October 2008 Archives

Growing up in L.A, I associated the Santa Ana winds with a very specific time of year. Two seasons were crossing paths, and the result was the mercilessly hot, dry days of summer's last hurrah and the dramatically cooler nights that signaled the onset of fall. I was back at school, dressed all wrong in woolly knee socks and plaid tartan (it took me a while to realize the Sears catalogue was geared to the climate of the whole country). But I sweated it out; I was going to wear my new duds, weather be damned. Every year I willed the temperature to change to accommodate my outfit, and pretty much every year it made a fool of me. But it was a ritual I looked forward to. By November the desert air was gone for good, maybe popping up a day here and there in February to remind us all that was indeed Southern California, and it could get warm at any moment. But contrary to mythology, Southern California kept its pact with winter, and I kept the knee socks.

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I live in Inglewood. It’s one of the many urban small towns that aren’t technically part of L.A. but are at the core of the storied megalopolis that is L.A. (What would L.A. be to the wider world without Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, even Culver City?) Inglewood isn’t exactly glamorous, but it shares certain characteristics with its fellow small towns, including having its own police force. Lately that force has been under intense scrutiny for fatally shooting four people, three of them unarmed and all gunned down in controversial circumstances, in the last five months. Unsettling to say the least, especially given the history of Inglewood as a resolutely white city that abruptly became black in the 60s and 70s but retained a police department that too often viewed its new black and brown populace as suspects, not citizens. Ever heard of sundown towns? Inglewood is part of that sordid tradition of de facto racial exclusion that L.A. didn’t invent but certainly succumbed to, led by its law enforcement.

This is all an introduction to the story of Michael Reed and his dog, Topaz. Michael was involved in the last Inglewood shooting that happened August. 31; he wasn’t the guy killed, but he certainly qualifies as a victim.

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I love fashion as much as anybody, especially in these financially dire times that make the looky-loo escapism of haute couture more attractive than it already is. But denial has its limits. When the Times debuted a new Sunday magazine a couple of weeks ago, a thick glossy that had already proudly announced it would bear little resemblance to the story-oriented magazines of eras past, I passed up the front page and went straight to it. I had a rationale: the headline news was getting so discouraging, I needed to cleanse my palate with mindless fare before facing those headlines again. It was like having a couple of drinks before dinner, and not a good dinner, but one with peas and liver and things you don’t like but that you know you have to eat because they’re necessary and make you a better and more conscious person. I always want to be better and more conscious, but sometimes I need a moment of complete self-indulgence to get there. This was one of those moments.

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Being a native of Los Angeles (Angeleno always sounded a bit too grandiose to my ears, especially in a movie town), I must say that, all things considered, I've been rich my whole life. Not in the way of money or things, because I never had much of either and still don’t. I mean rich in the way of what I didn’t have. I didn’t grow up with the cruelest aspects of winter. My brothers and sisters and I lived in a house my parents owned rather than in apartments or rentals. I was always able to see the sky, even in the thick of downtown high-rises. And thanks to the fact that my family moved to L.A. from New Orleans many years before I was born, I was spared the indignity of growing up in the South and being inculcated with its limitations of black life that were so deep and pervasive, blacks had to leave just to find some different air. The air here was not entirely different, not by a long shot, but it was different enough. L.A. turned out to be that rare thing, a big city with a lot of open space; between the hard rules of who did what and who could live where, there were gaps and cracks that went unnoticed by rule-makers and were big enough to fill with something new. So my uncle who was denied a future as a pharmacist because there were so few slots for blacks (especially during the Depression) became a successful car salesman on Crenshaw Boulevard when it was still populated by whites. My father, an intellectual and idealist who would have been ill-suited to the workaday life of most black men in New Orleans, was brought west early—1942—and found his calling as an activist and community builder in the roiling 1960s. For them, L.A. lived up to its hype as the last and greatest American mecca of reinvention, though the reinvention was more circumstantial than inspired. And it was a long way from redemption.

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