Like most everything these days, we have to wait for what we want.
So it is with the rains.
They are only now showing up, in late January, three separate storms, arriving as they do in Los Angeles from the north, with a slow, steady buildup of gray clouds in the sky, perhaps the only event in our region that telegraphs its arrival with deliberate and reserved politeness.
After the first storm, we went up to Mulholland Drive where the winds were blowing and the sky was clear and the ground saturated.
From there you could see across the San Fernando Valley and into the distant San Gabriels shrouded under clouds of her own.
There is only time of year I truly adore in Southern California, and it is right now. Soon the miserly precipitation will end and the months of heat and smog will rear up again.
But right now there is glory in the sky and the views.
A formerly homeless addict refutes all the tolerant and feel-good ideas that are bandied about by Garcetti and other enablers. Here is what WEHO LIBERAL said in a letter to the LAT:
“I’m someone who once was homeless multiple times, but always stayed in shelters no matter what. NEVER, ever camp outside! It’s a dead end and that behavior is only for people with serious behavioral problems, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. If you lose your housing? You do NOT camp outside. Period.
I’ve posted multiple times about homelessness on LAT over the years. The last time I did, Nita Lilyveld (not sure if I spelled her name right) wrote about 2 young homeless people in their early twenties that I reached out to offering support and even to take them to dinner. After 2 or 3 texts between one of them where they kept saying they’d follow up with me, they flaked. No more texts. They didn’t follow up or stay in touch.
I am done with this nonsense. And I say that as a liberal Democrat who supported all of these shelters being built. Enough is enough. My mother was mentally ill her entire life and constantly refused treatment. Even when I was struggling with my own addiction, I ALWAYS made sure I had shelter.
I live in Hollywood. You see these people every day. I see them sitting or lying around their campsites when I leave for work. I come home from work and they’re still there, doing nothing but eating, urinating, defecating, some listening to the radio or watching TV on their phones. But they are always there and they make zero effort to change their lives or better their situation.
They ask me for cigarettes, they ask me for money. Their laziness and refusal to change infuriates me. I was homeless, multiple times. I’m sick and tired of LAT columnists like Steve Lopez and Nita Lilyveld pleading to help people who simply do not want to help themselves–or in the case of Lopez, only interested in finding a charity case that they can champion in press and on TV for his own ego. No, I do not care to hear about how hard Nathanial Ayers’ life is when he refuses to take his medication that would help save his life and better his living situation. My own mother refused treatment for years so I have zero sympathy for people like him who literally are victims of their own refusal to simply do what could get them housed and improve their lives.
Look, being homeless and living in either a shelter or housing provided by local government was no picnic and no fun. I was miserable. My addiction was my responsibility and I deal with it and take responsibility for it. But Lopez, Lilyveld and others like them have their own faults and shortcomings, too. It’s morally right to have compassion for others, absolutely. But people who refuse to help themselves even when others try to help them and move Heaven & Earth to do it are not worthy or deserving of compassion. They are not money pits; they are emotional black holes who will drain the time, energy and resource of everyone around them because they refuse to do what they need to do.
I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yes, I’ve been lucky and yes, I have white male privilege. But as an incest survivor and an HIV+ positive drug addict in recovery, I no longer buy what Lopez, Lilyveld, LAHSA and others like them keep preaching. It is infuriating and it’s becoming obscene. I tried to help 2 homeless young people less than half my age last year after reading about them here. For God sakes, I offered to feed them more than once. They kept making excuses and then just stopped reaching out to me.
I am done with supporting this policy and their behavior. We all need help sometimes. God knows I spent years exhausting people and it took me a long time to get my act together. But sooner or later, you have to reach deep down inside yourself, confront your problems and change your behavior as much as possible to save your own life.
I am not perfect and all of my problems are not solved. But as someone who sees homeless people every day who sit around all day doing nothing, my compassion for all but a select few is pretty much drained and gone.”
Today we went to get our first oral Covid-19 test at a free clinic set up near Van Nuys High School along Kittridge St.
When we drove up the street, a little before 9am, there was already a parking lot in the high school set up with masked attendants, and tented booths marked #1, #2, and #3. There was an ENTER sign to drive up. A woman held up two fingers and we drove up to the second tent.
Another woman asked us our first question, “Chocolate or vanilla milk?”
It was strange because we had been instructed to not eat or drink 20 minutes prior to the test. “We are here for Covid tests,” we said.
“No, no. This is for free meals for students and their families,” she said.
That cracked us up. We left that area and drove around the block looking for parking.
There was another large line of people behind St. Elisabeth’s Church. Could that be the Covid testing site? No, no. This was a food bank pantry and they were distributing groceries.
We went up to Vanowen, and then back down and we parked along Kittridge and saw a CBS-TV van filming another line of people outside of a tent. Was this the Covid-19 test line?
No, no. This was free flu shots given by USC.
Then we saw the Covid tent, and the sign, and the RV parked along the sidewalk where you went and signed in.
After we signed in, another line. Six feet apart waiting.
A tent. We were ushered in, one at a time. A masked fire department man, standing six or more feet away, instructed how to cough into your elbow, how to unzip the plastic Ziploc, how to take out the long plastic wrapped swab, how to swish it around your mouth, under your tongue, on the roof of your mouth, and then insert it into a chemical container and break off the swab so it would fit into the tube. You then disposed of the litter, dropped your sealed plastic bag into another container, fixed your mask back onto your face to cover your mouth and nose, and then you walked over to the area where they were giving free flu shots.
Before you could get your anti-flu injection, you had to scan a QR code, which created a webpage which you had to fill out, with your hands, and your poor eyesight, and your mask; fill out the form which asked you to scan your insurance card, asked for your mother’s first name, asked for your email, your home address, your allergies, your date of birth, your telephone number.
The assistants were nice, helpful. Their boss was too, after she had been interviewed by CBS news. Then you were done with the fill in the information on your smartphone and you sat down in a tent, and took off your sweater, your sweatshirt, all the layers you wore on this blustery day, and then you got your flu shot.
But the best part of the day was laughing about driving into the wrong area and being asked before anything else if you wanted vanilla or chocolate.
Today, on our morning walk, around 6:30am, we passed an old RV that had pulled up near Kittridge. A tall, gaunt, middle-aged man came out with a cigarette and a big can of Colt 45. He walked up Noble, beer and smoke in hand. And, like so many of us these days, seemed headed to nowhere in particular.
Facebook must have known I had that RV and that lost man on my mind.
For, inexplicably, on my feed today, a glossy spread advertised a $190,000 Bowlus Road Chief RV, an exact replica of the 1930s with 2020 features. They start at $190K and go up in price from there.
26 feet long, six and a half wide, 3,200 pounds, the aluminum skinned, aircraft riveted trailer sleeps four. The all-wood interior features anodized galley, five silent gravity ceiling vents, LED Lighting, luxury commercial grade flooring, hotel bathroom with privacy doors, Italian Marine shower head, vanity, and toilet with a hygienic, “easy emptying cassette system.” There is also a stainless steel bathroom sink, teak shower seating and flooring, and yours and mine large wardrobes with hanging bars.
You can park, off-grid, in any desert and still enjoy a powerful, lithium iron, phosphate power system that runs for seven days. Even the A/C blows for up to four hours a day without current. Control it all on your smart phone. If it gets cold at night, don’t worry, the floors are heated and there is continuous hot water.
A “Wyoming” décor option features “natural brown seating that is incredibly soft with an unrivaled comfort. It pairs perfectly with luxury bedding in flax and oyster. The awning has stripes of flax and beige.” It would suit one of Ralph Lauren’s mistresses.
Margarita Mixers
Hand crafted in Oxnard, California, the tale of this exquisite trailer goes back 90 years to designer, engineer and aircraft builder Hawley Bowlus who built the famed “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane which Charles Lindbergh flew to Europe in 1927, the first time a man crossed the ocean by plane.
Mr. Bowlus built some 80 Road Chiefs in the 1930s before ending his project in 1937 and returning to aircraft production. Many are still in operation today and fetch a premium.
The new CEO of Bowlus Road Chief is Ms. Geneva Long who conceived of this while in Wharton Business School. She and her company have quite a few accolades:
• The first female-founded RV company
• The first [RV] with heated floors and life-work solutions that include the first charging stations/router/wifi amplifier for personal technology
• The first direct to consumer model in the RV market with sales generated online
• An ultra-luxury market for travel trailers
• The first lithium-powered travel trailer with sophisticated power management systems
• The first truly sustainable RV
The Bowlus Road Chief is a glorious toy for any person wealthy enough to afford one for their unique and privileged leisure.
Imagine Gwyenth Kate Paltrow in Pioneertown, CA alighting from hers after lovemaking, the scent of This Smells Like My Orgasmcandle wafting out into the desert as she rubs a soothing and aromatic nutritive Tammy Fender Bulgarian Lavender Body Oil ($65) over her moistened, tanned, bony arms and hands.
RVs: An Ethical Question
My question, as always: why can’t all the innovation, design, capital, industry, and technology be applied to housing those who are desperately in need of a place to live? Are we blind and deaf to the tens of thousands camped out in tents along our streets? Do we not smell the fires that burn every single day in these drug and alcohol saturated encampments?
Why can’t Mr. Garcetti employ Ms. Long or someone from her team to build ten RV cities with lower cost versions of this? Perhaps the City of Los Angeles could have ten factories around the city to employ workers turning these out for our current housing emergency and put up ten villages around the city to house homeless. Am I insane for proposing this?
In 2016, voters passed Proposition HHH which allocated $1.2 billion to build homeless housing.
“The city estimated in 2016 that it would cost between $350,000 to $414,000 to build a unit of supportive housing (in other words, one apartment), depending on the number of bedrooms. Now, more than three years after that estimate, the median cost per unit of housing in the Prop HHH pipeline is $531,373, according to the audit.” In 2019, three years after passage, not ONE UNIT HAD BEEN BUILT.
Imagine if during WWII we were attacked in 1941 and never built one aircraft until 1944? We would be saluting Hitler today.
You could have two, nearly three luxury Bowlus Road Chiefs for the price of one unit of supportive housing.
Something is terribly wrong in our city. And his name is Eric Garcetti.
So, let us appreciate the qualities and accomplishments of the Bowlus Road Chief. And let us not forget this jewel box of an RV will travel past the freezing, the hungry and the forgotten, a misbegotten luxury which could be a template for saving many, but instead is a frivolity for the very few.
Seeking to escape the haze and home confinement, we went where we used to go on Sunday in normal times: Santa Monica.
We parked on one of the wide, flat streets north of Montana, away from crowds. And we walked in masks that we imagined shielded us from dangers visible and invisible.
At Adelaide and 4th, where a palm lined grass island ends at a cliff and now blockaded stairs, someone had written “No Vaccine” on a wall.
This year everything is No: no work, no travel, no movies, no dining out, no socializing, no school, no hugs, no kisses, no bars, no strangers, no baby visits, no old people, and, of course, no vaccine.
Before the pandemic there were many runners here, and they would run up and down the stairs, but the virus put an end to that, and now the bad air ensures it.
This part of Santa Monica is grand, with large houses, of every style and decade from the past 100 years, but everything, under the grayish, smoky skies seemed tired, out of breath, defeated; like the city and the state and the nation.
There were Porsches parked in driveways, and Mercedes speeding past, but there seemed no respite from thoughts of ruin and gloom. Who will save us? Will we burn down? Will we be safe when fascism takes over? Or will the lawless sack the mansions and the stores while hated cops stand by and watch? Will a smart leader emerge? Or shall we suffer under Q-Anon and the conspiratorial voices on Next Door?
Who shall live and who shall die and who shall find the most followers on Instagram?
Only the Shadow Knows.
Along Ocean Avenue at Georgina there is a restoration of a grand mansion, with construction illustrations of the elegant plans, and other photographs of historic and happier Santa Monica. Why there’s Mr. Pepper Gomez, Muscle Beach Contest Winner, 1950.
On Georgina there are yard signs, some of them angry. “Elect a clown, expect a circus” says one placed inside a long olive tree lined forecourt of a gated house.
Sometime from the 1940s through the 80s, this area was not so rich. There were large houses, but they weren’t expensive, so developers came in and tore down some of the historic ones and put up cheap apartments.
A 1971 apartment at 129 Marguerita is emblazoned with a strange sign: 129 Career. A door or two off Ocean Avenue, the 2-story building is remarkably plain and homely, with a side alley of individual garage doors, stucco wall and steel windows. Balconies are big and full of plastic furniture. The good life was once available at bargain prices.
And at 147 Adelaide (built 1926) there is a mysterious, long, downsloping, concrete driveway that leads into an old, wood door garage with a five-panel utility door next to it. Two spotlights were on at Noon, and in the distance, haze covered the canyon and the hills and the houses.
I went to look at just a part of it, May 1975 (3,724 images).
There are black and white photographs of entire stretches of streets in our city, for example every structure along Melrose Avenue for miles.
Many who possess far greater insights than I will concoct profundities about these pictures, connecting them to politics or music or the decline of the West.
They will project onto the photos whatever template of modern ideology they wish.
But I think these photos just are. They are the exact thing they show. And that is what makes them brilliant. For they are the essence of Los Angeles, a homely and free place of ambition and anomie.
There is 3910 Melrose Avenue with a circa 1964 Pontiac parked in front of a 1920s Spanish Style house with arched windows, topiary and a cement walled lawn.
At 7168 Melrose there is a commercial building, with a 1960s decorative screen covering over a 1920s red tiled roof and stucco façade.
Most of the photographs juxtapose car and architecture. That is the recipe. It makes us long for youth, ache for what has passed, and imagine what it might be like to drive a ’74 Camaro down spotless Melrose, listening to a Doobie Brothers 8-Track, and stopping off to pick up a bag of gourmet Brazilian nuts at Iliffili.
Sex was open and advertised in 1975. Cock of the Walk had live sexy males in private rooms. It was next door to Madam’s Cat House with sexy girls in private rooms. If you messed up your clothes you could slip in quickly next door and change into a new pair of old jeans at Hollywood Used Clothing.
Bundi’s at 8525 Melrose had stylish looking clothes. Just outside, a bus bench advertises the Jewish funeral services of Malinow Silverman.
Along 8650 Melrose, a 1969 Cadillac convertible, and a 1964 Chevy Impala coupe, are parked on the curb in front of several young, hip stores offering haircutting, needlework, a rock gallery, and Ruthe Lee Richman’s Art in Flowers.
A few doors down, Irving’s Coffee Shop served Pepsi-Cola. What kind of menu did they have ? Imagine your dining choices in 1975 Los Angeles, a 90% white city prior to the mass immigration and cuisines of Vietnamese, Filipino, Burmese, Persian, Haitian, Korean, Guatemalan, Honduran, Brazilian, Malaysian, and Sri Lankan peoples.
Imagine a city where so much was tolerated but where nobody lived under bridges or slept alongside freeways, and bus benches were used by bus riders.
Having trouble sleeping? Stop by International Water Beds. Writing letters to friends? Pick up some custom letterhead at Melrose Stationers. Is your cane chair falling apart? Frank Lew at 706 N. Orange Grove will repair it.
There are a lot of photos to look at. Like everything else these days we compare it to 2020. Even 2019 seems more like 1975 in the take-for-granted-liberties we had before the pandemic.
And now we close with these lyrics:
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free, no no
And, feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
Here in Van Nuys 
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