Days of Drums and Tambourines

I had an epiphany the other day. I was lying on the beach in Malibu trying to avoid listening to the calamity around me when I realized that there’s too damned much noise in L.A.

It was a realization born in bedlam. Not far away, young men were beating bongo drums. On the other side, kids were banging tambourines. To my rear, tone-deaf teen-agers were playing loud rock music on a car stereo. For a terrible moment, I wished hammers on their empty heads.

That’s when I had the epiphany. Like Jesus suddenly realizing that water is no substitute for burgundy, it struck me that noise is making us crazy, and the madness is making us violent.

I am not that enthusiastic about the beach in the first place. Lying in the sun makes me feel like a spit-broiled rump roast. I went at the behest of my friends Nicole, Travis and Shana, all under 10, who like to play in the surf and punch each other in the stomach.

“It’s your vacation,” my wife, Cinelli, said. “Have fun.”

“God never intended me to have fun,” I said. “That’s why he made me a journalist.”

“Well, go anyhow. Maybe the Fuji Film blimp will crash in the surf. You can watch the sharks eat the crew.”

I’ve been reading Dennis McDougal’s startling new book, “In the Best of Families,” about rape and murder among macrobiotic vegetarians, and figured the ocean front at least would allow me a moment to enjoy the rest of it. It’s my kind of story. The Brady Bunch in Hell.

But the pandemonium around me was so intense, all I could do was lie there and ponder noise-induced madness.

*

I heard once that certain fish produce unpleasant sounds by grinding their bones together and expelling the noise through their swim bladders. This may seem like the beginning of a Howard Stern joke, but I’m not making it up. The resultant discord confuses the fish’s enemies and causes them to fight each other.

I asked a psychologist friend, an unfrocked Jesuit with an unreasonable fear of seeing his name in print, if it is possible that noise is behind the general disorientation of L.A.’s population, the reason we are doing so much killing and maiming.

He said excessive noise has been a factor in certain character disorders and could probably be applied on a mass scale.

“What you’re talking about is confusion,” he said. “It goes along with noise. We are confused and disoriented by pandemonium based on the unreal events around us. Could that lead to violence? Sure. Both noise and violence are disruptions. Why, are you hearing voices in your head?”

No, I’m hearing drums and tambourines, and the more I think about them, the more I realize they’re a metaphor for the madness that surrounds us. And their intensity has increased in the past few weeks. It’s due to the O.J. Saga.

The unreality of one of America’s sports heroes being charged with the murder of two people has created a clamor almost unparalleled in L.A. The vision of Simpson’s hangdog expression will be a logo for this generation of jocks for a long time to come.

Being away from the fray gave me better perspective on just how we reacted to it. The preliminary hearing was reality-soap of the lowest order--every sad and chilling word. Television banged the tambourines.

*

If violence is a disruption, we’re growing accustomed to it. A woman named Lisa Zuckerman tells me about having lunch at a restaurant in Van Nuys. As she stared out a window, sirens split the air, a car crashed out of range and two policemen shot into view. They tackled a man running from them, and, after a furious fight, handcuffed him at gunpoint.

The encounter was bloody and violent. “But you know,” she said, “it didn’t bother me at all. I’ve seen so much of that in the movies and on television, I was used to it. It was like watching a show.”

Even kid films bang drums of violence. I took Nicole, Shana and Travis to see “Baby’s Day Out.” I wish I hadn’t. Writer-producer John Hughes makes money by combining children and mayhem on the big screen. Setting someone’s crotch afire is his idea of humor for pre-pubescents. The drumbeat is deafening.

But, as Forrest Gump says, that’s all I have to say about that. I stayed at the beach long enough for the guys with the bongos to leave, for the kids with the tambourines to go home and for the owner of the car stereo to drive off. It was just me and my kids and a wisp of fog drifting down from the north.

Serenity to die for.