THREE ON THE TOWN : FINDERS KEEPERS : While Some Neighborhoods Have Block Parties, Others Have Search Parties

There are two types of people in Los Angeles: people who keep a thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment in their trunks, and people who wouldn’t leave a bag of Doritos back there.

I came to this realization in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl swap meet a couple of weeks ago, bent under the weight of half a dozen rusted-out porch chairs, dreaming of lemonade, when a friend pulled over beside me in a new Lexus and startled me with a tap on his horn.

The window slid smoothly down. “I’d give you a lift to your car,” he said, “but I’m afraid the rust would flake off on my upholstery. Do you want to put your chairs down and sit in some air conditioning for a minute?”

I grunted and got into his car.

He began to demonstrate the luxury features--computerized climate control, a power moon roof, a little flap that slides up around the rearview mirror when you drive into the sun. The passenger seat rose up, scooted back, enveloped me into its leather mass. There was a sleek, mysterious panel that controlled a CD carousel, loaded up and whirring, hidden in a corner of his trunk. The music sounded so beautiful I wanted to cry.

Click: Astor Piazzolla. Click: Sonic Youth. Click, click-click: Charlie Haden, Motley Crue, the Dim Stars. Lockheed should make warplanes that work so well.

It was only recently that I decided the benefits of keeping a spare tire in the trunk might possibly outweigh the drag of having one ripped off every year or so. This is a function of geography, or possibly of street-level socialism: Property Equals Theft 101. In certain parts of town, it is understood that excess wealth will be confiscated. I think of it as a kind of luxury tax.

I know about the places where squirrels prance on elegant lawns, where citizens commute from leafy streets to locked subterranean garages, where a person can leave her tools on the porch for a couple of weeks without anybody messing with the Allen wrenches.

But that’s how the other half lives. I have long been under the impression that certain people in my neighborhood more or less regularly check my (locked) trunk to make sure I haven’t left behind anything more interesting than a gallon of Arrowhead or a few tattered Philharmonic programs.

There are certain possessions the neighborhood lets you keep: an umbrella, a car jack and a spare tire, as long as it’s the dorky solid-rubber kind and not a new Pirelli. There are certain possessions it does not. This is why, whenever I bother to gather all my loose tapes into one of those cassette organizers, somebody swipes the bag--it’s much easier on a person than fishing the new MC Lyte tape out of the cushions and then having to look for the matching cassette box somewhere under the passenger seat. When I am dumb enough to leave a raincoat or a Metallica CD in the trunk overnight, I figure that I am donating it to the neighborhood, as a love gift to those less fortunate than myself, and I am surprised and happy if it is still there the next day.

Car alarms are more of an annoyance around here than an actual deterrent. The local kids delight especially in setting off the ones that bark “Step away from the vehicle” in English, Spanish or something that sounds like Japanese. Reinforced trunk locks are no help at all.

Once, I was dense enough to leave back there some belongings that I really sort of prized, and for a long time afterward, I entertained the fantasy that I was going to run into a guy wearing a scuffed biker jacket with a raccoon tail safety-pinned to the left epaulet, carrying a bass guitar, smiling enigmatically as he listened to the latest Fugazi tape on a newish yellow Walkman. I was really mad at that guy. It wasn’t just that he stole the stuff--I figured that was at least partly my fault--but that he was clumsy enough to break the latch, dent the trunk lid, smash the side-view mirror. Thrashing the vehicle is a serious breach of etiquette.