Truckin’ on Down to ‘Dago’

This is a great time for L.A.-bashing. People everywhere are filled with happiness over our various discomforts, including, but not limited to, our fears of new urban chaos if the Verdict of the Century should free the cops that beat Rodney King.

Friends have called from Oakland, Santa Fe, Portland and even New York to ask when am I going to get the hell out of what street preacher Bobby Bible calls the Mother of All Whores, meaning Los Angeles?

They mention not only the cops that beat King and the subsequent riots, but also gangs, drugs, graffiti, traffic, smog, drive-by shootings and the newest entries in the fun house of violent crimes, high school shootouts, carjackings and ATM killings.

“It sounds worse than it is,” I say in defense of the Mother of All Whores. “You just have to know where not to go and when not to go there.”

“And what not to breathe and when not to breathe it,” a critic from Santa Fe adds, referring to our polluted air.

“Let he who is without smog take the first breath,” I say, searching lamely for any route away from the conversation.

Not that I haven’t heard it all before. It’s just that the bashing seems to have intensified. I learned with some chagrin that it has even become the sport of the day in San Diego.

That hurts. My memories of what we called “Dago” are rooted in the agonizing months I spent in boot camp. It is a place where Marine D.I.s humiliate you and where sailors get drunk and vomit on themselves outside of topless bars.

It seemed a perfect opportunity to bash back. So I went truckin’ on down to Dago.

What I found was a sweet little town of 1.2 million loving souls who would rather disembowel themselves than honk their horn on a freeway, and whose expressions of disapproval are limited to a good, hard shake of the finger, and I don’t mean pointed upward.

In two full days of wandering the city and talking to everyone from media reps to the guy who guards the public toilet at the Civic Center, I found no one who was really filled with all-consuming hatred toward us. They don’t want to live in L.A., but they at least make an effort to understand those of us trapped here by circumstances beyond our control.

Everyone there seems to be related to someone in L.A. and checks on them often, the way you might check on an elderly grandfather hiding in a sewer in Sarajevo. One man told me he had a mother living in Glendale and added with some pride, “I’m not a bit afraid to visit her.”

I tried jerking criticism from the locals like a dentist yanking molars from a mouth full of rot, but it didn’t work. All they wanted to talk about was their own fine weather, their clean air, their zoo and their marinas.

To them, everything is wonderful in San Diego. Tour bus drivers point with pride to the hill where Tom Cruise rode his motorcycle in “Top Gun,” and they play recordings of the Marine Corps Hymn when passing the location where “Gomer Pyle” was filmed.

I thought for awhile that the toughest critique I would hear toward L.A. would come from a middle-aged lady at the San Diego Tourist Bureau who, cornered into commenting, frowned and said, “It’s so untidy up there.”

Of course it’s untidy. It takes time to haul away murder victims, sweep up shell casings and tow away freeway wreckage.

San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Neil Morgan says San Diego was settled by those who wanted to create the Midwest in a cul-de-sac where it would be safe from change. Now it doesn’t know what it wants to be, except it doesn’t want to be L.A.

Radio talk show host Ken Kramer agrees. “When people call in to complain about traffic or graffiti, they say, ‘We’re becoming another Los Angeles.’ You’re our standard for failure.”

He adds quickly, however, that there is no real hostility toward us. “It’s not as if there were a person from L.A. in the room, we’d pick up a chair and harm him. We’re not that way. Think of us as your little sister.”

Neither Morgan nor Kramer, who are in the business of commenting, would really bite into L.A., no matter how much I prodded. They typify the whole town. Everyone is too damned polite.

They don’t say, “Have a nice day.” They say, “Have a wonderful day.” They yield at intersections and allow you to cut in their lane on the freeway without giving you the finger. That’s not natural. A guy like me could die of hyperglycemia in a place like that.

I don’t have it in me to bash a town that smiles itself to sleep. That would be like garroting a puppy. He’s going to lick you no matter what.

Live in peace, Little Sister. The Mother of All Whores sends love.