Restless Id of L.A. Can’t Be Tamed by Authority

From his front-step perch at Sunset Strip Tattoo, Chester Oswalt watches the last daylight sink behind the Hollywood Hills and savors the vaguely cheesy ambience of the neighborhood he knows and loves.

An evocative mixture of incense, cigarette smoke and car exhaust hangs over the Sunset Strip. Soon will begin the nocturnal parade of temporary extras in a make-believe, improvised movie script that unspools on the Strip virtually every night.

But this script has acquired a troubling twist. In recent months, the Strip has been invaded by noisy convoys of young adult cruisers, jamming the already snail-paced traffic and threatening to tarnish the boulevard’s new up-market panache.

Oswalt scoffs. “It’s big money, and big money wants to keep out the riffraff,” says the bespectacled tattoo artist, fingering a hole in his jeans. “I think they’re just worried about people scratching their Lexuses.”

The Sunset Strip has never been fully tamed. Oh, sure, every now and then the politicians and police try to rein it in, to tender its inordinate appetites and curb its most visible vices.

But the Strip’s protean nature resists containment. Squeeze it at one spot and it will bulge and ooze out somewhere else. Whether slumbering by day or preening by night, this legendary 1.6-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard, bordered by Crescent Heights to the east and Doheny Drive to the west, always seems to follow its own wayward impulses, like an ornery private dick in a Raymond Chandler novel.

So it appeared, more or less, over the weekend when the Strip’s restless id ran smack into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the city of West Hollywood Municipal Code. Specifically, the code’s section that now forbids car cruising, which has become a major headache for the Strip’s merchant class, and a source of aggravation and fear for some residents.

The crackdown, which is set to continue indefinitely on weekends between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., made its debut Friday while curious pedestrians gawked and TV “eyewitness news” antennae sprouted like stunted palm trees from strategically parked minivans.

Vehicles Monitored at Three Checkpoints

Under the new rules, which the West Hollywood City Council passed last month, drivers and passengers on the Strip must negotiate three evenly spaced checkpoints. Those who pass through the same checkpoint twice within four hours may be fined $100 each. A second violation within a year results in a $200 fine. For a third violation within one year, they could be hit with a bruising $500 penalty.

“The cruising we get on Sunset is not what people think of as a lowrider,” says Lt. Ken Leffler of the sheriff’s West Hollywood station, referring to the asphalt-skimming, hip-hop blaring chrome-mobiles favored mostly by young Latino men. “We do have some lowriders, but most of the people doing the cruising are driving SUVs and Mercedes. We get a large influx from Glendale. I had a conversation with a guy in a Corvette from Illinois. It’s not the typical cruiser.”

On its first try, the show of force apparently worked well, resulting in 12 citations for the weekend. Aside from slowdowns at the three checkpoints, traffic flowed steadily and left parts of the street practically auto-free between midnight and 2 a.m., when the bars let out.

But this new, motorized law-and-order gantlet is only a small part of the Strip’s baroque choreography, its 24-7 ebb and flow of human desire and artful self-display.

On a street whose very name hints at a kind of psychological disrobing, the Strip is where a vivid cross-section of Los Angeles has met for more than seven decades to bare its deepest cravings. From its martini-sipping heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, when it was a swathe of swanky supper clubs, to its ‘60s incarnation as the hub of L.A.’s rock music scene, and its ‘70s rep as a haunt for burnouts and hookers, the Strip has always been a magnet.

Today, it’s perhaps one of the only places in town where fashionably jaded Westsiders in their Armani and Thierry Mugler can brush with open-air bong vendors, palm readers, dog pamperers, street musicians noodling at keyboards and fanny pack-toting tourists en route to comedy clubs.

That human cocktail was nearing full potency by 9 p.m. Friday, as Ari Ryan surveyed his chic, flirty, 20-something clientele at The Sunset Trocadero Lounge, the storied nightclub that Ryan and his partner reopened a scant five weeks ago.

“Our vision was to create a place that was upscale and to bring [back] a little of old Hollywood, the class of the old Hollywood Strip,” Ryan says over a background purr of classic Barry White bedroom soul. “You see pictures of Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby. That era can’t come back. But we can create an homage to that.”

As for the cruising crackdown, Ryan offers a mixed opinion.

“It seems like Sunset has become what Hollywood Boulevard used to be in the ‘90s,” he says of the cruisers. “It’s not that it’s a bad crowd. It’s just the congestion.”

Even as Ryan speaks, outside The Trocadero sheriff’s deputies are setting up laptop computers on their car trunks and punching in license plate numbers to track passing cars.

One’s Misbehavior May Be Another’s Good Time

Channel 13 news reporter Tammy Taylor, covering the scene, is about to go live when a shirtless young man with long black hair strolls up and slings his arm around her, mugging at the camera. “How about a hug?” he snickers, as a deputy hastily intervenes. Minutes later, the man is riding away in the back of a sheriff’s car.

Simultaneously, a white stretch limo careens up Sweetzer and sweeps past the police cordon. A young woman, swigging from a bottle, leans out the window and calls to a pair of security guards patrolling the sidewalk. “You’re cute!” she screams.

On the Strip, one person’s misbehavior can be another’s good time. Flaunting one’s assets, material and otherwise, is, after all, the boulevard’s raison d’etre.

Not so long ago, the Strip was personified by the weathered machismo of the Marlboro Man, whose multistory image towered over its eastern fringes. Today, the Strip’s icons are more like the handsome, buffed-out, multiethnic men and women who glare down at La Cienega Boulevard from a Gap billboard.

Ethnic Tensions Melt Amid Pursuit of Fun

In a stratified city still learning to embrace messy heterogeneity as its destiny, the Strip is definitely one place where mutually suspicious subcultures must strive for peaceful coexistence--if only until closing time.

As the night cranks into high gear at the House of Blues, veteran Texas country troubadour Jerry Jeff Walker is belting out “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” to a crowd of Stetson-hatted urban cowboys, singing along and pumping their fists. Tonight the club is a little patch of Dixie. Tomorrow it may be downtown Havana or Belfast or Rio.

In the club’s men’s room, the attendant known universally and affectionately by the single name Scottie, born 65 years ago in Bridgetown, Barbados, dispenses strawberry-scented soap and paper towels to the denim-shirted country fans.

“Last night we had Rock En Espanol,” Scottie says, laughing, “and my Spanish is about as good as my Czechoslovakian. I gotta be like a zipper in this job. I can’t just be in one position. You can’t be ethnocentric in this business. Actually, I like to be around people. Each night is different. Tomorrow, it’s hip-hop!” Scottie raises his hands in mock horror at the thought.

A muscular security guard summons club manager Jacquie Tedesco from an upstairs office.

“Whatever the city of West Hollywood thinks is best, we’re behind,” Tedesco says of the cruising crackdown. “I don’t know if you were here the night the Lakers won. People were standing on the tops of cars, they were sitting on the roofs of cars, people removing articles of clothing. It was wild.”

Elsewhere, the view of the crackdown is less positive.

“It’s empty, man!” shouts Tom Lovejoy, standing across the street from Tower Records, a cell phone earpiece dangling beneath his blue baseball cap. “I come here Friday and Saturday nights just to observe and to harmonize with the people. . . . But this looks more like a Monday night. It’s deserted.”

Across the street from the Viper Room, three men sit at a small sidewalk table outside Cuban Seed Cigars, puffing away and watching the night unfold.

“It’s OK to cut out the riffraff,” says shop owner Laith Haddad, “but this is a little too much. We don’t want to lose business because of [the crackdown]. We don’t want people to be discouraged from coming here.” But Haddad acknowledged that something needed to be done. “We’ve had guys fighting out here.”

Lovejoy, an attorney who has lived in the neighborhood 23 years, declares that “the ACLU should be out here defending the cruisers. “Social contact is good. If the cruisers want to waste their gas driving up and down, it’s all right with me, as long as they’re orderly.”

Of course, orderliness was never the Strip’s forte, a fact for which many are thankful.

Outside the pricey adult playscape of the Mondrian Hotel, street minstrel Gomez O’Prey strums a few chords of “Norwegian Wood” while his golden retriever Roscoe shakes a plastic canister for tips between his teeth.

Sporting a neatly trimmed goatee, a black beret and a magenta Hamlet shirt, O’Prey, a Des Moines transplant and unheralded stand-up comic, describes his look as “bohemian-white trash-farm boy-gypsy-anarchist.”

He used to perform at Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, he says, but found the vibe there too artificial and controlling. “For the most part everything’s been really cool on the Strip,” O’Prey says. “One in a thousand people will give me hell.”

Just then, a bit of Sunset Strip street theater flares up nearby. Three young men in a gold Mercedes start shouting at a West Hollywood traffic enforcement agent who’s about to ticket them for parking at a red-striped curb. “You’re going to ticket me? You’re a jackass!” one yells.

Luckily for him, the car doesn’t have any license plates, so the agent is momentarily flummoxed. The men zoom off, taunting and jeering.

“The thing is, we’re trying to make order here and these guys are blocking traffic,” the agent complains, more in sorrow than anger.

O’Prey takes in the scene and relates a story.

“I met Tony Curtis in front of Spago one night,” he says. “He was waiting for his car, and he gives me this Tony Curtis smile. Then he puts this fiver in my bowl and he goes, ‘Yeah man, this is great, this is life!’ ”

As O’Prey heads east, the Strip is starting to mellow out.

Even the Strip Has to Wind Down Eventually

At Mel’s Drive-In, a 24-hour diner, moony-eyed couples chat quietly in booths. A waitress shimmies to the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown” while attending an order.

Outside the bars at the Strip’s western boundary, pale, multiple-pierced patrons of The Rainbow and The Roxy drape themselves over concrete walls and around lampposts, smoking and laughing.

It’s almost 2:30 a.m. The street reeks of sweat and fatigue. The street’s unsustainable intensity has been sweetly, anxiously spent. Now its habitues must crawl home and replenish their juices.

Yeah, as Tony Curtis might say, this is life. This is L.A. This is the Sunset Strip.

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* Staff writer Roy Rivenburg contributed to this story.

* Reed Johnson and Roy Rivenburg can be reached at [email protected].