Chapter 37 -- Sunset Strip
Hip people along Hollywood Boulevard eyed me strangely when
I asked how to get to “The Strip,” or what I might find when I got there.
The only thing I knew about the place came from what I had
seen on TV as a kid, Kookie and Rosco, Kristan Royal and Lt. Gilmore,
characters so out of touch with what the strip really was, I knew better than
to mention them.
It was the East Village thing all over again.
Whenever Hank and I asked directions to the hip part of the
village, people eyed as us as rubes from the suburbs (which we were) and said
if we had to ask, we didn’t belong there.
And it wasn’t Kookie that made the place cool, but
institutions like the Whisky, the way Filmore East did for the East Village.
But I was even too naïve to even know that.
“The Strip,” I eventually learned, was a portion of Sunset
Boulevard located between Crescent Heights and Doherty in Beverly Hills, a
place so loaded with billboards and several prominent classic hotels, it seemed
impossible to fit the term hip, but did.
This was the landscape of Jim Morrison and other musical
greats, the place where an act could truly say they made it to the top when
they arrived here.
Standing at Hollywood and Highland, I hadn’t a clue as to
how far away it was, whether I could walk it or needed to hail a cab (still not
trusting the exact change situation the yellow buses imposed).
I decided to walk, down Highland, then right on Sunset,
greeted by the sign for a motel and a line of buildings stretching out ahead of
me like a string of beads, leading down into a place with a long history of
being nonconformist, starting with the gangsters and movie stars, now thick
with musicians, a landscape thick with car lots and bill boards, odd healthy
food stores and spiritual advisers, the legendary Playboy Club tower across the
street from a high end strip mall offering fashions and cheap coffee.
Had I known, I could have taken a cap straight from downtown
where Sunset started at Figueroa. Like Santa Monica, it stretched across the
county until it reached the ocean, going through the down and out Echo Park,
Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and such. The strip was just shy of
Beverly Hills, about seven blocks that had served as the hangout of hippest of
the hip, once the hangout of mobsters and movie stars, now where the rock gods
hung out or played, not a place for the poor down and out hippie, however, even
though freep people and others also cruised these streets as well, or made
their way up to the hills above it to get high.
Bill boards decorated it the way the marble stars did
Hollywood Boulevard, most advertising cars and cigarettes, although one bill
board had a huge picture of the Mod Squad with the word “Narcs” spray painted
under it.
The Strip was the section at that street's western most
point, where Sunset shifts south somewhere ne Harper Avenue and Sierra Drive
(one hippie told me the Strip was between Doheny Driver and Crescent Heights
Boulevard.
Many of the buildings along the way had a Spanish flavor,
stucco walls, rounded tile roofs with other houses rising up in the hills
behind theses.
The Chateau Marmont, one of the long-standing hotels that
technically marked the beginning of the strip, rose higher than most of the
other buildings – except for the Playboy Club and a few office buildings that
belonged to banks or real estate companies.
The hotel descended from the side of a hill in a flood of
trees like a model of a European chateau. Since being constructed in 1929, the
place had housed guests that included movie star, rock stars, and hip
dignitaries of assorted kinds. It was from a drain pipe that L. A’s own Jim
Morrison dangled during one of his many crazy episodes -- though I saw no one
dangling as I passed.
Sunset was broader than Hollywood Boulevard like a concrete
air plane landing strip full of speeding cars, confusing traffic lights that
made crossing some of the side streets difficult, even deadly. People clustered
corners in front of some of the hip restaurants and boutiques.
Both sides of the street became loaded with stores, marques,
in a nonstop parade gas stations, bill board after bill board, sun tan lotion,
booze, rock music – signs for Empire Savings, Marselles French hand launch,
JD's delicatessen, several more small shops, The Penny Arcade store a few
blocks on, Filthy McNasties, next to Turner's cut rate store with its complete
liquor department, fee delivery, the Optique Boutique, and a 30 mile an hour
speed limit nobody listened to
One block at a boots and shoes store, steak shop, hair
styling and, of course, the world famous Schwab’s pharmacy, aa flower shop, a
shell station across from an arco station, Lucky auto supply, worldwide travel,
ah fongs Chinese restaurant next to queen bee beauty salon and King B's men's
wear, and a sun bee food mart, and perhaps the most important place of all,
Whisky a go go
Like the rest of L.A., the Strip was a place of constant
motion, of people jostling each other along the sidewalks, of tourists trying
to capture an instant in that motion with the snap of a picture. It was also a
world of constant paranoia, of freaks glancing over their shoulders at the
police cars that rolled along the curb sides like sharks. While music blared
from the open doors of the clubs, in daylight few live bands played, as if all
part of one large vampire cult.
If I had wanted to find a life similar to the one, I knew
from Washington Square, this wasn't the place. These people seemed caught up
with themselves, a constant parade of egos -- each one afraid to reveal their
true personalities for fear of being seen as less than hip. Their fear of cops
and fear of revelation rolled over me, and I was suddenly afraid as well.
I hailed a cab and gave him directions back to east L.A.,
allowing the glitter to fade behind as we rolled away. As the cab drove east --
at an equally manic rate as the cab coming west -- the city became real again,
the shabbiness of the ordinary world shaking off me the cobwebs of the dream
world out of which I had just come.
The world was all too real by the time the cab pulled up to
the curb in front of my apartment building, and the smells of the old Chicano
section replaced the perfume of the headshops. The cab driver waited until I
was safely in the building, as if fearing this poor lone white boy would come
to harm in a world where few people spoke English.
Indeed, I climbed the stairs feeling confused, as if I had
touched upon a little of my own culture, found it offensive, and when returning
here again seeking sanctuary, found that I no longer fit here either.
Not until I made my way into my own apartment and closed the
door did, I feel safe again.
Whatever I had thought to find in Hollywood had eluded me
and I knew I would have to look elsewhere if I expected to find peace.
For the next few days, I stayed inside, falling back into
the same pattern I had established before wandering out. If I went out, it was
to the bodega on the corner or downtown, where I finally purchased some
household items, including a blanket, bath towel, soap, shaving gear and such.
For some reason, I felt more at home downtown than any other
place I’d seen so far in L.A county, even though downtown looked even shabbier
after my having seen other parts of the city.
Downtown in L.A. is generally defined by four streets:
Olympic Boulevard on the South, First Street on the North, Figueroa and
Alomedia on the West and East. Among the more significant constructions is the
Los Angeles Times Building near the northside of this area. While downtown had
his share of better stores, most of the stores were of the kind I remembered
along 42nd Street in New York, where deep doorways housed prostitutes and
perverts, even in broad daylight.
What scared me was how much the hippies I had seen in
Hollywood and The Strip resembled the bums that occupied the allies downtown.
Hippies who saw themselves so cool for giving up their possessions, slowly grew
less colorful, until they turned as grey and decrepit as the characters people
had always called bums. Walking along, watching the street characters in
downtown, I could predict a time when few people would make a distinction
between hippie and hobo.
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