that swept out of Eaton Canyon this month were terrifying, swift and fierce. They took Robinson’s home. Took his 1966 Pontiac GTO. Took the 1962 Impala. Ravaged his father’s old Ford pickup, driven up from Mississippi and preserved to remind the family of the patriarch who, more than half a century ago brought his wife, sons and daughter out of the Jim Crow South to the California foothills. But nothing hurt like losing the Corvette, the tires melted, windshield shattered, and fine lines twisted into a charred puzzle of metal and ash.
Robinson looked at the wreckage as if it were a beast hauled in from a war. But, he said, a man needs to know his blessings and move on. Enough preachers have told him that over the years. It’s a testing of the spirit you have to do yourself: “Don’t dwell on anything. If you dwell on things, you can’t move forward. It’ll clutter your mind,” said Robinson, 63, a big man with a loquacious air wrapped in a musical lilt. “You eat your dinner, and in the space after, you think of moving forward.”
Many of the houses on Robinson’s block are gone, including the home of his former neighbor drummer Kenny Elliott, who died of cancer last year and had played with Lou Rawls, Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Robinson’s friend, Danny Shigemori, who has lived on the street for 55 years and ran a landscaping business, lost his place too. So did the young man whose face popped up from behind a burned wall.
“Hey, neighbor,” he shouted to Robinson from the ruins.
“How you doing over there?” Robinson yelled back.
“Looking for some of my mom’s stuff,” said the young man, waving and disappearing behind the wall.
Robinson smiled.
“I’ve known that boy since he was this big,” he said, cradling his arms across his chest as if he were holding a baby. “There used to be a lot more kids here. I watched the kids growing up across the street. They went from pushing toy lawnmowers to driving big trucks. But then it got to the point when it was almost like a retirement community. Everyone was grown and moving away. No one was having kids anymore. It got real quiet at night.”
Robinson walked through the no-more rooms of his vanished house. Bedroom was there, kitchen there, living room, and then on to the driveway and his destroyed cars, including the Corvette, valued at $45,000, and the Pontiac, worth about $20,000. Tool crates, jacks, free weights and a bench press were scattered nearby in the sunlight, not far from where he had written the names of his family in cement: Charlie (dad), Minnie (“Mom, like the mouse”), sister Valerie and brothers Henry and Ronny.
A son of segregation, Charlie Robinson came to California first, sending for his family members, who traveled across the country by train in the early 1960s after he hired on as a truck driver. They started in Pasadena and moved to Altadena in 1979. “My last year of high school,” said Robinson, who after graduation would become a mechanic and a construction framer, working on cars on West Harriet Street on weekends and evenings. His father moved back to Jackson, Miss., but Minnie stayed with her children until they left home — except for Danny, who lived with his mother, escaping the flames with her around 3 a.m. on Jan. 8.
“My mom would take in people,” said Robinson, who is divorced and has two grown children. “If someone needed a place to stay, my mom would give them a room so they could get on their feet. My cousin came here from Mississippi and my mom gave her a room. She became a nurse, got her own job, found her own place. Then her boyfriend came up and went to school for truck drivers. They made enough money and moved back to Mississippi. And now they have a home.”
“My mom,” he said, “did that for a lot of people.”
Robinson said he didn’t come to sift the cinders, not today. That would be done later, when the debris and toxins were cleared and he could hire contractors with the insurance money to rebuild. He spoke instead of lost things: his collection of 400 miniature Hot Wheels cars and pictures of him with his uncle Cleveland Green, who played offensive tackle for the Miami Dolphins in the 1980s and once invited Robinson into the team’s locker room.
“He used to block for Dan Marino,” said Robinson. He paused, looked into the indecipherable gray at his feet. “Those pictures are gone, but I’m enjoying talking about the things that were once in this house.”
He recalled other things too, things you couldn’t hold but that you knew about and were part of the story of the neighborhood.
“Every evening right before dark,” said Robinson, “the crows would start migrating in packs of 20 and 30 and fly by. I used to count them. Every day at the same time. One time, a flock of hawks came by. I had never seen that before in my life. They migrated west. Another time I had a group of buzzards in my tree. Six of them. The wing span was 6 feet. Just sitting there in this tree right here. I’ve seen a lot of things up here.”
He pointed to his father’s charred pickup. He didn’t want the man who raised him — he died years ago — forgotten: “A lot of memories in that truck,” he said. “My dad brought us here for a better life, and he gave it to us. “
He looked across the way to Shigemori, who was poking around the remains of his fallen home.
“Cuckoo, Cuckoo,” quipped Robinson.
That was the call the men had made across backyards for years to one another. It meant it was time for a beer, to talk as the last bits of day turned to night. There was no beer on this day.
Shigemori walked over. He said he’s lived on this street so long he wouldn’t know where else to go; he’d be like a homing pigeon, throw him in the sky and he’d wheel back. When the fires breached the neighborhood and surged toward the homes, Shigemori, a slight man with a gray mustache, who is known as the “rebel of the block,” grabbed a garden hose and tried to hold them back.
“The flames came up the fence,” he said. “The winds were too strong. I tried to go back inside to get my wallet, but the fire was in the house. Windows popping. I was the last one to leave the neighborhood.”
He stared into the distance, past bare chimneys, a bright red — miraculously so — child’s wagon, and a table where men played dominoes. Why did one house burn and another didn’t? What are the vagaries of the wind, and what are the possibilities this could happen again?
“I don’t plan on moving,” said Shigemori. “This neighborhood is a family. We’ve been devastated. We had a meeting the other night. We told one another we’d always be family. We told each other, ‘Don’t sell.’ ”
Robinson walked to a blackened tree where he had nailed up a cymbal Elliott had given him. It had been scorched and cracked by flames. Robinson pinged it.
“Man, I used to love to watch Kenny play,” he said. “I put this here to remember him. It hurt to see him when he went into hospice.”
A quiet settled in. The sky was clear, the kind of blue that made it hard to believe so much ruin lay beneath.
The National Guard was on the corners, health workers handed out face masks, churches heard prayers, and pickups hauled burned things that might be salvaged. Robinson said his 83-year-old mother was going to visit family in Mississippi for a few weeks while he and his sister sorted through paperwork and other details that would begin the ordeal of raising a new house on this battered ground.
Robinson had a brain aneurysm that nearly killed him him a few years ago. “I cried in front of the doctor when he told me the swelling went down.” It feels a little like that now, he said, waiting for the healing to come, mentioning that when he returned alone to the neighborhood for the first time a couple days earlier he felt like the last man on Earth.
“If I hadn’t been living up here so long,” he said, “I would have thought, “‘Where am I?’ ”
He walked down the driveway toward the backyard. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what was there, just as sure as they knew that the summer’s heat eased against the evening breeze. The Pontiac was a classic. People used to stop and ask him about it. The Impala for years was scavenged for parts for other cars. He looked at the Corvette. It was unrecognizable, but not to his eye. He would never get it on the road, but, he said, he got close to his dream. Not many men get that.
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