Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (16 page)

But returning home to the ranch house, which was now empty save those mawkish light fixtures, I found myself in the basement sobbing so hard over the clothes dryer that I literally
could not stand up. It was a worse display than even the one I’d unleashed in Topanga after learning I wasn’t getting Northwest 207th Street and Rural Route G. There were heaving sobs, jaw spasms, gag reflexes. Back then, I’d merely been denied the prize behind door number one. Now the game was over. And unlike back then, when I hadn’t known exactly why I was coming so unglued, I knew exactly what this meltdown was about. It was a bitter pill I could taste even through the hard rain pouring from my face. It was the dirty truth about my relentless search for “domestic integrity.” It was this awful fact: you cannot pursue authenticity at the same time you are pursuing fabulousness. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be the down-home farm girl and the queen of lower Fifth Avenue at the same time. You cannot be Maggie O’Connell (the floatplane-piloting, pixie-haircut-sporting, flannel-shirt-wearing cutie from
Northern Exposure)
and also Carrie Bradshaw from
Sex and the City
. You cannot be Dorothy Parker and also Willa Cather. To attempt to be both of these things is to be not only neither but in fact nothing.

I indulged this grief for twenty minutes or so. Then I took my clothes out of the dryer and went upstairs. And the next morning I got in the car and drove west. This time without detours.

F
or six weeks, I lived in a two-story Spanish Colonial in the foothills of Beachwood Canyon, just below the Hollywood sign. I was dogsitting. The plan was to look after two border collies until their owner, a friend of a friend who was working in New York, “sent for” them (this conjured the nonsensical but nonetheless disturbing image of packing the dogs into steamer trunks), after which Rex and I would have the place to ourselves. This was supposed to happen within a few weeks of my arrival, which is why I was paying $1,450 a month rent, an amount that was too high considering the dog care duties and too low considering the size and location of the house. Perhaps as such, the dogs were never sent for, and I continued to pay rent anyway. I was supposed to be writing articles or thinking up ideas for screenplays or television pilots. But because I found it nearly physically impossible to walk three dogs simultaneously, I often went on three or four separate walks a day, which cut into my writing time significantly.

Speaking of dogs, I’m obliged here to give a little shout-out to Rex. He had grown up to be a large, yaklike creature, and
he was unequivocally my favorite thing in the world. I’d had pets growing up, but they all were cats (in keeping with my parents’ relentless musical motif, two consecutive orange tabbies had been named for Bach’s
Magnificat
—Niffy One and Niffy Two) and were of course aloof and subtle and noninteractive in the ways cats often are. But having a dog was a whole other story. Having a dog was like having a child that was at once fearfully mature (can be left alone for hours at a time) and entirely feebleminded (notably low IQ). And though I had little interest in an actual child of my own, I loved Rex as if he were precisely that. Just three years old, he’d logged thousands of miles in the back of the car and lived at seven different addresses. Throughout this, he never peed indoors, never wandered off, never so much as chewed on a rug. Docile to the extreme and a nonbarker (at twelve weeks old, he’d barked nonstop for an entire day and then given it up entirely), he was a canine Zen master. He was a calming force among all people and even most other dogs. He could lower your blood pressure simply by leaning against your leg. And for these reasons—not to mention the fact that I was the kind of person for whom loving a dog was infinitely easier than loving a human—I had not for one second entertained the thought of not taking him along on my moves.

I had, however, occasionally allowed myself to think about how many more housing options would have been available to me sans pet, especially sans long-haired, slobbering, eighty-five-pound pet. Today as back then, one of the wonders of Los Angeles is that housing, though terrifyingly expensive to buy (somehow, even when the housing market sank into the San Andreas Fault, this remained largely the case), is relatively affordable to rent, at least by the New York City standards to which I still compared just about everything. If you can let go
of the idea of living near the beach, you can find a two-bedroom Spanish Colonial–style apartment with arched doorways, a dishwasher, and off-street parking for about what you might pay for a room in a Brooklyn share. If you have a few dollars to rub together, you can rent yourself a sleek mid-century pad in Santa Monica or a stark industrial loft downtown. But if you have a large dog, it doesn’t matter how much money you do or do not have. You need a house with a yard. The yard needs to be fenced. The neighborhood needs to be relatively pedestrian-friendly since it’s nice to be able to walk the dog without butting up against a freeway or a crack house. Moreover, you need a landlord who isn’t going to look at an eighty-five-pound yak/dog and tell you he’d rent to a group of unsupervised high-school boys before letting that beast walk on his newly refinished floors. In other words, you have to rent from other dog people. And dog people tend to have dog properties.

Ergo the Beachwood Canyon house. It was, in many respects, a delight: a three-bedroom, three-bath Mediterranean villa with Mexican tile and screened French doors and bougainvillea bushes arcing around the iron gates. It was also exploding with debris: dog poop on the patio, dog hair on every piece of furniture, and all manner of dog- and human-related clutter on every possible surface. At night, the border collies ascended and descended the stairs as though they were training for a boxing match. During the day, they flung themselves in and out of the dog door until I had no choice but to close it, which caused them to whine like toddlers. Rex just stood there and stared at them blankly, the canine equivalent to shaking your head in pity.

It was shades of Dani’s place all over again. How had I managed to do this to myself once more? Why was I again
holding myself hostage in someone else’s chaos? Where did I get this uncanny knack for moving to places that, thanks to lack of drawer space or floor space or drinkable water, ultimately proved to be as uninhabitable as they were ostensibly desirable?

As my brother and I used to say (actually, as we still say), duh, duh, and duh. It was all so woefully obvious. When you’re more concerned about where your dog goes to the bathroom than where you go to the bathroom, the chances that you’ll sign a lease on a decent property go down considerably. I realized this one morning while sitting on the terrace, attempting to eat breakfast al fresco among a flurry of stuffing that one of the border collies had ripped from the sofa. I had a bruise on my leg that I’d incurred by walking into an elliptical trainer I hadn’t noticed because it was doubling as a clothes rack. I decided I had to move right away. I would sign a yearlong lease and not break it under any circumstances. I called the friend of the friend and told him I had to leave. He sent for his dogs. Apparently, they loved New York.

I was embarrassed to be moving again, but I felt I was making progress, mostly because the next house might as well have had my name spray painted across the front. It was a farmhouse. Right there in L.A. Granted, it didn’t look
exactly
like a farmhouse. If you were actually in the country, you would not point to this house and think, “That’s where the farmer and his wife sit down to Rice-A-Roni every night.” But against the backdrop of palm trees and steep hills and tattooed young people riding fixed-gear bicycles on the sidewalks, it almost looked as if it had blown in from Nebraska on the winds of a tornado. It was a 1908 Dutch Colonial with yellow clapboard siding and a slate roof, a redbrick chimney, and creaky steps leading to a wide-planked wooden stoop. When I happened to drive by this
place and saw a For Rent sign on the fence, I was so afraid of someone snatching it up—never mind that it had been available for weeks—that I called the number on the sign twelve times in less than two hours.

This neighborhood was the aforementioned Silver Lake, an ultra-trendy area east of Hollywood that was still slightly funky in places. Latino families who’d lived there for generations now shared the streets with hipsters who had a fondness for converted bio-diesel Mercedeses and rockabilly hairstyles. Silver Lake is about twenty miles from the beach and in the summer can be twenty degrees warmer and considerably smoggier. But the housing prices are cheaper, and the people tend to be less proselytizing (though this is a generalization about a generalization) about things like soy and the healing powers of “body work” (I’m not talking about cars), and after my less-than-stellar experiences in Topanga and Venice, I’d decided that as much as I loved the ocean breezes I was an east sider at heart.
*

When talking to non-Angelenos, I’m often tempted to explain the “east side” by saying that it is to L.A. what Brooklyn now is to New York City or Oakland to the Bay Area or Belltown to Seattle. It’s where the cool kids live, or where the gentrifiers do their gentrifying, or where rich but not obscenely rich people can pay $850,000 for a three-bedroom house as opposed to $1.3 million for a condo on the west side. But gentrification issues notwithstanding, the east side of L.A.
is not Brooklyn or Oakland or Belltown. It is its own region comprised of highly individualized neighborhoods—Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Mount Washington—and sections within those neighborhoods—too many to name here—that are themselves their own things. I won’t launch into a geographical treatise here (I’d get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn’t lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong), but suffice it to say these are the city’s old neighborhoods. Hilly and hot and swirling with vegetation and murals and taco trucks and—in many pockets—more brown skin than white, these are the regions where populations of artists and radicals in the 1930s and 1940s morphed into heavily Latino populations in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, Silver Lake became a locus of gay culture, and Echo Park became a gangland. By the 1990s, Silver Lake was brimming with hipsters, and Echo Park was slowly beginning its rise into a “desirable” neighborhood. In 1995, a six-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian in the Angelino Heights section of Echo Park would have sold for under $100,000. Less than a decade later, its asking price would be $1 million or more. And just to put it in perspective, a few miles away on the west side (where a lot of people have never heard of or would be afraid to come to Echo Park) such a property could cost $6 million.

Anyway, it was now 2003. The rent on the urban farmhouse, which was in the heart of Silver Lake near an adult video store and a Catholic elementary school, was a very urban $2,000 a month. This was definitely on the high end of my price range, but the place had leaded-glass windows and a working fireplace and a built-in floor-to-ceiling china cabinet. There was a small bedroom downstairs and two more rooms upstairs. I’d have room for two of my three beds. Never mind that the kitchen was small and poorly configured with a tiny, ancient
stove and no dishwasher. Never mind that you had to park on the street. Never mind that the house’s sole bathroom was right off the kitchen, a location that, should nighttime visits be necessary, would require stumbling through four separate rooms and descending a dark staircase. Never mind that if I’d spent another week or two looking at rentals, I could probably have found something better and cheaper, maybe even with a dishwasher and central air-conditioning. Patience wasn’t my racket that fall. I needed a house of my own right away.

Part of the reason, I’m embarrassed to say, is that I had a date. This was a very big deal. Lest you thought in my account of the previous few years I’ve been coyly omitting any mention of romance, I’m afraid that there was nothing to omit. I had an ongoing platonic friendship with Ex, but when it came to real boyfriends or real dates or even just flirty encounters at Trader Joe’s (why is it that even the most banal exchange at Trader Joe’s—“where’s the frozen rice?” for example—sounds as though you’re asking if someone’s an Aquarius?), my life had been nunlike for nearly two years.

Not that this bothered me significantly. Not that I’d even really much noticed. That’s because moving, like chocolate and sunshine, stirs up many of the same chemicals you ostensibly produce when you’re in love. At least it does for me. Like a new lover, a new house opens a floodgate of anticipation and trepidation and terrifying expectations fused with dreamy distractions. It’s all encompassing and crazy making. You can’t concentrate at work. You space out while driving. Granted, you’re buying curtains and dish drainers and wastebaskets instead of getting manicures and buying lingerie, but the adrenaline rush is shockingly similar: you close your eyes at night and see only your new kitchen; you meet your friends for lunch and can speak only of your closet space.

No wonder I hadn’t needed sex. I was drowning in the eros of real estate. But after five whirlwind romances with various households, the sudden opportunity to revisit the human version of a relationship was surprisingly compelling. (I also worried that I was one holiday season away from turning into one of those people who send Christmas cards with photos of their dogs.)

Hoping to prevent such a fate, I’d allowed a tall, light-haired man whose acquaintance I’d made some weeks earlier to pick me up at the house in Beachwood Canyon and take me to watch Chinese acrobats perform at the Hollywood Bowl. This went well enough—it’s hard to have a bad time under the summer night sky in the breezy folds of the Cahuenga Pass—but despite my date’s good looks and the romantic nature of the setting I’d found myself hoping he wouldn’t so much as hold my hand that night. It would have been all wrong. Not because he was all wrong for me (he was, but that would be revealed later), but because he had absolutely no idea who I was. Since I wasn’t living in my own place and, in my mind, couldn’t have possibly conveyed anything to him about my true essence, I might as well not have been there at all. It didn’t matter that I was wearing my own clothes and speaking my own thoughts and laughing my own laugh. All that mattered was the scene into which he stepped when I opened the door to him. All that mattered was that the furniture and artwork and kitchen supplies and the damn elliptical trainer had not been of my choosing. Two of the three dogs were not mine. The water glass I’d handed him was the product of someone else’s shopping trip to IKEA rather than my own. The result was that I felt invisible, unaccounted for, even a little nonexistent. And for those reasons alone (of course, there were others, though they seemed not worth thinking about at the time)
I refused to see the tall, light-haired man again until I’d fully moved into the urban farmhouse in Silver Lake.