OS ANGELES - Mesmerizing, kinetic, dangerous, hip, heavenly, mad, new and eternal, sunshine and stoplights without end, amen.
It is all still here.
Jack Kennedy turned the place out the last time the Democrats convened in LA for their national convention. That was 1960. Back then, movie moguls ran the town, not the stars. Back then, the LAPD was still regarded as a sleepy police force.
On Monday, the Democrats begin their presidential convention here, hoping to erase the nation's memories of the recently ended festivities in Philadelphia, where George W. Bush received his party's coronation.
Being here should help. Philadelphia, as a city, was all blue notes and earthiness, a neighborly place, trying hard to please, despite the rain. This city errs on the side of the exotic, of scandal and stars, mystery and improbable success. Marilyn Monroe is long dead, but the Marilyn knockoffs in this city are astonishing. Here, the ghosts have ghosts.
''This is a place of art and creative energy. Sometimes that's seen as a positive, sometimes as a negative,'' says Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, who represents a district here and was home on a recent Saturday afternoon rallying the faithful. Waters is mindful of the city's image, battered one year, beloved the next. ''I'm sure for someone who lives in `Timbuktu,' Iowa, or `Somewhere,' Nebraska, they would be alarmed that we have rap artists amongst us. They wouldn't know how to manipulate this setting.''
The setting: 469 square miles, a place with sharp geographical demarcations that divide the populace. And the people - dreamers, schemers, do-gooders, urban wanderers, the brilliant, the lost - keep coming, arriving down at Union Station, at LAX, as if coming to Xanadu. The sun shines 325 days a year, and it can distract the mind from even the deepest wound.
''You can rot here,'' John Rechy, who wrote a novel about this city, once said, ''without feeling it.''
Lonely in LA
As an American city, LA actually has no peer, so sophisticated and resourceful it has hosted not one, but two Olympiads. It can produce raw magic from its movie kingdom. You can ride in most directions and spy jaw-dropping wealth, mansions with trees smelling of fruit. You can ride atop the city, along the curves of Mulholland Drive, look down upon the place, and wonder: How does it work? There's the traffic, the people, the busyness. But it does work, in a kind of nervous urban calypso.
The city's public relations honchos are out in full force now, with all the conventioneers coming. There are dazzling treats to show off: museums, the landscape, knockout institutions of higher learning: USC, UCLA. A guru came from the Midwest last year by the name of Phil Jackson and coached the LA Lakers to a championship. A place in the sun suddenly got that much hipper.
But in a city of 31/2 million, you can feel swallowed up, lonely as an owl.
The Democrats will convene near downtown, at the Staples Center. Rose Appelbaum lives nearby. She's just another voter trying to keep a life in LA together. The Democrats might bellow about inclusion, but the word, here in this city, bothers her at times.
In 1951 Appelbaum arrived here from Missouri and was swiftly swallowed up. She took some odd jobs, ended up doing work for a wealthy couple with children. She lives near downtown now, in one of those old apartment buildings that has a film noir feel about it: glass, rich carpet, dark hallways where mystery hangs like dust.
Appelbaum is white in a city that is increasingly becoming black and brown. The transition to a minority majority, an ongoing movement in many other American cities, is an old story here.
''We're in the minority, and I'm on the lower economic spectrum,'' she says. The imbalance is starting to make her fret. ''I ride the bus every day,'' she goes on. '' It's mostly minorities on there. And sometimes you're treated very badly. It's rough riding buses. I'm like in a prison here. I used to go down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But if you watch news here, it's murder and mayhem every day. It seems like I'm pulling in more and more every day. Sometimes, I carry a stun gun. It's against the law. But some of these bus lines are very rough.''
She's sitting in the lobby of her building, sunlight catching her hair, which is the color of a cloud. Sometimes she'll take the subway. The subway in this city is an oddity, derided by many as a boondoggle, going to not enough places in a city with too many faraway places to get to. ''This white woman was coming out of the subway station with me the other day,'' Appelbaum says. ''I said, `Gosh, everything's getting sleazy.' She said, `What do you expect? We're paying for them to ride the subway. They're bringing graffiti and trash.' I didn't know what to say. But they do bring their culture here.''
Rose Appelbaum is single now. There were marriages. Oh, were there marriages. Six of them. ''I had marital problems, which I always seem to.'' Her voice has a breathless quality to it; imagine Marilyn Monroe, if she had lived to Appelbaum's age. ''These guys I married were rough. What, back then, you would call hoods. They died on the streets. You know what I'm saying?''
She hasn't had a man to call her own since 1991. ''I'm like Elizabeth Taylor,'' she says of the many marriages. ''Back in those days you didn't shack up. You married. We didn't do anything illegal. We just did it a lot. I'm sorry I look like a wreck.''
Appelbaum has two sons, Joe and Richard. They steer clear of mother, and she is not happy. ''I have a strange relationship with my boys. They married sisters. These two sisters are quite heavy. See, I take very good care of myself. They seem to be antagonized by my presence. We really don't communicate much.''
Appelbaum swears she'll survive. ''I have to keep my head. I cannot be friendly. Because you never know if somebody is gonna turn on you.''
Image is everything
Out here, the headlines tend to be loud.
On March 3, 1991, several police officers stopped a 25-year-old motorist by the name of Rodney King after a traffic chase. He was severely beaten by the officers, kicked and punched. A videotape caught the beating. It was as if Marshall McLuhan's premonition of the all-seeing eye had come true, and in the place - LA - where you would expect it to come true. There were convictions in the King aftermath, state acquittals, bloodcurdling rioting, and then federal convictions and sentencing.
On Jan. 17, 1994, the earth cracked under this city and its nearby valleys. Sixty died. A good many packed suitcases and bolted. Xanadu felt scary and looked unforgiving. It can seem, at times, that the city must pay for its beauty, its conceits.
Just now the city is undergoing deep soul-searching in connection with yet another police imbroglio, the Rampart scandal, where 70 cases of police misconduct have come to light as officers planted evidence and lied to frame innocent civilians. The scandal was touched off by the arrest of Officer Rafael Perez. ''The most important thing to come out of the Perez case is that every single case of police misconduct is going to be investigated thoroughly now,'' says Winston Kevin McKesson, Perez's lawyer. ''Police officers are hopping mad about it.''
It is also, of course, a city with many defenders. ''The exposure people receive is from the difficulty of life - and scandals,'' concedes Bishop Charles Blake of the 18,000-member West Angeles Church of God and Christ. ''Overall,'' he says, ''life in LA is pleasantly routine.''
Out here, where the big beasts of entertainment and media converge, where the city is a 24-hour continous newsreel, image is everything.
Gail Deculus-Johnson is the proprietor of ''Sable Images'' on Crenshaw Boulevard. Her store sits in the heart of a black community. She deals in memorabilia that show blacks in an often brutish and stereotypical light. The words ''Nigger,'' ''Coon,'' ''Slave Auction,'' ''Pickaninny,'' fly out from posters. There are stomach-churning photographs of blacks bent over in laughter in the face of pending disaster. It's the kind of store that Walter Mosley's fictional Los Angeles detective, Easy Rawlins, might stumble into and raise an eyebrow.
But Deculus-Johnson, who has lived here all her life, sees an analogy between the way ugly images of blacks threaded their way into the nation's psyche and the way stereotype warps the way many see the city. ''All those negative black images I relate to some of the same negative media images about LA. Obviously San Francisco is stereotyped as a gay city with interracial couples. As for LA - it's gangs and police. It's a result of what the media is showing people.'' And, she goes on, ''There's also the images of people being plastic, not friendly. If you have that prejudgment, that's what you'll see.''
She says folk ask her if it is safe being on Crenshaw Boulevard. ''I'm in the heart of Crenshaw and I feel fine. A German man came in to me and said, `What's the relation between blacks and whites?' And he had heard that Crenshaw was the bad street. Well, I asked him, `What's the relationship in Germany between Jews and Germans?'''
She went to Atlanta once and the city left her feeling odd; somehow the social divisions between races seemed more absolute. ''Back there, they don't want you living next door. Here, they don't care.''
Deculus-Johnson thinks the world of LA. To her, outsiders just don't get the place. ''I'm really suspect about people writing about cities and projecting the negatives,'' she says.
Who knows, outside LA, that the Crips and Bloods - two gangs here that were notorious for bloodletting in the early '90s - have had a kind of truce in recent years, that there's been a dramatic decrease in gang-related deaths?
Bervick Deculus is Gail Deculus-Johnson's son. He's 23 years old. A decade ago, when Bervick was a teenager, she worried herself sick about the gangs. Bervick was lucky: He got home every night just fine. His mother would hear the key and feel her chest lift up like a flower: her boy was safe. Bervick graduated from Howard University last year. He has also studied film at USC.
Bervick Deculus says the enticements of this city - endless nightclubs, endless dating, the dangers that lurk in those velvety night drives along Sunset Boulevard, the money that seems to be everywhere, just out of reach - have not derailed him. ''I kind of look at LA like: LA can make love to you, or LA can break you. But it's truly based on the path you take in making yourself successful in this city. It's about how disciplined you are, and how hungry you are.''
Out here, images ricochet back at you from the TV screen. Bervick knows. ''I look at TV shows, all the negativities. I see through it. We have kids without a support system. Yes, I had friends who were gangbangers. I was growing up in the middle of it. I had gangbanger friends but also friends who were, well, geeks.''
He wants to be a film director. He goes around with a digital camera. He has an idea for a film about parolees who get released, make a small mistake, and land back behind bars. People like his friend Cornelius, who got out last year after doing prison time. He got a job, but was caught outside Los Angeles County, doing yard work, a parolee out of his work-allowed jurisdiction. He was sent back to prison and never recovered. His spirit, already as fragile as a baby bird, was broken. Drugs filled the void.
Bervick imagines either a short film or a documentary, but he worries about finding a patron.
''Nepotism is heavy in the industry,'' he says.
Many sides, many souls
Many of those who can afford it have moved outside of Los Angeles. It's the traffic, the human congestion, the scary feeling that occasionally wells up. But Peggy Grossman won't be joining the exodus. ''I live on the west side, which is so much different, safer,'' she is saying, standing in the yard of property she owns in an area populated by white Angelenos. ''Most of the time I feel like I live in a bubble. I don't listen to the news in the morning because I'd be so paranoid I wouldn't leave the house.''
Peggy Grossman, 56, can talk and sound calm as a demographer. She's talking about the Fairfax Avenue area, how it has changed. ''It used to be our bagel belt, but a lot of it has been taken over by blacks.''
But she knows it can be a dazzling city. ''One of the reasons I've stayed here is I like what the city has to offer. Performing arts, the proximity to the ocean, the weather,'' she offers, brightening. But then in the next breath: ''If you're not scared to death to go out of the house because you're going to get hit in the head with a bullet, it's a great place.''
Even to Grossman, the city remains complex. ''I think there are many souls of LA,'' she says. ''I don't know if we have one soul. We're so much more hetereogenous than we used to be. I went to a white elementary school, a white junior high school. In those days the gardeners were Japanese. The help was black or Mexican. It's such a different world now.''
It was the Spanish who founded the Los Angeles area in 1781. The United States took it in 1846. The Mexican soul in this city is deep.
Many of the city's Hispanics reside in East Los Angeles. Bria Carrasco was born in Mexico and came to Los Angeles with her family when she was a child. She's proud of her heritage, but senses success lies with another group. ''I just want to be like them, the whites,'' she says.
On a calm afternoon, her neighborhood can seem safe, still as a lake. ''But you should come here at night,'' Bria says. ''Go in the apartments and you'll see the bald-headed gangsters. There's a lot of violence here.''
She's sweet 16, soon to be a senior in high school. Bria Carrasco has a dream. It is not to get to Hollywood. Or to the west side of LA. Or to some distant place called New York City. No. She wants to draw a line in the sand between justice and injustice, right here, in East LA. ''It's where people need more help,'' she says. ''It's the ghetto over here.''
There's a sad reality in her voice, but indomitability, too. Bria Carrasco wants a badge. LAPD. Never mind the headlines. She wants to handcuff gangsters. Bring them to their knees. ''I want to be a police officer,'' she says, standing in a pool of beautiful and wondrous sunshine.
