Replies

I was in L.A. in 92 and fairly near the frontlines of the riots, in the Miracle Mile area. I was basically just a few blocks beyond the high tide mark of the real devastation. Twelve years later, the 54 or so hours, from the time of the verdict on Wednesday until they instituted the curfew Friday night, were the craziest of my life. The night of the verdict, everything bad was still happening down in South Central, although the reports had it coming closer. But when we woke up on Thursday, it was like you'd been transported to Beirut. Columns of smoke coming closer, ash in the air, the streets empty except for people hell-bent on something, whether escape or mischief.

Most people had disappeared, either fleeing the city or hiding under their beds. We could come out of our apartment building and watch the looters make hourly attempts to break into the appliance and electronics store half a block down, then scatter when a squad car would come by and blast its siren (no cops were actually getting out of their cars that day that I could see). The looters would pile back into their cars and take off up our street, making the residents (the ones outside taking in events) scatter. We'd duck into doorways or behind cars in driveways. As we were doing this for the third time or so, one of the looters' cars squealed to a stop and a young, seemly well-dressed black gentleman yelled from it, "What are you running for? What are you afraid of?" And my wife stopped dead in her tracks, turned around and said directly to him, "Why are you here?" "F*** you, bitch," said the nice young man, and the car squealed away again.

One more anecdote of the riots: On Saturday, the only place you could buy beer in our neighborhood (and believe me, you wanted a beer), was the little liquor store next door to a gun shop. At the first sign of trouble, the gun store owner called all his employees to come in. They loaded for bear, with guys on the roof and everyone sporting bandeliers of ammo, and prepared for a siege. The story is that some gang guys drove up and told the guys to walk away, and one of the gun store guys, a huge Latino guy who had some street cred, basically said, "Can't do it." They got cruised a few times, but the gangs and looters stayed away, and the liquor store was the extra beneficiary.