April 24, 2008

• Internet Island Topic Post #34: A Really Bad Day

  I Couldn't Make My Appointment Because Someone Burned Down the DMV!

  We all have good days and bad days. One of the worst days I've encountered was also a pretty bad day for a good many people in Los Angeles. The day was April 30th, 1992. It was a Thursday, and the day before my birthday. I and my girlfriend Pat had planned to spend my birthday weekend at the beach in San Clemente. We would rent a motel room, and take Charlie and Laura, Pat's kids, to the beach. I was looking forward to this adventure. Only recently had I moved in with Pat in Long Beach, and our relationship together had only just begun.

  Both Pat and I worked at the same place in Long Beach, a small family owned electrical parts distributorship, where I ran the panel shop and Pat oversaw the assembly of the switches we sold. We both had cars, but since I didn't have a license to drive, we used hers to get to work. I had an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles on Thursday afternoon after work to reapply for my driver's license, which had been suspended a few years before  because of drunk driving arrests. In celebration of my new relationship with Pat, I was "cleaning up my life" and getting a license was one of the steps I was taking in this direction.

  The bad day actually began at around 3:15p.m. on the previous afternoon. It was at this time in a courthouse in Simi Valley that the LAPD officers who had been accused of beating black motorist Rodney King had been acquitted of any crime. This peeved a lot of folks in the L.A. area, and they commenced to riot. By sundown, there was a large melee in South Los Angeles, and some other areas of the Southland, including the area in Long Beach where I had just moved in with Pat about a month previous. There were heated discussions at work about the verdicts before we left for the day. We counted both Asians and blacks among our workforce. The blacks were especially pissed off, and the Asians were somewhat afraid of what might happen. The sparks which set off the ensuing six day rioting spree flurried about, and everyone could tell that things were not "normal" by watching the news.

  I was only just getting to know Pat as a roommate. Usually she had the television on all the time, but the evening of the 29th, she didn't want to turn it on, even though I'm a news junkie and wanted to see the unfolding drama which would become the "L.A. Riots" as it played out. Her kids, who were pretty much on their own anyway, left the house early and watched the rioting on television at friends' homes. We ended up playing cards and drinking beer like usual. Needless to say, I felt powerless and somewhat irritated, but didn't want to start a riot with my new girlfriend. At about 7:30, the kids came through the door with stories of what they had seen on the news, of motorist Reginald Denny being pulled from his truck and beaten in South L.A., of the shop owners in Koreatown standing on their roofs with shotguns, guarding their property, of the wholesale looting and the absence of police. I would only really realize the impact the next day when I read the newspaper.

  April 30th, 1992 dawned bright with the burning fires of Korean businesses crackling outside our bedroom window. Although the bulk of the rioting was in South Los Angeles, there was also rioting in Long Beach as well, 40 miles away. The devastation in Long Beach seemed more engineered than in South L.A.. Anaheim Street, which was the major thoroughfare close to the apartment where Pat and I lived, had many Korean and Asian owned businesses, and these were being "targeted" and burned to the ground.

  Pat drove me into work as usual on Thursday. We both had the next day off, May 1st, which was my birthday, so we both collected our paychecks at noon. By that time, the rioting in South L.A. was pretty widespread. On the television in the break room, we could see the war between the blacks and Koreans raging unchecked. News copters were flying around L.A. shooting unbelievable footage of fires, burning cars, wholesale looting, and gunfights. The police were nowhere to be seen. The world was watching as well, and although the bulk of the rioting was centered around Florence and Normandie in L.A., scattered fires, gunfights, and shootings were happening in Long Beach as well, and the people who showed up at work that day were getting ansty as the heat of the L.A. riots scorched closer and closer.

  On my lunch hour, I called the DMV, which was located on Willow and Pacific Avenues, about 12 blocks from work. The phone seemed to ring forever. In the strange atmosphere around town, normalcy was quickly fleeing, and there was a palpable feeling that people were about to take matters into their own hands. Only the strong survive. Somebody at the DMV finally answered, and I asked it they were going to be open, as I had an appointment at 3:00p.m. The voice on the other end of the phone was hurried and exictable. I was told that employees were leaving as we were speaking. It didn't look as if I would be able to make my appointment. I hung up in disbelief.

  Jack, our CEO, decided to close down our business a day early. I and Pat had already collected our checks because we'd scheduled Friday off becuase of my birthday, and the rest of the company wasn't so lucky. A little after noon on Thursday, everyone left the building and Jack locked it up for nobody knew how long. Our office was located in the middle of Long Beach, which is a pretty sizable city, and the smoke plumes we could see in the South were happening on Anaheim Street, quite a few blocks to the south.

  But only a couple of blocks from where Pat and I would be headed home.

  We stopped at a 7-11 to get some beer and supplies. We were still planning to leave for the weekend, but the atmosphere all over town was eerily quiet and anticipatory, as if waiting for a big explosion to happen, or an earthquake. Customers at the 7-11 were depleting the store's stock rather quickly. On the street, people were hurridly walking, with heads lowered, trying to mind their own business. Although the rioting in South L.A. was being shown on televisions everywhere, there was not a lot of news about Long Beach, and so you didn't know what areas were "safe" and which were "unsafe". Neither Pat nor I wanted to chance being robbed at a Long Beach ATM, so she drove me back to where I'd lived before moving in with her, to Lomita. We visited my bank, and I cashed my check. Next we went to Bob's "Frat House", where I had lived previously, and convesed with Bob and his roommate Joel about the insane things going on around town. Lomita was far from any conflagration, so the atmosphere there was like a safe harbor in the middle of a war. I shuddered to think of what was going to happen when we got home.

  Driving on the freeway back to Long Beach seemed "normal" enough. We got home by 6pm, and the whole of Anaheim Street seemed to be on fire. Thankfully, our apartment was in the southwest corner of Long Beach, so we didn't have to drive down Anaheim. We could see roving bands of rioters torching buildings as we made a right turn onto Daisy Street, where we lived. The apartment was completely fenced in and  had a locked gate. Pat's kids were home, and again, she forbade anyone to turn on the news. From the bedroom window I could plainly see four plumes of fiery smoke billowing into the air. The area looked like a war zone. One of those fiery plumes was only two blocks away, near the furniture store where I had bought our bed a couple of weeks earlier.

  The DMV was burned down at 8p.m. It looked like I would have to reschedule my appointment at another time....and place.

  I like to think I can get through any situation, but I felt trapped and began to get a bit afraid. Pat was taking this a little better than I was. "I'm not going to worry until someone crawls into the bedroom window", she proclaimed. I suggested that this might actually happen. A guy was shot near the furniture store. It was really a bad day.

  We went to bed fitfully and nervously. The night air was filled with burning embers. We finally slept a bit, and woke up to even more plumes of smoke, scattered yelling, and the sounds of gunfire. It was Friday morning, May 1st. My birthday. Early in the morning, we piled the kids and the supplies in the car, and locked up the apartment. I didn't know if the building would even be there when we got back from San Clemente, but we decided to risk it, and get out of town. As we made our way to the corner of Daisy and Anaheim, we looked to our right. No way would we be able to even drive down the street. The melee in Long Beach wasn't as intense as in South L.A. for sure, but it was bad enough. Gangs of folks were running up and down the street. A Thai restaurant was burning not a half block away. "We can't go right," I told Pat, let's make a left and head to the 710 freeway."

  We spent my birthday and the weekend in San Clemente as planned. I read about the remainder of the rioting while lying on my beach blanket. The rioting lasted almost a week. It was the top story in the nation for most of that time. When Pat, her kids, and I got back home, which thankfully hadn't been burned down, on Sunday evening, there was a renewed feeling of quiet in the air. The next day National Guardsmen were stationed all over the city, standing sentry on streetcorners near banks and check cashing outlets.

  I've had some good days and some bad days, and most of them I can contol somewhat. I pretty much would call April 30th, 1992 one of the worst days of my life, and the life of the nation. The worst part of the day is that I felt no control. Even the little control I had could have been waylaid by unforseen forces. There was a riot going on, and I was smack dab in the middle of it.

  This is a topic entry for the current Internet Island topic post: Bad Days and Good Days.  GO HERE for more bad and good day stories. (EDIT: 7:51 am) I meant to write this last year for the 15th anniversary of the riots. The 16th anniversary is next Tuesday. Oh, and the photos were obtained from a web search this morning. I wasn't out shooting photos of the riots!

  • 10:15 am
  • 60 Comments