Pennermag.com

City Councilman Martin Ludlow has urged those he represents to put pressure on Sacramento — to get more money for police officers.

I’m still wondering where my current tax dollars are going. All my phone calls, e-mails, and faxes to Martin Ludlow haev been ignored. Many in my neighborhood — as in many predominately minority neighborhoods in the United States — can’t get any response from the police when they call them.

Yet they want MORE money. They’ve got to be kidding. Just last week a high ranking officer from the South (Central) Los Angeles division of the Los Angeles Police Department was crying on television when he asked for the public’s help in solving dozens of unsolved murders.

No matter how many police officers a city has — the already underserved population never seems to get more service.

The police or fire department not showing up or refusing to show up is ingrained in the stories my family tell — from the 1920s until today.

My office — when I was a criminal defense attorney — was littered with stories of how the police wouldn’t come unless the 911 caller lied. The most often used fib to get the police to come — “He’s got a gun!” What people use to absolutely guarantee the police come to the scene, “Officer Down!”

Now don’t get me wrong — too much policing scares us as well. The stories of police brutality in Los Angeles, Compton, and Cincinatti — give many of us a healthy fear of the police. We know if we call them, we may end up dead ourselves. Quite a dilemma — but throwing more money at it — not that answer I would choose.

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I can’t say what triggered the thought — but today I was thinking about a store I worked in during high school. Because I left high school early, I was able to work full time.

I worked at a store in Hartford, Connecticut’s west end called Cheese & Stuff.

So while having a bit of nostalgia, I typed cheese and stuff into my google deskbar — assuming I’d find a website right away. Instead, I found a list of articles (diatribes, really) about the demise of Cheese & Stuff.

From the unofficial annals of the internet, it appears that Wild Oats Market’s parent corporation is a self described ’sleepy little Boulder (Colorado) company that started in 1987 and grew into the supermarket chain style health food behemoth it is today — purchased Cheese & Stuff in the late 1990s.

Cheese and Stuff was a gourmet/organic food store that opened in the 1970s. It was my first exposure to natural food, organic food, free-range birds, and a wide variety of cheeses.

It was there I discovered carob as an alternative to chocolate and a plethora of dried fruit, sesame, and rice snacks. So it was no surprise while looking for a well-paying job, that I began to work there.

I believe my pay was a minimum wage busting $5.75 per hour in 1989. I had a regular schedule that gave me two days off per week. I had regular breaks and received wonderful bonuses for a continually balanced register. The owners were a bit absentee, but the staff was stable and the management was great. I never worked past when I was supposed to. I didn’t receive frantic phone calls to work all sort of weird hours. I received an hour for lunch every day, and now I look back on my work experience there fondly.

Ten years later, it appears, that Wild Oats made the owners an offer they couldn’t refuse and purchased the store — extending the lease on the land. The store was expanded and surrounding community was excited. Just a short time later, however, Wild Oats opened a superstore where the former Service Merchandise was located in West Hartford’s Bishop’s Corner — about two to three miles northwest of Cheese and Stuff. Citing concerns about a community of about 100,000 being able to support two health food stores — Cheese and Stuff was closed down in 1999.

As we move into our thirties, my friends and acquaintances often wax nostalgic about cities and towns they lived in.

The truth is however, we’ve fixed a picture of the past in our minds. The people in these places move forward just as we do. Everywhere I’ve visited where I once lived, I don’t know why I’m surprised when I see SUVs barreling down every road. If they’re here, they’re there too. Wal-Marts and other superstores have taken over smaller locally owned places where I’ve shopped. Neighborhoods have changed, houses have been torn down, new houses have been built. Demographics have changed, especially in places like Brooklyn, New York where I once lived.

The Cheese & Stuff/Wild Oats story illustrates that communities all over America are dealing with the same struggles — with more or less the same outcomes. The nostalgic places of our past exist in only once place — our memories.

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Andy Richter passed me a cafe mocha this weekend. Again — Adam has powers of observation on Larchmont Boulevard that continue to amaze me. Not only did he recognize this former Conan O’Brien sidekick — never having watched the show — but also knew he’d had a short-lived, nineteen episode, television show — Andy Richter Controls the Universe.

After getting my coffee, I sat down with my bagel when none other than our new police chief Bill Bratton walks by. I’m credited with this one. Adam didn’t even notice him. Had my mouth not been full of half-chewed bagel, I would have loved to have talked to him about the LAPD. When you call the police . . . they don’t come — at least not to my neighborhood. But when some African-American man was suspected of home invasion robberies in the chi-chi neighborhood of Hancock Park to the north — fifty to sixty officers were assigned to the case.

I don’t know anything about this Andy Richter fellow, but if he controlled the universe, it may be better than Bill Bratton. After the dismissal of Bernard Parks, he was appointed to the head position at LAPD — to do what he ‘did’ in New York City — clean up the streets. I’m no fan of the Bill Bratton’s ‘broken windo’ policy of arresting graffiti vandals and the homeless — turning once dodgy Times Square into a New York version of Disneyland. But his leadership hasn’t really seemed to have much of an effect here. Every night graffiti is sprayed everywhere in LA and every morning weary shop owners spray it over. Everyday I pass the same homeless folks on La Brea, on Wilshire, on Pico, on Venice as affluent shop patrons do their best to ignore them.

Bratton claims he needs more money and more police officers — given the number of police that respond to every little thing — I think the LAPD would be better of starting with the allocation of resources.

Andy Richter doesn’t control the universe. Bill Bratton doesn’t control the universe. Resident of the City of Los Angeles wished someone at least took the reigns to control this city.

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This summer, I joined a writing group, led by a published novel writer.

It was the jump start I needed to get my ass back in gear on the book I’m writing.

One of the biggest hurdles I encountered this summer was naming my characters. Noel, the group leader was not a fan of my character names — too cutesy, I think.

His suggestion was to pull names from the phone book. I, however, live in Los Angeles — the book’s locale Cleveland. As Cleveland has no large Latino or Korean population as my neighborhood does, the names from the phone book weren’t really working out.

The best solution I found are on-line name generators. They gather first and last names from the U.S. Census and the Social Security Death Index and spit out random names. This has been a great little tool. You can generate hundreds of names at a time, male or female, common or obscure.

Little did I know, however, that these tools were used for nefarious purposes . . . . I just learned that they are primarily used by spammers to generate realistic sounding names . . . so you’ll open those dreaded e-mails that sell you 28 million e-mail addresses or endless supplies of Viagra or V*agra as it’s often spelled these days.

When the book gets published, I hope you’re not reading about a character, get a niggling feeling, check your e-mail, and find out some Cleveland mom is selling you prescription meds.

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I have the oddest habit that I can not break.

I eat on a high school schedule. Early breakfast, or none at all. No lunch, dinner at three o clock, and a late night snack.

I ve tried, without much success, to eat at the times everyone else eats, a regular six, twelve, six schedule.

But, after trying to stuff food in at the regular hour and feeling fat and bloaty I m not fighting my body anymore.

It s three o clock now, my stomach is growling, and it s getting last night s sausage and olive spaghetti.

It s funny most people talk about being on a school schedule . . . getting excited about work in September . . . slowing down during the holidays. To me, especially with the same weather all year round, every month seems the same as the last but the daily food schedule, I can t beat it.

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