Los Angeles
NO one here even knew there was an election last week. Elections in Los Angeles just happen, like expensive new buildings suddenly happen. Frank Gehry has said that the bureaucracy of architecture in Los Angeles is “under the radar,” so extraordinary structures can go up without anyone knowing until it’s done. Elections are under the radar as well, no matter how much they get written about. But unlike the architecture, the results are usually singularly and spectacularly unspectacular.
In Los Angeles, when you read about local elections, no matter which elections they are, even the word “county” acquires a preternaturally creepy pallor, and it is as if you are gloomily scanning a parallel universe, or as if you have fallen into a huge wormhole, or are reading a defunct paper, not The Los Angeles Times but The Herald Examiner. It is a curious effect. It is literally as if they are not happening or have not happened or as if you are reading a story, not to be pretentious, by a dimwitted, civic-minded Inland Empire cousin of Borges.
The mayors of Los Angeles are an eerily bland cortege of men who are out of time. I remember Sam Yorty because he lived up the street from us when I was a boy. I remember Tom Bradley because he was a sweet walking dead person. At least he was hip enough to live in the giant mayor’s house in Hancock Park. Still, those two could smile.
And then there was Richard Riordan, who could really smile. Some people I knew had heard of him, and everyone liked him because he was rich, way rich like Michael Bloomberg and David Geffen, and it’s always fun when someone is incredibly rich. It’s fun when Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom everyone I know has heard of, says he has so much money he could never be bought or sold. But at least Richard Riordan was a sweet, fuzzy fat cat who loved books so much that he had an entire library that he kept at his house. I think he had more books than Karl Lagerfeld, and that’s a lot. You could imagine him having brunch with Ray Bradbury before dropping in on an AIDS walkathon.
Jim Hahn, soon to be the ex-mayor, is among the most gloriously breathtaking ciphers in the political history of the known world. He was nearly an antigravitational force, formed from a rib that the former governor Gray Davis broke off from his own body. (Gray Davis was another natty, zombified politico in a long, distinguished gray line of Walking Dead.) I think Jim Hahn had a father named Kenneth, who is invariably described as a “giant” among politicos. It is always played respectfully but is nonetheless bizarre. I have a dim memory of the former Govs. Pat Brown and Jerry Brown, and while it would be a stretch, you could lay a They Might Be Giants rap on them. But to lay it on the Hahns, well: such men seem to exist in a netherworld, like characters in a comic book written by osteopaths or periodontists or outsider artists whose work will never surface to be catalogued, celebrated or exhibited, except perhaps in the odd, blandly disjointed dreams people have while resurfacing in recovery rooms after – the pun is inadvertent – elective surgery.
Anyway, everyone I know is still confused over just what happened with Gray Davis. No one knew who Gray Davis was, or even why he was governor. He thankfully had big hair and appeared, at least in demeanor, to be a sort of mildly buff Jim Hahn or Kenneth Hahn on watered-down steroids but still, in one’s imaginings anyway, capable of rage, which was at least a comfort. An android who one day might violate the Asimovian Code, thereby necessitating his destruction by human caretakers. I thought that was something to like about him. But everyone I know could never fathom the mechanism behind Gray Davis being elected, nor could they fathom the mechanism behind his impeachment or recall or whatever term they employed.
No one I know has ever heard of Jim Hahn. Some people I know have heard of our new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. I myself read about him giving a speech where he was apologizing for his not-great fluency in the Spanish language. I thought that was charming. Other people I know confuse him with the actor whom Glenn Close replaced on “The Shield” or the guy under house arrest on “Desperate Housewives.” He has a kind of rascally charm and is way more sexy than the silvery, flat-jowled Dead Hahn Walking.
Some people I know became aware of the candidates when they were visiting the churches of African-Americans. Some people I know became aware of them when they made pit stops at Jewish assisted-living centers and Hispanic trade schools. It was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Villaraigosa was going to win because no one knew why or how Jim Hahn had become mayor or even what becoming mayor meant or even why Los Angeles needed a mayor and, anyhow, Antonio Villaraigosa had that Eau de Alpha Predator. But even so the newspapers kept acting as if no one really knew who would win, as if it were a real horse race, and the papers kept doing that thing where right before the actual election they say it almost looks like the incumbent’s a shoo-in, but then of course Mr. Villaraigosa won by a landslide.
Jim Hahn and most Los Angeles mayors are like that ghostly caretaker in “The Shining.” Whenever there’s a new mayor, the old one says to him, just as the ghost caretaker said to Jack Nicholson in the lavatory: “You are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker.”
I read somewhere that Jim Hahn said he is planning on running again or doing something absolutely psychotic like that, but no one knows how he would even do that or why he would, and as I am writing this I am even forgetting who he is and I am trying to remember who Antonio Villaraigosa is – I keep giving him the name “Vargas” in my mind, like the illustrator who used to do those pin-up paintings for Playboy, Alberto Vargas – but now I am remembering that he’s the new mayor, I either dreamed that or it’s true, and all any of us can do is hope that he will do something terrible or scandalous or flat-out crazy so we may always remember who he is and not think we are seeing his picture in a group photo in “The Shining” or starting to read about him in a newspaper that no longer exists and is crumbling in our hands before we can even finish.
