Crossing ZIP Code Lines in the City of Sun and Self-Reinvention

Reading the stories Steven Gilbar has collected in “LA Shorts,” you sense that the sexiest boundaries Angelenos cross are property lines. Borders, both real and metaphorical, run like an electric fence through the streets and suburbs of Los Angeles, separating neighborhood from neighborhood, neighbor from neighbor. Realtors hold the keys to self-reinvention--and sometimes, to their clients’ bedrooms (Tom McNeal’s “Winter in Los Angeles”).

Like the house in the D.H. Lawrence story whose walls whisper, “There must be more money!,” the streets of L.A. seem to hiss, “Do you belong here?” The impulse to trespass and find out tantalizes the temptable; those who clear the wire land in a forbidden zone in which all identities are fluid. Those who don’t clear it set off alarms.

Sometimes the alarm is literal. In Bernard Cooper’s “Night Sky,” a Bel-Air divorcee under house arrest takes advantage of a power outage to bolt from her house and check out the damage she caused when she backed a car through her ex-husband’s picture window. Her electronic ankle bracelet sounds at the police station, but Kay doesn’t care--she’s a “nouveau offender”--what can they do?. “I’m making a break!” she gleefully declares. But you don’t need a police bracelet to get zapped.

“Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow,” Michelle Clinton’s electric story of two black teenage girls who set out for Venice, drunk on the “juice and arrogance of adolescence” and a half-bottle of Spanada, shows the jolt that comes from mixing ZIP Codes. To the hippies of Clinton’s Venice, the girls’ jangling energy seems alien. When Debra takes off over the sand, squealing: “Help. Help!” in a Polly Pureheart voice, goading Sandra to chase her, the beach people approach the girls like a stoned neighborhood watch patrol. “Listen, kid . . . it’s not cool to stress out your community support, you dig?” one scolds Sandra. “We was just playing,” she defends. “We’re not from here.”

Not from here? But aren’t they and the hippies all from Los Angeles? Well, as every Angeleno must know, yes and no. “LA Shorts” shows that “here” in Los Angeles, Watts, Encino or Beverly Hills can have parameters as narrow, and precise, as a Battleship gameboard spot--you’re either between F-4 and F-7 or you’re nowhere, out to sea. Venturing into an unfamiliar neighborhood, you never know what you’ll hit. All the same, it can be safer to dare the unknown than to stick to your own spot, where you unquestionably belong--particularly if someone else knows your coordinates.

In William Harrison’s “The Rocky Hills of Trancas,” a boy gets sunk by his own side before he’s old enough to leave home. Roper, a Malibu High School kid from “the wrong side of the highway” falls in love with the only girl at school who shares his down-at-heels locale.

He doesn’t notice that his father occupied the same gameboard location, but when his dad poaches her, then flees in shame, he takes one of his dad’s flawed screenplays, improves it, sells it, and catapults himself to the most sought-after patch of land in town. “It’s a palm-tree world, a halter-top world, where phrases like Malibu or development deal roll off the tongue,” the boy thinks. “But one lives on a personal fault line where everything is shaky and terrifying.”

The subjects in these 18 stories learn that chance encounters can’t be prevented any more than earthquakes, and that Los Angeles is particularly prone to them. The collisions that result yield epiphanies along with the aftershocks.

A middle-aged woman comes to accept that her handicapped daughter has married a man who loves her and is happy with her choice (Karen Bender’s “Eternal Love”); a shelter volunteer doesn’t know how to console a friend for the loss of her son, but one of her charity cases does (Ann Nietzke’s “Los Angeles Here and Now”); baffled Russians, whipped by the “soft, hot Laundromat air of Los Angeles,” struggle to understand how their new geography will change them, and find no answer, other than the certainty that it will (Karen Karbo’s “The Palace of Marriage”). It is that certainty, Gilbar might agree, that draws people to Los Angeles in the first place.