But there are no motor vehicles for now on two sections of Broadway at Times Square and Herald Square that have been blocked off as a kind of pedestrian mall to allow regular walking and bicycling people to enjoy themselves without losing a leg to a limo. And they were doing it by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, right there before my startled eyes: New Yorkers happy and relaxed. It just wasn’t right.

I am accustomed to seeing tension and fear on their faces, not loopy smiles of contentment while laid back in the sunshine or even the rain. They are not Los Angeles sun bunnies, for God’s sake, lying in the sand with their bikinied behinds reflecting the pale light; they are not surfers skimming along the tops of a gleaming waterfront. They’re not supposed to be either content or playful. They are expected to be on the make, on the run, late for everything, doing deals, pounding the pavement, full of angst and regret and fiery ambition.

What’s going on here?

I hadn’t heard about the Broadway pedestrian mall before I got there, because in L.A. we are not allowed very much news about the Big Apple. If it didn’t happen here, it didn’t happen. To most of the people on the western edge, Manhattan is a foreign country full of dangers we never have to face in Funland, U.S.A., where the beach meets the sea and doing nothing has become an art form. It’s almost too damned peaceful…as long as you don’t end up in the crossfire of a gang shootout.

Imagine my surprise on a recent visit to New York City running head on into one of the best known streets in the world cut off from motorized traffic. It was like turning the Champs Elysees into a petting zoo or, heaven forbid, filling the Hollywood Freeway with ping pong tables.

Our hotel was on West 44th, and as my wife and I strolled toward Broadway, I sensed something different. I was no longer being jostled, and a few of those I perceived to be non-tourists were actually smiling. New Yorkers don’t usually smile. A tight grin is what you get under normal circumstances as they knock you off the sidewalk.

“Maybe they’re pumping cannabis into the air,” my wife Cinelli suggested. “You see any vents anywhere or smell anything sort of
sweet and compelling?”

“There is nothing sweet and compelling in Manhattan,” I said, “except for the toasting raisin bagels.”

Then we hit Broadway, turned north and ran into the pedestrian mall. I fixated first on a fat man sprawled on a blanket stretched over seats in a bleacher like he was at the beach in Malibu or dead. I realized instantly that it couldn’t be, because there are no fat people in Malibu and there is no ocean on Broadway. Lifting my view, I was amazed to see the thousands of pedestrians on lawn chairs and at café tables in the middle of the street, chatting and acting almost like normal people.

It wasn’t until later that we learned the street had been blocked off to keep traffic-generated smog down and to allow pedestrians a little leisure. Also, they somehow concluded, this will help traffic congestion. However, it is really pissing off the drivers of taxis, buses and other vehicles, which normally shoot down the Great White Way in a hurry to get someplace, anyplace, just get us there.

But I like it. Mingling in the mall, as it were, I felt a sense of community among the loungers, as though they had achieved some kind of cultural miracle by convincing the city to do this. They could throw back their arms and tilt their faces to whatever sunlight made it into the concrete canyons. They could shop at the stores lining Broadway, tip their hats to passersby and even have conversations with each other. No one gave anyone the finger all the time my wife and I wandered through the mall crowds. Not once did I hear “up yours!”

I am going to suggest to our mayor in L.A., the perpetually grinning Antonio Villaraigosa, to block off something, if I can get past his vague and glowing smile into his brain and register the idea. I think he’s been to New York, but I’m not sure, so I’ll send him photographs of what the Broadway mall looks like. He understands pictures. Crayon drawings are better, but photographs are helpful.

I’ll let you know when the synaptic connection is made. His eyes will blink twice.

Visit Al’s blog for more on Everything Else.

(almtz13@aol.com)

In the vast stretch of cosmic time, six decades is not very long. When one thinks in terms of Earth’s wrinkled age and all the growth and creatures that have inhabited it, 60 years is about a quarter click on an atomic clock.

But when you’re two fiercely independent, highly emotional people, every day is a journey through a dense jungle, a shot into space, a dive to the deepest parts of the ocean, a race without a finish. Nothing is easy in a collusion of spirits.

That’s why the storm on that particular Thursday seemed quite appropriate. I will remember for a long time ducking through the calamity heading toward our hotel, umbrellas offering little shelter from the rain that lashed at us in horizontal gusts. We got to our room drenched, and we laughed.

It is the power of laughter that has helped prolong the drama of our marriage, the willingness to perceive life as an amusing trek, and the two of us as funny little travelers on an unforgiving orb. A shared sense of humor, with its whimsical blend of irony and inanity, has helped carry us past the point where others have failed, the laughter dead in their throats.

So I sing today of the woman Cinelli as the perfect companion, whether it’s getting drenched in the Big Apple or breathing in the perfume of night blooming jasmine on a perfect evening in the Santa Monica Mountains. She loves both locales. Our home in Topanga Canyon with its cool, forestry places to hide is the Eden of her soul; New York City with its clatter and murmur of human wildlife is the home of her spirit.

We see shows in Manhattan, visit myriad art and history museums and dine on fussy little foods at multi-starred restaurants tucked away here and there in the quiet shadows of the city’s imposing towers. My tastes are more gourmand than gourmet, and I am rattled by the subtle ambience of a restaurant like Daniel, its décor once described as “the lining of a prim octogenarian’s underwear drawer.”

In such a rarefied atmosphere, Cinelli reminds me of my manners by whispering, “Pretend you’re not from Oakland.”

No Oakland guy would pay $513 for a pair of tickets to watch a little boy tip-tapping across the stage in “Billy Elliot.” I wouldn’t pay that much to see Dick Cheney in a tutu pirouetting drunk through Grand Central Station. But it was an anniversary, so I shelled out the $513 and more to see a revival of “Hair,” whose primary contribution to American culture was a celebration of drugs and nudity.

What intrigues both Cinelli and me about New York is the endlessness of it. While movement in the city may slow in the hour when old men are asleep, taxis still roam the main streets and lurk up and down the intersecting crossroads like lightning bugs in a neon forest. Garbage trucks muscle down narrow avenues vying for space with delivery vans. Limos slide through darkness toward hotels and mansions in a weary coda to party and pleasure.

When we talked about a 60th wedding anniversary trip, she said New York and I said Paris, both of which we have visited many times. This time, I gave up the City of Light for another season, but I feel no loss of testicular standing in allowing Cinelli to make our decisions. She chose where we’d live when we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to L.A., and it turned out to be a paradise in the mountains, a place of art and beauty and wildlife rare on the fringes of most large metropolitan areas.

She makes our decisions with honesty, wisdom and a sense of caring that involves more of others than herself. I rely on her to lead the way while I follow with a bag of words and stories that complete my life. She is my muse, my plot, my outline, my syntax. She is my beginning and my ending.

It is unavoidable to link as symbols the storms in our marriage and the storm that day in New York City. We have endured them all, Cinelli often waiting patiently, trusting that I will eventually have sense enough to come in out of the rain. My career in journalism has been a slippery race through a lot of bad weather, but that, too, has abated, and I am free to reinvent myself, with Cinelli, as always by my side.

I asked her as we dried off in our hotel room on the 60th year of our companionship, rain tapping at our window like a nervous stranger, whether if she had to do it over, would she still marry me. She thought about it for the briefest of moments and then, turning away, said, “Probably not.” I sensed the teasing quality in her voice and knew that secretly she would. I sensed it in the thunder.

Visit Al’s blog for more on Everything Else

(almtz13@aol.com)

Despite the passage of years and Fonda’s numerous apologies there are still bursts of vitriol as caustic as any we leveled at the Japanese and Germans during and after World War II. We forgave them for the sins of warfare far quicker than the noisy few have forgiven Fonda.

What brings this to mind is a new resending of an old email message that begins, “Yes she was a traitor” in capital letters and recycles Fonda’s selection years ago as one of the “100 Women of the Century” on a Barbara Walters ABC network special.

This rekindled memories of Fonda’s 1972 trip to Vietnam on a “peace mission” that turned her into an iconic representation of those who took to the streets of America to protest a war that was even later declared wrong by a U.S. Secretary of State who was considered to be the architect of the war.

If Robert McNamara, who died recently, could do an about-face and declare the war a mistake, then Fonda and her legions must have been right. The fact that she took her feelings to the enemy during the war and lobbied for the North Vietnamese was admittedly thoughtless and stupid, but thoughtless and stupid acts are often the measure of a free society.

As a newspaper columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, I was witness to the emotional protests to the war, the street marches, the flag burnings and the confrontations with authority, not just by college students but also by veterans, scholars, housewives and statesmen. The emotions splashed over to those in show biz, and many took up the banner that urged us to get out of Vietnam, which we ultimately did, running like dogs in the face of an advancing army.

All of our bombs and napalm and defoliating chemicals proved useless in the face of a people’s will. We saw scenes of panic during the war’s fading minutes and a final salute to the blood of the dead that still stained a useless battlefield. Today, the war is history and Hanoi a tourist stop on a journey through the killing fields.

If it is history and we’ve forgiven old enemies, why can’t we forgive Jane Fonda? I’ve pondered this question for many years, partially because the war I was in — the so-called “Korean conflict” — created so little fuss and the war in Vietnam such high emotion. Jane Fonda was one of the many celebrities to assume a role in the anti-war movement, and it is because of her high profile that we remember her most.

She took activism from the streets to the enemy, and it wasn’t Joe Blow doing it but a well known, instantly recognized celebrity who was out there being photographed with the men who were killing our people. That’s hard to forget, I’m sure, especially if someone you loved was an ill-treated prisoner of war at the time who was paraded before cameras with Fonda for the world to see.

Because of her celebrity status, she remains the postergirl for treason. Couple that with the fact that we lost the war and the impact continues like the Super Bowl loss by a favored championship team and you have the enduring hatred of a woman who neither deserves nor warrants it all these years later. War is an emotional journey, high drama that plays forever in the hearts of its participants. They cling to the adventure by parading about in their camouflaged dungarees, displaying their campaign ribbons and gathering together in a brotherhood that still needs an enemy.

War, not Jane Fonda, is the real enemy, along with what it does to each of us who trod the killing fields. But the Vietnam War is history and so are the old enmities. Take off the uniform, boys. The battle’s done. The war is over.

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(almtz13@aol.com)

It began with our purchase of a five-unit apartment building in Oakland. It was my wife’s idea. Her name is Cinelli. She believed beyond rationality that by buying a 50-year-old building we would parlay it to make us the biggest land holders in California and possibly Southern Oregon.

I argued that landlords are hateful people, thinking back to the years of the Great Depression when we were forced to move every few months for non-payment of rent by landlords who growled and shouted what in the hell did we think he was running, a poorhouse?

I recall incidents as a kid of hearing a knock on the door and my mother flinging me to the floor to be out of sight and whispering, “Shhh, it’s the landlord!” It was the era of the “Frankenstein” movie with Boris Karloff. In my child’s mind the landlord became a monstrous creature with arms outstretched, walking stiffly toward us moaning a sound from beyond the grave.

“Just be yourself as a landlord,” Cinelli suggested. “A nice guy, fair, maybe a little vague sometimes and not always aware of…”

“All right, all right.”

My first encounter with what I like to think of as the Landlord Me occurred one rainy night in January when a tenant telephoned around midnight to report that other tenants were hauling away the stove from their furnished apartment and making a lot of noise. The tenant didn’t care that they were stealing our stove just that they were keeping her awake.

It was those damned Romanian Gypsies. We had rented a one bedroom unit to two Gypsies and they had snuck in eight children Gypsies and five cousin Gypsies who were living there and driving everyone nuts by stopping passersby and aggressively demanding to tell their fortunes or they would die.

We ordered them out and their revenge was to steal a stove. When I arrived in a downpour, the stove was on the back on their pickup and a refrigerator was being manhandled down the stairs. What next, the linoleum? The wallpaper? After I threatened to call the cops they put everything back and drove off cursing me while I stood in the rain cursing them. Fortunately, mutual curses neutralize each other.

My attitude toward tenants continued to sour as theirs continued to sour toward me, encompassing the attitude in an old Irish proverb that says, “Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you shoot at your landlord and miss.”

Further events, such as a rent-skimming by an onsite manager, a worker who punched a hole in a water pipe and flooded a downstairs unit, and a pair of college students who may or may not have been running a bordello, hastened my transition from nice guy to Frankenstein monster. I even began walking stiffly, arms outstretched.

The final transmogrification occurred with my encounter with the Sweet Old Seamstress who occupied one of two stores that were part of the building. She had been there since the place was built and had paid $80 a month rent forever. We let her get by with that even when the other store tenant was paying five times that much, then decided to raise her rent to $95 a month.

The Sweet Old Seamstress swore like a sailor and said I was taking advantage of her because she was black and I probably hated my mother, but I didn’t hate my mother I just thought she was a little simple minded. The Sweet Old Seamstress and I had a ferocious argument with her calling me whitie and a racist and me calling her a cheat and an ungrateful burden on the American economy. She moved when I threatened to drag her out and beat her and she threatened to call the Black Panthers.

We have since purchased another apartment building, still seeking the American Dream of Greed and Luxury, and just recently my wife, in a whimsical mood, noted that San Quentin Prison might be on the market and did I think I could handle the tenants? I said sure. I’d put lifers in charge of maintenance and let homicidal maniacs collect the rent.

Visit Al’s blog for more on Everything Else.