Back Home in California, Where the News Never Stops

Here’s a little confession:

I’ve always been embarrassed about growing up in this state with a name like mine and never getting past second-grade Spanish. People call me on the phone speaking Spanish at 90 mph. Spanish-language radio and TV reporters occasionally call for interviews. I usually answer, “Sorry, yo soy gringo.”

My father never passed down the language his parents brought to California from Spain, and that’s why I spent the past two weeks living with a family in Ensenada. It was part of an immersion program at the Baja California Language College, and the entire adventure was terrific.

But I’m not sure my hostess, Blanca, felt the same way.

“Esteban,” she said one morning after I had a particularly late night on the town with her husband and brother-in-law, “tu eres una mala influencia.”

It’s true -- I wasn’t the best influence. Blanca’s brother-in-law ended up going to the hospital for stitches one night. Some family members took up cigar smoking. I sort of bumped into a couple of pedestrians as I drove away from a bar one night. And more than once, a dozen of us danced until it was almost time for breakfast.

I wanted to stay forever.

Two more months and I could be fluent, I told Blanca.

Two more months and we all could be dead, she said.

And so I returned to the great state of California, once ruled by Mexico, once ruled by Spain (and currently ruled by Indian casino operators), able to order beer, talk about having ordered beer, and muse about future beer orders, in all 14 Spanish tenses.

All of which made me want to skip work and go try out my Spanish in a good Eastside joint, or at Talpa, the Westside eatery where laborers gather at the bar after work to watch baseball or soccer en espanol.

But I’ll have to go another day, because news got in the way. It never stops in California.

Phil Spector, the music producer who came here from New York as a punk kid and was a millionaire by age 21, got arrested on suspicion of murdering the 6-foot-tall blond star of Roger Corman’s “Barbarian Queen.”

You can’t make this up.

And before the day was out, the mayor of South Gate clocked a fellow council member with an overhead punch before a standing-room-only crowd, then accused the councilman of fondling her breast.

I miss Ensenada, but Dios mio, it’s good to be back home in California, the mishmash nation of pips and pretenders, dreamers and dregs, and gringos named Lopez.

This isn’t a state, it’s a thrill ride, and we’ve got no seat belts.

The victim in the Spector case was Lana Clarkson, 40, a B-movie queen who was shot to death in the Alhambra home Spector called his Pyrenees Castle.

Clarkson’s Web site, www.livingdollproductions.com, covers the highlights of a career in film and television that included appearances in “Love Boat,” “Deathstalker” and “Amazon Women on the Moon.”

“Rest in peace, beautiful lady,” reads an epitaph that crawls over the screen after a photo montage of Clarkson. “You were a star on Earth and now shine bright [in] heaven.”

If he gets out of jail in time, Robert Blake will play Spector in the TV movie.

And speaking of fallen stars, we move now to South Gate, where Monday’s council meeting was temporarily halted midway through the third round on a technical knockout.

My first thought, upon hearing that Mayor Xochilt Ruvalcaba had slugged a councilman, was that we need to get hold of that tape. It could be a training film for L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn. Wouldn’t you have more respect for him if he got worked up enough to wallop someone?

But, on second thought, residents in heavily Latino South Gate deserve a break from this nonsense. In fact, it was their landslide recall of the mayor and other city officials that sparked Monday’s mayhem.

There’s more decorum at a cockfight than at the average municipal meeting in South Gate, where a federal corruption probe is underway and where the city treasurer recently beat charges that he threatened to rape a state senator and kill her husband.

Councilman Henry Gonzalez, the guy who was slugged Monday night by Mayor Ruvalcaba in a silly dispute over a citizen’s request to address the council, was shot in the head in 1999 while mayor. That case remains a whodunit.

“A bullet bounced off my head, so I can take a punch,” Gonzalez said in a post-fight interview in which he denied fondling Ruvalcaba’s breast in the tussle.

I have just one thing to say to Mayor Ruvalcaba, and she better listen up good:

Tu eres una mala influencia!

It’s paying off already.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com