Waiting for You Know What

Notes from a city in waiting:

The jury couldn’t agree on lunch. This was the big news Tuesday out of The Deliberations. Most of the jurors ordered the Southern-fried chicken. A few partook of the enchiladas. One--and we don’t have this absolutely nailed down--might have gone for the liver. It’s a tough one to read: Do we have a holdout? An ethnic split? Who knows?

It’s a difficult time to be a journalist in Los Angeles. The city is full of them, all anticipating . . . something, all reading smoke, swapping rumors. Many come from far away and hope for a quick resolution of the Rodney King matter. The lull frustrates them.

I did meet one who is more than happy to be here. He works for a London newspaper, and has just left Waco, Tex., and the David Koresh standoff. Escaped is probably a more accurate verb. Just prior to his departure, this reporter had described Waco in a dispatch as “a one-horse town where the horse died.” Needless to say, the locals weren’t thrilled.

*

I took the man from London along Monday afternoon to watch Tom Bradley visit the Manchester Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. Bradley gave a good show. He wore a black-and-white cardigan sweater that looked as though it came from Mr. Rogers’ closet. Children knelt around the mayor and asked what might happen in the next few days.

“If we have another riot,” one child said, reading from the 3-by-5 cards each carried to the event, “do you think it will be as bad as last year?”

“Duane,” Bradley said, looking not at Duane but at a panel of television cameras positioned across the room, all “going live” at the top of the 5 p.m. news hour, “I don’t believe we are going to have another riot. And I want everyone in this room to say that so we can get it firmly fixed in our heads: I don’t believe we are going to have another riot. “

The children repeated the sentence, speaking slowly in a sing-song chant: I don’t believe we are going to have another riot. The cameras whirred, the mayor beamed, and the correspondent from the London Times grumped that, at best, all he had was “a holding story.”

*

The federal trial has been a dubious adventure from the start--double jeopardy for both the defendants and the city at large. Nonetheless, it provided Bradley with a golden opportunity to shore up his political legacy. The riot last year put a nasty twist on Bradley’s tenure, underscoring the city’s inability to confront fundamental problems--in his time, and in a part of Los Angeles that had provided his political base.

Now, however, he has a chance to rewrite the epilogue, to depart as a mayor who, in his final act, helped hold his city together when everyone expected it to blow apart. If it can be held together . . .

*

There have been a flurry of news reports assessing Peter Ueberroth’s first year at Rebuild L.A. Most have been negative, suggesting that the chieftain of the Los Angeles Olympics has lost his touch. This conclusion ignores the difficulty of the task. He has been given a job the city ignored for 25 years, and the timing now is terrible: He must persuade a bottom-dollar business community, already made half crazy by recession, to invest in a part of the city that was afire only one year ago and--if one is to believe the prognostications--soon will be torched again.

At a speaking engagement Tuesday, Ueberroth reminded an audience of business types that he was a volunteer at Rebuild L.A., adding with just a taste of acid that anyone who wanted to assume his “dollar-a-year job” was more than welcome. There were no takers.

*

Time magazine is out with a cover that asks: “Is the City of Angels going to hell?” The story is a prime example of a journalistic genre--California-bashing. It’s not so much the criticism that bothers; it is fun to live in a place that is written about so much. I simply wish they’d find something new to say, and a new way to say it.

Instead we get the same old lines, all seemingly culled from a quick reading of Didion and McWilliams on the flight out. We read about a “garden in the desert” gone fallow, about “palmy suburbs” that hold menace, about “the center not holding” in “a land without limits.” Such cliche-mongering makes a “one-horse town where the horse died” seem the height of literary genius.

*

Finally, the e-mail report. The in-house computer messages at this paper have become increasingly dire. First, all hands were instructed to pick up beepers. Then gas masks. Then flak jackets. Those prone to alarm might ask: Does the press know something we don’t? In this case, I am happy to report, the answer is no.