Fire and Water

An old man stood near the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Vernon Street, staring sadly at the blackened shell of a burned-out building, and said, “This is a lonely time.”

When I asked what he meant, he just shook his head and walked off. It was an odd kind of comment in the bustling aftermath of calamity.

The term lonely didn’t apply on this busy weekend. South-Central L.A. had all the attention it could possibly take.

The eyes of the world were focused here. Streets were full of people trying to restore order. Pundits filled the television screens, and every politician in the country was elbowing his way toward the cameras.

They were saying, What we need is change, what we need is love, what we need is money, what we need is the Army, what we need is me.

In South-Central itself, the mobs that gathered now were middle-aged white ladies from Sherman Oaks and Pacific Palisades and college kids from Pepperdine and Cal State Northridge.

They were manning brooms and shovels at the behest of actor Edward James Olmos, who somehow had emerged as the Great Voice of Reason out of the whole mess . . . but better him, I guess, than what we’ve had.

And if all of them weren’t company enough in the ghetto, there were heavily armed cops and soldiers everywhere, repair crews and enough media to cover the end of the world.

That sound like a lonely place to you?

Days after the fires had been extinguished, South-Central still reeked of wet ashes. Its pungency is a familiar one.

I’ve smelled it many times covering fires in the cities and mountains, a kind of sweet-acrid aroma that evokes sad memories of troubled days.

If humanity needs another metaphor to describe its uneasy trek through the valleys of time, fire and water isn’t a bad one.

But despite its presence in the ghetto, and the presence of all those people associated with calamity, there were scenes of normalcy too.

A young couple held hands on Manchester Avenue, sweetly oblivious to anyone but each other and to anything but what they saw in each other’s eyes.

No one was lonely in their world.

And there was no loneliness at the Mt. Carmel Recreation Center, where children laughed and screamed on swings, eyes on the blue sky, small feet pointing toward heaven.

Kids have their own secret world, full of elves and fairies and all the things that prance through sunlit glades, where loneliness never exists.

There was enterprise in the post-riot ghetto too. Teen-agers washed cars for $4 a pop. Others sold fresh oranges amid the ruins.

And there was humor: a big guy in a fast food restaurant ordering a half-dozen hamburgers and explaining to a nervous clerk, “You build up an appetite looting.”

What the hell was that old man talking about, loneliness?

How can you be lonely in a place getting more media attention than the Korean War and provoking more advice than the World Series?

How can you be lonely in a community full of outsiders fighting over brooms and straining to understand what went wrong?

Sure, they know all about the verdict in the Rodney King trial and are as angry as everyone else in America.

But the hard part is trying to comprehend how a bad verdict could translate into such wild violence. Everyone from Bill Cosby to Pope John Paul II will be trying to figure that one out.

When I asked a guy in the ghetto how it happened, he said, “We ain’t educated people. We had to do something to be heard.”

What am I missing here? When you can’t form words, you burn down your house? Is that the last act of frustration?

Ironies aside, that could be what the old man was talking about. Shouting into a crowd with no one listening is certainly a lonely place to be.

That was on my mind when I passed a woman holding a sign that said “Care.” That’s another thing. Caring is lonely too, when you’re heart says you’re the only one who does.

Later, I saw a second sign: “Forgive.” I was getting to the core of what the old man meant. Trying to forgive a cop who’s beaten your son or a thug who’s killed your husband occupies a quiet corner of the soul. No crowds there.

Just before leaving South-Central, I stopped at a neatly kept house on 23rd Street. I had questions. The woman inside wouldn’t come to the door. “I’ve got nothing to say,” she said. “Go away.” Her voice trembled. I heard deep and abiding fear.

And at last I knew what the old man meant, because being afraid of anything is the loneliest place of all. He was right. By that measure, at this moment, this may be the loneliest town in the world.