Peter and the Dilettante

I came home the other day smiling and whistling a little tune and my wife said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said, kissing her on the cheek and patting our dog, Hoover, on the head.

“Something’s the matter,” she said.

“I’m happy, for God’s sake. Why do you insist something’s the matter?”

“For one thing, happy isn’t you. For another, you just kissed the dog.”

“I love the dog,” I said, wiping my mouth in disgust.

“You may love the idea of the dog, but you don’t love the dog. And if you ever pat me on the head again you get one right on your mother’s nose.”

Relatives used to say I had my mother’s nose. I still do. Though my mother is gone, her nose lives on.

“You only smile when you’re miserable,” my wife said. “You still being bugged by the lady who predicts earthquakes by throwing up?”

“Naw. She stopped calling weeks ago.”

“Did an editor challenge your syntax?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, OK? Let’s just go out and have a nice dinner. No cooking tonight.”

“Good idea. La Famiglia? Chez Helene? Gaetano’s? L’Ermitage?”

“McDonald’s.”

“Lie on the floor and breathe normally,” she said. “I’ll call the paramedics.”

She doesn’t understand. I’m just trying to make contact with what Supervisor Pete Schabarum calls the real people. The man on the street. The woman in the gingham dress.

He wrote me the other day and said I was a fatuous dilettante and ought to stop wandering through rose gardens and get to the blue-collar areas.

I guess that’s why I came home happy. No one had ever called me a fatuous dilettante before. Most of my critics tend to couch their epithets in cruder terms. I love it when an ex-jock talks intellectual.

“Instead of going to Fresco Ristorante,” the supervisor thundered, “try going to McDonald’s and ask the real man-on-the-street his thinking on public issues.”

All this began when “Pistol Pete,” angered by AIDS activists, shot from the mouth at a Board of Supervisors meeting. Hardly anyone cares about AIDS (bang!) or about AIDS funding (bang, bang!) , he said .

He set himself up like a pork roast at a glutton’s table. I couldn’t resist. I talked to people I met casually and asked if they cared about AIDS. They were at the Huntington Rose Garden and at a restaurant called Fresco.

When the column appeared, Pistol Pete wrote. Fatuous dilettante. Try going to McDonald’s. Get to the real people.

“I didn’t think there were any fatuous dilettantes that came out of Oakland,” my wife said.

“He challenged me to eat at McDonald’s, where the Joads chow down.”

“That’s probably where he eats.”

“No, I figure him more as a Pioneer Chicken kind of guy, with maybe anniversary dinners at the Sizzler.”

“All the shrimp you can eat.”

OK, so I went to McDonald’s. And Denny’s. And Carl’s Jr. And I asked the people--the real people--do you care about AIDS?

Sorry, Pete. They do.

I could’ve told you that. In a Gallup Poll last year, one out of every three Californians said they believed AIDS was the most important health care issue the state faced. More important than cancer. More important than heart disease.

Ask them.

“I have a little boy,” a guy in jeans and a plaid shirt said. “Christ yes I care about AIDS.”

That was at a McDonald’s in Van Nuys.

A woman said, “Now they’re saying the test for AIDS is no good. Care? I’m scared to death.”

Denny’s, Santa Monica.

“They say more kids in junior high are testing positive,” a delivery man said. “That means it’s going to get worse. Only a fool wouldn’t care.”

Carl’s Jr. on South Figueroa.

All real people, Pete. Not a journalist, poet, professor or pink-tinted floral arranger among them. They were butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Twelve in all. And every one of them gave a damn.

Twelve opinions don’t constitute a consensus. But they say to me, if not to you, that the concern over AIDS isn’t limited to gays or fatuous dilettantes.

OK, so one guy cursed the “faggots.” A woman pounded the Bible. But I found more compassion than hatred, and not one of them didn’t care.

That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been a reporter for 30 years. Trust the people, Pete. The people in silk suits at four-star restaurants, and in hard hats at fast-food places.

A telephone lineman summed it up when I asked if he cared. He looked at me with an expression of incredulity and said, “Man, don’t everybody?”

Bob’s Big Boy, Highland Park.