Behind the Scenes in Jerry’s Building

Fade in. Exterior, day. Jerry’s apartment building. Jerry’s fellow tenants are coming home from a shopping trip.

“Ayudeme con los Pampers.”

“Mira, no tengo llave.”

“Ay . . . ni yo tampoco!”

Laughter up. Applause. Yada, yada, yada.

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I have seen “Seinfeld” twice: Once, because everyone else in the home where I was a guest was watching it, and a second time when I was chained to a wall in an Argentine prison. OK, I lied about the prison. All I’m saying is, I wasn’t struck by sitcom lightning.

But among my small knowledge of Things Seinfeld is that the brick building that serves as the facade of the show’s New York apartment building is in Los Angeles, a truth that tickles me--all those New Yorkers telling one another how authentically and essentially Big Apple the show is.

It stands on South New Hampshire Avenue, not too far below Wilshire, built handsomely of brick in what once was a flossy stretch of town, between the Miracle Mile and MacArthur Park. This building, the Shelley, is the last on the block still wearing the passementerie of that more glamorous age. The Shelley’s neighbor buildings have been stuccoed over, painted over, barred over, fronted in steel bars and fringed in concertina wire.

Along the street, gnawed corncobs and hollow Marlboro hard packs and used-up sofas ornament the thin-

grassed medians. It is like New York in this one thing: Finding a parking space on the street demands an act of God.

On the north side of the Shelley, you can still make out, in phantom-white letters, advertising boasts older than V-E day: “Beautiful Singles/Large Front Doubles.” Nowadays, it sounds like a double-

entendre from the show.

The Shelley distinguishes itself with an awning of a goldenrod color, its name in the Gothic letters that kids hereabout may only recognize as the typeface of gang tattoos. The beveled glass doors and leaded glass windows are protected by lacy wrought iron. Inside, the names on the tenant roster are Montes, Lenin, Joaquin, Shin. There is no corner coffee shop, only Mexican fast food, a Korean acupuncturist, a mail-order service to Guatemala and El Salvador.

It is most definitely not 129 W. 81st St. in New York, the Shelley’s TV incarnation. Nor does its interior life resemble that of “Seinfeld,” an emperor’s-new-clothes show famously about nothing.

In these parts, in all such places as this, the prospect of nothing is a luxury. Every day is over-crammed with clamoring somethings: finding a job, juggling the two you have . . . wondering, are the kids safe at school, am I safe at the Laundromat, will the car break down, will the bus show up, will the money run out before the workweek does?

Having time and leisure to smirk and fret over peeing in a gym shower or a smelly airplane toilet or what shirt to wear on TV--well, the life of nothing must sure be something.

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Perhaps eight or 10 people came and went from the Shelley’s vestibule while I was there. I asked, in Spanish, if they’d seen “Seinfeld.” Described the show, the channel, the reruns. Wrote it out--

S-E-I-N-F-E-L-D. No, miss, they shook their heads. Don’t know it.

So said the recently arrived Mexican coming home from his restaurant shift. So said the Guatemalan woman who swung her head “no” in time to swaying with her sleeping baby. Only one, an old woman, her head wrapped in a pink cartoon-print towel, nodded brightly and rattled away in Spanish. “Oh yes, the little fat guy. I’ve seen that. The friends. He has a lot of pretty girlfriends.”

That little husband-and-wife exchange at the beginning of the column translates this way:

“Help me with the Pampers.”

“Look, I don’t have the key.”

“Hey, I don’t either!”

As for “yada yada yada”--it’s not a Seinfeld thing. My friend Chris was saying it 20 years ago. I think he wrote it in my yearbook--”Have a bitchen summer, yada yada yada.”

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Lesson 1: This was an obvious column to write--shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes the fish have to be shot.

Lesson 2: Ballyhooed universal phenomena hardly ever are.

Where, then, will the television sets at the Shelley be tuned to on Thursday night? My money is on the telenovelas. They are absurd melodramas of lust, betrayal, greed, corruption, jealousy, murder. They may be crap. But they are about something.

Patt Morrison’s column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].