‘I Don’t Know What to Do to Stay Alive’

Suddenly, fearfully, I don’t know what to do.

In my 15 years in Los Angeles, crime has advanced faster than I have moved addresses to stay safe. Last weekend, violence was twice at my door. One day, I know, it will crash through to slash at me or those I love, and I am empty of ways to keep us from harm.

Bernie and Lea Graf were our friends. We bought camping gear, a survival kit for the Big One and tough clothing for desert assignments from their chummy surplus store on Reseda Boulevard.

We talked about having come from other cultures in search of something easier in Los Angeles; about the little secrets of keeping love and marriage alive; about their two decades spent watching and worrying as crime slithered across Reseda.

Ten days ago, it took them. Two men were waiting in the dark when Bernie and Lea left the store. One began shooting to obtain, or to prove, God only knows what. Lea, 61, was killed. Bernie, also 61, was wounded.

The investigation is uphill. Typically, said a detective, murder contains a motive. It’s a road sign to culprits. But this time, no money was taken. Bernie and Lea were just nice people who owned a store.

Three days later, there was an eerie urgency to shopping in Woodland Hills, and it had nothing to do with Thanksgiving. Volunteers were distributing pamphlets begging for signs of 8-year-old Nicole Parker. I was papered at Target, Rudy’s Hardware and twice at home.

That night, Nicole’s body was found in a closet in an apartment a door from her dad’s home. It is a complex I pass every day. It is a new, gated, pleasant place; terraces of cube homes in Santa Fe pastels built on the slope of a view hill.

And finally, irrevocably, location no longer matters.

Crime in Los Angeles has completed its move from an inner-city problem that most could ignore, to a concern of certain suburbs we could bypass, to a grisly plague that is everywhere.

We can’t run, we can’t hide. What inner cities have endured for decades is now a total suffering. When President Clinton spoke of reclaiming our communities, the reference was coast to coast and all of Los Angeles, not just a few dank parts.

Is Valencia far enough from it all? That’s where mall bandits heisted $300,000 in jewels this month.

Is Rancho Santa Fe rich enough? Remember the Englishman who committed suicide after killing his wife and children? Or were they all murdered?

Is Santa Paula rustic enough? Their gang shootings have slopped onto the beaches at Ventura.

Parents are pulped by shotguns in Beverly Hills and a pregnant woman is stabbed to death in Sherman Oaks for a few bucks from a money machine. Three teen-agers killed on Halloween by automatic weapons fire in Pasadena, a molester of 22 kids loose in Canoga Park, a San Clemente teen-ager dead after the rod from a paint roller is rammed into his brain, six mourners shot at a Long Beach memorial service--and that was just the first week of November.

Getting hurt in Los Angeles is no longer a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Night or day. Watts or Brentwood. There are no gaps, no guaranteed safeties. All of us, of all colors, of all ages, of all addresses, are surviving on scared wits, prayers or armed response for $40 a month.

And I don’t know what to do about it.

In Sherman Oaks, my MG was stolen and a neighbor’s house torched. So I moved.

In Van Nuys, my German shepherd was beaten by burglars who took several generations of sentimental jewelry. Then a midnight team pried the wheels off my vintage Porsche. So I moved.

Woodland Hills only lengthened intervals between assaults. Another car radio stolen. A loaner vehicle returned with the ignition smashed in a theft attempt. Last year, there was a pursuit by follow-home bandits who gave up only after realizing that I know quicker ways around the back streets.

That makes me an average victim and luckier than most.

And I survive the way the urban fearful must, in a single-family fortress behind dead bolts with an alarm system and a noisy dog in the yard. There are motion detector lights on the front of the house and a 12-gauge shotgun behind the front door.

I hate this living.

I’m angry at graffiti on every flat surface and at the humbling of decent citizens who volunteer to scrub it off. I have no applause for a 16-year mayor who allowed Los Angeles to become a toilet on his watch. I will never understand why our carjacking, bank-robbing, drive-by shooting capital of America has fewer police officers per 10,000 citizens than any other city.

I’m infuriated by officials who believe that more laws against buying, owning and carrying handguns will restrict those who casually break much stiffer laws against murdering, raping and robbing us. Also jurists who fight fire with tinder, who believe a fingernail for an eye and probation for a tooth--and who expect cops to behave like priests.

I’m sick of being anxious on beaches at night, of not opening my front door after dark, of locking cars from the inside when driving through any part of town, of criminals who laugh at their victims in court, of buying a cellular phone more for security than convenience, of hesitating before using an automatic teller, of hearing a friend decide not to buy a better car because of the neighborhood she lives in--and of people who say it is no better any place else.

It is better in many other places.

Above all, I’m scared for all of us.

Few of the these things we fear will lessen in most of our lifetimes.

Our moments here have degenerated into a race between violent Los Angeles and retirement to some peaceful place.

Lea Graf, who liked to touch hands as a part of smiling, didn’t make it to her retirement.

And I still don’t know what I must do to stay alive.