Do Not Adjust Your Set

It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.

--Nathanael West, “Day of the Locust.”

*

The second most talked about story in Los Angeles over the last week or so involves an angel. It’s been passed along, not by the media, but mouth to mouth, friend to friend. While details vary, certain elements seem to make every telling:

A motorist is stopped on the Pacific Coast Highway by a CHP officer for weaving. You won’t believe this, the driver says, but an angel just appeared in the back seat and warned of a major earthquake. The officer responds: “I wouldn’t believe you--except that you are the sixth person on this road today who has told me the exact same thing.”

In most versions, a specific date was attached to the forecast, a date which has since come and gone. Still, there are people who swore by the story. I heard for instance that, on the appointed day, at least one television producer arrived at work in a crash helmet, and that several other believers called in sick, taking no chances.

And who could blame them? After what has transpired in L.A. over the last week or so, who would not have trouble distinguishing between fact and rumor, fantasy and reality?

*

The most talked about story in the city, and probably across the land, of course, has been the investigation of O.J. Simpson--the accusations of double murder, the absurd Friday night ramble across the basin. It is a story that, only a few days ago, might have seemed as implausible as Gabriel sightings on the PCH.

A collective disbelief surrounds the Simpson case, giving rise to rumors. The rumors grow wilder and more rampant by the day. No one seems ready to believe--as the prosecutors have alleged--that O.J. Simpson was capable of double murder or of committing the crime alone or, at a minimum, of committing it in such a clumsy fashion.

And so everywhere there are people who insist he must have been framed. By whom? There are scenarios to satisfy every “conspiracist.” There is the Chicago mob land hit theory. There is the gambling debt theory, the cocaine connection theory and multiple variations on the love triangle theory.

*

The spousal abuse angle in the case has received fast and heavy attention. This seems to fit a common media tendency to attach societal themes to seemingly senseless crimes, to squeeze them into a neat topical box. Still, it would seem that, no matter what facts emerge, the Simpson case can exemplify only an exception and not the rule. For the rule of domestic violence is that it is committed by everyday people, not by the superstars of pop culture. The rule of domestic violence is not that the cops come and leave, but that they don’t come at all.

*

I saw a man interviewed on television Monday. He was an older fellow. The camera caught him standing in the morning sun outside O.J. Simpson’s house. The man was asked what had drawn him to the Brentwood mansion that two days earlier provided the final scene for an unbelievably strange day.

“I just wanted,” the man explained, “to see if it looked the same as it did on television.”

It made perfect sense.

*

The crowds that lined the freeways Friday night and rooted for Simpson have got everyone rereading their Nathanael West. This was “Day of the Locust” material, a convergence of the disappointed and the bored. And, of course, these roadside renegades were characterized elsewhere, quickly, as yet one more piece of evidence that Los Angeles has gone to crazy hell.

I wonder, though, whether the people who stopped along the freeway were different in any significant way from those 95 million Americans who watched the proceedings at home. And I wonder, too, about the geographical analysis:

A friend of mine was at Madison Square Garden on Friday night for the NBA playoffs. In the second quarter, he reports, the Knicks fans began to notice that the television sets in the Garden luxury boxes no longer were carrying the game. Instead, they were showing the chase, live.

“And so,” he tells me, “everybody in the stands quit watching the game. Instead, we turned around the binoculars and watched the luxury box TV sets. Since no one could hear, all these rumors started flying around. It was like an informational wave. O.J. has just shot himself. O.J. has been shot. It was a river of information, and, as it turned out, all the information was bad.”

See, Los Angeles, it’s everywhere.