While I Was Sleeping

A vacation in a sense is a long sleep away from the activities in which one is usually involved.

If, for instance, you’re a plumber it’s OK not to plumb during your time removed from leaky sinks and overflowing commodes.

If you’re a clerk, unclerk, if a doctor, undoc. Leave the selling and the healing to others for a while and bask in the ease of a starry night.

It isn’t necessary to go anyplace. Adlai Stevenson used to say all he wanted to do on his time off was sit under a tree with a glass of wine and watch the dancers.

He meant it metaphorically, of course. You don’t actually have to hire a dancer, and if you prefer beer or a cold martini, that’s good too.

I didn’t travel during my weeks off, which made the long sleep of a vacation difficult because my job in a way is L.A. and there was a lot of that going on.

The glorious part of the time removed from writing was that I could watch as spring flounced by, dressing the town in the blossomy pinks and whites of an Easter parade and embracing us for a moment in the warmth of a gentle sun.

But it was a false spring that brought color and warmth but no respite from the gunfire that thrust this city of dreams once more onto the world stage.

The dead lay like toys in the street, and the cries of the wounded chilled our very souls. It’s impossible to sleep through something like that.

*

I kept waking up to the jarring cacophony of urban warfare, watching and reading the accounts of two incidents only days apart that left five people dead and 14 wounded.

The killing of three alleged “cocktail bandits” by the LAPD’s highly questionable Special Investigations Section was disturbing enough, only to be followed by the North Hollywood shootout that killed two and wounded 13.

The cry of those outraged by SIS tactics that allow a suspect to be followed and a crime committed before he’s arrested threatened to thrust the LAPD once more into a scandal of major proportions until the Bank of America shootout came along.

I turned in my sleep toward the Valley to hear not only the roar of gunfire and the cries of pain, but also a city singing hosannas to the heroism of the cops who faced the bullets.

Anyone who confronts death for the sake of duty without running and screaming in retreat is, I suppose, a kind of hero, and I won’t take that away from them. They’re heroes just for being out there all the time.

But what emerges from the smoke of battle in addition to the applause is the angry notion that our guys were outgunned by the bank robbers. So do we go after the guns on the street? Nope. We demand that cops get heavier weapons than the crooks.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the start of an urban arms race.

*

Historically, the sequence works like this: You begin with a rock and go to a club and then to a spear and then a pistol and then a rifle and then a mortar and then a cannon and then a bomb and on ad infinitum.

What happens when the bank robbers get tanks? We get planes. They get planes, we get laser-firing satellites.

I lay on a hillside one day during the dreamy time of my vacation and thought about it. I could smell an earth warmed by the sun and see a canopy of new growth in the branches of the oak trees that shielded me.

In the distance, the green contours of the Santa Monica Mountains rolled toward the sea and a sky as pure and clear as heaven formed my ceiling.

I am not one who believes, as some do, that the rights of criminals equal the rights of their victims. You poke a gun in the face of someone I love and I’ll track you down.

But I similarly do not believe that the quest to outgun those who imperil our safety is the ultimate answer to minimizing crime. Education, sure. Good parenting, right on. But more importantly: gun control.

To hell with the NRA and with the hunters and the target shooters and the terrified urbanites who sleep with dogs and assault rifles. Guns belong in the hands of soldiers and law enforcers, and in no one else’s.

Activists go crazy when a cat is kicked or a cigar is lit. But where are they when bullets whistle overhead and voices are needed to shout down those who fail to see the link between guns and violence?

I wondered about it as I lay on a hillside warmed by the sun of a false spring. I wondered and then slowly, very slowly, came awake.

(Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected])