Significant differences again appeared between regions:
| - | East/War Zones | West |
|---|---|---|
| AGREE | 22% | 35% |
| DISAGREE | 71 | 55 |
| NO OPINION | 7 | 10 |
Should the center of the national government once again be reestablished on the East Coast, that is, moved from Los Angeles?
| - | 1993 | 1992 |
|---|---|---|
| AGREE | 38% | 39% |
| DISAGREE | 45 | 42 |
| NO OPINION | 17 | 19 |
Do you support the recent demands made by some groups for dividing the United States into two permanent regions, e.g., West and East?
| - | 1993 | 1992 |
|---|---|---|
| AGREE | 47% | 47% |
| DISAGREE | 50 | 48 |
| NO OPINION | 3 | 5 |
Los Angeles
It is the greatest city in the United States. In size, San Francisco isn’t even close.
Jim and I found it nostalgically complex, a vast mechanical toy full of buses and clanging trolleys and more cars than either of us have seen in one place in years.
It looks like fun, and the tension in the air reminds me a little of New York.
As much as there are things that are here from the past, there is something from the present that is missing. It is the sense of having suffered—the subtle tension that hangs between friends and strangers alike, everywhere else we have been so far. California didn’t suffer too much from the famine, and few people here were weak enough to be killed by the Cincinnati Flu. Radiation sickness is almost unknown, except among refugees.
On our first night in the bright streets of Los Angeles, I found myself returning to my old metropolitan habits, moving with quick anonymity and never meeting anybody else’s eyes.
There is a much stronger Japanese influence than ever before.
The streets are packed not only with Japanese businessmen but also with clerks and factory workers and children with American nannies. And there are cars: new Nissans that whistle when they accelerate and get 130 miles to a gallon of gas, sporty Toyota Z-90s, Isuzus and Mitsubishis and the occasional Mercedes-Benz.
There are also a few Fords, big and beautifully made at the new plant in Fullerton, and a great improvement over the notorious Consensus with the plastic windows. Despite its size, the new Thunderbird gets sixty miles per gallon. It also has a sensor that sounds an alarm if any radioactive particles should be taken into the air-conditioning system.
More, though, than its prosperity, L.A. has the feeling of prewar America, the cheer, the confidence, the cheek that one associates with former days.
I indulged myself shamelessly. In Little Tokyo there are dozens of open-air fruit and vegetable stands where melons and tomatoes and lettuce and carrots and squash and dozens of other things are stacked in abundance. Little Tokyo, by the way, now extends all the way to Sixth Street. It must be four times its prewar size. In Little Tokyo I bought an enormous vine-ripened tomato for two cents and ate it like an apple. I have not eaten such a thing in years. It was rich beyond belief, dense with a flavor that swept through my nostrils, heavy with juice. If I could design hydroponics that would grow tomatoes that flavorful, I’d get rich.
For fifteen cents we spent half an hour at an open-air sushi bar, sampling the catch and burning our nostrils with Japanese horse-radish. Then we strolled on, satiated, only to be tempted a few minutes later into a beautiful ice cream store, which sold a new brand called Sweet Sue. I had a double-dip cone of cherry vanilla and, in honor of my son, pistachio.
I wish that my family could enjoy the life here. No wonder the P.O.E. is so strict. If immigration was free, California would be drowned in people.
As illegals, we were faced with a number of very serious problems. The first was transportation. There are ten long-distance trolley lines and many more buses than there were before the war, but a car is still a terrific convenience in L.A. We did not have one and couldn’t rent one without revealing that our IDs were bogus.
So we were condemned to trying to figure out the intricate system of buses, minibuses, trolleys, and Aztlan-like pesetas.
Beyond transportation, we had the difficulty of finding a place to stay. I have enjoyed some extraordinary hotels in Los Angeles: the Beverly Hills, the Chateau Marmont, the Bonaventure.
But you can’t register in a hotel without an ID that will pass the computer. In every bus and trolley, posted in stores and in post offices and pasted on every available public bulletin board, of which there must be thousands, is the following sign:
Illegal immigrants are liable to arrest and imprisonment for up to three years for the first offense, imprisonment for no less than ten years, without possibility of parole, for the second.
WARNING! There are severe penalties for failing to report an illegal! You may be imprisoned for no less than twenty years for this offense. So don’t take chances, report!
California will pay you for information leading to the capture of an illegal immigrant! You can make five gold dollars just for picking up the phone and dialing the Illegals Hot Line, 900-404-9999. So, if you get a bad ID or just see somebody who looks road-weary, give us a call. You never know when your suspicions might be worth their weight in gold!
We decided to assume a hostile population and made a few basic rules. First, we had to keep moving. Second, we had to sleep under the stars. We couldn’t even risk a rooming house—assuming we could find one with a room to rent. Housing is a nightmare in L.A. I saw ads in the Times offering small homes in the Valley for eight hundred in gold, no paper accepted and no mortgages given.
Dallas has whole neighborhoods where all you have to do is move in, bring your new house up to code, and it’s yours.
Our third rule was that we had to look as happy and well fed as the rest of the Angelinos. Considering our other rules, this one was damned hard to keep. But we dared not look “road-weary.” Angelinos know that overpopulation will strangle their prosperity, and they are generally avid to turn in illegals. We couldn’t risk arousing suspicion, especially not among our interviewees and in the offices Jim was visiting to get government documents.
We spent our first night in a carport at the La Mirada apartments. Immediately after dawn the next day, we had our second taste of conflict between government and members of the Destrueturalist movement. Shouting began echoing up and down La Mirada Avenue from the direction of El Centro. Then there were people running frantically through the carport, breathing hard, followed by battle-dressed officers on black mopeds.