One Last Story About Leaving L.A.

Had one too many stories rammed down your throat in recent months about the Great Escape from L.A.? About leaving the smog and crime and heading for the hills of Utah or Arizona or Colorado? About smiling women named Marge who process your car registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles in three minutes flat? About buying the dream house with four bedrooms for $112,000?

Me, too.

So, settle back for a few moments and let me clue you in to the awful, horrible truth.

I recently made the big leap, leaving the oh-so-many splendors of the San Fernando Valley for a life in Colorado. Colorado Springs, to be precise. After 16 years, I packed up the wife and kids and two mangy dogs and headed for the Rockies.

Hell. That’s what it is. Hell.

Right off the bat, the woman at the Department of Motor Vehicles was not named Marge. Her name was Debbie. And the registration process took closer to five minutes. Three minutes , what a load of bull. OK, maybe Debbie did smile a lot and make the process remarkably pleasant, but let’s not get off the point here.

And the house for $112,000? Snap out of it. Try $125,000 or even $135,000 for a 3,200-square-foot house. And tack on another $3,000 or $4,000 if you want to fence in the entire five acres. No one told you about the stinking fence. Or that the view of the Front Range of the Rockies is so mind-numbing that you can hardly get any work done even if you wanted to build the fence. No, they didn’t mention anything about that!

Let me give you just a few more of the many, many reasons not to make the mistake I made in leaving a charming--albeit occasionally hectic--life in one of the world’s truly great cities, Los Angeles:

* Deer. Big, brown hairy deer all over the place. Two days ago a really big one with sharp, pointy things growing out of its head crashed through our shrubs and stomped all over my front lawn. I mean all over it. The kids went crazy. Took half an hour to settle them down and get them plopped back in front of Nintendo. I’m checking into the use of deer traps. About time someone did something about this go-where-we-please attitude that these flea-bitten beasts seem to have.

* Rain. Not the usual, normal rain that comes in sky-emptying doses once or twice a year, flooding the streets and wrenching houses from their foundations. Oh, no, this rain comes several times a week, late in the afternoon, in ridiculously small amounts, sweeping over the 10,000-foot peaks accompanied by great flashes of awe-inspiring lightning and booming thunder. It’s just enough rain to soak the grass and turn it emerald green, then it’s gone and the skies change back to a sickening deep blue, a color that starts to get on your nerves after a few weeks. They make a big deal, by the way, about the clean air here. Wow. Like carbon monoxide ever hurt anybody.

Let me add a note about the thunder: Dogs seem to dislike it. If you want to spend the rest of your life coaxing two big dogs out of a pine tree, the pupils of their eyes dilated in terror, then this is the place for you.

Not that there’s much else for a big dog to do around here. Sometimes at night I can see my 90-pound Max through the window, eyes alert, body tense, just begging for one guy with a cute nickname like The Night Stalker to come slithering over the fence, like in the old days. Don’t hold your breath, Max, my friend. The poor mutt. We don’t even have a fence.

* The people. Oh, they seem pleasant enough to the untrained eye, barking out this good morning! stuff wherever you turn, smiling a lot and even--get this!--using their turn signals when driving. (It’s that thin, silver rod protruding from the left side of your steering column, the thing we are told our ancestors once used while driving in L. A.)

Care for another example of the hell I stumbled into? The other night I was stealing lumber from an upscale housing development, like we all do, so I could build a doghouse. Actually, the lumber was in a huge dumpster in front of one of the 8,500-square-foot, nine-bedroom, $250,000 mansions going up around here--lumber that was headed for the dump. But we all know that in a normal place like L. A., even that is an open invitation for a severe beating by the construction-site night watchman or a life-threatening mauling by one of his cross-eyed pit bulls.

Oh, no, not here. What do I get? I get the construction foreman catching me in the act. Pine-handed. And what does he do? Well, he helps me, that’s what he does. No kidding. Piles some choice boards near my car and uses his own knife, not to slash my throat as any normal person would do, but instead to cut some rope to lash the lumber to my roof. Said something about having to get rid of it anyway. Right, buddy. Like this guy won’t be lurking in my bushes some dark and stormy night, clutching a cheap handgun.

By now you should be getting the idea that this move was the mistake of a lifetime. Direct my mail to P.O. Box 134, Hell.

In closing, do you remember those bumper stickers so popular in L. A., oh, let’s just say a while back, that read Welcome To California. Now Go Home ? Yeah, I know you don’t see them much anymore, but that’s not important.

What is important is that none of the rest of you make the same stupid blunder I did, leaving a comfortable life with few worries (except whether someone with a bandanna might actually spray-paint you some day or that silly uneasiness you feel when withdrawing money from a bank machine at night or that sort of nagging concern that your children might have the tuna sandwiches blown out of their little hands during school lunch hour by automatic weapons fire) for a place like this: a nightmarish, deer-infested, trout-leaping town filled with the kind of people who actually stop at red lights and try way too hard to give the impression that they don’t want your wallet or your car.

I plan to return to L. A. immediately. And I’m going to tell my three kids today or tomorrow or, at the latest, next week, as soon as they wipe those smiles off their faces, get rid of that aggravating twinkle in their eyes and stop laughing so much.