Wink at the Chaos

On the day the pump jockey at the 76 station got murdered, we drove past on our way to the freeway, slow. The local paper had carried the victim’s picture: Dark eyes. Peach fuzz. A sweet boy. A local boy. Cut down by a gang thug. Right here in suburbia.

The station was a kind of local landmark, the last chance for gas before the subdivisions ended and the freeway began. How many times had we stopped at this very gas station, paid at this very plexiglass window? How many times had this very boy sent us off with a “Have a nice day”?

No more, we thought. From now on, we’d tank up closer to home. In the space of a headline, that gas station was erased from our map. It is a prerequisite of this vast, suburban metropolis that you carve out a comfort zone. There was no place for deadly pit stops in our corner of Greater Los Angeles.

It took less time than you might imagine before things were normal again. They took down the canary yellow police tape, packed up the shrine of candles and supermarket bouquets. The dead boy became a ghostly face that peered occasionally from the local paper alongside briefs about the ongoing investigation into his death.

Then they found the suspect, and he turned out to be another kid--a kid who’d been shot in another city and then dumped in a parked car in a park half a dozen blocks from our ranch-style house. It was the park where our little girls had learned to go--whoosh!--down a slide into a mound of sawdust. In the space of a headline it too was erased from the map.

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When visitors think of Southern California, they don’t think in terms of personal maps and particular corners. To them it is just a metropolitan wilderness. They describe it in wilderness lingo--it is a “paradise” or a “jungle.” A nice place to visit but not to settle for life.

Actually, living in a wilderness is easier than visitors realize. It is visiting that is hard. I was 26 when I came here, and for years my experience of the place was that of a long-term visitor. It took a long time to discover the trick of comfort zones.

Back then, I had no filter: The corner with the beggar in the filthy blanket, the house where the wife made Guatemalan tamales for everyone at Christmas--everything was equally vivid. Everything was on the map. To make matters worse, I was a newspaper reporter, and when you are a newspaper reporter, you focus on zones of discomfort--nice local youths cut down by gangs, et cetera.

You’d think that field of perception would give you the real scoop on a place, but it is the topography of a transient. People who don’t feel an urge to cleave to the brighter aspects of a place are people with no stake in it. And until you develop a stake, the day-to-day grace, the subtext, will always elude.

For years, everywhere I looked, I saw trouble in paradise, a wilderness of impossible beauty and impossible pain. The coast would burn and flood and slide into the ocean, and people would keep living there, as if someone had surgically removed their collective memory. Poor children would be sleeping in bathtubs to ward off stray bullets, and yet if you talked to their neighbors, they’d insist, “Actually, this neighborhood is pretty safe.”

Teenagers would shave their heads and go on crime sprees, and people who’d grown up with them would say, “But they seemed like normal kids.” It wasn’t until I married a native Southern Californian that I understood: These people weren’t crazy. They were survivors who had learned the rules of a particular wilderness.

And here in the wilderness, Rule No. 1 is that you map out some turf you can live with. Wink at the chaos, welcome the grace. It is a rule that runs counter to everything you stand for if you are a newspaper reporter, and yet it is one that can tell you everything you need to know about this place.

In my neighborhood, there is a cul-de-sac. To the visitor’s eye, it might look anonymous, but it is the cul-de-sac where my husband played touch football as a kid. And there is a barbershop. It’s where my kids get their hair cut. The barber knows us all by our first names. And there is a supermarket. If you live here, you know the checker who calls everybody “hon.”

These landmarks are the stuff of my personal map, the map of a woman who has a stake in a particular wilderness. Not shown is the nearby house where last week a neighbor was arrested on suspicion of arranging the murder of her husband. It made headlines, but the address has been conveniently erased from my personal corner of Greater Los Angeles.

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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com