Intoxicated by the Palm Trees and Orange Groves of Los Angeles

I didn't sleep at all last night. Isn't that the beginning of a song?

In between tossing and turning, and punching my pillows into submission, I spent the night solidifying in my mind the direction of this blog. Yes, it will be in large part an archive of my life and of the lives of the people with whom I have intersected and interacted.

There will be pictures.

I am reminded, somewhat painfully, of a pronouncement by a decades long friend the other day. He said, with the certainty of the Oracle of Delphi, that no one is interested in my pictures. He said something similar some years ago, I recall, also with a sting of hurt, about the journals I have so assiduously kept. Did I think them worthy of being housed in a college library or some such institution of preservation?

I suppose it is true. I get it. I am not a graduate of Yaddo, or a head of a corporation, or an inventor, or a great philosopher. I have made no mark on the world to justify that the artifacts of my existence be held dear to anyone, certainly not in the public forum. I am the commonest of common people. My journal is mostly reams of complaint and lament, about people, places and things, punctuated by an occasional putative deep thought. I know I ain't got the gravitas. But I AM interested in the lives of others. And am an "other" who is a stitch in the tapestry of the world and so, I hope that others might find the petals of my past of some vague interest to them as theirs is to me. It's all connected anyway, or so I believe.  I suppose that my insistence on proceeding with this direction is a rebellion of sorts. I hope that my friend is utterly wrong. I hope that someone will be interested in my pictures, perhaps another old friend in the mists of time who was in one of them. And in the ill told tales of this blog and its predecessors.

And so I proceed despite the dire predictions of my inevitable earthly anonymity and with the happy hope that if it is thus, it won't matter to me since I will be with the Eternal God.

It is 34 years since I took the only risk in my life. I was 27 years old and still living at home. It wasn't so odd a thing perhaps in that my mother had died some years before and there was plenty of room for me and my widowed father in the two bedroom apartment Bronx apartment. I went to law school two buses and two trains away, in Queens, a serious commuter student without funds to rent on my own. And frankly, I had been raised by parents who loved me, but feared the dangers of the world profoundly and bestowed a share of their weight of worry on me.  With all good intention, they wrapped me in a cocoon and for my part, I was loath to leave it.  In part, it was fear of betrayal of paternal wisdom. In part, I inherited that part of the extended family genetics, that with rare exception (I am specifically thinking of my Aunt Teri and Uncle Frank and I came to learn, even my father when he was young and overseas) eschewed all things adventurous. My mother dreamed of a different life from the one she had, but she never stepped out to pursue it, modeling. She depended on my dad to find it for her, and that was hard to do on the manager's salary at a Baby Photography Studio in Brooklyn. We were not a confident trio, my late mother, my father, and me.

My little room in that second, more upscale apartment building than we had known near Mt. Eden Avenue, was a cheerful hiding place and quiet study space. The neighborhood was closer to Riverdale, the upper middle class enclave. Or maybe rich, I never really knew. It wasn't however, in Riverdale. My mother wished there had been a doorman, but my father's more generous salary in the city government, still did not raise us to those heights.

A cat, there always was a cat. This is Rameses. He was a hisser. He'd lay in wait in the bathtub for a visitor.
He made the move to California, but was so traumatized, as he arrived on a different plane than did my dad, in a brutal storm, he sat in an empty closet facing the wall.  He recovered some, but not enough. He was only eleven

I was a driven, restless, often depressed and hypochondriac kid. I needed escape. As I grew older I thought I needed a taste of something very different from New York. This bee in my bonnet could not be driven away or warned away by my practical father a doom saying Cassandra. In a brief break from my first semester at St. John's, I suddenly had a plan.  My father's youngest brother, Steve, had lived in Southern California, Los Angeles, for years. I had met him, and his wife, maybe twice as a young child.  I hit upon the idea of a week there, and with a little intercession on the part of my father, I hoped I could presume upon their hospitality.

While the relationship between Steve and my father had always been distant, he, they, said yes. And in June 1977 I made my second trip by airplane (the first was Bermuda with college friends and I had yet to develop a nearly crippling fear of flying) to Los Angeles. My uncle, my aunt and their 14 year old daughter, Angela, made room for me on their couch. I was in a new place and I had a new extended family to get to know.

My Uncle Steve, Dad's youngest brother, his wife, my Aunt Mary, Cousin Angela on the right and her niece Becky.

I never loved New York winters or summers. The trains were freezing from November to March and boiling from May to October. This was the New York of high crime, needle parks, graffiti that obscured the windows of every subway car, and broken windows along the El lines. It was a gloomy place. It exacerbated my natural internal gloom.

Los Angeles in those days was still open and relatively uncrowded. The sun wasn't blocked by tall buildings, at least where my family lived, and there was more foliage than concrete.  I was mesmerized by palm trees and an ocean that was just ten minutes from the Fairfax District, where my family lived. I was astounded by the drivers who yielded to pedestrians and never went through a red light even when there was not one other car around.

I was hoping one day to be a television writer, with my then partner, Len Speaks. And that was all in Los Angeles. My guide, one of our group at Fordham, was a fellow at USC and he showed me the sights. We went to the Sea Lion in Malibu (now Duke's), right on the beach, which had been featured in a skit on Johnny Carson about furious rain storms and waves in Los Angeles that literally broke a picture window. We tooled around the other college village by UCLA, Westwood. I had my very first Mexican meal, a tostada at Villa Taxco on Sunset. I stood in front of the Hollywood Roosevelt, watching kids line up for the very first Star Wars movie. I felt I could breathe here--literally (the smog of the 60s was mostly gone) and figuatively.

My first guide Dennis Vellucci. This is in his apartment on Euclid Avenue the year Len and I made our joint visit.
We heard that Troy Donahue or some such 1950s idol lived in the building.
And Beau Bridges was at the hamburger joint we went to on Wilshire. We listened to My Sharona together. Well, he was at his table, we were at ours.

Not sure about the face, but I did love that UCLA shirt. Mary and Steve's former mother in law, who spoke no English was visiting. 

I even managed to spy a vestige of old Hollywood. Schwab's Pharmacy where Lana Turner was apocryphally said to have been discovered had seen its heyday and was closed, awaiting its fate, a tear down to make way for a strip mall. The first tenant in the very spot was Virgin Records, which itself became obsolete. I note that there was a Wells Fargo Bank next to Schwabs. There is one today in the exact spot. These days I live around the corner from what used to be the famous star counter hangout. I feel the vibe as I walk by the facade of the newest tenant, a hip furniture store.

The seed was planted. Was it possible to move here? The likelihood seemed remote. I looked into transferring to UCLA's law school. There were obstacles I could not presently manage. The next year, Len Speaks and I came together and, in his rented car (I still did not have a license) we roamed the Hollywood Hills while Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" played and replayed in the top 40.  Len had made a connection with a television writer that used to go to Fordham. On one visit we even got to visit Twentieth Century Fox, which still had their fake New York Elevator train on the lot, a part of the set for Hello, Dolly.  We managed to get onto the MASH set, watching a scene being filmed. We met most of the cast, including Alan Alda, another Fordham graduate, who, having left the Bronx campus in 1957 or so, commented on our youth. We walked from the commissary back to the "swamp" next to Loretta Swit and her beau at the time.  Harry Morgan actually asked to know my name.  There was Yesterday's, the Restaurant not the song, and Casey's Bar. I was delighted when at age 25, I was still "carded."

Len seems amused. I really hate my outfit. I think this place became a Mexican Restaurant. Westwood.

Len, Malcolm, his college roommate, (today a very well known writer and professor of sports journalism) and my cousin Angela, eight years our junior, jaunted to Disneyland on one of the visits. I seem to remember Angela somewhat enamored of Malcolm, though I think she might say she doesn't have any memory of that.  Disneyland was the Wonderful World of Color for a child growing up in the Bronx. I had never imagined that one day I would be there watching the Electric Parade feeling like a retro 10 year old. I could never be bored with the Pirates of the Caribbean and an early dinner in the Blue Bayou which abutted it. It was pure play.

Our rented car broke down on the way back from Anaheim. I was content waiting for rescue sitting on a curb with Us or People, reading about my fave at the time, Roger Moore, who had taken over from Sean Connery in the role of 007.

Resting after dinner at the Blue Bayou?

I know on one or two of those visits, we saw the Carson show, where Jimmy Stewart recited his poems in celebration of his trip to Africa with his beloved Gloria. His appearance is on one of those "best of" reels advertised on late night television. I probably have it in my collection.

There were visits to the ABC Plaza by the Shubert Theatre, quite the destination in its time, but now long gone and replaced by a sleek shiny building that houses Fidelity Financial. It was in this complex that we would see one of many Joan Rivers' performances, in an intimate venue where our unrestrained laughter bounced off the walls.

The sadly gone Shubert Theatre. Good Chinese Restaurant in the complex. And a sport bar. And the nightclub where we saw the late Joan Rivers in her prime.

                                                                     

The Sheraton Unusual, I mean, Universal is over Len's shoulder.

Len and I were on the verge of finding success in our writing partnership. Lots of speculation scripts, several given wonderful critique by our industry friend, who let us peek into his world and bask glancingly in his success at a very young age. He never helped us put our foot in the door. We managed to find an "agent" at William Morris in New York. We "almost" had a job writing jokes for Carol Channing, albeit on the east coast, but there was a taste of Hollywood even in that.  The opportunity fell through and our "agent" disappeared from the hallowed halls of William Morris. Our visits there were concluded. Well, at least I had seen Jack Lemmon in the elevator.

I finished law school in the summer of the last year of the 1970s.

Me and Mr. Anonymous.

I had an immediate problem finding a job-as an attorney. I was fortunate to have help in getting a non-legal job in a New York City agency through the aegis of the gentleman pictured above. There wasn't much to do, so the job provided an opportunity to write. And it allowed me to meet someone who helped me get an attorney position in the Appeals Unit of another City agency. While that job did not last, for a confluence of reasons that were truly beyond my control, after a few months of unemployment I found myself on Madison Avenue right near Grand Central Station in the very small law office of a friend of the son of our old neighborhood hardware store owner. It was a profound education in the reality of volume practice and quick settlement three times the meds--a dramatic contrast with the idealized fluff fed to us as students. I soon learned that it was my job to be yelled at by judges who disliked my employer who overbooked and never was on time. One Edward G. Robinson-esque judge, with Clarence Darrow suspenders over a rumpled white shirt, and chewing a thick stogie, ordered me to tell my boss he was an asshole.  "Yes, your Honor," I'm sure I said.  The Courthouses, particularly in the Bronx, were dirty, hot and sticky. If law schools told students what it was really like "out there" for the majority of us who were not destined for large firm jobs, no one would pay to go.


Los Angeles might as well have been another planet, it promised so different a lifestyle from that I had known.  One night I sat in the Bar of Peppercorn's, a regular Westchester haunt, with Len and Mr. Anonymous pictured above, awaiting our table. The light was dim. I was probably drinking a bourbon sour on the rocks. I emphasized either to myself or them that I had to leave New York. I had to start a new life in temperate and novel Los Angeles.  I'd get work, get a California license to practice law and write on the side. It's a good thing that, in contrast to my usual modus operandi, I didn't allow myself to think of the obstacles.

Next:  Changing Coasts