L.A., Love It or Leave It? She’ll Leave It

I’m leaving Los Angeles.

The last straw was 24 hours beginning one evening this month that, if they were unique, could be turned into humor. For me they were all too typical of the way the Los Angeles life style hits this middle-aged Mt. Washington resident.

First I learned of a drive-by shooting at a Figueroa Street market I frequent, and the newscaster suggested that it is part of a pattern of increased gang activity in our neighborhood a few miles northeast of downtown. The police helicopters wake me up almost every night, but that evening they were relentless. And at 4 a.m. a beam of light pierced my bedroom and I discovered three police cars on Mt. Washington Drive below my home, shining searchlights on the hillside chaparral.

My collie bellowed to explore, and I thought of the spent gun shells I find on the dirt road behind my house, and of the fact that several thoroughbred dogs have disappeared from my street. I have been robbed or burglarized five times in four years.

The chaparral isn’t totally grown back yet from the suspected-arson fire on Kite Hill last summer that came within 100 yards of my house.

A Fight Looms

In the morning I found the cracks in my plaster walls were larger, and two support pillars underneath the house were down. I called the landlady and the city safety inspectors. A fight looms that will probably lead to my having to move again. And where is there decent housing in my price range? My rent is three times what it would be back in my native Michigan. So are many other expenses. And my income isn’t that much larger, not enough to justify the prices. In L.A., I feel that I am always broke. In Michigan, a 20-acre farm with a pond and pleasant house can be found for $30,000.

During my last period of hunting for jobs in public relations, I felt subjected to all the discrimination that the “California Girl” stereotype pits against those who don’t conform. Back in Michigan I didn’t have to be thin, young, blonde, tanned, athletic and beautiful to be seen as a worthwhile human being. The billboards there show more realistic women. And men. The restaurant booths are more spacious. More people listen.

The next evening, in this 24-hour period that epitomized L.A., I was trying to grieve for the astronauts. It was raining. L.A. drivers don’t know what to do with rain. And now I had to try to make it to my class at UCLA from downtown in “only” two hours in the rain.

Crunching at the Corners

Traffic on Olympic pinned me into my lane. Accidents crunched at corners, brakes locked, cars swerved, middle fingers jabbed the rain as L.A. drivers are convinced that the whole world is against them and that they must drive as offensively (pun intended) as possible. I couldn’t get into the right lane to turn north on Veteran Avenue. I was at Bundy Drive before traffic cleared enough to allow me to change lanes and turn back.

Finally northbound on Veteran, I sat behind exhaust fumes at Wilshire Boulevard, one of the busiest intersections in the county on the best of days. In the rain I sat for half an hour. When traffic finally spurted forward, it was already past 7 p.m., when my UCLA Extension class had started without me.

I zipped toward the nearest UCLA parking lot, to find it full. So was the next, and the next, and the next. There was not a single parking space, legal or otherwise, in all of Westwood.

Totally frustrated, on the way home I wrote mental letters to UCLA Extension, the Daily Bruin, and the teacher of the class, railing against the consumer fraud of charging for classes that there is no possibility anyone can attend because of the lack of parking. I slowly drove past the $400,000 West L.A. homes, furious, exhausted.

Helicopters Return

That night I couldn’t sleep as police helicopters circled my home like buzzards.

I thought about the afternoon in November when I last left Los Angeles for a visit to Michigan. On that day, as I left my collie at a kennel, a man tried to steal my purse. From out of the memories of my anti-rape self-defense training, a deep roar sprang out of my lungs. Startled, the would-be burglar said, “No offense, ma’am,” and ran. He was the only polite person of that day.

Shaken by the incident, I had decided I needed a cup of tea before I hit the freeway pressure, and I pulled into the next coffee shop I saw. Two loonies in cowboy garb told the cashier they were paying their check with a counterfeit $20, which they thought was leg-slapping hilarious. The cashier called the police. I left. In the parking lot a convertible full of teen-agers had me pinned into my parking space. They noticed that fact, and decided to keep me pinned. They thought it was a riot.

I am not laughing. I am leaving.

I will miss friends and my sister, whom I hope to lure back to our homeland as well, but it feels like self-preservation to me. I have to get out of this insane asylum and back to clean air, nice people, country roads, affordable prices, easy living.

New Move Afoot

I understand that there’s a new move afoot to do just that, and once again I am on the front lines of a trend, as I was in 1970 when I left Michigan for L.A. I hope no one discovers my town of 2,000 in the thumb of Michigan, near where I attended a one-room country schoolhouse in the late 1940s.

I know I am remembering a romanticized picture of the past, and theoretically you can’t go home again, but my visits home tell me that life goes on in the vast stretches of America with some semblance of sanity. I will be spending some time each year in Los Angeles for business and family reasons, and already I am wondering how I will survive the contrasts.

I have been in Los Angeles for 16 years. I am going home. Metropolitan Los Angeles, which has added a million and a half people in the past five years, will not miss me. Others are waiting to get in, to attempt to achieve the legendary California life style, even if it kills them.

Carol Schmidt is a novelist who formerly was public relations director for a medical research institute in Los Angeles. She is leaving for Michigan in April.