Native sons and daughters

As he made the fateful journey from womb to delivery ward, I like to think my son gave a moment of thought as to what would greet him on the other side. Would he find himself in an igloo, surrounded by Eskimo obstetricians? In a mud hut in an African township? In a bombed-out suburb of greater Baghdad? Whatever he was expecting, it must surely have come as an immense relief to glimpse the masked face of Dr. Jason Rothbart -- the ob-gyn from People magazine! -- and the bridge-of-the-Enterprise interior of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a palm-tree-shaded stroll from Rodeo Drive. No wonder the little fella shouted and waved his arms so much. “Jackpot!” he was probably telling us. “I’ve hit the jackpot!”

No one else seemed to share his excitement. “Now that you’re a father, I imagine you’ll be leaving L.A.,” said a colleague a few days later. Confused, I asked him what on Earth he meant. “Oh, y’know,” he said, in a prickly tone. “You don’t want your boy exposed to ‘Hollywood values,’ do you?”

In all fairness, this was the opinion of a man with a famously conservative disposition. Nevertheless, it was repeated to me over the following weeks by several less-likely candidates, including a rock musician with a history of life-threateningly unwise lifestyle choices. She informed me that gay friends of hers had just adopted a boy but had decided to relocate to Scandinavia. I asked why. “Oh, y’know -- all this,” she said, pointing to the L.A. cityscape beyond the diner in which we were sitting.

At first I shrugged off these comments, but as my first-ever Father’s Day approached, I began to wonder if they were right. Maybe L.A. really is the worst possible environment to raise an enlightened young man of the 21st century.

Take my own journey to this city. Raised in a sheep-farming village under the rain-swollen skies of northern England, I spent much of my boyhood fantasizing about the promised excesses of Southern California: the hot skies, the hot cars, the even hotter women. Naturally, when I finally made it here at the age of 27, I indulged. I made walking-distance journeys in a 9-mpg SUV; I bought spray-on tans and caviar facial spa treatments; I purchased a negative-amortization, adjustable-rate mortgage via speakerphone from a broker in Santa Monica. The only thing that saved me from an implosion of Britneyesque proportions was the thought of my father, in flat cap and tweed jacket, shaking his head in sadness and bewilderment. But how would my own son survive if L.A. was all he knew?

Terrified at the damage I was about to inflict, I began to plot a relocation, to an eco-village in the Netherlands, perhaps, where the locals would commute in giant wooden clogs and make electricity from flatulence induced by homemade cheese. My boy would learn the value of abstention, worthiness and lackluster personal hygiene. My friends seemed to think this was an excellent idea, aside from one surprising constituency: those who were actually brought up in L.A.

What are you thinking? they exclaimed. Kids in L.A. get to go outdoors all year round. They have mountains, ocean, desert. They have culture. They have world-renowned educational establishments.

An epiphany soon followed. Being raised in L.A. isn’t a problem. It’s not being raised in L.A. that’s a problem. It’s being raised in a sheep-farming village that’s a problem. Without exception, my native Angeleno friends are utterly immune to the lure of “the L.A. lifestyle.” They drive tediously fuel-efficient cars. They have fixed-rate mortgages. They find Sunset Plaza to be an unbearable enclave of poseurs and Euro-cheese. Indeed, a childhood in L.A. seems to act like a kind of vaccination against the media-image of this city sold to and consumed with great pleasure by the rest of the world.

And so, on my first Father’s Day, I can say with absolute confidence that I am no longer troubled by those who question my decision to raise my son in L.A. Soon, he will be a proud Angeleno: He will look at me with contempt as I cast admiring glances at shirtless Lamborghini drivers cockscrewing up Sunset Plaza Drive; he will never shop at Kitson; he will be unimpressed that the $16 gravlax-filled bagels at Barney Greengrass in Beverly Hills are flown in daily from New York. And perhaps one day, when he’s older, he’ll move to the English countryside, where he’ll adopt a fake Madonna-style accent and buy a lordship on the Internet.

And then, of course, he’ll have his own son, who’ll get bored and come to L.A. to see his grandfather -- he won’t have aged -- and together they’ll go to the Sky Bar and drink $1,000 martinis.