QUALITY OF LIFE : Six L.A. Lives : Residents Polled by The Times Talk About Their Love-Hate Relationship With a Changing L.A.

PAULETTE AND MAURICE Bennett knew that the rock cocaine problem in their working-class Inglewood neighborhood had hit a new low when they noticed that the faces of the dealers had started getting younger.

To the Bennetts, it seemed that the numbers of teen-agers selling crumpled foil packets and plastic bags full of cocaine had not grown. They were the same kids, it seemed, who were out on Centinela Avenue every day, hawking their wares. But driving home one night from her nursing job at a Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles, Paulette Bennett, 37, got a good look at the dealers’ faces. They were softer and younger--three, four, five years younger than the 17- and 18-year-olds who had sauntered on the corners only three years before.

“I’m watching little babies running around with beepers,” she says with a sigh.

“And you know what they’re for,” says her husband, 37.

The Bennetts’ Los Angeles is a dire place that drains away the tiniest of life’s pleasures, where the violent whims of children have reordered their daily activities.

The Bennetts’ worries about the daily effects of violence on their lives seem to reflect overall apprehension about crime among black families. According to The L.A. Times Poll, 89% of black respondents cited crime as the city’s worst problem--a higher percentage than any other group.

A cursory glance at the Bennetts’ neighborhood might leave the impression that they are overdramatizing their plight. There are new garden apartments, pennants flying to attract new tenants. The houses and apartments have trim, green lawn plots and are lined with overgrown oaks and willows.

But the sliding glass doors of the couple’s garden apartment are held shut by broom handles to keep out burglars. And there is the invisible toll of worry. At work, Paulette Bennett always fears for the safety of her daughter, Ta-Tanisha, 17, and for her two sons, Timothy, 12, and 4-year-old Tristain.

Like many of the Times Poll’s black respondents who said the city’s gang and drug problems have made it a poor place to raise children, Bennett believes that she has cause to worry. At Inglewood High School, where Ta-Tanisha is a senior, students are forbidden to wear the blue and red belts and shoelaces that are insignias for the city’s major gangs, the Crips and the Bloods.

Recently, while Bennett was home during the day after a night shift, Ta-Tanisha suddenly appeared at the door. A youth had been shot outside the school grounds. Ta-Tanisha had seen the injured boy, covered with blood, before joining dozens of students who, fearing further gunfire, fled the campus in the middle of the day.

“This is what we live with,” Bennett says. “I’m tired of it. This city is no place to raise kids. I’m always afraid one of them will get jumped.”

Even when she puts aside the gnawing concerns about gang violence, she wonders whether Los Angeles is the right environment for her children.

Before the start of each school year, Timothy has to have the right clothes. Two years ago, all his friends were wearing Fila athletic wear with a little emblem on the breast pocket. So Bennett went downtown to find Timothy the proper shirt. This year, the rage is Air Jordan sweat suits and tennis shoes that cost as much as $100 a pair.

“I call back East and none of my friends know what I’m talking about when I tell them about these trends,” says Bennett, who makes a solidly middle-class salary as a nurse. “Living here, kids have to live up to this image.”

She came to Los Angeles from Boston in 1972, lured by relatives’ siren songs about the sunny climate and an endless array of jobs. Bennett admits that she found both, but 17 years later, the appeal has worn thin.

Maurice Bennett, who came earlier from Detroit, also found work but recently lost his job with a courier firm. His friends have found nicer homes toward Covina and Walnut, and he thinks that a move out to the suburbs is the best solution. But he hesitates when he thinks about the long commute that he and his wife might have to make back into the inner city.

And Paulette Bennett admits that her daydreams of her newest favorite destination--Florida, where her mother and sister live--are probably futile. She would have a hard time leaving a job she has grown accustomed to, and she is not keen on moving her children away from friends and a familiar school.

But if she had her way. . . .

JAMES D. MCGEE

JAMES D. MCGEE MISSES the times he took to the air over Los Angeles.

Until 1984, when vertigo put an end to his flying days, McGee was one of the lucky few who could literally rise above city life, even if only for a few hours.

When he started flying his single-engine Cherokee Piper back in 1961, there were ample patches of green and brown below him--empty swatches of land that seemed as if they would remain untransformed forever. But “one by one, they started building all these malls and developments right next to residential areas,” McGee, 56, recalls. “From down below, that kind of growth dawns on you slowly. But flying, it hits you fast. It’s a little scary to see a city change like that.”

That was about as close as the Hughes Aircraft Co. engineer has come to being startled by the growth of the city around him. For almost 30 years, McGee, a lifelong bachelor, has pursued a course of comfort and routine in his solidly middle-class North Torrance neighborhood.

Although he is concerned about the heightening intensity of city life, McGee takes it as a natural result of life in a place “where everyone wants to live.” McGee’s satisfaction with L.A. life seems to be a minority sentiment--mirrored by the 34% of respondents in the Times Poll who said the quality of life in L.A. had stayed the same or improved in the past 15 years.

“Most of the changes seem acceptable to me,” he says. “You can’t have things the way they were when you have more people, now can you? We’re all living together, and it’s not as nice as when we had more room. You adjust.”

When his vertigo attacks made driving temporarily impossible, McGee mastered travel on the L.A. bus system. “I found you can get where you want to go if you have patience,” says McGee, who still plans to commute to work by car when his health improves. “You may have to transfer two or three times, but if you’re not in a terrible hurry, you get what you need from the buses.”

McGee has never thought of leaving the Los Angeles area. He came, as so many do, for sun and the jobs that never seem to be as abundant elsewhere. (The sun and economic opportunities are still L.A.’s main attractions: In the Times Poll, 54% of the respondents cited climate as the city’s most appealing feature, while 29% listed the lure of the economy.)

In Valley City, N.D., where McGee grew up, his future had seemed obvious. His father was a railroad worker with 37 years on the job, low pay and nothing to hand down to his son. McGee had already had a taste of Los Angeles, having come out for several family vacations, so he decided to try living here. For a few years, he bounced between the coast and the heartland. He joined the Navy and served two hitches on an aircraft carrier. And when his tour ended, he used the GI Bill to finance an electrical engineering degree. Taking a job with Hughes, he settled in the South Bay area for good in 1956.

“One of the things I still love about living here is the water,” McGee says. “It fascinates me. It kind of makes you feel small in the world.”

He rarely visits the ocean now, but when he does drive to South Bay beaches, he is amazed by the crowds. And, like the 14% in the Times Poll who cited beach litter as one of their pet peeves about the city, McGee is sickened by the refuse people leave behind.

The farther McGee ventures from his neighborhood, the less he likes what he sees. When he became a regular bus patron, he occasionally took long rides to downtown Los Angeles to run errands and pay bills. He found fellow passengers sullen and most drivers easily irritated--examples of the rudeness that 20% of the poll respondents mentioned as a pet peeve. “Ask them the wrong thing and most of them would chew your head off,” he says glumly.

Disembarking at the Greyhound Terminal, McGee was dismayed by what he found. Homeless men in blankets and tattered clothes lingered everywhere. “They’re lying on the streets, on the grass,” he says. “It’s irritating.”

Unlike his neighbors, McGee has not transferred his fear of crime to his home, blithely strolling the sidewalks near his house at midnight and later. But, like many residents, McGee has been victimized. Once, a man tried to jimmy a rear window. Another time, someone stole his gas-powered chain saw. A month ago, McGee left two sliding glass panels on his porch so he could give them to a neighbor. By the next day, they had been stolen.

McGee has an old .45 automatic beneath his bed. But he keeps the gun, once his uncle’s, more out of habit than of fear. “I know how to use it,” he says. But he never has.

Violent crime, like most of the vexations of city life, seems remote to Jim McGee. It’s an attitude that has less to do with reality than with his own mind-set. The problems are always there, but as long as he has a garden to tend, cars to overhaul and a neighborhood that is intimately familiar to him, those problems may as well be happening in the next block or the next state.

“This is where I plan to live the rest of my life,” he says. “This is where my roots are now.”

GLEN EFFERTZ AND MELINDA GARCIA

GLEN EFFERTZ AND HIS wife, Melinda Garcia, arrived in Los Angeles in October, 1979, hewing to a strategy they still aim to carry out: Finish what they have to finish and clear out.

“We’ve always said it was temporary,” says Effertz, 39, who works as a computer-systems designer for the Warner /Elektra /Atlantic entertainment conglomerate. “We wanted a place where I could find a good job and Melinda could finish up her doctoral work in psychology. Then, we would move on to our permanent home.”

For the time being, Effertz and Garcia, 35, live in Venice in a sunny stucco house near the canals. It was a fixer-upper when they moved in six years ago, but the floors have since been refinished, the bathroom retiled and their old furniture covered by brightly colored throw rugs brought back from Tijuana. It is as comfortable as a temporary home can be, but still not enough to make the couple forget that they are still living in Los Angeles.

The irritating reminders are everywhere. Even the nearest major thoroughfares, Venice and Lincoln boulevards, seem to the couple to be “ugly and kind of dead,” in Effertz’s words.

They are vaguely happy only within the confines of the neighborhood. When Effertz strolls the residential streets of Venice--he notes that he and his wife are usually “just about the only ones out walking”--he is pleased to see year-old Jesse Jackson stickers still on car bumpers. He and his wife of 15 years take a bit of comfort in what they see as the area’s political correctness.

But everything seems sullied by the city’s march toward urban chaos.

Like more than 30% of Times Poll respondents, Effertz says the problem that aggravates him most is the traffic jams that confront him daily.

“My biggest complaint is just how big this place is,” Effertz says. “It’s practically impossible to get out of the city.”

Traffic congestion ensures that he never escapes. When he works--he has had to cut his hours because of the exhausting symptoms of Epstein-Barr virus--Effertz takes surface streets from Venice to his Burbank office. “It’s about the same time on the road and fewer headaches,” he says. Going home, he takes the freeways.

His wife is bothered by traffic, too. But Garcia, a Harvard-trained psychologist who specializes in working with minority mental-health clients, is more disturbed by what she sees as Los Angeles’ silent racial disharmony.

Like 20% of Times Poll respondents who said they like Los Angeles’ cultural diversity, Garcia is a strong adherent of “cross-cultural communication.” But it saddens her that the city’s potential for pollenization among ethnic groups appears to be stymied by segregation.

“There’s a mystique that this city is tolerant, and it’s not true,” Garcia says. “We pay no attention to this fantastic mix of people we have.”

At its worst, she says, intolerant attitudes show up in overt racial attacks. When she read about recent incidents of crossburnings and vandalism at synagogues in Los Angeles, she told her husband, “I don’t want to raise my children in this environment.” (She was seven months pregnant when interviewed for this story).

Now, like almost a third of those who answered the Times Poll, the couple want to move out of California. They talk increasingly about moving to Albuquerque, N.M., where Effertz and Garcia lived in the mid-1970s. Effertz wants a home with a “big yard and gardens and chickens.” Garcia pictures a place “with land around it and a garden and dogs and 17 cats and still close to a city where you can find the good things you like.”

In Los Angeles, such a simple dream is beyond their reach. So, they have made up their minds. They are biding their time while Garcia fulfills professional obligations and Effertz regains enough strength to make the money they will need to move and buy a new home.

“We always intended to go,” Effertz says, “but L.A. sure didn’t do much to persuade us to stay. If anything, it made our decision a lot easier.”

ALBERTO MARISCAL

ON THE INSIDE OF his bedroom door, Alberto Mariscal has assembled a pictorial shrine to Los Angeles and his life in it.

Snapshots taped to the door, one atop another, portray the high points of Mariscal’s eight years in Los Angeles. Here are Alberto and friends on the Universal Studios tour. Here is Alberto with girls. Then, in quick succession, the cherry-red Mustang that Alberto proudly drives on the wide streets of the San Fernando Valley, Alberto with girls, Alberto on the rides at Magic Mountain, the animals Alberto saw at the L.A. Zoo, Alberto with girls, the smoggy view Alberto saw from the parking lot at Dodger Stadium, the ponies Alberto bet on at Hollywood Park, and Alberto with more girls.

If Mariscal, 26, a muscular swimming-pool contractor, is not exactly eloquent about his contentment with Los Angeles, his photographs and possessions speak for him. In Guadalajara it would never have been possible for him to own his ’83 Mustang, a small tower of stereo equipment and a closet filled with beach and disco clothes. But in L.A., hard work has brought material rewards. Like 38% of Latino poll respondents, who said economic opportunity is this city’s greatest attraction, Mariscal is a reasonably happy man.

He and his family came to Los Angeles in 1981, lured by “letters from my cousins and my uncles,” he says. “They would say we could get better jobs and a better life. That was true.” And now he is applying for citizenship under the amnesty law. In L.A., he can stretch out on his bed in his own bedroom--something he had to share with six brothers in Mexico. Even the blue stucco house in Sylmar where he lives with his parents and brothers, is partly his. Six months ago, Mariscal pooled some of his savings with his father, Salvador Sr., and another brother to make a down payment on the house.

On their small farm just outside Guadalajara, Mariscal and his brothers were simply peones , toughened kids fated to sweat the rest of their lives at menial labor. But in Los Angeles, they became a company, Cleopatra Pools, a subcontracting firm that builds swimming pools for affluent South Bay residents.

At 5:30 every weekday morning, Mariscal and his older brother, Salvador Jr., crowd into their company pickup truck and make the long commute south toward the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where they do most of their work. Often, other brothers take seats in the flatbed.

It is a long drive made longer by the city’s ever-worsening traffic conditions. Three years ago, Mariscal says, it was rare that they would hit heavy traffic before 6 a.m. Now, they can expect it as a matter of course. The trip takes 30 minutes longer than it did in 1986.

The only member of Mariscal’s family who has yet to adjust to life in Los Angeles is his father. Other than going to Dodger games, it seems, there is nothing about life in Southern California that the 62-year-old man can stomach. American cooking, coated with grease and lard, is horrid, he tells his son. “He hates hamburgers,” Alberto Mariscal says with a laugh. Salvador Sr. refuses to drive. He never learned how in Mexico and has no intention of starting here. He so hates urban life that two years ago, he bought a fat black-and-white cow. The cow is installed across the street from the Mariscal home and lolls in the dust of a rented pasture.

“When my father gets homesick, he goes across the street and looks at the cow,” Alberto Mariscal says. “It makes him feel better.”

Instead of yearning for simpler times, Mariscal is intrigued by his new home’s sophistication. At least once a week, he likes to drive out for a night of club-hopping in the San Fernando Valley. The clubs he stops at are a far cry from the crowded beer halls of Guadalajara, where drinkers range from teen-agers to the elderly. In the Valley, he can drink with other Spanish-speaking patrons who are in their mid-20s and 30s. The music is new Mexican pop music, not the old stuff adults cry over. And any weekend, Mariscal can join his friends and drive to an amusement park or head for the beaches of Santa Monica or Malibu--if they leave early.

“If you don’t, you’ll never get a parking space,” he says.

Once, he drove in circles for two hours before finding a space near the beach, an experience he vows never to repeat.

Parking snarls aside, Mariscal and his family came here for “a better life” and found it. They park their cars in their narrow driveway, play video games on their wide-screen television and pitch footballs at each other outdoors, American-style. The neighbor on one side of their house is Anglo, but another Mexican family lives on the other side--one more sign that Los Angeles has done well by them.

“You see a lot of Spanish people wherever you are,” Mariscal says. “That’s a good sign. It feels like home.”

LAUREL BOWEN

WHEN LAUREL Bowen was growing up in Lincoln, Neb., all of her relatives predicted that the youngster with acting talent would someday end up in Los Angeles.

Sure enough, Bowen, a cheerful woman who once starred on a weekly television children’s program in Lincoln, did not disappoint. Twelve years ago, she drove north from San Diego, where she had lived for four years because she “didn’t have enough courage to go directly to L.A.”

Her new home seemed a frightening place. In Bowen’s first year in L.A., her Volkswagen convertible was stolen three times. On the freeways, drivers maneuvered around her so quickly that she “kept my eyes peeled ahead of me all the time.” Yet the city was intoxicating in its potential rewards. Whenever she glimpsed the Hollywood Hills from the freeway, she forgot her troubles. There was the Hollywood sign, the one image of Los Angeles that propelled her toward an acting career. “I dreamed of that sign ever since I was a little girl,” she recalls.

Eventually, Bowen, 39, found an agent and steady, lucrative employment doing voice-overs for cartoons. She married another actor, Dennis Bowen, 38, who understood the pressures of her work. Her life turned on career considerations. She worried about getting her timing right on the freeways so as not to be late for auditions. “You try to stay fresh and the freeway makes you a wreck,” she says.

And then the Bowens had a little girl and everything changed.

No longer does Laurel Bowen look at Los Angeles from an adults-only perspective. Every plan for the future requires thoughts about how Tory, 6, will be affected.

The Bowens got “mortgaged to the hilt” to buy a home where their impish, red-haired daughter could run free. In an affluent, remote suburban section of Toluca Lake--”just two blocks from Bob Hope”--Bowen and her husband found a ranch house with a towering sycamore where Tory can swing on an old tire hung from a sturdy branch.

These days, Bowen is preoccupied with the quality of education in Los Angeles. “Right now, Tory is our only child,” Bowen says, “and we feel that she deserves the best.”

When they began checking into the programs provided by Los Angeles public schools, the Bowens were startled by what they found. Bowen was dismayed that the elementary school two blocks from their house had no regular music program.

“They had music only every other year because of budget cuts,” she says. “Well, where I grew up, we sang every day. It’s little problems like that that scare you about our schools.”

Slightly more than a fourth of those questioned in the Times Poll said that Los Angeles has become a poor place to raise children because of problems in the school system. Most respondents agreed, however, that gangs and drugs are even more serious concerns.

For those reasons, the Bowens enrolled Tory in a private school. The costs are high, but the Bowens have no apprehensions about the quality of Tory’s education or her safety or the role models she encounters among older kids.

Still, despite the Bowens’ good fortune, they worry. In recent years, they have seen graffiti on nearby freeway underpasses, the first scrawled evidence that urban gangs are proliferating even in North Hollywood. And sometimes, during rush hour, traffic noise in their neighborhood becomes uncomfortably loud.

Occasionally, Laurel Bowen thinks back on her years in Nebraska and wonders if her parents lived a better life. “I’ll bet there’s a simpler life somewhere else,” she says.

If there is, she has no plans to try it. On their refrigerator door, Bowen has fastened a note that reads: “You will rise to the challenge that God has placed on you and meet it.” To live in Los Angeles, Bowen says, is to struggle daily to achieve that goal.

Pam Herbert

LAST JANUARY, Pam Herbert endured her “classic L.A. experience.”

At the the urging of a friend who said he was tight with the bouncer at a New Wave dance club in Hollywood, the tanned, lanky 23-year-old college student joined a party of six who drove up from Long Beach to Los Angeles on a chilly night.

Shoehorned into a ragged line that Herbert later recalled as “a mob scene,” she and her friends had come in party clothes, much like the others in line who were dressed up in miniskirts, high-heeled boots and baggy trousers. Expecting immediate entry, they were not prepared for the cold.

The bouncer was uncooperative. He knew the friend, but he was more eager to please familiar patrons and well-dressed trendies who stuck rolled-up bills in his fist. So he let in two of the men and one of Herbert’s girlfriends, leaving Herbert and two other friends waiting in line.

Ninety minutes later, angry and shivering, the trio persuaded the bouncer to let them into the club long enough to grab the car keys from one of their friends. On the way home, they swore that they would never return to L.A.’s club scene.

“It was Hell Night,” Herbert fumes. “I mean, the worst.”

Again, as always, Pam Herbert’s hopes had been dashed. Like the dark side of the moon, Los Angeles’ good life has yet to be revealed to her.

After three years in Long Beach, contending with the worsening daily pressures caused by crime, traffic and overcrowding, Herbert expects to stay on only until she obtains a degree in speech pathology or education from Cal State Long Beach. Like nearly half of Times Poll respondents, she is thinking about moving.

“I figure I’ll get my degree and look around elsewhere,” she says. “I consider myself a true-blue Californian, but I’ve had it with Southern California.”

Herbert came to Los Angeles in 1986 to share an apartment with a friend from Lodi, the Northern California town where she’d been living. After high school, she had taken several years off to work, but now she was ready for college, and she’d heard good things about Long Beach.

“I tried to keep an open mind,” she says. But it was impossible to stay neutral when her roommate came home one day with a swollen face. A derelict had walked up to her car at an intersection, leaned into her open window and punched her in the head. Or the time the same roommate was assaulted on the public beach by a man who pawed at her breasts.

Soon enough, Herbert had her own war stories. Her car was broken into four times. When she went to the supermarket, she had to fend off transients, each with a tale of woe tailored to the situation at hand. Herbert is not without sympathy, but like 66% of Times Poll respondents who said they believe that the homelessness problem is affecting the quality of life in Los Angeles, she has grown tired of constantly being asked for money.

One woman thrust a small child in her face and said she needed money for milk. Already suspicious, Herbert offered to buy groceries for her. The woman stalked away, scowling.

“It depresses and angers me when something like that happens,” she says. “It’s like a violation of my neighborhood.”

At the shopping center, Herbert warily eyes the “mall rats,” high school students who hang out there on weekends. “Kids look so different here than they do in Lodi,” she says. “They’re always in packs, wearing black leather, looking real hard. It’s sad.”

If Herbert has her way, she will move to a small town--”some place nice like Santa Barbara”--close enough to a larger city so that she can drive in and take in a play or a day of shopping.

Sealed each night in her garden apartment complex, Herbert misses Lodi--its ample parks, roomy houses and friendly residents. But for now, she will put up with the television blaring from next door, the crowds at the pool.

“At the worst, I have four more years to go,” Herbert says. She is keeping count.