WAITING FOR REAGAN Scenes from 20th and Arizona in Santa Monica

by Thomas Brennan

I live three blocks from the Gates, Kingsley & Gates mortuary in Santa Monica. Walking east on Arizona Avenue this last Saturday at 3:15 p.m., I noted twelve motorcycle cops and eight media vans, with the 30 foot high spindles that hold microwave dishes, clustered in the middle of 20th Street blocking all traffic going north or south. Two knots of five people were at the northeast corner and at the southwest corner.

My first thought, must be some Iraqi tragedy hitting home, maybe a Major or Colonel or high-ranking officer from the Santa Monica area killed, although I had read nothing about it in the newspaper.

Getting home, I put on the TV, just to see what the camera crews were focusing on. Reagan had died. His body was being brought to the funeral home in my neighborhood. I debated if I should devote my afternoon to observing a part of history and decided that I should.

When I arrived, I counted the throng and I became the 20th person to be waiting. I was surprised at the small crowd, but knew that on a bright, sunny Saturday, people were out shopping and most had not heard.

By then, two media phalanxes were in place. Now there were a total of eight trucks north-south and eight trucks extending west of 20th, on Arizona Avenue. There were more people on the southwest corner, so that's where I went.

I had a jumble of emotions. I had dated a woman who grew up in Bel Air and whose family was very close with the Reagans socially. I have as a client a woman whose mother was a good friend of the Reagans. I thought that his presidency signaled the beginning of this era we still live in: No longer would Americans think about ending poverty in our society--now we would just think only of ourselves. Reagan marked this strange sea-change in American Life. The Christian Right would embrace and espouse Darwinism.

But then I thought of Nancy Reagan's caring for her husband and their closeness. I decided I would focus on that positive for this day, and bless him on his journey home. My battles with him were over. I thought that the example Nancy set of looking after someone with Alzheimer's and lessening the national stigma about this condition was something that I could definitely applaud. Also, this was a moment in history, like the train bearing Roosevelt's body, or JFK lying in state in the rotunda.

Soon these thoughts were interrupted.

"Yeah, I'm here to honor the Presidency," a 5'8" tough looking guy in a light blue Lacoste shirt was barking as loud as he could. "It doesn't matter who's president. You honor the office."

He was, as it turns out, talking to a beet-faced, black haired gentleman of about 50, wearing a black suit and tie. They both seemed to stand out in this crowd. Most folks on the street had a quality of gentle neighbor. But these two were talking loudly and acting as if in charge.

A young Japanese man brought his bike gently to a halt in back of me, where these two guys were. He was on his cellphone for a moment and I could hear "Moshi Moshi" and some Japanese phrases. He flipped his phone shut, and asked Lacoste what was going on. Lacoste looked the Japanese fellow up and down. I had noticed the Japanese guy's Shonen Knife shirt, and was about to say I was a fan of that band, when Lacoste bellowed at him, "Reagan's dead. Do you know who he was? Huh? He would be to YOU PEOPLE like a Chiang Kai-shek!"

You people, I thought? Chiang Kai-shek?! This guy's Japanese! The Japanese guy gave me a bemused look of "We're sharing this absurd moment" and then moved his bike about ten feet from Lacoste.

Now a lady in her 70's in a blue terry cloth house robe, also sporting a robust New York accent, came up to the black suited man. Earlier, she had told an NPR reporter who was working that knot of people for quotes how wonderful Reagan was. "Our fortieth president...I'll never forget him."

"Well, you got black pants and a black tie, and a silk shirt. Either you're a chaffeur or a dignatary. Give me the long story!" she said whimsically to Black Suit. I liked her. She talked like Jean Harlow in an early 30's comedy.

Black Suit looked offended by her openness and said nothing. Lacoste intervened for him, "He's a dignatary from Beverly Hills. He's here paying his respects."

"Oh," she said and walked over to a spot on my right.

She started talking with a woman who had a small mixed mutt in her arms. "I wonder why Nancy picked Gates Kingsley Gates?" It was a good question that she answered herself. "I bet they had this in the will 40 years ago, even before he was Governor. They used to bury a lot of stars from here."

I thought, perhaps the mortuary was chosen for the name as well. Gates, Kingsley & Gates has the sound of a Warner Brothers law firm movie from the early 40's. Ronald Reagan, Bruce Barton, and Jerome Cowans as a trio of attorneys. "Gates, Kingsley, Gates!" Also, with Nancy's impeccable sense of public apperance, the mortuary name evokes heavenly, kingly gates opening to receive her husband. A good choice.

Now Lacoste is speaking to the woman with the mutt. "Y'know, they had a photo of that Clinton with a girl's choir...he had his arm behind them, and it made you wonder where his hands were!" Wait. This gentleman was, a half-hour ago, saying that you respect the Presidency no matter who's in office. I looked behind him and there were three kids between ages 7 and 12 within earshot.

As I looked at these kids and hoped they hadn't heard Lacoste, the police women who had been manning the cones and stanchions gently asked us to step back behind the white lines. My shoes were both just over the line, and I didn't want to push into the women that had gathered to my left, so I moved into the crowd, which had swelled to at least a hundred on that one corner.

My path was blocked by a guy about 6'4". "Excuse me," I said. He put both hands into my chest.

"I'm standing here," he said, without irony or any politeness whatsoever.

"Sir," I said, "I'm paying respects to the President...the police women said all of us have to move back."

"I'm not moving," he said again in a Germanic accent that I had, at first, not noticed. A friend of his moved toward him to block me further. I had been standing for 30 minutes and now my vantage was gone.

I moved further west among the now constantly swelling crowd so I could stand behind the one hipster-looking couple. She, an Angelina Jolie lookalike and he, heavily tattooed and with a diamond earring in the right ear. They both expressed sympathy at my being blocked from my spot by the louts. From this angle, I could see that the larger guy who had blocked me had a gold earring that was half-swastika. Lord!

The couple nudged me to look up at the medical building on the southeast corner of Arizona and 20th. On the top open atrium were four sharpshooters in bush hats, who seemed to have stashed the rifles after doing preliminary sight-adjustments, and were now surveying the crowd with field glasses. The boyfriend was shooting photos of them, and Angelina kept saying, "Cut it out!"

Lacoste, still in earshot was booming, "Yeah, someone might try to pull a stunt, that's why they're

up there."

Finally, a third guy who had joined Black Suit and Lacoste, flipped his cell phone shut and said to them, "The hearse should be here around 6:15." It was 5:15 and I had waited a long time and I was hungry.

I decided to go home and watch the rest on TV. They took the hearse down the alley and into the back of the mortuary garage out of the view of the crowd. Good, the guy with the half-swastika earring didn't get to see it after all. I felt bad that Bath Robe missed the view, though.

Then I thought to myself I really hadn't missed a thing. After all, if you've seen one redwood coffin, you've seen them all.

* * * Thomas Brennan is a Santa Monica, California, resident and co-owner of Tom Brennan Media, a media placement firm based in Santa Monica.

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