Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : Has the Myth Been Shattered?

How you see Los Angeles depends on the tint of your sunglasses. Mine were ground in New Jersey. I came here for work, insensible to the lure of softball in mid-January. I brought few illusions, a useful trick.

The places I had lived had stopped boasting a long time ago. Their cores were rotting, their margins sprawling, their people growing old. If fewer dreams disturbed their sleep, they had the wisdom of age. New Jersey, state of humility.

Fate tossed me to its antipode, San Diego. America’s Finest City, it had elevated smugness to a civic virtue. A city of converts, the well-buffed congregation chanted about perfection. They believed they had found it--if just they could avoid looking south.

And north.

After San Diego, Los Angeles felt like real life. The horizon looked smudged but at least oxygen reached the brain. The Hondas idled in the fast lane, but the radio dial was the world’s greatest university extension. Malagasy music, call-in psychotherapy, Joe Frank.

I found an apartment near Olympic and La Brea. The corner church was Korean, the neighbors black and white. After nightfall, police helicopters raked the yards with their searchlights. By day, the Hockneys at the county art museum were a short walk away.

Sometimes at dawn I would lope north across Wilshire into the muffled dewiness of Hancock Park, among the gardens, voluptuous and meticulously tended. White-aproned maids padded silently down flagstone walks, bending to collect the morning papers.

Twelve hours later, I would leave work downtown. Sunset and dust washed the glimmering high-rises in a hazy pink. In the alley behind the garage, the occasional woman dressed in a trash bag would squat on her haunches, defecating demurely behind a cardboard scrap.

It was undeniable: This was a place of brutal contrasts. Among the most grotesque was how people talked about food: The critic on the radio mooning over the caviar-and-creme-fraiche sandwich, as if it mattered. Once in a while, I would catch myself doing it.

The annual gang death toll climbed: Was it 300 or 700? Security guards were shooing panhandlers away from the theaters at intermission. Once, a friend and I tried to give a pair of $100 running shoes to a haunted man with bleeding feet. He fled, eyes wide in horror.

The challenge, it seemed, was to reconcile the contrasts: The $3,500 handbags, the semi-automatics, the patients strapped, naked, to gurneys in the corridors of the county hospital. But I found it impossible. So much about life here seemed morally incompatible.

All I could say, in my defense, was that I wasn’t running away.

Yet I wasn’t helping anything, either. I was probably making things worse. I eventually bought a house in a nice neighborhood where the helicopters don’t come. Sure, I voted, but what was the point when four in five didn’t? Unflexed muscles atrophy, including the ones for change.

Then came the riots. A shock, but no surprise. Like the poster in the bookstore says: What Did You Think Would Happen? Sooner or later, the tension between the extremes had to snap. People knew things weren’t right; we were all just too distracted to face it.

For two days, the city spun out of orbit. Its compass had been plunged into an electromagnetic field. My friends sat, shell-shocked, in their homes, riveted to the tube, feeling ashamed as they fiddled with the window locks.

Now, no one talks about anything else. After the war stories, talk turns to poverty, urban policy, race, guilt. On the radio, a bewildered New York liberal confesses his sins: Anxiety in elevators with black men who aren’t bicycle messengers.

We’re groping. But at least we are doing that. A strange lightness swept over me, like adrenaline, one morning last week. The riots were forcing people to face up to inequities long taken for granted. People were talking about things that matter.

I’ve even begun wondering whether, this time, we might end up doing something about it. History warns that’s unlikely, but I can’t seem to shake this nagging sense of hope.

So Southern California finally got to me: I’m nurturing my first illusion.