Day 22: Hollywood!
The next day we blast our way to Hollywood. It was really something rolling down from the farm highway onto I-5. Traffic got wilder and bigger as we rocketed over foothills and into busier and busier valleys. We finally hit the Valley Girls valley and saw the malls and minimalls and tall buildings of Universal City and Burbank. We’re getting close! I saw the exit for the old street where all the best no-cover jazz clubs are. M popped on Michelle Shocked’s song “Leaving L.A.,” about the girl bustin’ loose and racing all over town on her stolen motorcycle. All those great place names. We blasted it at full volume. It gave us the shivers. We’d made it! Faded “Toyo” micro-pickups merge on and off. Mexican gardener’s truck everywhere. Palm trees! Sightings of bungalows beyond. A cell-tower disguised as a palm tree! Huge entertainment billboards. An electric air of possibility. Finally we swung over the last hills that I used to ride on my bike and on into Hollywood and LA. Cahuenga Blvd! Our exit! We peeled off and into the hubbub of the familiar street. Then we climbed and twisted up and off the main drag and into the hills and instant cool and quiet. We parked at my Uncle’s place at the end of his cul-de-sac.
It was great to see them again. We went out back and checked out the views. Ah, yes! That skyline, Capitol Records, the works. Fruit trees, flowers, narrow-twisty, rickety pathways. Just the ticket. Then we went into their quiet, cool, tidy, artful house and relaxed.
Then Martha took a bike ride up to the reservoir above. Then I took one as well. Stretch the legs! The new 28-t cog worked lovely as I rode the lush, quirky little lanes from my past and from my dreams, up and down the Hills.
I really like the living places around here. There’s a narrow, beat-up walkway at the end of K’s cul-de-sac, cutting under an avocado tree and through some flower bushes, between their house and their neighbors. I knew it went to a separate apartment house-like thing off the back of their place, but when I went to check it out I noticed about six mailboxes nailed at crooked angles here and there along an old fence. It turns out that the little foot-wide path twists its way back in to several other houses that you can’t even see. Hidey-holes everywhere. Code, what code? I like that.
They had another lovely apartment below their place that used to be rented for decades by a crippled little entertainment columnist who drove an old Mercedes, the same black one forever. He knew everyone in the biz and was a wonderful man. Chuckie. His place was now ours, with lovely new leather easy chairs and a big screen. Wow.
Back when I used to stay for months at Kent and Jo’s as I worked on my adventures in books and boats, Chuckie once pulled me aside as he started down the narrow walk to his place. We had our one and only chat out on his patio. He was a private person. Couriers would come and go for him from the studios all day. We’d hear him typing away down there. But that evening he told me about when he was young and healthy. He and some cartoonist friends owned a 90-foot schooner in LA Harbor in Long Beach not far from where I kept my 30-foot cutter. They had the greatest and hardest times on that ship. The main thing was they didn’t abandon it or their dreams. It would sink when the pumps weren’t on, but they kept living and partying on it. People told them they were fools, but an old man told them to keep at it and they did. “What times we had,” he said. “And you, you keep at it, too.” So I did, in one way or another.
After dinner at Lucinda’s, “their” wonderful Mexican place nearby (where mariachi’s serenaded us), we were in heaven as we watched the lights of the city twinkle and I felt like I was home all over again.
