Rats in Our Trees

There’s a line in Larry Gelbart’s play, “City of Angels,” that describes Los Angeles as “a pretty girl with the clap.”

Clap, in addition to defining what we do when we’re pleased with a performance, is also a slang term for gonorrhea, which is a sexual disease.

Ergo, a pretty girl with the clap is quite obviously a thing of beauty with a disquieting flaw. That, according to Gelbart, is L.A.

I realize the line was never intended for scholarly interpretation, but I decided to ask what he meant by it.

There’s nothing a writer hates more than being asked what he meant by what he wrote beyond what he wrote, but I asked him anyhow.

Gelbart is too gracious to tell anyone to go to hell so he said what he meant by the line is that L.A. is incredibly packaged, but our majestic palm trees house rats.

Then he added, “The make-believe is gone. Everyone now knows we’re as tough and mean as any other tough town in the world.”

That fits perfectly with what I’ve been discovering lately while traveling outside of L.A. Everyone else is beginning to discover the rats in our palm trees.

I found this to be true in New York and I found it to be true in El Centro, which are about as different from each other as Madonna is from Nancy Reagan.

Residents of both these places share a changing attitude toward us. We are no longer perceived as, well, kooky. We are no longer laid back. We are no longer mischievous and whimsical.

We are, alas, weird and dangerous.

L.A. has always been the city everyone loved to hate, but there was tolerance in antipathy, and perhaps even envy.

We seemed to be having so damned much fun cowabunging on the beaches that it was difficult for others not to wonder how we managed to stay so young.

L.A. seemed unfinished. It was a deal still going down, a meeting still being taken, a lunch still being done.

I was warned when I left Oakland for L.A. 20 years ago that I was only going to a bigger Oakland but found that wasn’t true. Oakland has a better climate.

But I came anyhow and discovered a town where you went south to get to the ocean, which is west, and west to go north, which is east.

I found a city where everyone I met had an agent, a shrink and a Mercedes, where every waiter was an actor and every third person was trying to sell a screenplay. I loved it.

But that was then and this is now.

The Rodney King beating defined us as something other than lunch at the Bistro. We’re violent, possibly racist and certainly screwed up municipally.

We’ve got cops who beat blacks, a mayor who is only a little smarter than a chair, a police chief who can’t keep his mouth shut, a Police Commission that can’t fire him, and a City Council not quite as quick as the mayor.

We kill children in gang wars, shoot at each other on the freeways, threaten each other with death in back-fence debates and are more horrified by dead dogs than by dead babies.

Our perceptions are murky, our values skewed. Worse, we’re not fun anymore, dude.

In the Bronx, a man told me he would rather spend a week in hell than a day in L.A.

When he said that we were standing amid the incredible debris of a culture in chaos. Buildings were burned out and boarded up, drug paraphernalia littered the ground and danger lurked around every corner.

And yet he perceived Los Angeles as being worse than all that. He saw it as a place where, if you did not own an Uzi and a pit bull, you measured your life span in months.

In El Centro, which is like up the street from Mexico, a woman asked why I lived in L.A. My reply was like that of bank robber Willie Sutton who, when asked why he robbed banks, replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”

I moved to L.A., I said, because that’s where the newspaper is.

She said, “Yes, but, what with the crime rate, don’t you feel a little like a Kurd in Iraq?”

She had a sense of L.A. being at war with itself.

“El Centro may not be Paris,” she said, “but I feel a lot safer here than I ever do when I visit Los Angeles.”

Someone else showed me the page of a local newspaper that featured stories on both L.A.’s crime rate and Tom Bradley distributing Slim-Fast nutrition bars to poor people.

“That’s L.A.,” he said with a sigh. “Death and diet candy.”

“We’re no longer a lovely orange grove,” Gelbart said when I asked about these other perceptions. “Andy Hardy has been replaced by the Terminator.”

And we’re not a city of angels anymore.