Two A.M., Koreatown. Helicopters and searchlights actually wake me up. Usually I sleep through gunfire. This time I did, too, but the search is noisy and centered on my street. Out my living room window, I can see the searchlight scanning my driveway and the parking lot behind my apartment building; then moving next door through the playground of the Korean preschool and over the rooftop of the minimall where we get our liquor and pizza; then traveling across the street to the rooftop of the Koreana department store, which isn't really a department store but some kind of gambling parlor.

The helicopters isolate something or someone on the ground a block away. They hover there for a long time, making the neighborhood as bright as a supermarket.

A couple of months after I moved in, I drove up to find a TV news van pulling away from the curb while the guy from the pizza place hosed a puddle of blood off the driveway. Someone had just been shot, he said. He didn't know who, or why. Had I come home five minutes later, I would never have known about the shooting. This incident became emblematic of that Koreatown apartment: I didn't ever feel like I knew what was going on there, or why.

When I first looked at the apartment, there was a family living there, and the place smelled like boiling meat. I took it because it was huge and cheap, and 1'd just gotten seven thousand dollars as a settlement from a car accident. The apartment had three bedrooms and a hallway the length of a regulation bowling alley. It wasn't until I moved in that I noticed it had all been painted in semigloss enamel, so it had a vibe like a Victorian mental hospital, all shoddy and institutionally grand. Everything that happened in the building's stairwell sounded as if it was happening in my living room, so there was a constant breaking-and-entering sound track at night. The toilets were the kind you flush with your foot. There was even a full-sized fire hose coiled up in a corner like a Claes Oldenburg sculpture.

I made the mistake, on moving in, of trying to pretty up the dump with a coat of warm-colored paint, but it was the kind of place where every aesthetic effort just underlines the general hopelessness of the situation. None of the windows closed, which was all right since they were crusted in so many years' worth of dirt you couldn't see out of them. There were holes in the backs of closets that seemed to lead to the bowels of the earth. The kitchen counters had been painted. The refrigerator had been flocked. The scarred linoleum on the bathroom floor didn't even go all the way to the walls.

My downstairs neighbors lived in an apartment of identical size and shape that had been geegawed out of sight with knotty-pine walls, tomato Formica, a faux-stone fireplace spread across one vast wall, weird carpet, linoleum, and velvet sectional sofas snaking all over the place, making pathways between half a dozen TV sets. It was like a coral reef down there. The windows all looked out on the concrete rear wall of the minimall. You walked in, and you were underwater, in some amniotic America as elemental as it is inconceivable. The husband was a teacher, the wife a nurse, and they had a six-year-old boy named Darius. For some reason, I thought about their apartment all the time. It was like a parallel universe, one that was safe and warm, whereas mine was cold and windy and open to interrogation from the sky.

One day I was lying in bed with chicken pox, watching Cops, when suddenly there on the screen was my apartment building, as the LAPD brought a suspect to the ground in front of the Korean bridal shop across the street.

*

I was single. Tyrone was two. I was living in Koreatown, doing odd magazine features, and I was poor. Then I was writing a column about babies and doing nightclub reviews for the L.A. Times, and I was slightly less poor.

For the first time in many months, I could afford to pay my car insurance premium on time. I would have, too, except for one insurmountable problem: I didn't have a postage stamp. The post office was only three blocks away, but according to my child-sized map of the universe, I might as well have trudged on over the hill to Sherman Oaks barefoot with a sack of pennies on my back to pay the damned thing in person.

When Tyrone was a baby such raids on public services could be organized with little more than a day's notice. All that was required was a rucksack of gadgetry, fair transport, and a good night's sleep. Anything seemed possible back in those days; the post office, the copy shop, Radio Shack-why, we even went to the mall once. Then one fine day Tyrone grew out of his stroller. I was proud, sure, but the thing is, two-year-olds don't walk the way we do. Like us, they are oriented along a vertical axis, and like us, they are capable of both forward and backward movement at varying speeds, but they don't go anywhere. Occasionally one of them may appear briefly to be heading purposefully in a direction, but that's almost as rare as a chimpanzee typing Shakespeare.

The net effect was that the neighborhood post office was now three hundred and fifty miles away. Since Tyrone had jettisoned his diapers along with the stroller, that was way beyond our range. I could take the car, sure, but it's six miles of rough terrain to get to the driveway.

I tried once. Actually, our destination wasn't a post office, but a Payless shoe store. One thing about all this random oscillation: it's hell on tennis shoes. Tyrone was going through a pair a month. So there I was, juggling seven shoe boxes and chasing Tyrone up and down the aisles. You've seen Payless shoe stores on CNN: they're the ones that were universally looted during the riots; it was electronics, food, and Payless shoes. This is understandable. If I could build a nuclear weapon in my kitchen, I'd test it in a Payless shoe store. The place was full of fun-house mirrors and TV sets playing cartoons: very kid-friendly, I supposed?wrongly. As I knelt and fumbled shoes on and off quickly, while Tyrone was briefly transfixed by Batman, a high, whiny voice pierced the din. «Look at this mess! Look what you've done!» I looked up to see a horrid little cretin standing over me, feet planted wide, arms folded across his chest, exuding the kind of fearsome absolute authority shoe-store managers and postal workers are notorious for. «I want you to put them all back in the boxes and put them in the right places.» «Y-yes,» I stammered humbly, «just as soon as we're finished.» «No, now!'' the fierce little goblin intoned. Suddenly I'm Ned Beatty in Deliverance, crawling on hands and knees, trying to oink like a pig, some anonymous, all-powerful hick standing over me.

Shaken, I went home, locked the door, and set about conceiving a plan whereby I would not have to leave the safety of my own home again until Tyrone was fully grown. The apartment was big enough; between mail order and modems, we could create our own self-sufficient Biosphere.

One more venture out there was all it took: I went to the Salvation Army and bought an exercise bike, then swung by the local Korean minimall and plunked down $36.95 for a fax/modem. After that, a quick stop at Ralph's for frozen food, and we were off on our adventure.

DAY ONE: Tyrone is running around naked. I'm wearing a fluffy negligee, since the world as I know it has come to an end and I can wear whatever I want. I spend the day installing the fax/ modem, while Tyrone pops the bubbles in the bubble wrap and throws all his toys out the windows onto the neighbors' cars. We have frozen Penne with Marinara and Italian Sausage for dinner.

DAY TWO: Tyrone agrees to let me use the exercise bike, as long as he gets to pedal. He's also decided to edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT file so that red warning signs flash on my screen when I try to play video poker with myself. Then he rubs tuna salad along all the windowsills, I imagine as part of some kind of baby-voodoo ritual.

DAY THREE: I discover Cyberspace! A whole universe of people who are old enough to type! I send E-mail to my friend Gina in Hawaii, and chat convivially on-line with people who have no idea what fetid squalor lurks behind the eloquent typing of this onetime data-entry clerk. We eat Linguine with Four Cheeses.

DAY FOUR: Tyrone finds a Magic Marker under the sofa and turns himself into a Keith Haring baby. I get a strange, misguided impulse to go to the post office, just for the company. Who knows, maybe they'd give me a job.

DAY FIVE: Garbage day, the urban single mother's nightmare. I slip into something a little les~ Miss Havisham, like shorts and a T-shirt, then gingerly heave a bag of week-old diapers (he still wears them at night) over my shoulder. Tyrone is jealous of his waste: he wants to be carried, too-down two flights of stairs, around the building, then back, dragging the trash can a hundred yards to the curb. When I put him down just for a second to unlock the gate, my little illustrated man runs into the road, growling and spitting. I save him, but not before he frightens the armed security guard at the Koreana department store. The last person to do that got shot, as I recall.

DAY SIX: The phone rings. I don't answer it. Why bother? I E-mail NASA to tell them that I'm qualified to spend long periods of time in a state of confinement and need a job. I'm willing to travel, especially at the speed of light, if that means Tyrone won't be two anymore when I get home from work. NASA doesn't answer.

DAY SEVEN: I realize I haven't clipped the family fingernails for a long time, but for some strange reason I decide not to....

*

That was before preschool (what a haunting phrase, «Before Preschool»-it sounds like the title of an Arthur Miller play). I was more or less housebound with two-year-old Tyrone, plotting various delusional scenarios involving foster homes and the Fiji Islands. In order to get him into preschool, I had to earn more money, but to earn more money I had to work more, which meant I had to get him into preschool. In fact, the system was breaking down, slowly but surely, as I lost my car insurance, my health insurance, my designer antidepressants, and occasionally my phone service, for lack of cash flow.

But it wasn't just the money thing. One desperate morning, after Tyrone woke me at six by pouring powdered ginger and seaweed all over my bed after I'd stayed up until four to finish an article that was already overdue, I called his father. «Come ... take ... the ... child,» I choked out. He said he couldn't leave work.

So I called my own father up in Oregon, who is always a good man in a crisis, averaging almost as many of them per annum as I do. «Come take the child,» I said in Gregorian tones. He also couldn't leave work, but what he could do was send me a check to cover the first month of preschool.

I dragged Tyrone out the door, marched him down the block, and pounded on the door of the nearest Montessori school. The director, a Filipino woman, gave us the grand tour. «The playground's in the backyard,» she pointed out. «Very safe from driveby shootings.» This struck me as one of the least reassuring remarks I'd ever heard.

I went to the local YMCA, where Tyrone has been on the waiting list since November. The silver-haired directress said she'd make room. The teacher was great, and our neighbor's daughter, Nora, a sprightly, witty little number with a gift for mimicking all

states of humor with her big eyes, was a distinguished alumna. But four hundred dollars a month for part-time? Sensing my hesitation, the old bat who ran the place started rattling off the names of her students' minor-celebrity parents. In a town where every shoe repair shop has a wall of signed eight-by-ten glossies, even the YMCA is a nickel-and-dime pantheon. I couldn't do it.

Next I looked at a school in an even worse neighborhood than mine. It was extravagantly named after an Ivy League university, and run by a dotty old Englishwoman I quite liked. But the blighted playground looked ripe for a Samuel Beckett scenario, and inside the ramshackle classrooms, everyone seemed to be ,recovering from a long-ago trauma, or else they were just beginning to feel the effects of some slow-acting poison. The dolls all had black scuff marks on their faces and were missing hanks of hair. The somnambulant teacher put a record on a scratchy phonograph and the kids played ring around the rosy: «Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!» The game seemed too prophetic under the circumstances.

I narrowed the search down to two possibilities: the Christian school and the Islamic school.

The Christian school was inexpensive, friendly, multi-ethnic, and, being in a church, had great architecture. We were given the grand tour-the playground, the kitchen, the gymnasium, the classrooms, all splendid, spectacular, glowing with that pure, porcelain warmth peculiar to Christians. And he could start on Monday. I got a wonderful, creepy, tingling this-is-it feeling. We met the teacher, who was obese and wall-eyed. Tyrone joined the class as they sat down to read a story. A little boy came and sat next to him, ready to make friends. «Settle down, Henry,» the teacher said, «or you'll have to stand in the corner!»

I'd like to say that I didn't wait to see the dunce cap, but hustled my baby on out of there; in fact, I denied the whole thing, such was my desperation. Now I understand those people who claim that they participated in satanic rituals with their entire families and then repressed the incident in the station wagon on the way home. I was ready to enroll Tyrone the very next day, but felt I should check out the last place on the list just for good measure.

The moment I entered the Islamic Center preschool my heart said Inshallah!The playground was bright and clean. So were the kids. The teachers reminded me of my ex-mother-in-law. I choked back tears, suddenly awash in sentimental reminiscence over the way she used to paddle about the house in her petticoats, a towel draped over her chest for modesty, admonishing servants and grown-up children in shrill Urdu and pidgin Bengali. This daily performance wasn't the least bit neurotic?no, it was Wagnerian. I don't care what anyone says, there's nothing on earth like an Indian mother for filial love, or gratuitous melodrama. Standing there in the bright, primary-colored preschool, I realized I wanted a little melodrama in my life. Sometimes a girl gets all alienated and self-actualized, here in the touchy-feely state of California. I liked it here among the Orientals, where there was not a speck of dirt of anomie, just softness and light and the scent of jasmine perfume mixed with cardamom.

And that's why Tyrone bows to Mecca every night before tucking into his Korean pizza. His friends are named Hakim and Gibran and Tanou. Instead of Power Rangers they play Sword of Allah on the playground. And in the Thanksgiving pageant this year, I sat among the ladies from Egypt and Pakistan in their chadors and Hermes head scarves, and the fathers from South Central in their mudcloth toques, applauding Tyrone's debut as a carrot in the school play, where he happily warbled out a rousing chorus of «Abu Youssef had a farm, eeeyi eeyi oh!»

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson