What I Did in School

The boy stood at the edge of the luncheon area, looking toward rows of tables caught in an eerie blend of light and shadow. Beyond them, a concrete archway seemed solemn and forbidding, like the entrance to an abandoned castle.

It was Sunday. The boy was the only person there, and for a moment he appeared caught up in the emptiness, listening to far-off sounds: the shout of a child, the choppy hum of a helicopter, thin, wavelike reeds of music.

Then he said, almost to himself, “The place feels haunted.”

He summed up perfectly the aura that surrounds Fairfax High, where last week a student was killed and another injured by the accidental firing of a gun brought to school for protection.

The boy perceived a spookiness that permeates not only the school, but just about every corner of L.A. itself, where the proliferation of guns can turn a walk in the park into a trip to eternity.

But, oddly, gunfire in the streets, like peril in a war zone, seems to have become an accepted element of life in the big city, along with traffic congestion and air pollution.

We tolerate with only mild distress the deaths of innocents beyond the schoolyards, but a killing within the classroom is different. It violates the perception that school is for learning and the street for killing, the way murder in a church scrambles the rules of an organized society.

In addition to violating the unwritten rule, the death of Demetrius Rice stuns the city because it was the first classroom killing in the L.A. school district.

But don’t worry. Consistency establishes rules of its own. Future killings will be easier to accept. We’ll get used to it.

Unless . . .

I was talking to Zev Yaroslavsky. The councilman was enraged. They call him the wolf of the Westside because Zev means wolf in Hebrew and because his temper sometimes borders on feral.

He was the guy who, in a fit of pique, threatened to punch out a colleague in the council chambers a few years back.

I could feel the heat of his passion over the phone. He was talking about the installation of metal detectors at schools to stop the influx of guns.

“I don’t give a damn what everyone thinks,” he was saying. “I won’t rest until it happens. I’m tired of listening to people tell me it won’t work. Kids are being killed and shot and stabbed in schools. It’s time to do something.”

He was thinking about Demetrius Rice and about his own daughter, a student at North Hollywood High, who tells him she sees guns on campus all the time.

“Metal detectors are used at airports and they work. They’re used at courthouses and they work. They’re used at the nation’s Capitol and they work. They’re used at schools in New York and they work. Don’t tell me they won’t work here!”

A school is a “leaky place,” a teacher says. There are a hundred ways a kid can sneak in. If someone wants to bring a gun on campus, he will. Metal detectors won’t stop him.

Yaroslavsky fires back: “Hell yes, they can parachute guns in or helicopter them if they want to! But what’s the alternative when kids are getting shot? Who’s got a better idea?”

Metal detectors? Sure. Anything to keep the kids alive. Strip search them if we have to. Empty their backpacks, kick in their lockers, dismantle their cars.

Yaroslavsky’s passions are justified. He’s a father as well as a councilman. He sees his daughter walking into cross-fire. He hears gunshots and screams in his worst nightmares.

But why does his rage dissipate in uncertainty when I ask why he doesn’t bring the same fervor to the very existence of guns on the street? That’s where the kids get the firearms they bring to school.

“It’s easier to do this than to root out every gun in L.A.,” he says uneasily. One moment he’s chastising those who say it can’t be done and the next he’s saying it can’t be done. Or someone else ought to do it.

I hear that often. Someone ought to do something. But always the someone is someone else. Few are in a better position than Zev Yaroslavsky to funnel outrage into action.

I’m not just talking about metal detectors at schools. That goes into effect now. I’m talking about a rage against the violence that is keeping L.A. hostage. I’m talking about a tidal wave of protest that could someday wash the city clean of the blood that stains us all.

The kid at Fairfax High, standing in the half-light of a Sunday in mourning, said that the place felt haunted. The whole damned town is haunted, Zev Yaroslavsky.

Somebody do something.