For Neighbor, Concert Hall Is Near, but So Far

Mario De Leon pulls his Kia out of the apartment complex and onto Sunflower Avenue, intent on Chinese food for lunch. It’s the car his best pal gave him before heading off for a second stint in Iraq. He pops an Al Green CD into the player.

“The Reverend,” De Leon says, with a hint of reverence. He likes the Reverend and some of the other soul singers from the ‘60s and ‘70s, but he also listens to gangsta rap, heavy metal and other rock oldies. De Leon likes music and liking Al Green shows he has taste.

As things go, this should be a pretty big cultural week in the neighborhood. Across Sunflower -- a proverbial stone’s throw away from De Leon’s complex of stuccoed buildings and big rents for much less space than he was used to in L.A. -- the arts folks are opening a $200-million concert hall Friday night named for Renee and Henry Segerstrom.

The hall has been under construction for three years, or just about the length of time De Leon has lived in his apartment. When I mentioned the grand opening to him on Wednesday, it was the first he’d heard of it. Upon further reflection, he noted that he’d seen the construction site as he made trips over to the nearby TGI Friday’s restaurant but didn’t know what they were building.

“They going to have a movie theater there?” De Leon asks.

It’s not that everyone needs to like the symphony; it’s that De Leon’s unawareness of its very existence so close to home highlights the gulf between the two publics who traverse the opposite sides of high-end culture.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center, which De Leon could walk to in less than five minutes, might as well be on Pluto or some real planet in a distant galaxy. When we talked Wednesday morning, the only remaining tickets for Friday’s gala opening cost $1,000.

“Honestly, man,” he says, “I grew up on welfare.”

But this is no troubled man. It’s just that operas and ballets are a bit removed from the task at hand.

He moved to Orange County to escape a Los Angeles gang life that led his father to spend much of De Leon’s life in jail, a fate also shared by an uncle and numerous others he knew back in the neighborhood above Boyle Heights. Since he was 15, he says, he was bouncing from one friend’s house to another.

De Leon, who’ll be 25 in a month, spent most of his youth living with his grandfather. “I was a bad little kid,” he says. “All I remember my grandfather saying was, ‘Don’t end up like your dad and uncle.’ ”

About three years ago, De Leon says, he took a look at himself. “I was 22 or 23 and I was on that road. I didn’t want to be on that road anymore.”

He came to Orange County to escape the life. He likes it here. He hasn’t renounced L.A. and still visits the old neighborhood, but he thinks the future lies elsewhere.

I ask if that future is clear. “It’s not clear at all,” he says. “I feel it’s going to happen, I want it to happen, but exactly what it is, I have no idea.”

He works the 3 to 11:30 p.m. front desk at a Hilton hotel. He likes the work and his co-workers. The job requires that he deal with the public, and he likes helping them out, he says.

I ask if he’d ever frequent the arts center. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” he says. Spending whatever extra dough he might have on the arts, he says, isn’t even a consideration.

“So, no ‘Swan Lake?’ ” I ask.

“Do they really have swans?” he asks. I tell him it’s a ballet, and he gets it. “Someone changing their life, something like that?” he says. “The ugly duckling-swan kind of thing?”

De Leon is well spoken and shows none of what us outsiders think of as street-tough attitude or body language. “I’m not dumb,” he says, but admits he never liked school. Now he knows he’s got to get on with it. “I don’t want to be 30, 40, 50 years old and still living in an apartment with two guys,” he says.

I wonder how he couldn’t be aware of the new concert hall being built so close by. He says they probably advertise to people in Laguna Beach or Newport Beach, people “who have $200 to go to shows or plays and stuff like that.”

He doesn’t begrudge them their entertainment nor resent their wealth. It’s just foreign turf to him, as far apart as Boyle Heights and South Coast Plaza. “Whatever floats your boat,” he says.

His interests run toward the Dodgers, UCLA football and the Dallas Cowboys.

One of the posters near the new center says, “Enrich Lives.” I ask De Leon if he can imagine the symphony or opera having that effect on people.

“I don’t see how,” he says, without any bite in his voice. “If there’s a lesson being taught or it teaches you something, then, yeah, you could say you get knowledge out of it. But if it’s just a more fancy way to waste time, what’s the point?”

“So classical music just doesn’t do it for you?” I ask, smiling.

He returns the smile. “Beethoven?” he says. “Again, nothing against it, but you won’t hear me playing it in my car.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.