A New York Stunt That Even L.A. Can’t Match

God bless you, New York City.

God bless you for so gallantly going out of your way to make Los Angeles look good.

Every time L.A. does something off-center, off-kilter, off-color, off-base, this city can count on you, the bighearted Big Apple, to draw our fire, by doing something even worse.

Rodney King takes a few whacks on a midnight freeway--and you step right in and oblige with Abner Louima, a man who was not only beaten but sodomized with a broomstick, right in the police station.

Joey Buttafuoco packs his libido for L.A.--and just like that, you invite Mike Piazza to move his libido and his ego to New York.

In Los Angeles, you’re never more than six feet from a producer--in New York you’re never more than six feet from a rat. (The mayor of New York himself watched a foot-long specimen scamper across the porch of Gracie Mansion, and not for the first time).

L.A.’s mayor gets married for a third time--New York’s mayor gets a girlfriend, and his wife gets a restraining order.

Our multimillionaire mayor got the Central Library named after him--your multi-billionaire mayoral candidate named an international news service after himself.

But this--this is the greatest sacrifice of all.

Our political class, the bold and brawny figures like Schwarzenegger and Eastwood, only pretended to shoot people. Even Antonio Villaraigosa’s little juvie scuffles never--in the dried-up dialect of the courts--involved the discharge of firearms.

New York’s latest candidate to be mayor, to be heir to Fiorello LaGuardia and John V. Lindsay, really did shoot people--four of them, blam blam blam blam.

You may remember his name: Bernhard Goetz. You may remember his nickname even better: the Subway Vigilante.

Bernhard Goetz, the .38-caliber candidate. Well, what can you expect from a city where the businessmen and the ballplayers both wear pinstripes?

L.A. barely has subways, and so far as I know they are still gunplay-free. I believe this to be true because the transit cops are still at leisure to roust subway riders to show their tickets.

Certainly no candidates for Los Angeles mayor have ever campaigned in the subways, much less made their bones there, unlike Mr. Goetz, who, three days before Christmas 1984 was riding a Manhattan subway when he shot four teenagers he said were trying to rob him.

He was acquitted; the only thing he was convicted of was illegal gun possession. It is a record many politicians could envy.

Some of L.A.’s mayors have acquired rap sheets, or deserved them. One mayor quit so he could organize a lynch mob. Another was the first mayor in America to be recalled.

But in the main our candidates for mayor have been as benign as May sunshine: Eileen Anderson, the redheaded free spirit who, in fair weather and fairer, danced in a green swimsuit outside the Federal Building, tossing around the season-appropriate sports ball and singing her way through 17 or 18 campaigns for mayor. Melrose Larry Green--I’ve never been sure what he’s running about, but he’s made it loud if not clear. Ted Hayes, the only homeless man I knew who had a PR person--and the only one in demand enough to need one.

I don’t know how a city like this would go for a mayor who considers the essential urban accessory to be not a bottle of boutique water but a .38.

I propose, however, that we find out.

So many New Yorkers have come west and taken up residence on the Westside that the place is already practically the sixth borough of New York.

In a great old Broadway tradition, let Goetz open out of town. Test his campaign here first, among New Yorkers who still pine for Manhattan but wouldn’t dream of going to L.A.’s downtown.

Goetz’s campaign platform for vegetarian menus in public institutions will play great in Venice. Santa Monica would love his rent stabilization program. Who couldn’t embrace his plan for rehab rather than jail for drug offenders? And Brentwood couldn’t help but love a man who chose not to leave his personal safety to the police force, but had his own private security company right in his pocket.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.