Frayed Nerves, Hopeful Calm Mark Vigil

Lying awake at night in a Pico-Union neighborhood ravaged by fires during last year’s riots, Sonia Arias anguishes over unanswerable questions. What might the verdicts provoke? And for how long? And will she--and her city--endure a reprise of the hell that broke out the last time April drew toward a close?

“I’m thinking how crazy it’s going to get,” the 27-year-old college student said, wide-eyed, describing an anxiety that has spread over much of Los Angeles like a sulfur smog. To be sure, her fears do not represent a majority; in most corners of the embattled metropolis, residents were expressing calm as jurors in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial apparently prepared to announce their verdicts this morning.

But the strains of the wait were being felt--in subtle ways, mostly among those who were near enough to the upheaval a year ago to feel its searing heat. To those, and to untold thousands who struggle anyway to cope with the stresses of a violent urban habitat, the trial has become a gut-wrenching drama worthy of Hitchcock.

Its effect has darkened the mood of the city, blending Angst with nonchalance, creating a place of tics and insomnia and quiet confidence. Courage and false bravado share the same streets. Untold thousands ignore the news reports, while others maintain a nervous vigil at their TVs and radios.

Richard Andrews, 51, who with his wife and young daughter watched his optical shop destroyed by fire and looting last year, now is sending the 6-year-old girl to a psychiatrist for crying spells. Andrews, who rebuilt the Crenshaw district store, is taking four Anacin a day.

Because of the trial, he said, “I’ve been getting headaches the last three weeks.”

During a “false alarm” over possible verdicts Wednesday, most neighborhoods, even in riot-scarred inner-city communities, seemed tranquil. Still, record gun sales in California--more than 65,000 in March--attest to the fears of citizens such as Janet Rosenwald, 80, of Hollywood. She bought her .45-caliber revolver--”a big one”--a year ago, and is keeping it handy.

“I don’t intend to use it unless somebody breaks into my apartment,” she said. “If they break in, if they get their head in the door, they’re going to get it. They break through my window, they’re going to get it.”

Not even the relative sanctuary of home is comforting for those who have come to believe that no place is invulnerable to destruction. Dr. Michael J. Singer, a Long Beach psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, said a nervous faction of the population has awaited the verdicts indoors, nursing migraines and flaring ulcers.

“They’re having heart palpitations, an increased (incidence) . . . of shortness of breath episodes, along with jitteriness,” Singer said. In the first few days since the case was handed over to the jury for deliberations, he said, he had sessions with 16 patients. Nine have exhibited a “preoccupation” with the historic trial, Singer said.

One had dreams about his business being burned down, even though it is miles from the inner-city neighborhoods destroyed in last spring’s tumult. “One has noticed abdominal pain . . . diarrhea . . . due to nerves from all this,” Singer said.

For Arias, who has begun listening to a police scanner to catch signs of trouble in her Pico-Union neighborhood, insomnia feeds on mental images of intruding rioters. “They hit the house, break in . . . when everybody’s asleep, just shoot somebody dead and take what they want,” she said.

In her mind, she is forced to defend herself--swinging a baseball bat.

Other residents look to the future with less-vivid apprehension. Near the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues--a flash point of last year’s violence--Richard Hamilton, 49, awaited his car at an auto detailing shop this week and remembered the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Then he added: “I can’t let thugs or criminals dictate my life, and I’m not going to do it. I see some people stocking up on groceries and ammunition and arms. Some of these people are armed to the teeth. That’s hysterical.”

Even so, Hamilton has talked with his wife and teen-age son about contingency plans: how they will meet, should trouble happen. He and his wife carry cellular phones.

A few doors away, at the tiny beauty parlor that bears her name, Goldie Bell knows with certainty that the trial is on practically everyone’s mind. “There’s not a customer who doesn’t talk about it,” she said with a laugh. “I’m tired of hearing about Rodney King. I bet he’s tired of hearing his own name.”

Talking about concerns can be therapeutic, psychiatrists point out. At the same time, the endless speculation and the multichannel bombardment of media pronouncements can heighten a sense of alarm.

Dr. Peter Swerdlick, a Sherman Oaks psychiatrist, said the news coverage and the passing days create a “free-floating anxiety,” a feeling of strain and helplessness that might precipitate anxiety attacks, nightmares and stress-related physical problems. “This is a city that’s on edge,” he said.

Distracted workers are “fuzzy about what they do day to day,” said Dr. Claudewell S. Thomas, chair of the psychiatry department at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. He cited one nervous colleague who wants to “turn on the television and watch it all the time, as if by watching it he could accelerate the decision.”

In Koreatown, a major target of last year’s violence and arson, distracted workers have been tuning in to Korean-language news reports day and night--”actually, 24 hours,” said optician Robert Cho, 31. “They don’t want to shop. They stay home, watch TV and listen to the radio.”

Charles McCoy, 67, of Watts listens not only to the TV reports and the radio talk shows but also to the dialogue in the streets. The other morning, two gang members--a Crip and a Blood--were voicing an intent to get violent if the verdicts came down in favor of the four officers, McCoy said.

Hearing them--and sensing tensions he described as “very high”--McCoy is left wondering if Los Angeles is about to splinter in the way that strife-torn Bosnia has. “That can happen here, believe me,” he said. “You’ve got factions here trying to make that happen.”

McCoy tries to counter the street talk with his own flatly stated call for nonviolence. “The white people are our friends. There are no white people in Watts shooting down black people,” he said. But the exercise seems futile against what he considers the prevailing attitudes.

“That’s what frustrates me,” McCoy said. “I’m so mad I don’t know what to do!”

With police and even the military prepared to move in as the verdicts are read, some residents say they feel more secure. Sandy Brown, president of the Westside Civic Federation, said about 35 South Carthay residents attending a political meeting this week seemed generally at ease when the question of possible rioting was raised, largely because of the leadership of new Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams.

Characterizing the level of anxiety, Brown said: “I don’t think people are losing sleep, but I think when they wake up each morning they are hoping today is the day (that the verdicts come in), and let’s move on.” Her personal hope had been that the judgments would occur during the week.

“Weekends are more of a free-for-all time,” Brown said. “People are out partying, drinking. . . . On the weekends it’s a little more difficult to control events if there is trouble.”

The psychology of readiness has become tricky, however. For Doreet Hakman, owner of the Snow White Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard, the TV images of military forces going through anti-riot drills were anything but reassuring. She now wonders: Why does this city need all that?

“Maybe (city officials) know something we don’t know,” Hakman said. “Now I’m really scared; now I’m really panicked. I’m talking to my customers and they say the same thing: ‘Maybe there’s more to it than we know.’ ”

The uncertainty upsets her stomach; she is afraid of falling ill, she said. As a single mother, Hakman worries about being able to get her two young children home safely from school. On top of all that, business has dropped off because the tourists are avoiding Los Angeles, compounding the stress with new financial straits, according to Hakman.

“It’s too much pressure--too much, too much,” she said. “My God, I think the worst. I can’t sleep at night because I wonder.”

Many merchants, keenly aware that more than 1,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged a year ago, were preparing to flank their roofs and entryways with security guards. The demand for protection has been so enormous that one major security firm, Van Nuys-based Pinkerton Security and Investigation Services, was having to turn away business, said Peter C. Sawyers, vice president of marketing.

“We have had a frenetic level of activity . . . ever since the jurors went out,” Sawyers said, estimating that the company’s normal Los Angeles County deployment, about 2,500 officers, has been boosted by several hundred with more being recruited. “We just don’t have the manpower to keep up.”

Wary of promoting the siege mentality, two major Hollywood studios were taking unusual steps to de-emphasize movie violence in Los Angeles. Warner Bros. Studios altered its print ads for the newly released film “Boiling Point” so that a picture of actor Wesley Snipes no longer shows him pointing a handgun.

Hollywood Pictures went even further, postponing the Los Angeles release date for its R-rated film “Bound by Honor.” The movie, about three Latino brothers from Los Angeles’ Eastside, is scheduled to go into about 30 major markets April 30, but it was judged too sensitive to be shown locally at the time of the pending verdicts.

“Tension is high enough out there,” one studio spokesman commented. “Why add to it?”

Despite such precautions, rumors racing through town have torqued up the paranoia. One leaflet making the rounds at an import factory in La Mirada told of 10,000 anticipated deaths, saying gang members were ready to impersonate police using stolen uniforms. Authorities emphatically dismissed such reports, but after her daughter brought home the flyer, longtime Eastside resident Rachel Reyes found herself with “bad insomnia.”

“You see a group of teen-agers, men in the streets, and you start wondering: ‘Maybe it’s going to start,’ ” Reyes said. Her daughter, who is 26, went to the doctor a day before the case went to the jury, complaining of numbness in her hands. The doctor said “it was just her nerves,” according to Reyes.

A rumor control hot line established April 5 by Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores has generated more than 2,500 calls, said spokeswoman Niki Tennant. One caller wanted to know if it was true--it wasn’t--that National Guardsmen were being stationed under manholes throughout town. The longstanding rumor that gang members would target affluent parts of town in a new riot apparently has “worn out it’s life,” Tennant said, but the calls keep coming.

The hot line--(310) 548-7637--had been ringing this week with even the faintest hint of verdicts. During Wednesday’s false alarm, in which defendants were summoned into court only to learn that a juror was ill, calls poured in so fast over eight different phone lines that “(we) couldn’t even log them,” Tennant said. “The phone was just ringing straight from 1 o’clock on. . . . It was incredible.”

That afternoon, from a 60th-floor office in downtown’s First Interstate skyscraper, Michael Collins watched a dramatic, L.A.-style tableau of fear. The Harbor Freeway below him became jammed up with traffic only an hour after the 2 p.m. court hearing. Then it cleared out so completely an hour later that “you could have put a bowling ball down the (traffic lanes).”

Collins, an executive with the Los Angeles Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, could reach only one conclusion: “I think people just said, ‘I’m out of here.’ ”

Fear has been high enough in fashionable Brentwood to cause residents to circulate a warning: In the event of violence, remain inside and turn off the lights, thus eliminating any silhouettes that might draw fire from drive-by gunmen.

But longtime Beverly Hills activist Ellen Byrens strongly discounted the thought of any danger. “This is a lot of hype by the media,” she said. “I’ve never done anything except be supportive of minority groups. I don’t think they would harm me in any way.

“I feel absolutely safe and comfortable.”

Times staff writer Greg Krikorian contributed to this story.

Rumor Hot Lines

Officials have set up three hot lines for callers to inquire about rumors surrounding the Rodney G. King civil rights trial and its aftermath.

(800) 2-GOTALK: Sponsored by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

(818) 345-1091: Staffed starting from 7 a.m. today. Sponsored by Los Angeles Councilwoman Joy Picus.

(310) 548-7637: Staffed beginning at 7 a.m. Sponsored by Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores.