I rarely try to influence my friends in most things. Over the years I've learned it's ultimately futile, not to mention dull, to attempt to convince people of something, no matter how true I might think it is. Besides, differing opinions make the world go around, and all that stuff. Lately I've been reminding myself of this philosophy a dozen times a day, as a friend in Maine recently informed us she is determined to move to Los Angeles as soon as she can. Now, anyone who knows me even slightly, or who may have read my writing or listened to my music, knows that whenever I hear the words "Los Angeles" I reach for my gun. It's my trademark running gag: hardly a day goes by that I don't tell myself (and anyone who will listen) how glad I am to be out of that hellhole. And honestly, I rarely encounter significant opposition to such fulminating. As anyone knows who has done more than take the Universal Studios tour, or spend a few days sunbathing down San Diego way, the urban core of Los Angeles is a festering sore, a war zone of racial tension, over-population, air pollution, and transit nightmares. It is a giant wannabe-metropolis which due to its wealth, media influence, and population could ostensibly be included among the great cities of the world, but nonetheless rarely if ever is. Ask it if it cares.
My attitude toward L.A. is no capricious prejudice: In the more than thirty years I lived there, I researched and wrote extensively about its politics, culture, and sociology. As a native Angeleno, my feeling about the place was always somewhat ambivalent -- I'd spent time in Europe, in Mexico, and in various other parts of the U.S., and it was obvious all along that Southern California could not compete in any way with any of those places. There was just too much wrong with it -- too many problems, new and old, historical and developmental, to solve. In retrospect, I suppose I was trying to convince myself that there really was something to love about L.A., but in the end I had to admit I couldn't, though it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.
So I have never minced words when an unsuspecting stranger brings up the subject. I feel justified in stating the case as forcibly as possible; I've paid my dues, just like anyone else who managed to survive several decades in a war zone.
Our friend presently lives in an 18th-century farmhouse on Maine's central coast, where she's been for the past decade. We've spent many a grand weekend there: cooking and eating too much, exploring the picturesque geography, gardening, antiquing, enjoying the fall foliage. Perhaps not surprisingly, the backwoodsy aspect of life in a small hamlet, which so enchanted Eric and me, eventually got to our friend, as did the long, relentless northern winters. She had also lost her lover, who died, totally unexpectedly, of a heart attack in the bedroom upstairs -- an event which for three years she struggled heroically to understand and to move on from. Maybe it was inevitable that she'd want a change of scene. But still, when one day she suddenly announced in an e-mail that she was looking at condos in Pasadena and Highland Park, north of downtown Los Angeles, and was putting the farmhouse up for sale, it was a considerable shock. Our friend, while she spent her youth in the San Francisco Bay area, knew nothing about Los Angeles. She had made a snap decision to move there during a brief visit, after having a genial chat with people waiting in line at the Eagle Rock Trader Joe's store. Her naivete about conditions in urban L.A. was just as chilling. "I will look in the Pasadena area," she had written us initially, enthusing over Pasadena's "low crime, no gangs, good schools and good neighborhoods." I wondered if she'd ever heard of South Pasadena, one of the most gang-infested areas in the metro region. Not to mention the fact that Pasadena is located in the smoggiest part of the smoggiest metro area in the country. I wondered, frankly, which planet she was on.
The other day I drove through a typically scenic part of the North Shore. It was a classic Eastern coastal late- summer day -- rather humid, but sunny and clear, with a cornflower blue sky and puffy white clouds. A thick green tunnel of oak, maple, hickory, walnut, and tulip trees arched overhead, creating delicious shade that made using the air conditioner optional and flung rippling light and dark patterns on the windshield. Life here is not perfect -- is it perfect anywhere? -- but I couldn't help contrasting my surroundings, driving on a summer day down State Route 25A, the North Shore's Main Street, with an equivalent drive down Sunset Boulevard in L.A. Admittedly, Long Island at its worst is rather bland, with its mid-Island cookie-cutter residential developments and nondescript shopping centers; but at its best (which I personally think can be pinpointed in an area of the North Shore from around Miller Place in the east, west to the Nassau County border in Cold Spring Harbor) it combines picturesque scenery, historical resonance, and homelike comfort in a way that is completely seductive, at least to a refugee from an urban war zone like L.A.'s Rampart Division. Living in L.A., I never had a chance to take a deep breath -- literally or figuratively. The relative equilibrium of life in the Silver Lake hills was punctuated at regularly irregular intervals by riots, earthquakes, gang mayhem, and fires brought on by the Santa Ana winds. Danger was ever-present, even if it sometimes went in disguise. For me, Los Angeles existed in an ongoing state of blanket denial; the television weather forecasters always smiling big, vacant smiles and announcing that "today looks like another perfect day" -- 98 degrees and 85% humidity, visibility six miles (in reality, more like one or two miles on account of the chronic air pollution). An earthquake may have decimated one's stock of heirloom glassware, or damaged one's house to the point of uninhabitability, but the mantra was usually "look on the bright side: this gives you a chance to start over fresh, in a new place with new stuff!"
I have resolved not to say anything to our friend about her decision. It's her life, not mine. But I can't help wondering how she'll view that life, that decision, in a few months, a year or two -- however long it takes for the initial euphoria to wear off and the reality set in. For a relatively affluent middle-aged person who has no need to depend on the local economy for survival -- especially if it's possible to dash off on a vacation whenever conditions become even slightly uncomfortable -- it might not be so bad. But anyone who lives there long enough becomes adept at recognizing the twilight state of love-hate, rejection-acceptance in which many Angelenos exist. Nobody in their right mind truly loves the place; at best, they enjoy certain aspects of living there. Only the rawest of new arrivals babble like newly initated cult members about how wonderful it is. The lifers know much better.
