Legislators have never understood the pubescent mind. : Picusing Teens in the Valley

You’ve got to give her credit. Councilwoman Joy Picus, mom’s best friend in city government, has been able to accomplish with one piece of legislation what adults have been trying to accomplish since teen-agers discovered noise and sex almost simultaneously sometime in the 1950s. She is getting them out of the dance halls and back onto the streets.

By forcing L.A.’s three teen discos to close at 10 o’clock on school nights, a new city ordinance is inviting the kids to expend their vast and uncontrollable energies among real people rather than keeping them confined to places like their own clubs, all of which are in the Valley.

Picus introduced the measure because of what she called “hair-raising” incidents outside of a place called Phases in Canoga Park. What raised her hair was, among other things, “sexual activity” by the teen-agers.

No one has ever publicly specified what kind of sexual activity, but since it can raise hair, one can only assume it involves bizarre combinations of kids and trampolines and geese and perhaps sky divers.

The teen-agers I know who go to Phases say that’s nonsense, all they want to do is dance and now they’ve been picused, which is a neat way of turning a noun into a past participle. They don’t even know any geese.

I suppose that the point of the new law would be to get the kids home by, say, 10:30 or 11, but its proponents are mistakenly presuming that simply closing the place where teens dance will accomplish that.

The City Council had the same grand notion when it closed the kid-disco in Westwood, and now the streets of Westwood consist of wall-to-wall adolescents, complete with swagger, a surly attitude and those loud portable radios they carry around.

Legislators have never understood the pubescent mind. Teen-agers don’t vote and have no lobby so they are traditionally dumped upon during the height of periodic morals crusades. We assume, when this occurs, that the little rats have been Taught a Lesson This Time They Will Never Forget.

This kind of Mickey-think has been going on at least ever since I was a kid, which was during the period in public education when teachers were finally free to inform their students that babies were not the result of fornicating bees. We still didn’t know exactly how it worked, but at least we knew that whatever made babies did not occur in hives.

Parents were raising hell back then because Frank Sinatra was causing young girls to swoon, which, so it was said, made them vulnerable to hair-raising suggestions that had nothing to do with music. I can tell you here and now it didn’t work all that well.

Then pelvic-oriented Elvis Presley gyrated on to the scene at a world-class rotation rate of 45 rpm’s, calling attention to that portion of his body which until then no one had even thought about.

I remember my mother’s being up in arms by what she understood to be another effort by international Protestantism to spew filth among the young. She wagered that Elvis was probably a Unitarian, a liberal branch of the Protestant church which she felt had a 600-year relationship with the devil and a special facility for physical enticement.

The Beatles followed shortly thereafter. They not only raised hair, they grew it, which for reasons I never did understand triggered an adult response with symptoms very close to functional psychosis.

The hairy Liverpudlians were accused at various times of encouraging sexual promiscuity, promoting the use of drugs and/or of re-establishing the acceptability of public swooning.

And so ad infinitum adulescentulum.

I think the problem lies not so much in trying to protect teen-age morality as in simply being unable to tolerate teens. They are essentially disagreeable people who argue, make noise, goof off in school and never put the cap back on the toothpaste tube.

Also, they listen to music played by people like Twisted Sister and say hey, dude, to their fathers.

The sweet cooperative little guy you had around the house who always wanted to help daddy and go to the store with mommy suddenly awakens one morning and tells you to go to hell when you offer to fix him breakfast.

He would rather be tortured by fire than even admit to his friends that he has parents, much less be seen with them in public. I accidentally met my son on a street corner once when he was 16 and he introduced me as his probation officer.

A year later he ran away from home with a girlfriend and ended up in Riverside. I told him, for God’s sake, the next time you run away at least go to Santa Barbara. There was the family name to consider.

I understand completely how miserable adolescents can be. It would make more sense, therefore, not to limit but to extend the number of hours they can stay in their damned discos and possibly keep them there until their glands settle down.

If the noise becomes intolerable, we can always ship them to Riverside.