Don’t Eat the Water

Welcome to Los Angeles. For those soccer fans from other countries visiting for the first time, I say have a wonderful stay in one of the world’s great cities. Just don’t carry a camera, don’t drive a rental car and don’t go around town asking where Heather Locklear lives.

I offer this advice after two days of conversation at the Rose Bowl press tent in Pasadena, where at least half of Earth’s media has gathered to cover World Cup soccer.

I wanted to know how foreign journalists viewed L.A. and what they were told prior to coming here. During the course of our dialogue, they asked what advice I would give them. I said they should not act like tourists.

Muggers and others up to no good look upon tourists the way a lion looks upon elands at a jungle watering hole. They’re just something good to eat.

In addition to cameras and rental cars, a way of being spotted as a visitor is to ask about the best place for seeing movie stars. In Africa, you ask where is the best place to view elephants. In L.A., it’s celebrities.

One reporter wanted to know where Heather Locklear lives. I said she lives in a little box with a screen on the front, which was probably the best place to see her.

Their main concern was for personal safety. Many had been told that L.A. was not only crime-ridden but environmentally unsafe. They were talking about air and water pollution, although a sportswriter had heard that a large hole in the ozone layer was centered directly over Pershing Square.

I said that was true, but if he wore a hat and a self-contained spacesuit any time he was in the area, he’d be OK.

*

Language was something of a problem during the interviews. Most of the journalists were not fluent in English, and I am not fluent in anything, so we had occasional difficulties communicating.

But that didn’t stop Malaysia’s Jamaluddin Abdullah from expressing his opinion about L.A. He thought it was “notorious” and would not walk in the city any farther than from the door of his Downtown hotel to a shuttle bus that took him to the Rose Bowl. It was a distance of exactly 14 feet.

He refused to listen when I suggested that it was all right to walk just about anywhere during daylight hours and even in certain areas at night, such as Pasadena’s Old Town and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

“I know people who have walked, oh, 20 or 30 feet in those places,” I said, “and many have lived to tell about it.”

Our conversation took place in a lunchroom adjacent to the media tent, where I noticed another reporter from Asia trying to eat a sandwich that was dripping wet. He thought he was adapting to an American cultural trait.

Sandwiches were kept in plastic containers surrounded by ice cubes to keep them fresh. One of the containers had a slight opening, and water from melting ice cubes had seeped in, soaking the sandwich. The bread was pulp.

I tried to tell him to take it back and get a dry one, but he spoke no English and made polite yummy sounds to indicate American food, especially water-soaked sandwiches, were just fine with him. What a gentleman.

Jamaluddin Abdullah didn’t eat anything for lunch and insisted he wouldn’t until he found a place that served rice. They didn’t serve rice in the media tent, and unless his hotel did, it was going to be a long, hungry stay for him in L.A. Perhaps he can find an armored vehicle that will take him to Chinatown, where rice is in abundance.

*

I tried to interview a woman from Russia named Elena. We were in the middle of a conversation about the comparative quality of crime in Moscow and L.A. when we were approached by a man with a name tag that said simply Italiano.

He demanded to know what Elena had said to me. I tried to be polite, but there is really no polite way of saying “It’s none of your damned business.” He said she couldn’t talk to me. I said the Cold War is over, she could talk to whomever she pleased.

For a moment, I thought he would hit me. The man waved his arms furiously and said they were from language services and not allowed to talk to anyone. “We are here to help!” he shouted into my face. Some help.

Soccer is an emotional and occasionally violent sport. I didn’t want to be the first World Cup media death, so I walked away. Italiano continued to fume in the background, like a volcano erupting in the wilderness.

As I was leaving, a reporter from Indonesia, Fuad Ariyanto, who had seen me talking to others about L.A., said, “High criminals in Los Angeles?” I said, “Some are, but it’s the short ones you really have to watch for. They’re mean little suckers.”

He nodded wisely and went into the lunch room for a cheese and water sandwich.