The Safest Place in Town

I was standing at a railing just outside Staples Center when a policeman said, “You’ll have to move, sir.”

It was hot and I was tired. Moving seemed to require an effort I did not wish to expend. So at the risk of being arrested and tortured, which, as everyone knows, is standard LAPD procedure, I said, “How come?”

He said, “Security, sir.”

I glanced around. Security? People were milling about with credentials around their necks, looking simultaneously lost and self-important. The protesters, caged in an area far in the distance, paced and growled like lions at feeding time. You could barely hear them.

It was a different story for them later on. Rubber bullets flew like peanuts. The protesters didn’t have a chance. Uniforms everywhere. The LAPD, the CHP and the LACSD. Everyone but the BSA. Sorry, sir, but protesters have to obey the Scout law. You must be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly . . .

“Do I present a security risk?” I asked the policeman who had ordered me to move.

He said, “Sir, if you’ll just stand over there.”

Clearly, the man was losing patience with me. He was moving his head from side to side, the way a shark does before it rips your guts out, so I moved. I’m not sure what security zone I violated, but I’ll never go back.

*

I mention this only to emphasize the degree of police protection inside, outside, over and possibly under Staples Center during the Democratic National Convention. L.A. will never be this safe again.

Credentials are required for every area of Staples but the bathroom, and even then I noticed a security guard carefully monitoring everyone who went in and out.

There are area credentials, hall credentials and floor credentials. There is also a credential for messengers, but none for people who just like to hang out, which is my favorite thing to do. I’m great at loitering.

I managed to latch on to a hall credential and drifted with the flow in the main corridor, like souls in hell doomed to circle forever, listening to politicians over the P.A. system. I can’t imagine a worst eternity. Inside, Hillary Clinton was urging the party to get out there and fight. The delegates went mad with joy. I guess the idea hadn’t occurred to them before.

Then Bill Clinton spoke and afterward everyone partied. It was the kind of party the party understood. Salud, l’chaim and here’s looking at you, bro. An all-inclusive party.

*

“Isn’t this wonderful?” The words flew like sparrows from the mouth of a woman in a tall, red, white and blue hat. It bore the words, “Good for Our Mental Health.” She was standing by a McDonald’s stand eating an ice cream cone.

A New York delegate, Norma Downey is a retired psychiatric therapist. “This is a great honor and a great thrill!” she said. Her smile lit the hallway. What her hat meant was that Gore and Lieberman would be good for our mental health. I don’t know why. “What a great country,” she said.

There was something about her that was so, well, American. The tall hat. The ice cream cone. The in-your-face enthusiasm. She asked nothing of anyone. Just being there was enough.

Not so with Jeri Washington. She paced the hall wearing a sandwich board that said, “What Would George Washington Do?” It was written both in the full phrase and in initials: “WWGWD?” On the back of the sandwich board it said, in answer to the question, “By George, He’d Give D.C. the Vote.”

Unlike Ms. Happiness, Washington (Jeri, not George) was angry. “We deserve the vote!” she said over the noise of the souls in hell. She was serious about the District of Columbia’s lack of real congressional representation. Maybe if we took the vote away from everyone, they’d demand it back and more than the usual 17% would show up at the polls. Just a thought.

When I tried to leave the building, a policeman stopped me. “This is an in-door, sir,” he said. They all sounded like Jack Webb in the old “Dragnet” series. “The exit is down the hall, sir.” As best as I could determine, there was no out-door. I risked death by sneaking out another in-door and ducking under a rope.

As I left Staples, I asked a young policeman how it was going. He said, “A bunch of mothers breast-feeding their babies tried to get in. They were protesting.” The march of the breast-feeding mothers? “I don’t know what they were protesting,” he added. “I could have arrested them but I didn’t know why.”

Welcome to L.A.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.