Lost in Angeles

…on a mountain bike

It was my dirty little secret. And even more scandalous because I knew how. I'd done it in hot-blooded Latin Montreal, after 15 years of not doing it at all. And I'd even done it in England, on the left, and in Manhattan at midday. But I was not going to do it in Los Angeles, not even when people said I'd have to or be laughed out of town.

I would not drive. I'd seen the molten glob of 8-lane freeways from the air. Each with one or two different names and a number and gazillion cars per day. I'd heard about the rush "hour" that lasts from 6-10 a.m. and 3-7 p m. — eight hours! And how, if you accidentally end up in the carpool High-Occupancy-Vehicle lane, the fine is hundreds of dollars. And you should never honk because the drivers could be armed.

Besides, after flying 22 hours from Kuala Lumpur, I was greedy to have some concrete to pound. Lots of it. Stumbling around Tinsel Town in a jetlag haze seemed perfect somehow. Like doing Djerba, Homer's Tunisian Isle of the Lotus Eaters, on mescaline. Los Angeles was bigger than life, and doing it while I was still hallucinating jet turbulence and the sound of beer nuts spilling onto fold-down tray tables, would be a heady trip.

But here's the attitude about pedestrians: On my first day in L.A., after having happily walked from West Hollywood to Downtown—gawking, touching, inhaling, listening, taking in all the sunny sensations along the Sunset Strip, and giving a nod to Book Soup, the Roxy Theatre and the Viper Room, and the chichi sidewalk cafe scene at Sunset Plaza, and always with that enigmatic billboard YOU HAVE A GREAT SEX LIFE ON THE INTERNET behind me—I collapsed on a bench.

"S'cuse me lady, you in trouble? You need some money?" asked a bald man in a crumpled Hawaii Five-O shirt. "No, I'm fine," I said. "Just waiting for the bus." "The bus! The bus?" he cried, as if I'd said flying saucer. I should have said flying saucer. It was a more respectable form of transport in L.A. and Angelenos believed in it more than the bus. "What happened to your car? Did it break down? Do you need money?" he asked agitatedly.

The lowly bus

Maybe I heard it wrong. Maybe he called me honey. Who offers you money in L.A.? No, he really couldn't believe a camera-strung tourist would be taking a lowly—oh so lowly—bus. But if I’d been driving a car, I'd never have met Mamie (her name must have been Mamie) the eighty-year-old rouged lady in pink frayed mink vest, spiked heels and black velvet cloche with a foot-long hatpin with an Eiffle tower stuck on end of it. She sat down beside me on the bus smiling and nodding as I babbled about how friendly L.A. seemed, so far. And if I hadn't strolled down Melrose Avenue in the late afternoon sun, I wouldn't have rapped with the street artist peddling his crazily-painted walking sticks that, he said, evoked Aboriginal spirits all the way from Australia.

Forget cars. What could look cooler and tougher in L.A. than dodging limos and weaving between stretch-caddies — on a mountain bike! My base of operations, the discreet Montrose West Hollywood Hotel provided its guests (reclusive stars and starlets and pouting rock musicians, and the likes of me) with purple mountain bikes and helmets. How far could I get on mv Fuji 20-speed? L.A. wasn't exactly threaded with bike paths like good old Montreal. The Hollywood Hills, and the 50-foot high HOLLYWOOD sign on Mount Lee, from which a failed actress leaped to her suicide from the letter H in 1932, loomed much higher than Montreal’s Mount Royal. Was it worth the scorching expedition?

You just can’t feel the soul of L.A. in a tour or a car. Billions of tourists come to the Big Nipple, as Louis Malle called it, to do things like the Hollywood Fantasy Tours’ Marilyn Monroe tour. “Relive Norma Jean's exciting life from her orphanage days through her superstardom rise to her final resting place." (From the Los Angeles Orphan's Home, 815 North El Centro Avenue, Hollywood, to the Westwood Memorial Park Cemetary at 1218 Glendon Avenue. Exciting, indeed.) Or what about Grave Line tours of murder and suicide landmarks in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, conducted in a hearse with funeral music? Soaking tourists has to be more fun than soaking corpses...

Mountain biking around Beverly Hills, "the best-policed six square miles on earth," seemed less likely to turn patrol and guard dog heads than walking and gawking from the sidewalk. My tough trail-eating tires found no potholes on the wide shady drives above Sunset Boulevard. And it was more fun not knowing who lived where, and imagining what crazy-shaped swimming pools and lives lay beyond the Spanish Mission iron gates and serpentine driveways, than hearing a spiel from a bus.

I'm the only urban cowgirl wheeling and not dealing around Rodeo (Row-DAY- oh) Drive, gliding by the citron colored storefronts and parade of Tiffany shopping bags and high-maintenance hairdos a bike helmet would love to crush. After cycling for seven hours, up and down trendy, funky Melrose and La Brea Avenues, and criss-crossing Wilshire and Beverly and La Cienega—my head a kaleidoscope of billboards and signs and Marilyn look-alikes and pasta shops and T-shirts and parched palms and fake Mission architecture—I head back to Le Montrose in time to see Mr. Colorado Cool in a cowboy hat and boots checking in, and two sleek glittery black women with frizzy white hair and a frizzy white poodle, strolling out.

And after a hot scrub, I leap into a dress and head down the Sunset Strip to the Comedy Store at 8433, where the likes of Dave, Robin and Whoopi, as in Letterman, Williams and Goldberg, got their starts. Every night adds a few more L.A. jokes to the city's archives, and tonight it's about cordoning off the entire city with yellow scene-of-the-crime tape, with a warning to tourists: "Don't touch a thing! It's all evidence." Did the L.A. police union actually launch a pressure campaign, sending out letters to travel agents and tour groups "Do not come to Los Angeles...it is not safe," or was that another joke?

One thing's for sure, L.A.'s earthquakes, sharks (land and marine) and high-tech muggers, murderers and cons keep the city in laughs. A hilarious cartoon page of "Personal Security Items" in Los Angeles Magazine featured a giant handbag disguised as a ferocious guard dog, with a built in "growl chip," a self-stick rubber nose loaded with pepper spray ready to fire at assailant with the simple touch of a mole. And to protect your Porsche from car thieves, a fake trompe l'oeil "dumpster" car cover to hide it under.

The moral of this story is, why drive a car. It'll only get stolen.