Mild-Mannered Members Welcome Novice to the Cruise Club

In 25 years I’ve done some kooky things while roaming this town for stories.

I’ve flown with a member of a women’s pilots club calling out on the radio for the long-vanished Amelia Earhart. I’ve stood among the costumed troops and gunpowder haze of a mock Civil War battle, notebook in hand.

But I had never before cruised the boulevard. Any boulevard.

Though the skirmishes between cruisers and police have been a fixture of L.A. and Valley life for as long as I can remember, I was never drawn to the milieu of metallic paint jobs and throbbing music.

It may have been a central part of teen-age life in the ‘50s, an awesome spectacle on Van Nuys Boulevard in the ‘60s, a cultural mainstay on Whittier Boulevard, but I’d just as soon attend a lecture on the life cycle of the three-spined stickleback as ride in procession past thousands of adolescents looking at my car.

I don’t even wash my car.

It was with no great expectations, therefore, and no little apprehension, that I drove on assignment Sunday night to the notorious La Rinda Plaza. La Rinda is the shopping center in Sylmar where the city, responding to neighbors’ complaints of hooliganism, trash and traffic nightmares, is currently trying to eliminate cruising.

The lot was shadowy and quiet when I arrived about 8:30, the only crowd in sight a band of evangelists passing out flyers.

But just before 9, a line of cars swooped into the lot and snapped with military precision into parallel parking spots. Soon another row of cars took up facing positions, and the drivers, along with their women and a baby or two, got out and stood beside their machines.

After waiting to see that there would be no immediate hostility, I approached a young man on the periphery. Within seconds, I was surrounded by a dozen members of the club Neu Exposure, all aflutter at having the ear of anyone wearing a jacket and tie.

The president, 24-year-old Leo Rodriguez, good-naturedly chastised the news media for their style of reporting on the La Rinda campaign.

“We were called malefactors, miscreants,” he said. “What does that mean? We’re trash?”

Rodriguez and his girlfriend, Rachel Torres, are bright, sociable people, both graduates of San Fernando Valley high schools. They work regular jobs and speak passionately of the virtues of cruising, which they contend gives young people positive values.

As an example, he introduced Bobby Juarez, a stocky man with a half-inch haircut and a Fu Manchu face. “He works at In-N-Out during the day and at night he works in a hospital,” Rodriguez said. Juarez also had his wife and infant daughter with him.

About 9:30, an LAPD car circled the lot, loudspeaker blaring: “Everybody get in your cars and get out.”

“Hey, you want to cruise with us?” Rodriguez asked.

I got in a white Buick with Sal Lopez, 19, and his friend Peps Noguera, 17, who doesn’t have a driver’s license, but owns a $1,500 show bike. They both work at Magic Mountain to support their hobby.

Neu Exposure’s cars, about a dozen, varied from lovingly painted and polished vans and pickups to Lopez’s ordinary Buick, which he borrowed from his brother after thieves took his Astro.

The cars moved west on Rinaldi Street, then south on Sepulveda Boulevard. Making a formation U-turn, they parked along the wall of the cemetery next to San Fernando Mission.

Rodgriguez said cruisers are blamed unfairly for littering the cemetery. “Personally, I have never seen anybody throw any litter over the wall.”

Just then, one of the members ripped a temporary “No Parking” sign from a lamp post and sailed it over the wall.

Rodriguez grinned with embarrassment, and then handled the delicate duty of correcting the culprit without accusing him directly. Whoever this person was, Rodriguez said--naming no names--should consider that someone’s grandmother is buried there, and how would he like to find litter on his grandma’s grave?

The members of Neu Exposure said they are not cholos, gang bangers or taggers. They just want to show off their cars.

“You can go to a party and get shot up faster than you can get shot up here,” Rachel Torres said.

Indeed, through the night, none of the club members drank any alcohol or said a provocative word to a fellow cruiser.

They applauded cars they liked, especially those that danced hydraulic-powered jigs. Their most enthusiastic acclamation was for a faded VW bus--a throwback to the hippie ‘60s--that bounced its front wheels a foot off the asphalt.

Shortly after 10, Rodriguez began thinking ahead to the customary police attempts to drive the cruisers away, looking for escape routes the club could use if police blocked the street later in the evening.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” he said, meaning a cruise.

The club’s driving style was impeccable as the cars circled through a traffic jam, round and round the quarter-mile row of parked cars on the cruising strip.

About 10:30, the police moved in, lights flashing. In a classic pincer movement, they sealed off the street. By the time the last car was released through the barricade, 93 tickets had been issued.

All of Neu Exposure’s cars escaped, however, sliding out a side road, just as Rodriguez had planned.

I was not displeased. I don’t doubt residents who say their lawns or houses have been defiled and they fear for their safety.

It’s just harder to want to eradicate those who have welcomed you into their club.