A Walk Across the City

You want to see sick? Take a walk around this town. That’s sick.

--A line from “Falling Down,” a new movie about Los Angeles.

I walked across Los Angeles on Thursday. I started downtown in the morning and reached Venice Beach by sunset. There were moments along the way, but no one shot at me. No one spat at me. No one brained me with a three-iron.

This will surprise anyone who has seen “Falling Down” and believes that it accurately depicts Los Angeles. In the movie, Michael Douglas portrays an aerospace worker who has lost his job and his sanity. He abandons his car in a downtown traffic jam and marches off toward Venice.

Along the way, the nerdish wanderer--short-sleeve shirt, pocket protector, crew cut and Kurt Rambis glasses--is assaulted by gangbangers, crooked shopkeepers, neo-Nazis, beggars, pushy motorists, homicidal golfers and snotty food servers. He returns fire with an arsenal that evolves from briefcase to switchblade to bazooka.

The Los Angeles of “Falling Down” is immediately recognizable. It is the Los Angeles of late-night news and boilerplate sociology. A city of drive-bys and Hare Krishnas and “Will Work for Food” signs, of absurd wealth and wretched poverty and little in between. In short, it is the new mythical L.A., which has supplanted the old mythical L.A. of endless summers and suburban white bread. Still, the notion of a walk across town intrigued me. I wondered what actually was out there.

*

Like the Douglas character, I hiked first into the hills that overlook downtown from across the Harbor Freeway. Barren now, they’ll be covered by skyscrapers after the next boom. I looked down on the mirrored skyline, shining in the morning sun. I had picked a good day for a walk: warm, sunny with a slight haze. I set a course that looped out of downtown then made a beeline to the beach.

It’s a peculiar experience, walking in Los Angeles. Not too many people do it. The sidewalks were pretty much deserted all the way. At times I felt myself a suspect: He walks, therefore he must be a wacko. In Hancock Park, private security guards crept past in their prowl cars, talking into radios. Human encounters were rare.

A driver called me “---hole” as I crossed Vermont; she wanted to turn right, I was in her way. A woman in light blue sweats and hair curlers walked across Rampart Boulevard with me: “The Lord,” she said softly, urgently, “wants you to be in the leadership of his church. He says if you do that, you will be a success.” At the Bob’s Big Boy on Wilshire, a waitress told me that her parents, wary of earthquakes and riots, wanted her back in Miami. “I’ll never leave California,” she vowed, although she conceded that Thousand Oaks was looking good to her these days.

I walked through neighborhoods of cramped apartments, laundry hanging in windows to dry, and others of Tudor mansions built of brick. These were the extremes; most houses were somewhere in the middle. I saw new fences going up all over town, lots of razor wire. Graffiti were everywhere, almost, and so were Richard Riordan campaign posters: “Tough enough,” they promised, “to turn L.A. around.”

The skins of most people I saw came in different colors than my own. I was amazed by the number of children. Babies in strollers. Toddlers on their fathers’ shoulders. Children running home from school. Los Angeles, City of Children. In Koreatown, sadly, I saw the form of a little boy and his bike under a white sheet. He had been hit by a truck an hour before. A large crowd watched from the opposite sidewalk, speaking in church whispers.

*

My feet hurt by the time I reached Venice. At the beach, a piper played a mournful “Yankee Doodle” while sunglasses vendors and hemp promoters folded up their booths. I sat in the Venice Bistro and waited for a cab. The Byrds were on the jukebox, and through the window I could watch the red sun slip into the ocean.

I reviewed my notes. Most of what I had passed on my walk was of little consequence. Gardeners planting spring flowers. Women sunning themselves in front of a pastel duplex. Old people filing into a church. Couples with groceries waiting for a bus. None of it was “news.” None of it material someone might mold into a movie.

It was, simply, the stuff of the everyday. Sometimes serene, sometimes sad--the human comedy, Saroyan called it. Myths aside, Los Angeles still has plenty of this kind of life left. It is the real Los Angeles, the anonymous Los Angeles and--bulletin--it is still a pretty good place to live. That’s my view anyway. Of course I just walked from downtown to Venice. So maybe I’m crazy.