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It was my dirty little secret. And even more scandalous because I knew how. I’d done it in hot-blooded Latin Montreal, after 15 years of not doing it at all. And I’d even done it in England, on the left, and in Manhattan at mid-day. But I was not going to do it in Los Angeles, not even when people said I’d have to or be laughed out of town.

I would not drive. I’d seen the molten glob of freeways from the air. I’d heard about the rush “hour” that lasts from 6am-10am and 3pm-7pm! And I’d been warned about how, if you accidentally end up in the carpool High-Occupancy-Vehicle lane, the minimum fine is $250. I’d seen the L.A. Web pages’ traffic map of “Current Congestion Locations” - updated every five minutes as if drivers sat with infra-red modems, detouring the trouble spots as they flashed across their laptop screens. And what was that headline in the Montreal Gazette? “Don’t honk. They may be armed.”

Besides, after flying 22 hours from Kuala Lumpur, I was greedy to have some concrete to pound. Stumbling around Tinsel Town in a jetlag haze seemed perfect. Like doing Djerba, Homer’s Isle of the Lotus Eaters in Tunisia, on mescaline. LA was bigger than life, and doing it while I was still hallucinating jet turbulence and the sound of beer nuts spilling onto fold-down tray tables, would be just right.

But here’s the L.A. attitude: on my first day, after having walked happily all the way from West Hollywood to Downtown, gawking, touching, inhaling, listening, taking in all the sunny sensations along the Sunset Strip, and giving a nod to Book Soup, the Roxy Theatre and the Viper Room, and the chichi sidewalk cafe scene at Sunset Plaza, and always with that enigmatic billboard YOU HAVE A GREAT SEX LIFE ON THE INTERNET behind me, I collapsed on a bench and....

“S’cuse me lady, you in trouble? You need some money?” asked a bald man in a crumpled Hawaii Five-O shirt.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Just waiting for the bus.”

“The bus!!! The bus???” he cried, as if I’d said flying saucer. I wished I had said flying saucer. It was a more respectable form of transport in L.A., and Angelenos believed in it more than they believed in the bus.

“What happened to your car? Did it break down? Do you need money?” he asked agitatedly.

Maybe I heard it wrong. Maybe he called me honey. Who offers you money in LA? No, he really couldn’t believe that a camera-strung tourist would be taking a lowly, oh so lowly, bus. But if I had a car, I’d never have met Mamie (her name must have been Mamie) the 80 year-old rouged lady in pink frayed mink vest, spiked heels, and black velvet cloche with a foot-long hatpin topped with an Eiffel Tower. She sat beside me on the bus, smiling and nodding as I babbled about how friendly LA seemed - so far.

And if I hadn’t strolled slowly, instead of driven, down Melrose Avenue in the late afternoon sun, I wouldn’t have rapped with the street artist peddling his crazily-painted walking sticks that, he said, could evoke Aboriginal spirits all the way from Australia.

Forget cars. What could look cooler and tougher in L.A. than dodging limos and weaving between stretch-caddies - on a mountain bike! The classy small hotel where I was staying, the fabulously renovated French décor Le Montrose Suite Hotel wedged between Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and West Hollywood, provided its guests (reclusive stars and pouting rock musicians, and the likes of me) with purple mountain bikes and helmets!

After a languorous morning swim on the hotel’s rooftop pool, I went to collect my Fuji asphalt-eating 20-speed bike. How far could I get on it? Los Angeles wasn’t exactly threaded with bike paths, like good old Montreal. The Hollywood Hills, and the 50-foot high HOLLYWOOD sign on Mount Lee, from which a failed actress had leaped to her suicide from the letter H in 1932, loomed much higher than Mount Royal. Was it worth the scorching expedition?

Probably not. My Montreal friend Jean Guérin had stopped in L.A. on his way back from New Zealand after playing Orson Welles in Peter Jackson’s ‘Heavenly Creatures.’ He’d stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn owned by the star of ‘The Alligator People’ and ‘Swamp Women’. What were Jean’s words? “Oh man. Hollywood is a dump. The only stars left are in the tee-shirt shops, Marilyn and James Dean. And Universal Studios was a big, hyped let down.”

Thousands of tourists come to The Big Nipple, as Louis Malle called it, to do things like the Hollywood Fantasy Tours Marilyn Monroe Tour: “Relive Norma Jean’s exciting life from her orphanage days through her super-stardom rise to her final resting place.” Or ex-undertaker Greg Smith’s “Grave Line” tours of murder and suicide landmarks in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, conducted in a hearse with funeral music. (Soaking tourists has to be more fun than soaking corpses.)

I thought biking was the safest way to explore Beverly Hills, “the best-policed six square miles on earth,” because it was less likely to arouse guard dogs than walking and gawking from the sidewalk. My tough trail-eating tires found no potholes on the wide shady drives above Sunset Boulevard. And it was more fun not knowing who lived where, and imagining what crazy-shaped swimming pools and lives lay beyond the Spanish Mission iron gates and serpentine driveways, than hearing spiel from a bus guide.

On Rodeo (Row-DAY-oh) Drive, I was the only urban cowgirl wheeling past citron colored storefronts and high-maintenance hair-do’s a bike helmet would love to crush. After cycling for seven hours, up and down trendy, funky Melrose and LeBrea Avenues and crisscrossing Wilshire and Beverly and La Cienega, my head a kaleidoscope of billboards and Marilyn look-alikes and pasta shops and parched palms and fake Mission architecture, I headed back to Le Montrose in time to see one of the guests, Mr. Colorado Cool in a cowboy hat and boots, check in, and two sleek glittery black women with frizzy white hair and a frizzy white poodle, stroll out.

And after a scrub in the beautiful hot tub, I leap into a dress and head down the Strip to the Comedy Store, where the likes of Dave, Robin, and Whoopi, as in Letterman, Williams and Goldberg, got their starts. Every night adds a few more L.A. jokes to the city’s archives, and tonight it’s about cordoning off the entire city with yellow scene-of-the-crime tape, with a warning to tourists: “Don’t touch a thing! It’s all evidence.”

One thing’s for sure, L.A.’s quakes, sharks (land and marine) and high-tech muggers, murderers and cons keep the city in laughs. Pippa Garner’s hilarious cartoon page of “Personal Security Items” in Los Angeles Magazine featured a giant handbag disguised as a ferocious guard dog, with a built in “growl chip”, and a self-stick rubber nose loaded with pepper spray ready to fire with the simple touch of a mole. And to protect your Porsche from car thieves, a car cover painted to look like a garbage dumpster! The moral of this story is, why drive a car in L.A.? It’ll only get stolen.

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