Sometimes it's nice to see what you're missing. Maybe the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. I've been living in the same small apartment ever since I first moved here. There have been times when I didn't think I could stand living there another day -- especially last week when the heat and humidity turned the place into a sweatbox. There's no air conditioner and really no way to install one without knocking a hole in the wall. I've considered it, but I think the landlord might notice the alteration. So, when I saw the ad for the hillside guest house with access to a private swimming pool, I just had to check it out.
I wasn't really looking for an apartment for myself, I was looking for one for my niece, Annie. She was out here last year for the summer and apparently liked it well enough to move out here for real. She arrived last week and has been staying with her former college roomate while looking for a car, a job and a place to live. I've been trying to help out as much as possible since I supposedly am older and wiser and better connected. Of course, she's already been invited to her first Hollywood party and I'm still reading about them in Premiere magazine. Nevertheless, I do know this town pretty well. And this town being L.A., the first order of business was to get her a car. Before she flew out here, she found a car on the internet that she really liked. I went over to check it out for her and thought it was a great deal, so by the time her plane landed at LAX, she already had a car.
Next order of business was finding a place to live. You can only crash at a friend's place for so long. Although, I do know a guy who shall remain nameless (Kevin Osborn) who lived for an entire year in New York City going from couch to couch to couch and never paying rent! And the amazing part of the story is that he remained friends with everyone involved. (Or so he says.)
Annie found a place not too far from me with a very nice young man named John and for a while there it looked like she was going to have the lodging situation all sewed up in record time. Complications arose however and now John is looking for a new place as well. Good luck John.
Meanwhile, I was checking out the local Craigslist for suitable apartments in decent neighborhoods with affordable rents when I stumbled across the hillside guest house with swimming pool. Damn! I have to see this one for myself.
The first drawback is the location. It's a long, stressed-out freeway ride from downtown to the Sepulveda Pass and I do not do well on long commutes. As it turned out, however, the day I went out there it took me exactly the same amount of time as my current commute. Hmmm. Then there's the size of the place. It's not large. In fact it was described in the listing as "compact." I already live in a "small" place, I'm not sure if I can handle "compact." But there's the pool. And it was nice, and you pretty much have it all to yourself since the widow who owns the house never uses it. She and I talked for almost an hour. She's very interesting and maybe a little lonely. I really wanted to like this place -- I mean it has a swimming pool. But for some reason it just wasn't bowling me over.
I drove back to West Hollywood and met Annie at my place. We walked over to the Italian restaurant two blocks from my apartment and had dinner. I realized while were sitting there that as claustrophobic as my place can seem sometimes, it has the three things that any real estate agent will tell you are the most important selling points for any property: location, location, location. I really am right in the middle of things and any time I feel cramped I can get up and walk to any of two dozen cafes, restaurants and bars. Or go to the nearby park or the West Hollywood Pool, or just go for a stroll on the Sunset Strip or catch a movie or even a play at one of the local theaters. So, I think I'm gonna pass on the hillside guest house with swimming pool. I'll keep checking out Craigslist every now and then, though, just in case.
And, as it turns out, a friend at work knows someone who is looking for a roomate. She sounds really nice and the rent is good and it's even closer to my place than the other one we looked at. And it has a pool. So if this works out, I may get to keep my location and still have access to a swimming pool. That is if Annie doesn't mind me coming over to visit every now and then. Hey -- I guess I do have connections after all. Who knew?
I often joke that while some people may have "emotional baggage," I have an emotional storage space where I keep everything locked away and pretend it doesn't exist. This isn't really a joke, however, I do have a storage space up in Maine near my parents summer retreat on Frye Island and it does contain an inventory of my past, packed up and labeled in boxes and crates. Or it did until last week when I finally undertook the soul-searching task of clearing it out.
When I decided to move to California, I had to stash my stuff somewhere. I came out here with only a couple of suticases and a box or two of scripts. I was starting a new life and had to leave the trappings of my former self behind. I decide to haul everything up to Maine because A) the rent was cheap and B) I had a fantasy of buying my own cottage on Frye Island someday. So in addition to boxes of books, tapes, videos and files filled with songs, stories, scripts, plays, letters, essays and articles, I also stored furniture and gadgets and clothes and kitchenware and tons of miscellaneous crap that I thought might be useful or cool to have in my imagined future home.
All that stuff has been sitting there collecting dust for the past six years while I've been busy generating and accumulating more crap out here on the West Coast. Recently my Dad built a new storage shed on the property in Maine and he suggested I sort through my stuff and figure out what I really want to keep. I could then store it in the shed instead of paying rent on it. It seemed like a reasonable idea.
To make things easier on myself I made an executive decision to give away all of the clothes and furniture. It doesn't look like I'll be buying that lakefront property anytime soon and if I do, I'll probably want nice new furniture instead of the junk I picked up off the sidewalks of Brooklyn. The one piece we will hang onto is a massive desk that my Dad got from GE about fifty years ago. The rest goes to the Salvation Army. That left me with about twenty boxes of material to go through.
Books were easy, most of the paperbacks got donated to the Frye Island library. They scored a bunch of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Ross MacDonald, and Robert Ludlum. The keepers got shelved in a cabinet in the back bedroom at my folks house. I had a couple of milk crates full of video tapes as well. Eventually some of those will go to the library too, but many of them, such as the Elvis concert videos, had to be retained as part of my musical archive. Cassette tapes were tough. What do you do with them? I'm buying only CDs now and my car doesn't even have a tape deck anymore. I suppose I could give them away, but there are so many of them and some of them haven't come out on CD yet. Besides about half of the cassettes are rare concert recordings, including my bootleg Dylan collection and then of course there are all of the tapes of my old rock bands and my short-lived solo career. These must be retained. They went up in the loft.
Now comes the hard part: the files. I saved everything. Every draft. Every note. Every copy. Every map, brochure, movie ticket, playbill, concert poster, resume, rejection letter, list, outline. I saved receipts, postcards, birthday cards, thank-you notes, phone numbers, bank statements, bills, invoices, foreign currency...
And every single little scrap of paper held a memory, an attachment, a piece of me. Some were easier to throw away than others. And some I could not throw away at all. A thank-you note from my niece when she was eight years old. An egyptian coin. My ticket stub from the Springsteen concert in '78. I put them in an old wooden cigar box.
As for the files containing all of my written output, I tried to get rid of as much as possible, keeping only the essentials. But there was just too much of it. I realized that for whatever reason, I have to keep writing. Whatever else I do, I will always do that. I found songs I had completely forgotten about. Stories and plays and poems and ideas for movies. Color-coded notecards with jokes for my short-lived stand-up career. Pages and pages and pages of words. Words.
Eventually I had to give up and just put the remaining boxes up into the loft with the videos and cassette tapes. Next summer I'll take another stab at it. But I did make a little progress. I no longer have that emotional storage space where my past is locked away and gathering dust. What I have now is a trove of memories and a body of work. Every now and then it's good to cast off some of the old baggage that's weighing you down. But it's also good to know where you come from and what you're made of. Maybe someday I'll get that cottage by the lake where I can preserve my store of memories. Maybe not. Maybe I'll just keep a few special items in an old wooden cigar box.
Meanwhile, I've got a whole new collection of junk to go through in my apartment in L.A. I'd better get a jump on it before I have to rent another storage space.
There's a fog upon L.A. And my friends have lost their way They'll be over soon they said Now they've lost themselves instead. There's a street way up in the Hollywood Hills called Blue Jay Way. About 40 years ago, when the Beatles were touring the U.S., George Harrison was staying at a house there. One foggy day he was waiting for some friends to come visit him and they got lost. So, while he waited, George sat down at the Hammond organ and wrote a song called, appropriately enough, "Blue Jay Way." It's not a very well-know Beatles song. It showed up on the Magical Mystery Tour album, which was one of those albums that only real hardcore Beatle fans bought. It's kind of a weird song about a sleepy guy sitting around waiting for his friends.
Nevertheless, I've always wanted to go to Blue Jay Way and see the house where George stayed when he was in L.A. I'm not sure exactly why I wanted to go there. I just liked the idea of George Harrison hanging out in this house in the hills and writing a song about it. So, a couple of weeks ago I went searching for Blue Jay Way, with very little to go on in the way of directions other than that you go up on Doheny and turn right on another street named after a bird.
As it turns out, there are about a dozen bird streets that wind around the Hollywood Hills near Doheny. There's Oriole, Thrasher, Warbler, Wren, Blue Bird and a bunch of others. And since I was on foot, it took me a long damn time to explore them all. Plus the hills get pretty steep up there and it was a hot afternoon and I was getting really tired and severely winded. By the time I got to the end of Oriole, which turned out to be a dead end, I was ready to give up. But as I was coming back I happened to look up Thrasher and I saw a sign that looked like it might say "Blue Jay" on it. I'd already been fooled by Blue Bird, so I didn't get my hopes up to high. But as I got closer, I saw that sure enough, I had finally found it. I was very pleased with myself for sticking with my quest. Even an arbitrary goal can have meaning if you let it.
Now to find the house. I had nothing to go on there, just that it would be one of the older houses and had a view of the city. I figured there would be something special about it that would tell me which one it was. I didn't think there would be many to choose from, because I'd read that Blue Jay Way was actually a cul-de-sac. Which it is. Eventually. First, though there's another half-mile of steep uphill grade, with dozens of 50's and 60's style houses that have city views. Still I persevered to the top. I actually had to stop about halfway because I literally ran out of breath. When I made it to the top there was a grand view of the hazy L.A. basin, but no spiritual epiphany, no flash of insight, no enlightenment. Just the realization that now I had to walk all the way back down. And don't kid yourself, walking down steep hills is strenuous work.
When I got back down to Sunset Blvd., I stopped at a cafe and guzzled a bottle of water. I don't know which house George stayed in, but I kind of picked one out and imagined it was the one. I thought about what it would be like to live way up there, looking down on the whole city every day like you were living in the clouds. I've always thought it would be really cool to live in the hills. When I'm on my street, I look up there and think about how someday I'll be up there too. It's fun to think about. I wonder if it's as cool as it seems.
I think about Blue Jay Way a lot too. I'm not sure why. It's kind of taken on a mythical status. I think about making another pilgrimage up there at some point. But maybe not. Maybe its just a state of mind. Maybe it's one of those moments in time where life just seems to make sense for no particular reason. Finding Blue Jay Way had no other meaning than the meaning I gave it, but that was all the meaning it needed. Blue Jay Way is perfect because it is what it is. Knowing that it is there makes me feel like things are O.K. It's just a street with a pretty name and a nice view, but sometimes that's all you need.
