Unleashed by Quake, Wild Bunch Rewrites the Rules

It’s OK to turn the freeway shoulder into an extra lane and whiz by your more polite fellow commuters. It’s OK to ignore a long queue for an off-ramp on a quake-damaged freeway, then race ahead and try to jam into the lane at the last minute.

When crowding into a Metrolink train, don’t bother waiting for others to disembark first. Go ahead and hoard food; Red Cross workers are required to feed all takers on a first come, first served basis, so no one will stop you.

But do not snore in a crowded disaster shelter. If your neighbor snores, don’t wake him up; the racket means at least someone’s getting some rest. And, for heaven’s sake, hold off on the sexual activity when your 130 roommates are trying to sleep.

These are the new rules as Southern Californians are rewriting them, the revamped codes and social contracts that are smoothing our days and nights in post-quake Los Angeles. Everything has changed since Jan. 17, thanks to a 6.8 temblor that didn’t have the manners to wait until daylight before tearing our fragile social fabric to pieces.

Except for the occasional flash of grace or compassion, it’s everyone for themselves these days as the region cleans up the rubble and attempts to carry on.

There are fights in emergency assistance lines, fraud in food stamp transactions. Solo drivers hog the car-pool lanes; tailgating is no longer just a sport for the busy BMW driver but a way of life for the masses.

“No one, but no one has recovered from the quake,” said psychologist Lilli Friedland, a member of the Los Angeles County Psychological Assn.’s disaster response team. “It’s the worst that it’s ever been. . . . We’re talking about a survival level here, and people at a survival level have a real problem bringing their most courteous selves forward.”

But the behavior played out in lines and on freeways, in shelters and suburbs, is more than just a lapse of good manners, an occasional stumble in the social sphere. The basic social codes that kept much of Southern California functioning as a community are largely gone, sacrificed to fear, the greater pull of anxiety over logic.

The new bad behavior that has replaced our former ethos has one goal, said Kirk Murphy, associate physician at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital: “averting loss in one’s own immediate sphere.” That probably will be the law of the land until freeways are mended, jobs return and anxiety levels recede.

California Highway Patrol Officer Wendy Moore, who works out of the Newhall station, says commuters in her area were a ruthless bunch even before the earthquake because they routinely drove for hours under the best of circumstances. They are the ones who head up the Golden State Freeway to the Antelope Valley each evening in conscious flight from the city and all it represents.

These days, though, with crippled freeways slowing them down even further, “they do anything they can to get a second or two quicker, a few car lengths,” she said. “We’ve had people go through cones into construction areas, thinking they could drive through. . . . Everybody is putting themselves first, ahead of everyone else.”

The Golden State Freeway bypass patrolled by Moore’s station is a twisting stretch of asphalt that takes motorists onto the so-called Old Road, the former California 99, thus avoiding a collapsed freeway overpass. It is so narrow that motorists practically must inhale to drive two abreast. The speed limit is 35 m.p.h., but drivers go at least 50 m.p.h. when they can--which is not often.

“There’s always a backup,” Moore said as she crept through the snarled traffic and out again to where the number of lanes--and drivers’ speed and recklessness--increases. Impatient drivers zig and zag like balls in a pinball machine as they fight to get just a little farther, just a little faster. “Look, now people are doing 70, 75 now, to make up for lost time. I can’t say that I wouldn’t be doing it myself if I had to do this commute every day.”

When far-flung commuters switch from the roads to the rails, they may take their bad behavior with them. Commuters from the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys--who have flocked to Metrolink trains in an effort to avoid long delays on the rerouted Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways--are textbook cases of what psychologists call the behavior of scarcity.

What is scarce in their lives is not food or water, shelter or medicine, the traditional objects of post-disaster desire. This is Los Angeles, not Bosnia; to commuters, a train seat, a passable freeway, time to sleep instead of drive, these are the necessities of life that are in scarce supply.

Novice Metrolink passengers--especially in their first weeks on the rails--stampeded their way onto arriving trains, mowing down those trying to leave. They dueled over available seats, took no prisoners in fights over untended newspapers.

Unhappy with having to set alarms for 3 a.m. and missing the convenience of the automobile, the briefcase brigade has taken out its frustrations on train personnel and one another--particularly because the existing service was extended into Lancaster and Palmdale. On many mornings, southbound trains have been filled by the time they reached the waiting throngs at the Santa Clarita station.

“The Santa Clarita bunch is the wildest,” said A Tuckwilkerson, an attorney from Lancaster who boards the train in his hometown for the trip to Glendale. “They’re rude, they’re crude, they act like they own the train.” Passengers from Lancaster, he said, “are too tired to be rude.”

Santa Clarita riders defend their behavior as a daily battle to protect the fundamentals of their existence. After all, they say, they’re just trying to make sure they get to work on time and home again at a decent hour.

“I will not stand aside and let the 20 ladies behind me on,” said Bruce Rawitz, a Santa Clarita resident who has been a rail regular for more than a year.

Because the unwritten rules of social intercourse carry no jail sentence or tangible fine, “we very much underestimate how pervasive those rules are,” said Jerry Jellison, a psychologist and professor at USC. “There are unwritten norms that guide almost every aspect of our behavior.”

Times of “natural disaster, scarcity and threat, war, civil unrest” throw our normal rules out the window, Jellison said, and cause societies to struggle with the rewriting process. Even though normalcy is creeping steadily back, parts of Southern California today are still enmeshed in that effort.

How long it will take for the pressure to ease and behavior to return to normal is anyone’s guess; those in the mental health field have a wide spectrum of opinion on the matter. But the good news, they say, is that we’re not fated to be terminally brusque, like a city filled with transplanted New Yorkers. In fact, some commuting behavior is already beginning to improve.

The bad news, however, is that wholesale altruism could be a long way away.

“First we had a drought,” psychologist Friedland said. “Then we had the trials and the riots, then the floods and the fires and the earthquake. Each one takes many months to recover from--emotionally and financially and physically. We have not had that.”

And because memories of the quake are still so fresh and some privations will continue indefinitely, many Southland residents still feel “a sense of imminent threat that is greatly disproportionate to their immediate situation,” Murphy said.

And how do they make themselves feel better? By doing something, anything, to get back in control, even if it’s an illusory sort of dominion. On the Santa Monica Freeway, such a reaction helped lead more than 100 solo motorists to crowd a car-pool lane the day it opened--even though they got $271 tickets for their troubles, a process that in itself lengthened their drives that day.

It caused thousands of quake victims to line up at 1 a.m. at food stamp offices that didn’t open for another six hours. The lines didn’t move because so many of the desperate cut in--a mass action that would probably not have happened under different circumstances. The ensuing rash of scuffling put Los Angeles police on tactical alert.

“These people are constantly cutting in line, and the police aren’t doing anything about it,” said one Sun Valley woman as she waited for food stamps for her family. “In six hours, we moved about 20 feet.”

Shelters are even more of a challenge. Stress runs high, space is at a premium and privacy is nonexistent for the hundreds of men, women and children still homeless. The new rules are even tougher to write in this hothouse of humanity.

“People are not prepared for things like this,” said Miguel A. Arturo, a county mental health worker recently assigned to the shelter at Granada Hills High. “They don’t know how to live like this. . . . It’s really hard to keep the kids quiet. . . . We got people who don’t want to shower. You got two ladies next to a man who smells bad, and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t call the police. What are you going to say? ‘Take him away. He smells bad.’ ”

Shelter staff did call the police, however, to deal with a man who on several occasions masturbated after lights out in a room filled with strangers. But when no would file a complaint, the police just went away, Arturo said. The unwritten rules against public sexual activity lost out to the ones about not getting involved.

In fact, shelter life is difficult enough so that even children are aware of the deep gulf between communal behavior and how they used to act at home. At home, before the quake destroyed her Granada Hills apartment building, there were “no rules,” said Mary Shomaf, 9.

But at the high school shelter, “you’re not allowed to play ball,” she said. “You’re not allowed to run. You’re not allowed to flash a flashlight at night because you wake people up. And you can’t walk backward at night. I bumped into someone once doing that and woke them up.”

Some people try to rise above the constraints and privations, to follow the codes that used to govern their behavior before Jan. 17 at 4:31 a.m. But even they have a hard time these days.

Rosemarie Frieze, a Northridge resident recently occupying all of 40 square feet (the size of a cot plus a little walking space) at the Granada Hills High shelter, goes out of her way to praise her sudden care-givers, those volunteer dispensers of food and water, shower and bed, comfort and kindness.

And she really works at getting along with her neighbors, strangers sleeping less than an arm’s-length away. It’s kind of hard, though, when you live next to “Guttermouth,” a fortysomething woman whose “every other word is the F-word,” Frieze said. “When The Mouth starts, I just walk away. That’s what you have to do.”

Times special correspondent Sharon Moeser contributed to this story.