Funny Old Town

I went to the opera one night recently and then to an old war zone the next day. I almost said an ancient war zone, it seems so long ago now that South-Central L.A. was in flames. Was it only last spring?

The opera was Leos Janacek’s “The Makropulos Case.” It was about lawyers, a lawsuit and a woman who discovers eternal life and spends it cheerfully bedding everyone in sight.

That may be a simplification but then that’s what I do. I simplify.

My wife, Cinelli, says I shouldn’t tamper with things I know nothing about, such as opera, but if I followed that rule I’d only produce an essay a year.

Writing a column has very little to do with knowledge but a lot to do with one’s willingness to fire at obscure targets. It’s drive-by journalism.

At any rate, I found “The Makropulos Case” less than thrilling, but then the only thing about sex and law that has ever intrigued me is that ruling a few years ago that lawyers shouldn’t sleep with their clients.

What does interest me is the contrast of activities in a city this size where women in jewels and men in tuxedos attend an opera less than a half-hour’s drive from where parents are trying to stretch the peanut butter to feed their kids and thinking about the fire next time.

This wasn’t a sudden revelation that came to me at the opera itself, because nothing came to me at the opera itself, but something I thought about later.

I thought about the dichotomy of wealth and poverty, and of gentility and violence, and it sent a chill through me.

*

It flashed on me as I was driving through South-Central and getting out of the car occasionally to talk to people and ask how they were making it.

I didn’t plan it this way, the contrast of culture and urban calamity. There was no brilliance aforethought.

It just suddenly hit me: How crazy, I’m at an opera one night and the next day I’m in what was a war zone a few months ago. From dining at Otto Rothschild’s to paying a guy a buck to wash my windshield so he can buy lunch.

But, hey, that’s life in the big city.

I kept telling myself that as I drove down Western and up Vermont and across Florence, where reconstruction is going on but not as much as it should be.

This is the big city all right, but does it have to be like this?

I counted seven burned-out gas stations still fenced off and still bearing all the scars of the riots. Chillingly, they had almost become a part of the landscape, disappearing back into the patterns that have characterized ghettos since the beginning.

One must wonder if these residuals of calamity, like surgical scars on a dead man, will remain in the collective memory long enough to remind us we’ve got to do better next time.

Food stores, pharmacies and medical buildings struggle to rebuild, while the only places that seem to be making it are the liquor stores, all bright and shiny and open for business.

An old guy sat on a bus bench not far from one of them, drinking God knows what from a bottle in a paper bag, and I kept seeing myself sipping Scotch the night before at a cocktail lounge where the right people meet.

We’re not too different, the old guy and I. We just sip from different bags.

“Returning Soon!” a sign said in front of a burned-out mini-mart. “We’re Coming Back!” another sign said, this time at where a furniture store had been.

On stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the character Emilia Marty asks, “Why is it men feel they must kill me?”

*

Forty-five people died in South-Central the night that fire lit up our television screens. Only Emilia Marty died on the stage at the Music Center, as far as I can remember. She walked symbolically up a stairway to, well, heaven I guess.

There was a stairway in South-Central too, at the corner of Normandie and 67th Street.

It was just about all that was recognizable in the debris of what had been a building.

The stairway stood in a back section of the jumble of steel and furniture and huge chunks of concrete. Where did it go? Who knows. It doesn’t go anywhere now, just kind of standing there to remind us there isn’t a heaven for everyone.

At the opera, I had my leg crossed over my knee and my foot fell asleep and clunked to the floor. I’ll be next, I thought. I’ll doze off in the middle of an aria and fall flat on my face.

There was no dozing in South-Central. Reality sounds a harsh and resounding reveille. I smelled the smoke in the riots and I smell the ashes now.

Emilia Marty ascended the stairway with a sad wave to life. I drove home from South-Central and couldn’t get it out of my mind.