My old church is a condo block. The Black Dahlia site remains '50s intact. L.A. is all new and wholly familiar. It's why I ran away and why I ran back.
The street grids are unchanged. Overbuilding has blocked out views and blitzed topography. Old buildings abut pocket malls. Old parks are wrapped in iron gates. L.A. is epidemically everywhere and discernible only in glimpses.
The L.A. mandate was always enticement and expansion. That marks all growth as just and true. Hometowns should offer the proper balance of safety and inspiration. I call inspiration a sense of danger contained. L.A. got too safe 25 years ago. I got out then. My life got too dangerous five years ago. I pondered safety zones for a long interval.
I learned that I'm only safe here.
The rooms were lush. The bathtub was big. The mini-bar featured gourmet potato chips and chocolate-coated almonds. My Beverly Wilshire hotel suite--spring 2002.
I love hotel suites. They make me feel like King Farouk in exile. I bestow mystic status on L.A. hotel suites. They are safety zones and affirmations of my inflated self-hood. I spent bad years in L.A. I slept in parks and did county jail time for puerile misdemeanors. How suite it is. Let's exult in how you overcame your hometown disadvantage.
Not this time.
I was midway through a three-year crack-up. It was the upshot of long transits of overwork and emotional seepage held in check by near-insane ambition. Brutal sleeplessness and panic attacks. Sobbing jags and weightless plummets.
It was a six-week hotel stay. My alleged L.A. agenda: take a neurofeedback course to curb insomnia. My real L.A. mission: hide out and seek safety in the wild-ass place that made me.
My marriage was burning down. My nerves were shot. My mind ran in obsessive circuits. I was strung out on sedatives, sleeping pills and herbal uppers. I flew and drove around L.A., staring at women. I crashed and tried to slake my king-size sleep deficit.
I was afraid that I'd lose my mind. I was afraid that I'd fully regain my mind and return to the work regime that cracked me up to begin with. I lost my mind on an L.A. rooftop in 1975. I knew it could happen again. Drugs salved my nervous system. Drugs provided sleep. Drugs failed to quash my dreams or alter their recurring backdrop.
It was L.A. then. The old neighborhood--Beverly and Western. The park I hid out in. The locales of cop rousts and losing fistfights. The dive apartment that I ran from and left my father to die in.
