65 – The Holy Place in Laurel Hills
Dan and I turned down Vine at the fountain, and took the
long walk to Sunset Boulevard, where we stuck out our thumbs to hitch, and when
nobody stopped, we walked, neither one of us thinking to climb aboard a bus,
which came frequently, but always asked for exact change, and the generally
nasty drivers usually claimed more zones than was the truth.
I was concerned about the cops since they hassled people
there, even when they weren’t doing anything wrong. If you blocked the
sidewalk, they threatened you. If you stepped off the curb, they busted you for
jaywalking, often they pushed people until people pushed back, and then busted
them for assaulting an officer of the law.
If they smelled booze on your breath, they took you in for
being drunk and disorderly, and even if you didn’t look like a hippie, they
busted you – often coming up with AWOL soldiers they turned over to the Shore
Patrol to be escorted back to this or that military base for punishment. My
hair was still short enough for someone to think I was a runaway soldier.
The street leading away from our end of Hollywood and
towards the legendary Sunset Strip had a stream of young hippie girls
hitchhiking, most of them runaways who had settled here to find the hip life
and found themselves addicted, resorting to prostitution in order to eat or
feed their additions. I’d seen some of them even along Hollywood Boulevard,
where dirty old men slowed down to ogle them, though few cars slowed down on
this end of Hollywood except to stop at traffic lights where the girls made
their pitch.
Within three years, L.A. had gone from love and peace people
hanging out at Pandora’s Box on Sunset Strip and passing out flowers in
Griffith Park to drug addicts. Four clinics in the area treated various kinds
of VD and other social diseases. Two halfway houses desperately tried to help
the growing population of addition.
The hippie of today differed from those who first invaded
these fair streets, the intellectual beatnik wannabe that had dropped out of
college to protest capitalism, hated violence, the war in Vietnam, the
expansion of big brother through the spread of color TVs, experimenting with
drugs as a way of expanding his or her consciousness, holding rap sessions,
living in communes, seeking more meaningful relationship that went beyond the
nuclear family.
Hank had met a number of these during our wanderings in the
West Village back east, people who abhorred success, many of whom had attended
red diaper socialist schools when very young. They talked about social justice
the way Christians did The Bible, expecting people to accept their “trip” as
truth.
LSD and marijuana were to these people like communion that
brought everybody onto some new elevated plain of consciousness Yogis would
take a life time to reach.
The current crowd was not nearly so high brow as all that,
having dropped out of high school when it became too tough, drinking to excess
when they couldn’t get pot or acid – though as Dan pointed out, the scene was
changing and uppers and downers became the new drug of choice, with the
ultimate high, Heroin. Cocaine, which cost too much, was still a jet set drug,
snorted by the upper echelon movie star and music performer hippies, not anyone
this far down in Hollywood.
Dan kept talking about how tough things had become since his
first coming, how much more crime and how the peace and love people had gone
from handouts to break ins, house burglaries were routine, so were store
robberies.
I kept thinking of the old song about “brother can you spare
a dime,” and how it had become the anthem for the boulevard, only inflation had
pumped this up to a quarter and more if anyone would give it.
Even the church that helped hippies got ripped off
regularly, Dan said.
He grabbed my arm and looked straight into my eyes.
“So, when we get to the place let me do the talking,” he
said. “If there’s acid to be found, I’ll find it – or at least find someone who
can tell me where we can find it.”
The church wasn’t as far down on Sunset at the Strip, but
near the border where West Sunset veered
south, just beyond the foot of Laurel Canyon Road, convenient enough to the
Boulevard Hippies to reach without needing wheels, yet near enough that they
could make their way down to the Whiskey or the other clubs to score or sell.
The scene was worse than even Dan had warned me to expect,
hippies sprawled out on the small lawn, only partly hidden by a dried up hedge,
hippie boys fucking hippie girls, and sometimes boys, right there in the open,
smoking dope, too, and perhaps worse. Until then, I hadn’t really understood
why some people called pot “skunk weed,” but as soon as we got there, I did.
The stench overpowered me, and I got a contact high just breathing it in.
Dan looked more nervous than usual, glancing across the
landscape as if conducting a military operation. He was searching the faces of
the people there, looking for ones he might recognize from the photos of narcs
the Free Press had printed the previous summer, and for which the paper was
being sued by local authorities. No doubt, the police department had scrambled
to change the agents, but some might still be working even if they were in
disguise.
“This is not a cool scene at all,” Dan said. “We try to
score here and we’re likely to get our asses locked up.”
Dan kept looking, and the more he looked, the grimmer his
expression became, even if he didn’t recognize anyone of the narcs from the
Free Press articles, he said the place was likely crawling with them.
“These guys and girls are nasty. They do dope. Some even
fuck, and then they drag out the badge and bust you even if they’d just dropped
a tab or shared a joint with you ten minutes before,” Dan said, shaking his
head. “We’re not going to find what you want here.”
“So, do we go back to The Boulevard?”
“Only if you want to get ripped off or busted there,” Dan
said. “I think we’re going to have to go up to The Castle. I know some people
there I can trust, and if they don’t have it, they know someone who will. Only
that’s a different and scarier scene.”
“You mean cops?”
“I mean everything. That’s a wild west up there. They got
guns, and if someone thinks you’re a narc, they’ll shoot first and ask
questions late – or maybe never.”
“Don’t the police go up there?”
“Sure, but they’re scared, too. A lot of guys up there are
veterans, straight out of Nam. They don’t only know how to kill, they’re crazy
enough to kill a cop, and the cops know it and so only go into that place when
they have to. They mostly leave it alone.”
“How do we get there?”
“We hitch,” Dan said, and we headed back up Sunset to where
it intersected Laurel Canyon Road, a twisting street that rose up into the
hills above Hollywood, and into the private enclaves that had become the real
gathering places of for the hip.
I had arrived far too late to catch the wave. While the
original scene had started on Hollywood Boulevard, then moved to Sunset Strip,
it had long shifted up into the hills, partly because there were still cheap
homes to rent, partly because they wanted privacy from the cops, and tourists,
who had become a drag. There were a lot of canyons to hang out in, where cops
didn’t routinely prowl. Many of those living up there, came down to the
Boulevard and to the Strip, they lived up in remote places, the most notorious
being the Castle or as some called Houdini’s Castle, as legend claimed he had
once lived there.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of hippies, live in the hills
above Hollywood such as Laurel Canyon or sometimes called Roach Row Hippies
tend to go where they don’t stand out, so avoided wealth or well-kept up
neighborhoods.
There was plenty of traffic coming and going, and almost as
soon as we put out our thumbs, a van pulled over to the curb to pick us up, the
driver, wearing a top hat with a feather stuck to its side, leaned toward the
passenger side, rolled down the window and asked, “Where you goin?”
“To the castle,” Dan told him.
The driver pushed open the door.
“Climb in,” he said. “I’m going right passed it.”
“Thanks,” Dan said, climbing in, motioning me to the side
door so I could climb into the back. The
van – a white Dodge with rainbows painted on the sides – was decked out for
camping inside, a Hookah sat in one corner, still emitting the lingering scent
of pot. The driver put the van in gear and steered up the narrow road, away
from the crowded streets of Hollywood and into the hills thick with greenery,
shrubs and short trees, reminding me more of back East than the palm tree-lined
streets of LA.
We saw the mansion as we came around the curve, glistening
in the glowering setting sun, though scarred, its face blackened in spots as if
it had a disease.
“What’s wrong with the place?” I asked, half bent over,
trying to peer out the front windshield as the van approached. “It looks
damaged.”
“Been that way for as long as I’ve been here,” the driver
said, glancing up at me in the rearview mirror, his dark eyes puzzled, trying
to make me out, as if he suspected me of being a narc. My hair was too short.
“Been that way since 59,” Dan said. “That’s when it got hit
by the fire.”
“Yeah,” the driver said. “Heard about that, too. Gutted the
place.”
“Not all of it,” Dan said. “Only half.”
“Why didn’t they knock it down?” I asked.
“An old lady named Pearson owns it, and she’s got just
enough money to hire just enough lawyers to keep the city from doing just
that.”
“For ten years?”
“Yeah,” the driver said. “But that’s coming to end. I heard
the city has got the bulldozers rev’d up and will likely tear it down later
this year.”
“That would be a real shame,” Dan mumbled, looking up at the
building until we got too close, and the batch of shrubbery and trees got in
the way. “The place is a haven for a lot of people.”
“Where will they go?” I asked.
“Where does anybody go when a dream ends?” the driver said.
“They’ll wander off to someplace else. A lot of people are already heading
north.”
“To San Fransisco?” Dan asked.
“No, farther than that. Oregon, even Washington. There’s
more space up there to spread out. Well, here you are,” the driver said,
pulling the van to the side of the road, engine grumbling, but so were other
things beyond the van, rising up from behind the hedge in the direction of the
house.
“Appreciate the lift,” Dan said, opening the door and
motioning for me to get out to.
He was out before I was and waved as the van pulled away.
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