DARKNESS FALLS IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS
Phone rang about five-thirty in the morning. I was already up, making my coffee. I said the effword and made a grab for the receiver before it screamed again and woke my wife. Said the effword because I knew the call was from some imbecile on the East Coast who, like most of those shell-shocked New Yorkers, hadn’t yet assimilated the fact that two-thirds of the continent ain’t on Manhattan time.
Ethnocentrism at an ungodly hour. It may be eight-thirty where you are, dork, but it’s still dark out here in the civilized world! Have an effword, dork!
It was a buddy of mine I’d left behind when I fled New York in 1961. A buddy who takes great pride in having four deadbolts and a Fox police-bar lock on his apartment door. A buddy who’s been burgled six times in the past nine years, been mugged three times in the past five years, and can survive only by living in a high-rise as fortified as Hitler’s bunker. Two ex-cop doormen, two rent-a-cop security wardens, full-range tv monitors, coded entry, and laser-scan security check at the front desk.
For the privilege of thus living in a battle-zone with “peace of mind,” my buddy exists in his two-and-a-half-room cave high up in that co-op mountain paying out each month an amount only slightly less than the combined budgets of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He’d called to gloat.
“Heard the news this morning,” he said, with a nasty chuckle. “Heard a couple of Crips with AK-47s took out a whole restaurant full of nutburger vegetarians. Just wanted to check you out, make sure nobody’d stapled you to a wall.”
“In your ear,” I said.
Then followed a charming chat about how he figured I might be considering moving back to New York, where life was safer. I used the effword a lot, told him at least we weren’t as dopey as Gothamites who went for the Tawana Brawley scam, and assured him Los Angeles was still Paradise.
Then I hung up and turned on KNX-AM for the news.
In Venice, a drive-by shooter unloaded from a van at a bunch of people standing around talking, and killed a nine-year-old boy playing in his front yard.
A family in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, broke up a gang dope deal going down on the sidewalk at 1:00 a.m. outside their house, shoo’ed off the creeps, who returned later and pumped some shots through the windows. The father of the household fired back, wounding one of them. Their car was, thereafter, vandalized and stolen, the house broken into, ransacked, trashed and, finally, set afire with Molotov Cocktails. House and the one next door burned to the ground. But the Fuentes family didn’t find out till this morning, because they’d already fled in terror.
The last thing my buddy had said to me, before I’d hung up on him, was a little street-rap currently fashionable in New York, as admonition to California-bound travelers:
In L.A. town, a warning true.
Don’t wear red, and don’t wear blue.
Some vato loco will shoot at you.
I turned off the radio. It was too early in the day to be reminded that Paradise has been paved over and the Uzi is the calling card of choice. It was too early in the day to be scared. I waited for the darkness to lift, and drank my coffee, and thought about what’s happened to my town.
You don’t need me to tell you what this place was like when I got here just after New Year’s Day 1962. If you’re under thirty it’d be like trying to describe Atlantis to a Visigoth: most of you think concrete is a natural state, that the peak of Western Civilization is gelato, that you’re supposed to pay fifty cents when you call information for a phone number, and the more Caucasoid Bill Cosby gets, the cuddlier he is to you. If you’re under twenty, then for most of you nostalgia is breakfast. If you’re over forty, only an idiot would insist that the condition of life in Los Angeles is better now than it was even twenty-five years ago.
So telling you that this was the best goddam town in the world, that smart and witty and educated people chose to live here rather than London or Paris or New York, that one felt every day like Ali Baba in magical Baghdad…is a pointless exercise.
And stating flat-out that darkness has fallen in our beloved town is something we all know, from the most frightened homeless bag lady camping under a freeway overpass to the best-protected estate owner in San Marino Mesa. We’re scared. We’re scared in so many different ways that even trying to put it in coherent form, simply attempting to codify it, makes the reason reel and the words get hysterical. We’re so goddam scared we don’t even know where to begin…
Scared. You used to be able to drive anywhere in the Los Angeles area and not worry about it. You could take off on a Sunday afternoon with out-of-town visitors or your kids or just a bunch of friends, and go over to South Central to admire the Watts Towers. You had to use a Thomas Guide to worm your way between the railroad tracks down around Willowbrook Avenue, to find that little dead-end street where Rodia’s magnificent gift to us stands, and you’d always get lost, but you had no fear of pulling in to the curb anywhere in that neighborhood to ask a resident how to thread a way through the labyrinth. Now you’re too scared even to go to Watts to see those Gaudi-like wonders. Scared.
Scared. To drive down La Cienega to a Creole restaurant was as easy as going to a neighborhood grocery to pick up a pint of whipping cream. Now there are damned few neighborhood groceries left, having been squeezed out of existence by the chain supermarkets as methodically as Crown Books has squeezed out of existence so many independent bookstores…and you don’t drive anywhere without looking constantly at every car moving alongside, to see if some roadway shooter has a 9mm Parabellum aimed at your head because you inadvertently cut him off. Scared.
Scared. If you’re a man, you don’t understand why women are frightened of elevators. Think about it. You’re a woman, and you enter an elevator, and you’re all alone, and a man gets in with you. And you’re in an enclosed space where no one can hear your moans if that particular man is one of the thousand loose-cannon crazies in Los Angeles, who gets his jollies raping and robbing. Paranoia? If you’re a man, ask the nearest woman. Scared.
Scared. Because we can’t leave our doors open or unlocked on those days when the Santa Anas blow in hot and humid off the inland deserts. Because if you’re old and slow-moving, there are street specialists in mugging senior citizens for the welfare check or the food stamps. Because if you’re a kid, you know someone will be bracing you for your lunch money in exchange for not beating the crap out of you. Because you can’t park your new car on a city street and not be worried all through dinner and the movie that when you return it’ll be there; or if it’s still there, if your tape deck and spiffy aluminum wheels will be there. Scared because your neighborhood is changing so fast you go to sleep at night with the tremor that you’re living on the edge of the slide area. Scared because you’ve got to have a security system and bars on the windows, and if they firebomb your house you’ll probably fry inside before you can get through those bars. Scared because everybody’s got a gun, and only half your worries are about the stereotypical nine-foot-tall black man who wants to rob you; the other half of your worry is that your own kid will get pissed at you and shoot you, or your neighbor will run amuck because your friends are making too much noise at your party, and he’ll shoot you. Scared because no place is safe, no place is quiet, no place is free of the developers, no place has the peace and ease it had when you first came to live in that area.
You’ve been scared for quite a while now. But it didn’t affect you as much, because you had a safe haven away from them. And that’s the way you thought of all those people in the Projects, in the ghetto, in Watts, in the barrio. Them. But now the gangs are everywhere. Your fears are no longer ephemeral, vague, omnipresent and disquieting. The gangs rule.
And not all of the pronunciamentos of Chief Daryl Gates, not one example of Action News posturing on his part, can cover the fact that no matter how much money we give him for more cops on the street, no matter how many sweeps and special task forces he deploys, no matter how many tiger tank battering rams he unleashes, nothing he does can contain the atrocities and depredations of the 70,000 kids currently estimated to be gang members.
We’re enjoying a death a day, on the average, from gang warfare. And for the fat, happy, self-deluding yups safe in their Beverly Hills or Malibu or Pacific Palisades enclaves, it has even passed the point at which they could dismiss the darkness, on the theory that, “Well, let them kill each other, what has that to do with us?” That cheerily racist point was passed when a gang kid smoked a member of Our Kind in warm, cheery, well-lit Westwood one collegiate weekend recently.
We have long been reaping what was sown in Los Angeles; even farther back than 1966 when Reagan was elected Governor, and proceeded to dismantle the best educational system in the nation. All the way back to the days of the theft of the Owens Valley water and the greening of the San Fernando Valley and the making of illicit millions by the forefathers of some of the richest movers and shakers in our community today. All the way back to the conspiracy that tore up the streetcar tracks of one of the best urban transportation systems in America, killed off the Big Red Cars, and made us smog-slaves of the automobile, for the greater enrichment of the road-building lobby, the auto manufacturers, the tire and gas companies. A long way back before 1966 and Reagan those seeds were sown…but something happened to us a little more than twenty years ago that accelerated the decay. Something that began to show its evil fruition in the flaming blossoms of the Watts Riots in ’65. And we learned nothing from that terrible warning.
Something happened to us at that nexus point.
Something that told the rest of the world that Los Angeles was getting fat and complacent under the vanilla sun, that it was Xanadu for the high-rollers and the blue-sky merchants and all the corporate entities with floating ethics. That we were a city so intent on building swimming pools and having a good time that we turned a blind eye to what we were creating—the Underclasses. Cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and even New York, took note of the days and nights of bloody civil rioting, and they moved to rectify their awful situations. But L.A. went back to sleep in front of the tv set, learning nothing from the message of the Watts Riots. Went back to feeding its face, feeding its ego, feeding its coffers as if we’d never come to the equivalent of New York’s sickness.
Something happened in Watts that should have scared us sufficiently in 1965 to avert the darkness under which we now tremble.
Something that foreshadowed eight years of Reagan’s America and the Me Decade that spawned the yuppies, and the slaughter of our ethics.
More than twenty years of “benign neglect” and of unrestricted “progress” that has left us with our hillsides ravaged by million-dollar-a-unit crackerbox builders and the Underclasses condemned to the Projects. Twenty years of Reagan/Deukmejian law’n’order horse puckey and no urban revitalization worth a spit in the wind. Twenty years of slapdash, if any, coordination among federal, state, county and city agencies to address what was going on among the people, to mitigate Nixon’s 1973 cutoff of federal funds for gang rehabilitation.
The streets are filled with litter; there’s hardly a vertical surface that hasn’t been “tagged” by illiterate thugs puffing up their withered egos with spray cans; six hundred different gangs have turned the schools into gulags where the dropout rate for blacks and latinos is pushing sixty percent; and the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four isn’t cancer or heart attack or even dope overdose. It’s murder.
Crack is everywhere; driven in, flown in, trained in, floated in, backpacked in, and as easy to score as a McDonald’s toadburger. This week a couple of UCLA scientists released a report based on their tracking of 700 students for eight years, the point of which was that kids who have a heavy dope habit in school fare far worse later in life, than kids who don’t. Gee, honestly!?! Would you believe that those of us out here in the darkness kinda figured that one a while ago? Dope is a trillion-dollar business, and the repeat market is the key to a fat p&l bottom line. And of all those pontificating, well-groomed politicos who appeared on KCBS’s evening-long preemptive special on gangs, a month or so ago, not one of those who paid lip-service to this bogus “war on drugs” seemed to understand that the big business of drugs is what we are reaping for twenty years of self-serving greed.
What do I mean? What fascinating, obscurantist theory am I pushing here? Well, I’m as scared as the rest of you, out there in the darkness, but being scared hasn’t turned my common sense into spinach. I can still figure it out as easily as Jesse Jackson, who points out quite rationally that we’re a self-indulgent species and if we weren’t wrecking ourselves with dope it would be something else. That if there weren’t vast fortunes being made from selling dope, if there weren’t jefes and Generalissimos getting rich off the trade, it would be better policed. So the theory is that L.A. has long been a model of greedyguts slum lords and pols on the pad and middlemen who are living on velvet from the circulation of dope.
And why shouldn’t the kids in the barrio and the Projects pick up on that? They see it on television every day. They see the choice between coming home after a shift at the Burger King, reeking of grease, with a few miserable bucks in their pocket, and buying a BMW and a nice home in Orange County from a few days of “slippin’” and moving some crack.
The Underclasses, the ghetto blacks, the latinos, the Asian refugees, they see the results of twenty years of gimme gimme gimme; and they want theirs!
It’s about jobs, and it’s about big money; and it’s about the turf where those street jobs and that big money are all that matter. It’s about people learning the lessons Los Angeles has been teaching for more than twenty years, and doing it outside the rules of the game set up by the Old Boys’ Network, and doing it in a violent manner that has the rest of us so scared that it’s made security systems the fastest growing industry in Southern California.
And, of course, it’s just lovely for the gun merchants. The NRA loves it! Get everyone so witless with terror that their distributors can’t keep up with the demand. Play on all that racist fear, and get guns into the hands of everyone. That’s the new L.A. way!
And the damned ugliest part of all this, is that nobody can talk about it in realistic terms without sounding like a racist or an apostate Liberal. If someone gets right down into it and says that a large part of the gang warfare problem, for instance, is the insane Latin adoration of the macho mystique, someone else (who’s usually making a buck from keeping his people paranoid) jumps up and yells racism.
But machismo, and its brutish effect on men and women alike, is not the sole property of the vatos locos. We’re all paying the price for that John Wayne posture. White folks demonstrate it with the need to fight wars all over the world, trumpeting that “God is on Our Side,” with Reagan blustering that even if we shot down a passenger plane by mistake, however inadvertently snuffing out 290 lives, it’s a “closed matter” because he’s the high-steppin’ brass-balled big-muthuh’ President of the Yew Ess, and those Shiites had damned well better listen up! It’s Wally George in the White House, and we can see how effective such posturing has been in the past.
But that’s how Whitey does it. The Black, Chicano and Asian Underclasses we’ve watched develop have learned the lesson. And those kids, untutored, poor, burning with hate and anger, they strut and blow smoke the same way. They think of “community” as the gang, R60s, Southsides, Crips, Bloods, it doesn’t matter: that’s family. And no one in authority, least of all Daryl Gates, seems to understand that sweeps and busts and arraignments won’t bring us back the daylight. Because for every hundred kids picked up on a big-PR weekend for the LAPD, there will be five hundred replacements out there on Sunday morning, dealing and shooting and tossing Molotov Cocktails. Because it ain’t macho to pay any attention to the cops; it’s like a pit bull punking out and humiliating its owner when it won’t fight. But if someone suggests that a part of the answer is somehow burning that machismo crap out of the consciousness of thirteen-and fourteen-year-old kids, sure as hell someone will leap up and denounce the observation as racist.
Yeah, racist. Like suggesting that before you can civilize crackers and rednecks you’ve got to get them off believing blacks are inferior, that Jews rule the world on the sly, that Catholics all pay obeisance to the Vatican, or that women have been put here just to keep men fed and happy.
But such a partial answer won’t put a dime into the budget of the LAPD, and offering kids who can get rich moving crack a part-time job at the Burger King won’t convince one Blood to shuck his colors, and Eddie Murphy bragging to Barbara Walters on-camera that he never reads won’t make one admiring black kid believe there’s any point in getting an education.
And until you’ve come face to face with just what we’ve allowed the Underclasses to turn into, here in the City of the Lost Angels, you’ll never know how truly scared you can be.
We live in darkness. And in that never-ending night the roaming madmen burn the libraries, the slumlords debase whole families, freeway shooters pack shotguns to revenge themselves for someone shooting them the finger; and every weekend hundreds attend barbaric pit-bull contests, synagogues are defaced by neo-Nazis, Cotton Mather religious fanatics vandalize family medical centers; trigger-happy cops go more steadily buggy, families are broken and merchants terrorized, lottery tickets replace baby’s milk, and now we can even be treated to one of our ever-so-responsible tv stations offering us The Morton Downey, Jr. Show from the East Coast, just in case we haven’t had our share of deranged bigotry and vigilante justice by way of Wally and his slavering idiot audience of pinheaded fruit-bats.
Why are we scared? Because when one tries to talk about it, as I have here, one thing leads to another, and one ends up raving. And there is oh so little consolation in the apologia offered by the Pollyannas: “Things have always seemed bad, always seemed on the edge of the abyss. It’s no different now. You’re just getting hysterical.”
No one in a right mind can go for that okeydoke any longer. Darkness has fallen, and we do grow hysterical. So we look around for a simple sociological scapegoat. It’s them, they’ve got polluted genes. It’s some other them, they don’t have the accepted Good Ole ‘Murrican Values. It’s not enough money from the State or Federal honeycomb. It’s lousy teachers. It’s not enough cops, and let’s get them cops out of the prowl cars and back on foot patrolling the neighborhoods. It’s this, and it’s that.
But the truth is, we let it happen!
We lied to ourselves that Los Angeles would be Baghdad forever, and to hell with them over there in BBQ-rib-and-taco land. Hysteria finally wanes, and we admit that it is us, the readers of this very magazine, who distract ourselves with glossy liposuction and plastic surgery ads, with articles about the ten wealthiest people in town, with fashion spreads featuring clothes they couldn’t afford if they worked for a hundred years. We didn’t want this magazine to run articles on the 10 WORST SLUM LORDS or WHY HAS THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS DESERTED ITS UNDERCLASS. We didn’t have time or interest for that. We had time for the latest designer pizza and the newest disposable clothing shop on Melrose. But we didn’t want to admit that the darkness was falling.
And so now, we’re scared. Even the dullest, most lock-and-bar secure, glossiest and silliest of us: scared. And in the words of Bertolt Brecht, “He who laughs has simply not heard the terrible news.”
From high above what was once the City of the Angels, one can look down through the smog and delude oneself that we do not live in the darkness. But even from on high one hears the message of the Uzi. Is anybody listening?