The South Bay Era, Part 1: The Long-Awaited Rest

The South Bay Era, Part 1: The Long-Awaited Rest

                On the nights of September 18, September 19 and September 20^th, I stayed in Venice Beach with Sycamore and Molly.  They shared a small studio for about $900 or $950 a month.  They had two cats that were rescued strays.  I remember the first day, driving Sycamore back from Westwood, parking in the visitor’s spot that I would use so many times over the next three months, and waiting for Molly to return, because she had the keys.  We went into a bar a block or so away and got large-sized Newcastle beers and waited for Molly.  I was also quite anxious to smoke.  When Sycamore went to use the bathroom, I took out my spiral notebook that I had used to write out all of my driving directions, and wrote this: “Arrived in L.A.  Am at bar with Sycamore.  We have giant Newcastles for $9 each.  We are waiting for Molly to get back so we can get into their apt.  I hope we can smoke weed there.”  My memory is stronger than I remember. 

                Their apartment would have been ideal for one person.  They were literally one block from the ocean.  While the rent was more than I would end up paying later for my own single-person apartment, the ocean-front quality certainly seemed to be worth it.  Later I would look at an apartment a few blocks away, also one block from the ocean, and it would be $975.  Venice Beach is pretty expensive.  So is Santa Monica.  But I stayed there for three nights. 

There was an incident on my first or second day staying at their apartment in Venice Beach when I talked to my mother on the phone and she came down on me, hard.  She had never spoken so sternly at me in my life since I had committed a particular transgression in 7^th grade, involving the abandonment of a friend at a mall.  She said, “What are you going to do in La-La land?  You think that’s actually going to work?  L.A. sucks.  The same thing that happened to your brother will happen to you.”  She meant my older brother, and that will be discussed later.  I told Molly about how mean she was being and I felt like crying for about two hours after that call. 

The first two nights I realized how tight it was going to be.  The apartment would be ideal for one person.  They could make it work with two people, who were very much in love.  Added to that, Molly’s father had built them their own natural loft bed, with real tree trunks as support beams.  It looked fantastic, and they had set up a couch underneath the loft, but alas it was too short for me, and I preferred my air mattress.  Their two cats—Eleanor and Desmond—terrorized me.  As these cats and I became more familiar over the next ten or eleven months, I would not be as scared of them—they also would soon be moved to a larger roaming space, and so were not always on top of you in their domain.  But after two nights, I said enough was enough. 

                 I could afford to stay in a hotel for a week, even if I had spent way more money on my road trip than I intended.  I probably had under $10,000 left to my name.  On the third day, I drove around the South Bay area, settling on a string of motels in Redondo Beach.  I went to a few different places—the Starlite Motel, a place in the completely different direction in Santa Monica, and the Moonlite Inn.  I talked to the motel managers and asked if they could provide a lower weekly rate for a room.  The best answer I got was from the guy at Moonlite Inn—which advertised private hot tubs—who said he would give me a room for a week for $400 if I paid cash—and then I could avoid paying tax.  That sounded good enough to me.  I went to the ATM, took out $400, gave him the money, and told him my stay would start the next day. 

                I went back to Santa Monica to the NRDC office to visit with Molly so that I could get the key to their apartment or something.  I told her that I had found a motel and tonight would be the last night I would be staying with them, and she politely and warmly told me I didn’t need to pay for a motel and I told her no, I insisted on having my own place to stay.  I wanted to take her and Sycamore out for sushi that night, my treat, as a way of saying thank you for letting me stay with you.  We did that, getting sushi around the “circle” in Venice Beach, which was some $75 or $80, but which was nothing for treating two dear friends to dinner, compared to what I had done in say, Oklahoma City. 

                The next day I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway down to Redondo Beach and loaded all of my stuff into the room.  It was a Friday.  I was moving in during the weekend.  I was very happy, but I did not get one of the rooms with a private hot tub—those were the fancy, higher-priced rooms.  I got the bottom-of-the-line economy room for the low rate of under $60 per night in Redondo Beach.  Redondo may not have been quite as upscale as Manhattan or Hermosa—but there was very little difference in truth.  Here was the problem as far as I saw it:

                I wanted to get a sublet for the month of October.  A week from that Friday, I would be returning to New York for about nine days in order to attend a wedding that next weekend, and to attend a concert the weekend after that.  Now, I had already bought my airplane ticket from LAX to LGA.  I think I had made this decision sometime around my stop in Boulder.  Never mind that I could have left at that point and returned to Chicago and flown from Chicago to New York.  Never mind that I probably could have even driven all the way back to New York in that week.  I had been in L.A. for three days and had not gotten to explore Hollywood or any of the other dozen more exciting, fresh, and new locales that I would never get the chance to see again.  I was there now, and I didn’t want to give it up.  Yes, instead of getting the motel, I could have left.  Yes, I could have even stayed at the motel, kept my belongings inside my car at LAX remote parking (which I did anyways), taken the trip, and left L.A. afterwards, maybe staying for another week or so somewhere else as a tourist.  I could have done that, but by this point I was floating around the excuse that I was “too depressed to drive all the way back across the country.”  I just wanted to stop and settle.  I didn’t want to go back to Chicago where I had no apartment or job and would have to live with my parents who were already disapproving of my plans.  This was mistake number one: extending my stay beyond this week in Redondo Beach. 

                Because in a way, that week symbolized everything I loved about California.  The weather was still warm and nice—though unfortunately the water in the Pacific was too cold for swimming.            I unpacked all of my stuff in my little studio, sans kitchen or hot-plate—but including medium-sized mini-fridge—and felt very cozy and comfortable, as if I would be content to live the last week of my life in that atmosphere.  It was like being in some kind of noir thriller or Raymond Carver short story.  Except there was no plot and all I worried about was getting some form of exercise, smoking pot, and feeding myself.

                I remember in particular the first run I did in California—no let me be exacting, I did do one run back and forth along the Venice Boardwalk area—but the first one I did from my own, self-selected space, was down along Redondo Beach.  For this segment of the film adaptation, please include the song “Redondo Beach” by Patti Smith on the soundtrack, as that was the first song I selected the playlist on my iPod that day.  You may also choose the cover version of “Redondo Beach” by Morrissey, off a live album, which I actually used as a song in the middle of the last playlist I ever made and ran to in California.  But that was much later.  At this early and exciting stage of the game, every sight in Redondo Beach was an inspiration.  The looks on everyone’s faces—everyone was not so sad.  I ran down along the beach boardwalk there, through some outdoor shopping plazas, up and down stairs, all the way to the Fisherman’s Wharf, which signaled the end of Manhattan Beach and the beginning of Redondo Beach.  I saw there was a Lobster Festival going on there, and that Sunday was the last night, and I made a mental note of it.

                That Friday, Into the Wild had just opened in theaters, and the first L.A. Weekly I picked up had a big feature on Sean Penn’s adaptation of that book that I had so loved as a high-school and college students, that I had read some six or seven times.  I had vaguely heard that it was being made into a movie before, but I had forgotten about it, and now here it was, opened in L.A. and ready to see.  I called up Sycamore and Molly and asked if they would want to come to my place in Redondo for a couple drinks, a bowl, and a movie date.  They agreed and I offered to drive them to-and-fro, because I had nothing else very pressing going on. 

                It was a wonderful evening.  I drove them down past Marina del Rey and LAX through El Segundo and all the various South Bay “Beaches” and they told me about how they had never actually been to the area before and I was amazed at that because I thought it was supposed to be one of the coolest areas of the city.  Or, the county, as those cities each went by their individual name, as did Venice.  But we had a couple whiskey and cokes and we smoked a bowl while listening to Deerhunter and we looked at the time and decided we were going to have to hurry to the Landmark Cinema at the West Side Pavilion Mall. 

All along the way my two compatriots kept saying that there was no way we were going to make the time, as we turned right on Pico and headed up towards Westwood Blvd.  We just didn’t have the time.  I decided to sound like an inspirational speaker and tell them that we just had to believe that we were going to make it on time and that everything would work out in our favor.  We made it to the parking garage about five or ten minutes before show time and I told them, “See, I was right.”  We parked, and did not have to pay, and I was amazed at this, the first of many times I would be amazed at not having to pay for parking in that fair city.  We went to the box office lobby and saw that Into the Wild was sold out for that time, but that we could still get tickets for an hour later show-time.  This was pretty late—I think 11:00 PM start time—but we hung out in a Barnes and Noble there beforehand and went into the movie without any feelings of regret, as far as I can recall.

And the movie was fantastic.  I think we all really appreciated setting aside a Saturday night for the purposes of viewing it, even if it didn’t end until later than 1:30 in the morning. 

At the time I was working on a long document called “Suicide” which was at one point keeping pace with my word count for “Self-Mutilation.”  I recall Into the Wild having some import into my thought process at the time:

Okay well after reading some of that, it is evident that there is nothing about the movie in there, but that the movie did in fact inspire the initial idea for the word processing document.  Let us be clear: it is a powerful document!  Just skimming through it, it is full of things I would never admit in other venues, and it will be very useful as I attempt to recount the antecedent days in Redondo Beach and Beverly Hills and New York in later sections.  But I digress.  The very beginning of the document is the only part worth copying:

I have decided to do this for 3 reasons:

1) Certain things became clear to me last night

2) Certain things were made clear to me today

3) It is really cool to work on two documents concurrently called “suicide” and “self-mutilation” –but this will not be a novella, it will be a real thing, when the time is right.

Also, there is one notable mention of the film, now that I see it.  There is a short discussion of dreams (one of which I have forgotten to transcribe here today) and then these few short paragraphs:

Oh shit there’s a James Spader movie on HBO Signature.  I think I’m going to have to watch that and cut this short for now, but I’ll continue.  Last night, I saw Into the Wild, the adaptation of the book I became enamored with some eight or nine years ago.  Of course there are many overlaps between the main character’s journey and my own.  His journey ends in death.  After two years.  I have been gone a month!  And I am not living off the land; I am staying in hotels and motels, spending that $20,000 I had saved up, not donating that $24,000 he had to Oxfam. 

In a certain sense, we both ran away for the same reasons…Now the movie is starting so I’ll continue later!

Well it’s two days later and the movie I watched White Palace (a take-off of White Castle) was pretty much a complete waste of my time, except to see James Spader freak out a couple times, at the beginning and at the end when he opens up a dustbuster at a party and says, “There’s no dust inside!  There’s no dust!” Susan Sarandon was only interesting the first 10 or so minutes she was on-screen.  The idea of being embarrassed by your lover is certainly a real thing, but it’s not something I consider entertaining, or fantastic.

I was thinking of this earlier today—art that is accessible for an audience.  I believe an audience has to want to fantasize themselves into the place of the character they are watching, or reading, or listening to, in order for them to say they enjoyed it.  They have to enjoy the fantasy too, I suppose.  Thus, if I write a book about self-mutilation, there are not many people that want to actively fantasize about it—BUT there are a lot of people that do actually cut and therefore would be interested in a book about it.  But, say I wanted to do a book on general contracting.  Not many people would want to fantasize themselves into my shoes—they would perhaps want to put themselves in the place of a potential “flipper” because maybe one day they would like to flip a house and make a bundle (once they have a bundle…).  However, the life of an operations manager of a family-owned homebuilding business is not very fantastic, or vicarious.  The best kind of art would be able to be an unfamiliar situation, but with familiar details thrown in so that one could identify with it, and also learn something by it.  I believe art should be educational, as well as entertaining, thought-provoking, and soothing.  Not always soothing, but it must soothe the soul in its resolution.

Well the night I watched White Palace must have also been the night that Sycamore and Molly and I went to the Redondo Beach Lobster Festival.  It was about $30 to get in for you to get a lobster.  I am not sure what Molly did, being a vegan.  I can’t remember.  I do remember the lobster being average to sub-par, and the overall enjoyment of the evening being somewhat a waste of time and money, but still interesting for getting to walk around the Fisherman’s Wharf area, where they had carnival rides and midway games set up for the occasion.  In a way, that Lobster Festival, that single evening, encapsulates a great deal of my experience of those ten months or so that I lived in that fair city.