The Haves and the Have-Nots

On the day it was announced that Michael Ovitz was leaving as president of the Walt Disney Co. with a $90-million severance check, it was also announced that the Bank of America was going to eliminate 3,700 jobs.

One day later, the Toronto Blue Jays broke the news that the organization had signed a three-year contract with pitcher Roger Clemens for $24.75 million just about the time a homeless woman I’d been interviewing broke the news that she had managed to put together $38 for a motel room that night.

I mention the dichotomies of fortune only to symbolize the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, both elements of whom I meet often in the course of wandering this big and often perplexing City of Angles.

The homeless woman who told me about her monumental good fortune in being able to get out of the weather for a night was in eerie contrast to a wealthy builder I met later at dinner who was having trouble fattening his profits.

She was joyful at the pleasure of having a place to stay, he was distressed because of his inability to make as much money as he had anticipated. In his words, “a million bucks doesn’t buy what a million bucks used to buy.”

All of this took place in a small circle of time that left my head spinning with the inconsistencies present in a season that requires assessments.

I look around and I see Michael Ovitz walking away from a job he’s held for about a year with a fortune in his pocket. I look around and I see Roger Clemens making about $8 million a year for his ability to throw a ball. I look around and I see desperate people without work, without homes, without food, without hope.

I look around and I ask what’s going on here?

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I’m not saying that on his cosmic level Ovitz doesn’t deserve what he got. This is a town in which an actor is paid $20 million for being in a movie that costs $100 million to produce that no one goes to see. If there’s money to burn, why not a few bucks for the guy on top? Nights are cold in Hollywood.

I am also not saying that the skill displayed by Roger Clemens should not be highly compensated, requiring as it does good eyesight and a certain degree of mental concentration in order to hurl a ball 60 feet.

By the negotiating skill of his agent, Clemens becomes a symbol for all those little guys who dream not so much of winning for the old home team but of someday putting together a deal that’ll make them multimillionaires too.

Having thus accepted that there are among us individuals in two areas of intellectual achievement, sports and show biz, who make more money in a month than some will earn in a lifetime, I still ask: What about the others?

If you’ve ever known what it’s like to be out of work, you’ve got to have sympathy with those employees of the Bank of America who shortly will be in line at the unemployment office.

You’re among the living dead there, a statistic, a sad sack figure in a Depression-era cartoon, looking toward a future with nothing in it.

But the good news is that the bank is making more money than ever and maybe, just maybe, some of the 3,700 being tossed out the door will be hired back. Meanwhile, utilizing the bank’s peculiar syntax of self-justification, those people aren’t being fired, they’re only being “dislocated.”

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Roughly 3.5 million Americans are millionaires. Another 36 million live below the poverty level. The gap between them has steadily widened over the years. From 1989 to 1994, it opened by almost 13%.

The word “million” loses meaning by repetition. We’ve become accustomed to its existence and immune to its impact.

I have no idea, for instance, what $90 million represents; how many times it reaches around the world at the equator or to the moon and back or round trip to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

I also have no idea how it feels to be among the 5 million who are hungry in California; how deeply it hurts to see one’s children go without food, how quickly rage can rise when starvation looms, how slowly death comes when life has no meaning.

I wonder as I walk among those who have nothing what the result will be of the widening gap between the haves and these have-nots. Will one voice rise in their midst that will stir the peasants to storm the castle on the hill? History burns with fires of desperation that have laid waste to kingdoms.

I drive home slowly on the day the homeless woman checks into her $38 motel room, which is the day after Michael Ovitz closes a $90-million deal, and I wonder as I wind down Sunset Boulevard toward the ocean how long it will be before the disparity between rich and poor becomes so great that the angry peasants will start charging up the hillside.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com