Los Angeles

Los Angeles, the vast and sun-drenched city on the Pacific coast, is the adult home of Richie Tozier, the disc jockey known to his listeners as the Man of a Thousand Voices. From his study overlooking the beach, Richie commands a lucrative radio empire built on characters like Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant, and Colonel Buford Kissdrivel. The city embodies the success and distance he has achieved from his childhood in Derry, Maine—a distance measured not just in miles but in the deliberate forgetting of the horrors he faced there. When Mike Hanlon's phone call arrives on May 28th, 1985, Richie is in the middle of his ordinary L.A. life: a record spins on the turntable, the Pacific Ocean glitters outside his window, and a couple walks hand in hand on the beach. The call shatters this placid surface, and Richie's immediate, visceral reaction—vomiting at the memory of George Denbrough's murder—reveals how thin the veneer of his California persona really is.

The City of Fame and Voices

Richie's Los Angeles is a city of professional triumph. He works at KLAD, the top-rated FM rock station in the cannibalistic Los Angeles market, and his syndicated programs, including a straight top-forty countdown show and The Freaky Forty, have made him perhaps the most successful disc jockey in the United States. His Voices—Buford Kissdrivel, Kinky Briefcase, Wyatt the Homicidal Bag-Boy—are his trademark, and he can summon them on demand, as when he performs Kinky Briefcase for his travel agent, Carol Feeny, without missing a beat. The city has rewarded his talent with wealth: a house poised between the fault-line and the brush-fire zone, twenty acres of timberland in Idaho, a portfolio of stocks that have risen steadily, and a barrel safe containing four thousand dollars in cash. Yet the very ease with which he inhabits these Voices is a lie; it is harder every year to go back to being himself. Los Angeles has given him a career but not an identity.

The Rupture of the Call

Mike Hanlon's phone call exposes the fragility of Richie's L.A. existence. As Mike speaks, Richie feels crypts cracking open inside him, and the memories of Derry—Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Belch Huggins, the house on Neibolt Street—come flooding back. The city of palm trees and ocean breezes becomes irrelevant; Richie realizes he is a dead man walking. He cancels a scheduled interview with Clarence Clemons, infuriating his program director, Steve Covall, who accuses him of being a busher. Richie's response—that he made a promise in the summer of 1958—sounds insane to Steve, but Richie knows it is deadly serious. He packs only kid-clothes, grabs the cash from his safe, and leaves his house without looking back, understanding that he may never see it again. Los Angeles, for all its glamour, cannot protect him from the past.

The City as Contrast

Los Angeles serves as the stark opposite of Derry in the novel's geography of memory and forgetting. Derry is a small, provincial, haunted New England town where the sewers run with ancient evil; Los Angeles is a sprawling, modern, sunlit metropolis where Richie has built a life of surface-level success. The contrast is deliberate: Derry is the place of childhood terror and blood oaths, while Los Angeles is the place of adult achievement and willful amnesia. Yet the novel suggests that no amount of distance—geographic or psychological—can sever the bonds forged in childhood. Richie's flight from L.A. to Derry is a journey not just across the continent but back through time, and the city he leaves behind becomes a symbol of the life he must risk to keep a promise made when he was eleven years old.