Chapter52 – a place in Hollywood
Had I known more then, I might have picked up a copy of the
Los Angeles Free Press and checked out their want ads for a place to rent or
gone to any of the many community bulletin boards.
Instead, I let Louise talk me into going to a broker near
Hollywood Boulevard, one of those agencies landlord use to screen out people
they don’t want, like blacks or hippies. Since I still looked as if I had just
stepped out of the military, the woman at the agency told us we would have no
problem finding a place – for a fee.
My journal at the time recalled it as “a soft airy place
with thick rugs, beige walls and a well dressed woman who smiled at us as we
entered, giving us a very friendly “hello,” whose tone would change as my hair
grew.”
“We’re looking for an apartment,” Louise told her.
My journal claims the woman’s shimmering lips broadened into
an even wider smile (I could almost hear the cash register sounding inside her
head.
“Her glossy lipstick shimmered in the florescent glow. Her
gaze – focused out from under thick black eye lashes – caught my gaze. She
pulled out a thick black book from her desk which looked too thick for her thin
wrist to lift. It thumped on the desk top, as she asked us what we had in mind.
Louise said she wanted something in Hollywood and the woman thumbed through the
book giving us several suggestions, one on Highland and others within that
large square between Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Boulevard, and came up
with a number of possible places.”
I don’t recall how many places she showed us before she
brought us to the apartment on North McCadden Place.
The building, partly hidden by heavy shrubbery in the front
reminded me of a seaside resort motel, windows flat along the northern wall,
while up the driveway small balconies hung over the long driveway, and a series
of external concrete stairs that climbed outside porches onto which the second
floor apartment doors opened.
Louise loved it immediately; I had my doubts.
Middle Class Hollywood lacked any sense of real taste, and
though the owners who lived in the apartment directly below us advertised the
place as “luxury” the apartment had little to offer except wall paper in two
rooms and stucco on the other walls and all the ceilings, imitating the Spanish
styles more historic legitimate places found elsewhere in Hollywood,
particularly down by the strip.
“Every aspect of McCadden reflected wealth,” I wrote in my
journal a few years later, “from the stucco Mexican exterior and stairs to the
balcony which overlooked the driveway, a richness that oozed out of the front
door when the landlord and his wife unlocked it for us, revealing the carpeted
interior.”
The landlord, a heavy set man with a large belly overflowing
his belt and barely contained by a pair of suspenders, grinned at Louise’s awe
as he and his wife led us in.
I disliked the landlady, a pudgy, pompous, middle aged
busybody with died red hair, wearing a flower-pattern dress that even in the
age of flower power stood out as extremely uncool.
Her shrill voice annoyed me the way new chalk might on a
black board, as she laid down rules by which she expected us to live, when we
had to quiet down at night, and how early we might make noise in the morning,
much of which the woman from the agency had already heard, nodding at each
demand with a knowing tolerance we would be paying her a hefty fee, and she
would not need to deal with us or the landlady again.
At the same time, I dreaded the idea we would see the woman
daily, and live through a litany of complaints over some noise we might have
made during the night, how many times we flushed the toilet or left a light on.
The idea of our creeping passed her door on our way in or
out of the apartment struck me like a perpetual horror movie, waiting for the
moment when the monster pops out of the dark to get us – since her kitchen
window looked out onto the driveway. Her front door also faced out onto the
bottom of the concrete stairs we had to climb to get to our apartment and I
could imagine her unwavering eye staring out through the peephole at us, as if
she suspected the boxes we carried in and out held massive amounts of the illicit
drugs local newspapers went on and on about. Or maybe she suspected us of
Satanic worship and the boxed contained body parts for the unnatural sacrifices
we intended to conduct upstairs.
Three doors faced out onto the upstairs concrete platform,
each leading to a different apartment, ours directly above the landlady’s. A
thin metal rail ran along the side facing the driveway, warm as I ran my hand
along it. From here, I could see the balcony just beyond, sticking out over the
driveway slightly, a easy leap for anyone looking to gain access to our
apartment through the balcony’s glass door – as my friend, Mike would later
prove, and still later, with more evil intent, Billy Night Rider who would
burglarize the apartment later.
The front door opened into a large, what would have been
square room, except for the far corner cut out to create a kitchenette, narrow
enough to walk through, but as Mark Twain might have pointed out, not wide
enough to swing a cat and guarantee the safety of the cat.
Walls and ceiling had the same uneven stucco as the exterior
of the building had as if we had landed on the moon with all its craters.
Standing at the front door looking in, we saw the sliding
door to the balcony to our immediate left or southern wall. The cut out for the
kitchen reshaped the room into roughly an L-shaped space with the shorter arm
in the far corner, where we would put a table to serve our meals – but not a
large table either. Often as not, we ate at the small counter that divided this
space from the kitchen, perched on two tall stools.
A long Formica counter ran along one whole side of the
kitchenette divided in the middle with a stainless steel sink. The stove, refrigerator
and other appliances stood side by side along the other wall. At the far end,
the kitchenette had a large window that also looked out onto the driveway, but
also provided remarkable views of sunset and the string of palm trees that
lined both sides of McCadden Place.
Off the main room, we soon learned as the lady from the
agency brought us in, another door – led to a short hall with two closets, and
doors to two bedrooms and one of the two bathrooms.
“There seems to be more than enough closet space,” Louise
noted when we entered the hall, the pudgy landlady at our heals like a French
bulldog. Still grinning, her husband followed on the agency lady’s heals as if
showing off a new car or a new born child.
Louise meant the two closets facing each other on either
side of the hall.
“There’s much more,” the lady from the agency said, leading
us on, pointing to the bathroom to the right with a tub and a glass door that
served as a shower curtain against the far wall with a window facing out onto
the landing at the top of the stairs from below. From this window, I could
actually see the front door to our apartment, and thought it might come in
handy if someone I didn’t want to see showed up – such as the cops.
The toilet and sink with cabinets above each – were against
the right wall, and across from the toilet, embedded in that wall, an electric
heater.
Louise laughed. “I don’t expect we’ll need the heater,” she
said. “This is Southern California after all.”
“It’ll come in handy,” the lady from the agency said. “Some
mornings in mid-winter it gets pretty brisk, even in LA.”
The vanity mirror above the sink had some many lights, it
might have served as something a movie star needed to make up for a shoot.
Because of the blue tiles on the floor and partly up the
walls, Louise immediately dubbed it as “the blue room.”
Down at the end of the hall another door led to what the
lady from the agency generously called “a second bedroom” with a string of
slatted windows along the long wall to the right that also looked out onto the
platform and stairway outside. A small handle to each allowed someone to crank
them open. Along the wall opposite the windows large doors opened onto a
shallow closet, with rod along the top for hangers, and a shelf about the rod.
“See what I mean about the closet space,” the woman from the
agency said. “There’s another closet just like this in the master bedroom.”
She led us back into the hall and through a door to the
left, a large room with windows along the wall opposite the door, slatted
windows that looked out onto a string of one family houses. To the left of the
door, a closet similar to the one in the other bedroom. A door beyond that led
to another bathroom, but without bath or shower, yet had elaborate crimson and gold wall paper, so gawdy as
nearly blinding. Louise loved this, and thought it the best room in the
apartment.
After another lecture on the rules from the landlady, we
agreed to take the apartment. We paid the landlord in cash, counting out the
bills into his upturned palm. He left to get us a receipt, following by his
suspicious wife, leaving us and the agency woman floating in the middle of the
carpet as if in a cloud.
Without furniture, the place seemed immense and Louise moved
through it, almost skipping, like an extremely satisfied child.
“I looked out the window at the palm trees swaying along the
street, struck about how odd they seemed after my life having seen a different
variety of trees back east,” I wrote in my journal. “Louise wandered back down
the small hallway, exploring the bathroom, bedrooms and closets as if planning
already what to do with them.”
After the agency lady drove us back to her Selma Boulevard
office, we took the cab back to East L.A. to pack up my things, and piled mine
and Louise’s possessions in the cab before deserting “Roachville.”
I didn’t have courage enough to face the landlady, so I
merely left the key in the door of the apartment, and never looked back
My journal foreshadowed things to come.
“I thought we would stay there forever,” I wrote as if the
money (already dwindling) would keep up this life style for the rest of our
lives, something as it turned out was not to be.”
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