THE High Life : There Are 54 Floors but at Least 12,000 Stories in the Vertical City at the Wells Fargo Center

It’s just before 6 a.m. at the Wells Fargo Center on Bunker Hill, and a tired and dirty John Ayling is ready to head home. Having spent the night with a small crew polishing the high-rise building’s bronze elevator doors, he packs up his waxes, tarps and buffing machine and disappears into the pre-dawn darkness.

As he leaves, stockbrokers on New York time are arriving at the office complex, many carrying take-out orders of pancakes and iced tea or Coke from McDonald’s. Security guards are moving into place. And trucks are lining up at the loading docks, bringing in everything from white wine--nearly 800 bottles a week--to legal pads and Post-Its by the case.

By 7 a.m., Germaine Parrish, one of a legion of secretaries working in the Wells Fargo Center’s two towers, is at her desk on the 32nd floor. She listens to the “voice mail” (recorded telephone messages), reads the “Wang mail” (intra-office messages sent on Wang computers) and opens the “mail mail.”

About an hour later, Ron Jones, a bank loan officer, is parking his black BMW in a garage three blocks away. He stops at Pasqua, the espresso bar popular with the center’s young lawyers, brokers, bankers and accountants, then heads up to his ninth-floor niche in a sea of cubicles.

By 9 a.m., financier Leonard Green is ensconced on the 54th floor, where he works behind locked doors in an 11,000-square-foot office, surrounded by Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs, Barbizon School oil paintings and priceless Asian and European antiquities. He commands breathtaking city views from this luxurious aerie 700 feet above the street.

Green, Jones, Parrish and Ayling are among the 700,000 people who walk, ride or drive each weekday into downtown Los Angeles--a dizzying, 3.2-square-mile patchwork of cultures that rarely intersect.

With a population roughly the size of San Marino’s, the Wells Fargo Center--daily destination for about 12,000 people--is a city unto itself, where the climate and the Muzak are carefully controlled, the security guards all wear Brooks Brothers jackets and even the McDonald’s will deliver.

With Wells Fargo Bank and data-processing giant IBM as the “name” tenants, it is a gleaming symbol of corporate America in a downtown sprouting ever more monuments to the capitalistic spirit.

Yet life inside this vertical world is a study in contrasts.

For the wealthy financier, there is the cultured solitude of an office with floor-to-ceiling windows that offer serene views of blimps and birds. The only traffic noise comes from the helicopter landing pad on top of the neighboring high-rise. For the polishers, there is the tedium of cleaning, waxing and shining, night in and night out. For others, there are occasionally wacky sights and eerie sounds.

Like many of the center’s occupants, legal secretary Germaine Parrish rarely strays more than a block away--never venturing into the older, grimier sections of downtown toward Broadway because she neither wants to nor needs to.

“It’s not that bad there, but I’m not that brave,” she explained, adding: “There’s nothing there that really interests me.”

If she wishes, she can get her shoes repaired in the high-rise or visit a women’s clothing boutique, drop off her coat at the dry cleaners or buy the latest bestseller at B. Dalton.

There are also shops selling 10 kinds of coffee drinks, sandwiches, gourmet cookies, candy and ice cream. In addition, three full-service restaurants serve up trendy fare, from Cajun fettuccine to Thai chicken pizza.

A fast-food restaurant rounds out the dining choices. But even the Wells Fargo McDonald’s strives for upscale ambience, with flowers on the tables, telephone jacks in the booths and a moonlighting Los Angeles Philharmonic harpist who plays twice a week. According to Allean Johnson, the restaurant’s 80-year-old hostess, some patrons joke that a hot tub is all that’s lacking.

Designed by the San Francisco architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the complex consists of a lushly landscaped central retail court and two trapezoid-shaped towers, 54 and 44 stories tall. Its 723-foot north tower, built in 1983, is the fourth-highest of downtown’s 30 skyscrapers.

One restaurateur calls the center “Suit City” because of its dense population of smartly, if conservatively, dressed young professionals. Chief among them are lawyers--at least 500 of them in 30 firms. There are also 16 banks, six investment banking firms, eight stock brokerages, seven real estate companies, two accounting firms and two executive search agencies.

In addition, a private business club on the 54th floor, the City Club on Bunker Hill, caters to young executives, most of whom work within a five-block radius of the Wells Fargo complex.

But also among the inhabitants of this vertical city are 120 janitors, who collect 36 tons of trash a week; 55 security officers; 100 parking attendants; 22 engineers, and two repairmen and four bronze polishers who work full-time to maintain the center’s 63 elevators.

Maintaining the 2.5-million square feet of prime downtown real estate is a mammoth job, according to Carmaleta Whitely, who runs the complex for Maguire Thomas Partners, the property’s developer and co-owner. Window washers, for example, stay busy year-round cleaning the high-rise’s 16,000 panes of glass. It takes four months to change all 100,000 light bulbs--a task undertaken every three years.

“I have people who do nothing but polish brass all day long,” Whitely added.

More numerous than lawyers and janitors, however, are secretaries. There are at least 1,000 of them at the Wells Fargo Center.

Parrish works for the law firm Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, on the 32nd floor of the south tower.

“I used to hate downtown,” said Parrish, 30, who drives in from Redondo Beach before dawn each day. “It seemed like such a big mess. Intimidating. Then I realized it was like a small New York . . . a mecca for all kinds of people. You can walk along the street and see almost anything, from the president of a bank to a homeless person. You never know who’s going to be around.”

But, she admitted, working in a high-rise took some getting used to. For example, she said for six months her ears popped every time she rode the elevators.

Then there were the nightmares.

“I had dreams for two weeks that the elevator either didn’t stop going up or didn’t stop going down. They were the worst thing,” she recalled.

But an eerie feeling sometimes still takes hold when strong winds whip through downtown’s granite-and-glass canyons. On such days, the towers sway at the top by as much as six feet, according to building engineers. Parrish said she does not get seasick, as some people do when the swaying begins. She just listens to the building creak.

While many of the sights and sounds inside the high-rise center are mundane, occasionally strange and unpleasant events break up the routine.

Early one morning, a parachutist floated down from the top of a neighboring high-rise, scrambled into a waiting car and sped off. A transient stripped his clothes off at McDonald’s after purchasing an ice cream. A homeless person was found dead on a stairwell. A television film crew made it rain outside on an otherwise clear night.

But apart from these diversions, it is really the power of money that continuously draws people to the center--whether it is the need for a weekly paycheck or a multimillion-dollar deal.

A bad day on Wall Street can cast a marked chill on the center.

“Everyone is upstairs talking to irate customers,” said a dour-faced broker, the lone bar patron at Stepps, one of the center’s three restaurants, one afternoon after the market had plunged 78 points.

Up on the ninth floor of the north tower, the almighty dollar consumes the thoughts of Ron Jones, a dapper 32-year-old lending officer struggling up the corporate ladder at Wells Fargo Bank. Jones spends his days poring over financial reports and punching numbers into a computer, trying to ascertain whether applicants have enough cash flow to assume a loan.

The Ohio native said he enjoys his work, which is heavily analytical. But he considers himself only “marginally successful,” even though he has a business degree from the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, drives an expensive car and lives in Manhattan Beach. As a black, he wonders whether his race will be a barrier to corporate success and yearns for a more freewheeling life, perhaps as a venture capitalist.

“If I stay here, I will never be able to drive a 911 (Porsche), and I will never be able to live at the beach, because this particular job or this company is not going to pay me that kind of money. If I’m going to do it, I have got to get out and do it on my own,” he said over coffee at a cafe near his home.

“The interesting thing about L.A. is you can come out here and have virtually nothing going for yourself and build an empire. . . . You have a lot of people out here who own small businesses, who’ve said, ‘Hey, forget the rat race. I’d much rather be on the 405 (freeway) or PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, on my (car) phone doing business, than sitting in an office.’ ”

Working at the Wells Fargo Center is “like being in an ant farm,” he said. “You go in one circular pattern” from the garage, to the office, and back to the garage. “You don’t meet people when you’re working in the towers. Everyone is kind of departmentalized.”

That was a disappointment to Jones when he arrived at the Wells Fargo Center in 1989. He previously worked in San Francisco and Washington, which had “little drinking holes all over the place” where he could meet other young urban professionals. In his view, the opportunity for social interaction at the Wells Fargo Center generally mirrors the problem in Los Angeles, which he finds a hard city in which to make friends.

“Here, you have Stepps. But people go to Stepps to interact with people they already know,” he said. “For you to come in and try to introduce yourself is kind of an intrusion. If you don’t go to Stepps after work, then you’re going to go to your car and go home.”

Jones does not know Leonard Green, the financier on the top floor, but he would not mind changing places with him.

Late one afternoon, Green, 56, was sitting in his penthouse office. Unlike Jones’ rather sterile corporate environment 45 floors down, Green’s quarters are paneled in Philippine mahogany and filled with expensive oil paintings and other artworks. Just outside his office is a 17th-Century Aubusson tapestry. Even his secretaries have spectacular views.

Green took over this space, occupied by only 15 employees, from Crocker National Bank, which housed its top executives there until it was purchased by Wells Fargo Bank four years ago. He says he was attracted as much by the views--which, he admits, he rarely takes time to enjoy--as by the isolation and quiet.

“You walk in here and it’s almost like being in our own home,” said Green, a Beverly Hills resident.

On prominent display just inside his office is a pillow his wife gave him that has been embroidered with the words “It Ain’t Easy Being King.” A photographer asks to take Green’s picture next to it, but Green declines swiftly and emphatically, prompting a publicist who is on hand to carry it out of sight.

All in all, however, his offices provide a grand setting in which to wheel and deal over multimillion-dollar company buyouts--specifically, leveraged buyouts, Green’s specialty for the past 20 years.

His is a high-stakes business that has become even riskier since the collapse of the junk-bond market, which had provided most of the financing for leveraged buyouts. But Green, ever the determined capitalist, will admit to no worries or fears--of any kind.

“If I have any fears, I’ve probably suppressed them,” he said, smiling.

Nonetheless, Green said one of his chief goals now is to stop coming to the office and turn his business over to his younger partners.

The millionaire says he would much rather concentrate on pursuits that will take him away from fax machines, cellular phone conferences and the latest dispatches from Wall Street.

For example, he said, he is “dying” to go on another arduous trek through the Himalayas. He has been on three treks already.

“It’s marvelous. It’s very spiritual,” said Green, sounding suddenly more animated. “You get away from the rest of the world. You have the ability . . . to turn inward and spend a lot of time cleaning out a lot of debris internally.”

Several hours after Green left his office for the day, John Ayling, the elevator door polisher, was pulling his white van to the curb outside on Grand Avenue.

At this late hour, Ayling, a scrappy, 35-year-old high school graduate from Springfield, Ill., began unloading his gear in the lobby of the south tower. Now and then, lawyers preparing cases and other workers on nocturnal schedules straggled through, barely noticing him.

Elevator 53 got his attention first. He taped brown butcher paper on the marble walls around the doors and spread plastic sheeting over the plush blue-green carpet. Then he set down his cans and a 45-pound, industrial-strength buffing machine.

Peering at the bronze skin of the elevator doors, he pointed out a minute scratch that could be seen only when the lobby lights hit it from a certain angle. Then, putting on ear muffs and a mask to keep from breathing in the dust, he pressed the buffer to the door, stopping only to apply a few touches of an abrasive wax.

While most of the building’s occupants are at home in bed, this is how Ayling spends his waking hours, removing the traces of careless commerce from the chrome, brass and bronze surfaces of office buildings.

To those casually passing by, “I’m just somebody cleaning the elevator,” said Ayling. But to him, the work is an art. And that, he said, is satisfying.

“You really get a lot of compliments because it’s a visual thing,” he said, trying to explain. “It’s something somebody sees every day. You come in and make everything look like brand-new.”

And with that, he turned on the buffer again, its whirring sound filling the otherwise still night. Long before the office tower would fill up with people again, the scratch would be gone.