The third Part of Mark Walderman's investigation into the human sides and motivations of the escalating conflict in L.A., the Valley concentrates on the White Middle class.
The Valley - Part 3
Traffic is light along Hollywood Boulevard in the heat of the afternoon. Frank Warco talks to me in the Golden Café, behind yellowed windows, a loud soda fountain humming behind him as he leans on the counter. "Things ain’t like they was back when I was a kid, for sure,” says Warco. “But it ain’t nearly as bad as it’s gonna get when all them spics and niggers come up town.”
Warco has run the Golden Café since 1969, and worked here since his father opened it in 1948.
“I was only eight years old. Loretta Young came in here once and got a soda. Joan Crawford too, though that was after the severing and before she died. Lana Turner came in here every so often and owned this building. It’s owned by ParaCentury now. I pay rent to ParaCentury and buy everything I sell from UFP, but I ain’t in no corp.”
Warco is a free agent. But his magazine rack is stocked with cheap glossies from ParaCentury. Thin because of the expense of paper, slick glossy covers and cheap rough paper inside. They remind me of comic books from my youth. Ads mostly cover local businesses. Drugstores, mail order remedies, dimestores, tire companies, and garages. All the services that are not firmly rolled into one of the giant corporations that most citizens agree “run” Los Angeles.
“I don’t have anything against the spics and niggers per se,” says Warco defensively. “But they gonna come up town and eat us all. The niggers ain’t the worst of it I suppose. Ain’t nobody much ever given them a fair shake. It’s the spics. They got all organized, gonna come up here and burn us out. Be a shame to lose this street.”
The southern California sun has sent most people indoors. A young woman in toreador pants with a blonde bouffant and a tight tube top walks along in dark sunglasses, glancing at the addresses. She doesn’t stop to talk.
On the sidewalk, I expect to see stars. I recall a boyhood trip to Hollywood in 2007, when I was fascinated by the names on the sidewalk. They don’t exist here. The first was laid in 1958. Paracentury placed a few notable stars at the corner of Hollywood and Vine as a tourist attraction, but either the budget did not call for massive changes to the sidewalks or the interest wasn’t high enough. Most Los Angelenos have never heard of them.
On the corner Len Motzinger is more sanguine. He operates a newsstand, selling the same cheap glossies as in the diner. A hanging television screen shows the latest ParaCentury news. The screen is cased in heavy brushed aluminum, brown with cracked plastic packaging and crusted on the corners from the dirty air. The Picture skips and rolls, but the sound is clear.
Motzinger remembers the time before the severing well. “I was already twenty five when it came up. I worked here and was going to go to night school and be an accountant. But the hard times came along and the riots, and by the time things got steady I was married. So I stayed here and worked. There wasn’t much mobility. If you were already an accountant maybe there was a job, but you didn’t get any new accounting jobs. You gotta understand that. Everyone talks about the Corps getting bigger. They didn’t. The Economy got smaller. Much smaller, Where once you could support four companies, now there was only economy for one. So…everything got rolled up. The biggest bought the smaller three, or drove them out of business…it was join or die.”
“I don’t suppose when they come up town they’ll eat anybody,” says Motziger. “They’re human. But they’ll nationalize and take over. I don’t suppose they won’t let me sell papers, but they may take a lot of my money. Or decide that glossy papers about actresses and sex aren’t good things. So then they’ll print a lot of papers about workers and tractors like in Communist Russia, or about Jesus and God, and unless they also make people buy them from me, I suppose I’ll go broke and not eat, because nobody wants to read that. Maybe they’ll use the stand to distribute ration cards and tell me to go work on a collective farm. I’m too old for that. There is a fund at the temple, but it only goes so far. And they might take the temple or shut it up. My daughter works as a hairdresser. She’ll take me in, but maybe they will decide everybody wears workers cuts and there’s no money in hairdressing either. It will be the end of the middle class for a while I suppose. Eventually the rich among them will rise up and take over, but maybe there will be a new corner newsman and a new hairdresser. Maybe my daughter will get work sweeping up after the Latino hairdresser.”
Up the street at the Broadway Bar, the late afternoon crowd has yet to arrive and things are slow. A beat Cop asks me questions about who I am and where I’m from. He offers to sell me any drugs I want including “V” at half price if I will pay in Imperial Banknotes, or Rising Sun Yen. I ask why. “LA Currency ain’ t gonna be worth much once the shooting starts. The fucking corps are going to throw us on the front line, and the fucking spics are going to want us dead so they can have our business. I’m thinking maybe to get out. You know anybody in New York that could use a bodyguard? I used to box light heavyweight, I’m still in good shape.” I give the cop a New York 50 for some local tips and promise to be in touch if I need entertainment. He’s pimping a girl named Sallie down the bar and I ask if I can talk to her. He wants more money. “Nothing free in LA buddy.”
I ask about “V”
“It’s the greatest fucking thing to come along,” says the cop. “It’s hard to get, but the Movement won’t let us move it in their territory. It’s a political thing. They figure if they act all tough on ‘V’ everybody outside will think they’re fucking white knights. In reality it’s just that they don’t have a good source, and we do. We make a higher margin on “V” than anything else. It’s doing well in clubs and with the middle class kids who have fuckall else to do.”
Sallie lists against the bar. Her hair is stringy, and she wears a bikini top and green army surplus shorts with heavy men’s boots. I can see her ribs and up close her skin has the look of permanent goosebumps, and a sallow undertone. I can see trackmarks on her inner thigh and legs. She agrees to talk to me for an ENY ten dollar note. I ask her first about work.
“It’s off. You can’t get modeling. The entertainment industry is in the middle of a train wreck. There’s all this lucrative foreign distribution, but the studios are afraid to make anything that will take more than two days to produce for fear it won’t get to market. I’m not an actress anyway, but that has pocket money down. Most of the independents are starving. The people with money are socking it away, not investing in film. I mostly get bored scared guys off the streets. The club scene is wild but there’s not much money there.”
Sallie hasn’t done “V” yet. “It’s got a kind of bad rep. The Movement is fucking afraid of it. I mean hello, wake up and smell the coffee. I know people who have done it. Too fucking freakish for me. A lot of Corpsec and Bodyguard types are into it. I think maybe it’s more a guy thing. I know one chick who was freaking on it. A guy tried some rough stuff she didn’t like and she tore his balls off…I mean literally tore his fucking balls off…I don’t think he got them back. I dunno. I talked to somebody who saw it. He was bleeding and shit and there was oxygen…”
“Money is drying up and blowing away. Everybody is scared pissless. I guess I could count myself lucky guys need to fuck.”
Sallie shows me her apartment, two blocks off the Boulevard. It’s a third floor walkup. I compare it unfavorably to an apartment in Syracuse. The refrigerator is old and makes a rattling noise. The toilet runs. The lamps are old and the shades worn. There is a mattress on the floor and a worn couch. A fan runs in the window. Still, Sallie lives better than all but the top percent of the Latinos in the Barrios. I ask what she’ll do if it comes to war.
“I don’t know. Run away. Get high? I mean I’ve freaked Hispanic and Black guys, they like white ass. I don’t think I’ll run out of business.”
Tom Morley is a cab driver. He takes me on a slow road up to Mulholland ridge, climbing past haciendas and cheap apartments built in the 1920s and 30s. His battered Nash cab was built ten years ago on the El Segundo plant. It is painted yellow and black but boasts a large white and blue Southland Republic flag painted on the rear and sides.
“This town’s not what it used to be. Big shit coming down soon” is Morley’s appraisal. “I got a thirty eight under the seat and a shotgun you don’t know where” said Morley. “Riot barrel too. I used to think we were going to have to take this shit, but now it’s different. I joined the Volunteer Militia up in the Southland Republic. They were willing to take me up at Baldwin Park, they need defenders bad there.”
I asked Morley the same question I’d asked in the barrios. Was a fight inevitable.
“Well…maybe if the folks up on the hill can make things better down there I’m okay with that. I don’t hate those folks. I’m not some hate monger gonna call them all niggers and spics and make jokes about them. I don’t drive in the barrio but I’ve gotten some of those people for fares and I don’t suppose they have very much. But I don’t have very much either. I got this cab, and my health and my place. They gotta get me into old age. There’s nothing I can give them. And they are sure going to come up here looking for a handout. Back in the 50s there were the riots and Reagan gave them enough that they backed down for a while. But now it doesn’t look to me like they are backing down.”
Morley shares his opinion about Mayor Ted Lawton, Jr.
“Fuckhead. He came along and sang this song about America and Stars and Stripes that nobody was buying. But we all figured that made him the status quo guy, the business as usual man. That he’d keep the alliances up and keep things like they were. Then six months later the Movement is running the Court. It was all a stupid goddamn sham. He tried to make a deal with the movement to fuck ParaCentury and UFP. I guess he thought he could fuck them in the end, but what did the guy think that he could ass fuck everybody and it would all be okay? They got him into line and now he’s humming the fucking Internationale is what he’s doing. Look most average people hate the Corps even if they work for them. I may hate the Movement, but I’ve personally been dicked over by the Corps a lot more. But we put up with them because they protected us and our way of life. Now…not so fucking much. They had a fight with each other instead of preserving the fucking American Way of Life that Lawton was so Goddamn poetic about…”
To understand old-school LA politics, you have to know that the party of Ronald Reagan and the GOP…the old American Republicans…was and is run by ParaCentury Corp. Reagan’s background was with the Screen Actors Guild and his powerbase firmly fixed in Hollywood. The Democrats drew their power from the Army, Air Force, big industry and were represented by Standard Oil. During the thirty-odd years of the “Great Compromise,” Standard took a backseat to ParaCentury Corp, with UFP playing tiebreaker and kingmaker between them.
Late last year in the first elections in which Mayor Reagan was unable to run, the two parties agreed to a Unity ticket to stave off a plausible and noisy threat from EPIC. As much as votes, which nobody in LA was counting anyway, the move was about counter-leverage. Leaders felt the Movement would not dare attack a consolidated middle and upper class showing a unified front.
In the first few days of the Lawton administration, Lawton promoted a GOP based coup that forced the wholesale resignation of ParaCentury and many UFP Legislators, and gave a majority of seats on the High Court to the Movement. The theoretic idea behind this was to neutralize ParaCentury which Lawton saw as “ultra-right” and forge a centrist alliance with the moderate Socialists in the Movement. The effect was to firmly betray the middle class alliance that had elected Lawton, and to hand the next election to the Movement. The High Court controls districting and has ordered new elections July 4 that are nearly certain to return a strong Movement Majority.
Morley is more scared of the new People’s Court than of the Corps. “You can’t take a case to Court now because there isn’t a high Court. White people are afraid to take any cases to Court, not knowing what’s going to happen. The People’s Court doesn’t hold much sway outside the barrios and the neutral zones, but I have to drive those zones. I’ve seen people dragged out of cars. It’s worse than the paseos. I saw them take some kids outside a club. They said they were selling “V.” Probably they were, they looked like the type. They dragged them out into the street and stopped traffic, and made them kneel down. Then they talked for a while and shot them in the back of the head. They waved the cars to go on and run over their bodies. I didn’t want to, but the guy directing traffic pointed a pistol at me, so I was like running over this eighteen year old girl who had maybe been moving “V.” What the fuck. I mean I know that if you go into that club district you’re taking your own chances. But that’s fucking cold.”
Morley’s Nash labors up the hill and we drive along the crest of Mulholland. The city is stretched out below, going on for miles, across the horizon. I see a haze of smoke hanging East of the LA River, where thousands of cook fires of charcoal briquets and trash are warming a meager evening meal. Morley sits in the front of the cab wearing a torn leather jacket, and stained shirt. I look for something to sum up, but the city offers very little. A landscape in contradictions
The city is often described as “two thirds Latino.” The actual figures show a guesstimate of about 61.3% Latino, 9.5% black, and 29.2% white, with a sprinkling of ethnic Chinese and other races. No valid census has been conducted since 1950. The average employed middle class white makes about $2000 a year. Income of $8000 a year or greater identifies the upper 5% of families.
The figures are misleading. While the average employed Latino makes about $900 a year, the average middle class white feeds a family with one wife and 2.3 children. The average Latino feeds an extended framework of 14-22 mouths, usually consisting of at least 2-3 additional adults making less than $300 a year. Penn State Economists suggested that the average per family member income is $465 for whites, and $83 for Latinos. About one percent of the L.A. population controls about 28% of the wealth. That may sound odd, but it is less than the figure as in the U.S. in 1948 (33%), and less concentrated than in the U.S. at the time of the severing when it was about 8%. Alarmingly the distribution of wealth is, per force, in L.A. more even than in most of 20th century America, and there is little sign that it could fall to a lower level without major upheaval.
The Distribution of Wealth in Los Angeles
Per of Pop Per of Wealth/Capital
Wealthiest 1% of Whites 0.3 28% of wealth
Wealthiest 10% of Whites 2.9 27% of wealth
White Middle Class 26.3 27.5% of wealth
Latinos 61.3 16.5% of wealth
Blacks 9.5 1% of wealth
Next: The Hills
