Carver’s Dog

Miss L and I had just settled into our room at the Bevery Garland Hotel in Studio City. We switched on the TV to check out the in-room options available: video games, internet acccess through the TV screen (keyboard provided) at $9.95 a day for those without Wi-Fi, free movies, and, of course, Pay-Per View. We scanned through the Pay-Per View options; when we hit the adults-only option, I punched the speed dial on my cell phone.

“What d’you want? Why’re you bothering me?”

I could barely suppress my laughter. “Cass, you remember that show we produced about fifteen years ago? The Ultimate Couples Guide to Sex Positions? Remember that?”

“The Ultimate … ummmm …. no.”

“You don’t remember it? I wrote it, you directed it, we shot it on the stage in Van Nuys? Fifteen years ago.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Well, it’s available on Pay-Per View in my room for $19.95. I don’t fucking believe it, fifteen years later and someone’s still making money off that fucker.”

“I don’t remember it. Can I hang up now?”

Previously in Return To L.A. (Briefly): That Sort of Courtyard

Thought y’all might care to take a gander at an appreciation Joseph Mailander wrote at Street Hassle yesterday regarding the series of posts about my recent return visit to L.A.:

I have now known Rodger Jacobs for about four years—a college degree’s worth of time. His body of work crosses classes, crowds, cultures; it’s not the Authorized Version, and that’s its special place: it’s LA, unauthorized and unrepentant. For fiction, he will squeeze a character named Bukowski next to a cartoon figure, perchance Pinocchio or Woody Woodpecker; as a critic, he snarks in a way that gives more rise to laughter than bitterness, even if the first anecdote he turns to is a desperately private one. He does not suffer fools gladly, and these tend to feel sheepish on approach.

Read Jacobs’ L.A. Unauthorized

Oh … I stayed at the remarkable Beverly Garland Hotel (yes, that Beverly Garland, for you film geeks out there) during my business trip, hence the photo.

Peering down from the balcony of my seventh-floor hotel room, I spy a woman in the courtyard. It’s one of those California faux Hacienda-style courtyards, wistfully recalling the lost days of Spanish occupation and the large landed estates used for ranching or farming by the proud landholders, lots of land that would someday become the cities we recognize today as San Diego and Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Monterey, Carmel and Sacramento. A mosaic of brick and clay and mortar and limestone and warm earth colors. Soft brown clay pottery in the flower beds. Four columns of trees rising from circular concrete embattlements in the far corners of the courtyard, the tips towering above the roof of the hotel.

And on a warm night like this you can almost hear the mariachi music blaring and see the long and colorful Spanish skirts swaying to the vibrant, life-affirming music and smell the frijoles and char-broiled pollo on the wind. You can taste the tequila and the vain-glory in your throat. And the dust too; you choke on that.

It was that sort of courtyard. A California courtyard. A Los Angeles courtyard.

And there was a woman in that courtyard. She wore a solid black dress and clutched a red purse to her bosom with one hand. With the other hand, she gestured frantically in the air as she engaged in animated discussion with a squat white-haired elderly gentleman in a dark sportcoat and slacks. The woman in the black dress with the red purse, it appeared from my limited vantage point, was no one’s idea of youth either.

I smoked a cigarette, unwinding from another day on set, and spied upon their conversation, feeling like a silent movie-goer in the twenty-second balcony row at some grand old movie palace, unable to read the title cards from such nosebleed seats.

But the story went something like this: blah, blah, blah, I’m really pissed off about this and (wave of the hand in the air) blah, blah, blah, Goddamn those sonsofbitches.

Suddenly the white-haired gentleman in the sportcoat and slacks recalls that conversation is a two-way street. He now has a thing or two to offer to the dialogue; and as he delivers his aria he, too, gestures frantically in the air with his hands. And then she raises her voice an octave against his, drowning out his protests with eardrum-splitting intensity; her hands flail like butterflies with a language of their own. 

Abruptly the hand speech between the old woman in the black dress and the old man in the sportcoat unite in meaning. They speak loudly and gesture with great force and emphasis with their electrically-charged digits and limbs, at the same thing, in unified purpose, the topic that has brought their vicious, sustaining bile around to something they can both bitterly agree upon … 

… the sad and sagging leaves of the olive tree in the fake Spanish courtyard.

Previously in Return to L.A., Briefly: Combat Mission

Actors, if they are skilled at their craft, can create drama out of thin air, can conjure theatrics out of the ordinary and mundane. Like fetching a car from behind a gated compound.

The Van Nuys soundstage where we shot today is in a bad neighborhood; a lot of small industrial parks but the surrounding residential streets are gang territory. The stage parking lot only holds six vehicles so street parking is mandatory for everyone, cast and crew alike, to accommodate craft services vehicles, the grip and lighting truck, and the production manager’s vehicle.

Lou, our lead actor, was apparently determined not to park his beautiful red truck on the gang-ridden street so arrangements were made for him to use the gated parking lot belonging to the anonymous brown warehouse across the street.

8:10 PM. Production wraps for the day. Lou, who lives across the street from the hotel I’m residing at in Studio City, offers me a lift. We crossed the dimly-lit street crisscrossed with shadows of evil gangbanging intent hanging over our heads and we stopped at the gate keypad. Lou punched in the code.

“8787 Star,” Lou said to me over his shoulder. “That’s the code. If that gate starts to close.”

The motor that churns the gate chain rolled into action with a shudder and when there was enough space for Lou to pass through, be darted into the parking lot and began jogging to his Jeep. He called out over his shoulder to me as he picked up his pace: “8787 STAR! If the gate starts to close!”

He jerked open the door, slamming it behind him as he leaped into the driver’s seat. The engine turned over in a mad rush, the headlights flared, and Lou kicked the Jeep into gear.

The gate began to close. I ran to the gate keypad. The Jeep was rapidly approaching but the margin for escape from the lot was decreasing with every creak of the gate’s closing.

8787 STAR

I had to get Lou out of there. Hadn’t he expressed that urgency by asserting, not once but twice, that it was imperative for me to remember the gate code?

The gate halted in mid-slide and wavered, as if making up its mind what to do, and then, slowly it began to open once more as the headlights of the Jeep grazed my eyes.

Previously in Return To L.A., Briefly: Mailander, Shannon and Markland

The Tam O’Shanter

Atwater Village

3:00 PM

Mailander, looking hale and hearty after all he’s been through with Lynn’s grueling and punishing chemotherapy cycles, in fact he’s downright jovial. I had forgotten what a calming, soothing voice he has and how his every response in conversational ebb and flow is well-considered and without pause.

Mailander enjoys meeting David Markland, online columnist for KNBC and Blogging L.A. and there is plenty of gossip about BLA contributors. Do you know what Ruth 666 once told Markland at a party? Were you aware that Jason Burns is actually a good writer and that Sean Bonner has a Beanie Baby collection? Sean also has all of the BLA contributors under some kind of mind control thing where they are left rendered helpless against an insatiable desire to point out assinine parking, backed up by photographic evidence. This is what Markland told us.

Mailander suggested that I was somehow in my milieu in North Beach, living among artists, writers, poets, musicians, painters, saloon keepers, book store clerks … and he is correct. I did so belong to that Bohemian scene — it still exists in North Beach, folks — but it’s also, as I pointed out to Joseph, a precarious Eugene O’Neill lifestyle that I opted out of.

So now I’m living a semi-tranquil lifestyle in Las Vegas, writing and caring for my ailing mother and doing this 8-day L.A. flyover and reconnecting with a city that I finally realize, after an absence of a year and a half,  I really and truly love. There’s a vibrancy here. A hum. A center.

John Shannon. John was there, of course, looking a little more gaunt than I last saw him but still with the beard and the booming, wisdom-laced voice and playful eyes and astute knowledge of contemporary literature. John speaks fondly and affectionately of his wife; they recently bought a house together in Topanga. John knocked back ten Dewars and waters and stumbled out of the bar screaming “Jack Liffey is a fucking asshole!”

That’s the last we saw of John. But we have it on good authority that he’s heading towards Bakersfield.

 Mailander’s Take: Pub Scrawl

Previously in Return to L.A., Briefly: San Fernando Road: In The Dismal Swamp