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Sample Chapters
Meet Clyde Langtry, Part One
This Is Our Nontraditional Historical Landmark
Meet People Who've Interacted with Famous People
Meet Clyde Langtry, Part One
In the four years Clyde Langtry has been my neighbor, I’ve had an awful lot of conversations with him and made careful observations. I’ve distilled the evolution of Clyde’s insanity to the following: Mother nut met father nut. They had Clyde.
One day, he was explaining to me that his cats run away. That’s right, cats, plural, run away, on a regular basis, proving that animals have an intuitive intelligence that humans can’t begin to approach. Ergo, Clyde took to hiring a cat psychic to tell him where his cats ran to so Clyde could go find them. Clyde told me that the psychic had divined the location of the latest runaway to a neighborhood about a mile southeast of our apartment building, and he had to find a time soon to go look for it.
Where do you start with news like that? Good question, and I needed a good answer at that time because it was the very first conversation I ever had with Clyde. This is how he introduced himself to me back in 2001. Since then, he’s been undoing that first impression by reinforcing it.
Furthermore, Clyde likes to talk. If I make the egregious error of walking out to my car while Clyde is around, I’m bound to get stopped and lectured on auto mechanics or nutribiotics or whatever else is shorting out his hard-wiring that day. Being a polite guy, I try to listen, giving him the benefit of the doubt every time that what he’s about to say is going to lead to something remotely relevant. Doubt has long been erased. Now I just listen to him for the material.
He’s a fan of old stereo parts, which he proudly buys on eBay, all for a grand home entertainment system he’s building. He likes chatting about his cats, how he “trains” them to fear street traffic, how his orange cat is the reincarnation of his previous cat of the same name. He proudly refers to the lemon tree in back as “his,” though he doesn’t water or prune it. He also used to skydive. No word on whether or not the chutes opened a little late sometimes, if you know what I mean.
And oh yeah, he’s a Scientologist. Texts from his boy, L. Ron, as Clyde refers to him, have taught him much about human nature. I know this because, on lucky occasion, Clyde delivers impromptu lectures on human nature. One particular subtopic warm to his heart is how most people don’t come close to maximizing their potential. I’m tempted to explain to Clyde either that L. Ron is L. Wrong, or that Clyde’s maximized potential equates to spending his autumn years in a one-bedroom apartment and driving a trashed Ford Taurus.
Clyde occasionally criticizes President Bush. Not about his politics or the Iraq war or anything like that. He criticizes Bush’s mind and soul, prattling on about Bush’s eyes or aura or something. “I’m very good at reading people,” Clyde likes to say during such conversations. He can’t figure out why he has no friends, but he’s very good at reading people.
The creepy irony is that Clyde is nearly the spitting image of George W. Bush. If he combed his hair and put on a suit, they could almost be twins. But Bush talks like a smug Texan and walks with a matching swagger. Clyde talks like he’s constipated and strides like he just graduated from debutante school. Plus, I doubt Clyde owns a suit.
Sometimes the details of my chats with Clyde are a bit sketchy. The man just talks so much, I don’t have the capacity to memorize every word. This is compounded by the phenomenon that sometimes when Clyde’s talking to me, I tune out and think about women or beer or how serene the world must be to deaf people.
This leads to the issue of trying to end a conversation with Clyde. I’ve tried oblique approaches but they don’t work. As soon as we reach something resembling a lull, I might invite him in to join me for six or seven tequila shooters, knowing he doesn’t drink. He responds by telling me again that he doesn’t drink, bragging about how few drinks he’s had in the last thirty-odd years—and drones on about the evils of dissipation. When I try to go for a wrap with something more off -putting, such as, “Well, I gotta hit the toilet. My diarrhea’s about to explode on me again,” Clyde lectures me about my diet.
Clyde’s fascinating to me because I can’t figure out how he got this way, abovementioned theory notwithstanding. Believe it or not, though, I have figured out why his cats run away.
Some time ago, Clyde and his wife, Priscilla, who is not outwardly nuts except for her choice in husbands, were going out of town for several days and asked our landlord, Ken, to feed the cats. All the food was in the refrigerator, in little dishes, each covered with plastic wrap, each labeled for each cat. All Ken had to do was uncover and set out each dish on each day. Slam-dunk, right?
That’s what Ken thought until he opened their fridge and found little dishes of vegetables. Clyde neglected to tell Ken that he thinks cats shouldn’t eat meat, especially that processed stuff made by pet food companies. Ken, however, embraced his humanity by going to the store for cans of Fancy Feast and tossing the vegetables. By the time Clyde and Priscilla came home from their trip, all the veggie bowls were empty and all traces of the meat were gone.
A few days later, Clyde thanked Ken and asked, in amazement, what Ken did to make the cats so happy and energetic.
That’s enough about Clyde for now. And this on a day when I read in Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success that one should train oneself to reserve all judgments about other people. Clearly, Deepak Chopra has never lived in an apartment building in Los Angeles.
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This Is Our Nontraditional Historical Landmark
Los Angeles has a rich history, one that we’ve paved over with offices, apartment buildings, mini-malls, and lots of other useful crap that we need. It’s not that we don’t value our history. It’s just that there is more value in destroying it and building new stuff on top of it. Since the value-niks outnumber the preservationists in both quantity and capital in this town, the commercial buildings outnumber the historical ones by a mile.
For all of our apparent disdain for our own history, L.A. was actually at the forefront of city preservationist movements. In 1962, when it occurred to enough people that urban overgrowth was swallowing our past, Los Angeles enacted the Cultural Heritage Ordinance. It was one of the first of its kind enacted in any major urban center, even predating a similar ordinance in New York by three years. Under our city’s ordinance, the Cultural Heritage Commission, a five-member panel of mayor-appointed citizens, was created to review and recommend sites for landmark status, a designation that over 700 of them have since received.
In one instance, preservationists even managed to relocate our history. In 1969, a group of prominent citizens teamed up with the help of the city’s Cultural Heritage Board to create Heritage Square, a sanctuary that now consists of eight historic buildings—and a recently acquired boxcar. The square is on some unused acreage at the end of a cul-de-sac in a Highland Park neighborhood where urban overgrowth appears unlikely to encroach. In one way, is encouraging. We revere our history so much that we make the effort to find a compromise with the commerce that threatens it. When looked at another way, however, it’s kind of sad that we think so little of our history that, rather than let it be, we shove some of it in a vacant lot in the barrio.
But generally, our history, unlike the rest of our city, remains hidden and unflashy—and, except for rare instances like Heritage Square, not freeway-close. If the average tourist came up to the average L.A. resident and asked him where a guy could go to look at historical landmarks, the average L.A. resident would be stuck for an answer. Some people would suggest downtown, but few would be able to name more than Union Station and Olvera Street. Some people might suggest visiting the missions, even though most of us don’t know where they are—or even how many we have. There was a time, not that long ago, that if any tourist asked me where to find historical landmarks, I would have suggested Boston.
I’ve since been somewhat enlightened. I would suggest tourists—and locals—find a copy of Landmark L.A. Nearly 500 pages of photos and multiple cross-referenced indexes make this the definitive guide to our city’s historic and cultural landmarks. Anyone who thinks we are nothing but a bunch of money-grubbers need only look at the 700 sites listed in Landmark L.A. Why, we have century-old Victorians. Frank Lloyd Wright residences. Sleek postwar buildings.
And pallets.
When I first got this book, I went straight to the section on San Fernando Valley landmarks. What were the cool old things in my valley that I must know about? The Van Nuys City Hall is in the book. Cool. I’ve been there. The La Reina Theater on Ventura Boulevard is in the book. I saw movies there before it was turned into a Gap outlet. There are a bunch of other places I’ve never even heard of, some of which I’ve driven by and never noticed. I must visit these places, I thought.
Then on page 243 was something called “Tower of Wooden Pallets.” It was located in Sherman Oaks, halfway down the part of Magnolia Boulevard that dead-ends at the San Diego Freeway. Maybe I don’t have an artistic eye, but in the picture, it looked like a five-foot-tall woodpile in an empty lot. A couple of years ago, I did a drive-by of this “monument” just to see what it was all about. There was a chain-link fence around the property, there was a bunch of brush growing over everything, and near the street was a pile of wood that vaguely resembled the photo in the book. I don’t think I even turned my engine off. I just made a U-turn and got on with life.
But perusing the book again compelled me to dig deeper this week, so I did a little legwork about the pallets. In 1951, a man named Daniel Van Meter lived on the property, and he was known largely for being eccentric. Among other things, he was once convicted of failing to register as a subversive during World War II. One day, he heard that the Schlitz Brewery was going to discard 2,000 wooden beer pallets. So he schlepped up to Schlitz and took them back to his property, where he built them in a stack around, he claimed, the burial site of a child who died in 1869. In 1977, when the fire department said it was a hazard and threatened to demolish it, Van Meter sought refuge via historic and cultural landmark status from the Cultural Heritage Commission. The next year, he got it. As Jeffrey Herr, Arts Manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, writes in the preface to Landmark L.A., the list is “peppered with some nontraditional landmarks that help define the character of Los Angeles.” Then again, as one commission member later said of their decision, “Maybe we were drunk.”
Since Van Meter died in 2000, his family has been seeking to undo the commission’s decision so they can sell the property, a 1.43-acre lot valued at $7 million by one estimate. The present plan is for a developer to build an apartment complex on the site, a move that would fulfill a jeremiad that Van Meter wrote nearly 30 years ago: “In a few years, this piece of the good earth may be covered by apartments for the storing of surplus people.”
I found out something else: It wasn’t a five-foot-high pile of wood. It was a 22-foot-tall room, a cavern with a staircase spiraling around the outside and a plumb line hanging from the roof. I even found a picture of Van Meter standing inside it, holding a chicken. Why doesn’t it look like that in the picture? Why didn’t I see this thing on my drive-by a couple of years ago? How can you miss a 22-foot-tall building made of beer pallets? Wait—did I read on another Web site that it was sagging, or had been partially demolished, thus the five-foot-high pile? Now I had to see it. Wednesday afternoon, I dropped what I was doing and raced down Magnolia Boulevard to get what may be a last look.
I found a parking spot across the street from the lot, which looked bigger than when I last remembered it. Something else was different too: The gate was open. I wandered in and found a photographer, a genial fellow who had been contracted by a historian to take pictures of the thing. Take pictures of what, I couldn’t tell. It was an abandoned lot filled with weeds, brush, trees, and, as I discovered, junk, including a bus and at least two cars. I followed him deeper into the lot.
Then I saw it. Landmark L.A. got the wrong photo. This thing was for real. It may have been sagging, but it was still 22 feet high, or thereabouts. It was an igloo-shaped thing, an overgrown beehive clearly laid out with thought and care. The photographer told me I could go in if I wanted. A narrow entrance had been built into the side. I went in. It was dirty and grubby and had empty bottles on the dirt floor, but the plumb line was still there, a cement anchor hanging from a beam across the top of the open-air roof. Hundreds of prismatic views of the outdoors could be seen in every direction through the pallets. God, it was quiet inside. It may have once been a glorious sanctuary, the kind of place that a convicted unregistered subversive probably enjoyed building and sitting in during his spare time.
The photographer referred me to a freelance historian who was overseeing the photography as part of a survey of the property. She explained that before demolition of a designated city landmark could be authorized, a historical documentation of the structure and the land around it had to be conducted. But it was largely a formality, she said. Th e apartment complex isn’t a done deal, but it looks like the developer is going to get his way.
A determination of the artistic merits of the pallets has been playing out since Van Meter’s death. A 2004 environmental impact report included an analysis of the tower from an artistic and historic perspective. The analysis deemed it historically insignificant and artistically uninventive. The historian I met said that, on occasion, museums and galleries raise funds to disassemble, transport, and reconstruct large pieces such as this at their venues. To date, no such facility has stepped up to do this. Except for a 2005 Los Angeles Times article about it, there has been little mention in the media about the tower’s threatened destruction. Unlike other historic monuments that are faced with demolition, no outraged preservationists, prominent scholars, or concerned citizens appear to be doing anything to save the pallets.
It would appear that, at the moment, the pallets’ only hope is me.
I don’t know when art should trump commerce, and the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with the idea of arbitrating such things. Lacking the ability and the desire to assign a dollar value to the pallets, I’m left with a default view: As much as I loathe the trend toward expensive ticky-tack rental property overtaking the city, I’m all for individual liberty. I see no reason why the owners shouldn’t be as free to sell this property to a developer as the previous owner was to use it for a giant fort that his goats could pee on.
But as long as I’m here, if you or someone you know has the wherewithal to rescue this tower and properly move it to Heritage Square or elsewhere for preservation, well, that would be nice. What’s a city full of nontraditional people without a peppering of nontraditional landmarks?
Author’s footnote: At press time, the tower had been razed, and a giant apartment complex for the storing of surplus people was being built on the lot.
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Meet People Who’ve Interacted with Famous People
Celebrity is rampant in this town. This month alone, I saw Walter Koenig, the guy who played Chekov on Star Trek, coming out of my post office. I saw Leonard Maltin at my Trader Joe’s—where, last week, I also saw William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman getting out of their car. At my coffeehouse, Morgan Fairchild made one of her regular visits, to the regular excitement of approximately no one. Also at the same coffeehouse, I saw some guy claiming to be a music producer hit on a pretty blonde who herself was claiming to have been the star of Bring It On Again, the straight-to-video sequel to Bring It On. I don’t know what the star of Bring It On Again looks like, so no telling if it was really her. Then again, who’d lie about such a thing?
Of course, just by mentioning the above names, I risk being accused of the regional crime of name-dropping. Name-droppers are people who try to prove to everyone how cool they are by their brushes with fame. In truth, these people can get annoying. You ask them what’s new, and invariably, it involves a celebrity. I have this casual acquaintance, a musician, who always mentions some known music personality among his latest gigs or recording sessions, never anything personal like he has a new girlfriend or he took a vacation to Peru or anything like that. One time—this goes back some years—when I asked him what was new, he said his band was going to appear on The Tonight Show in a month. It didn’t happen. Next thing I know, he was fi red from his band. (He was the backup percussionist.)
The line between merely mentioning celebrity sightings and trying to appear exceedingly cool due to such mentioning can be a fine one. On the one hand, if someone asks you what’s new, you’d be a fool—a fool, I tell you—not to mention that you had the chance to gawk at Winona Ryder’s ass in a movie theater lobby to see if she wore underwear or not. (I couldn’t tell.) Since stories like that would be considerably lamer without saying the famous person’s name, your only other option would be not to tell them at all. But then you’d have no one to share your excitement with. If you practice this form of self-censorship too much, you find yourself stifling your excitement entirely. Before you know it, you’re seeing Adam Arkin squeezing produce at the market and not thinking twice about it.
However, a charge of name-dropping is as much a function of the accuser as much as it is of the accused. I’ve noticed that not just anyone accuses other people of name-dropping. The same small group of people always levels the accusation. Let’s just call them what they are: name-dropper finger-pointers. These are people who get instantly or unnaturally irritated just by the dropping of a name, regardless of the context. My theory is that they’re just jealous that the woman who played Ted Baxter’s wife on The Mary Tyler Moore Show didn’t ask them to put a letter in the nearby mailbox because she couldn’t reach it from her car. (Happened to me. Happened to me. Swear to God.)
Then there are insiders, people who have so many of these stories and sightings that they look at garden-variety name-droppers as merely annoying. Some just ignore name-droppers, but some are insecure enough to one-up a namedrop, either with a bigger name-drop or a request to stop gossiping about a friend of theirs. A writer friend of mine witnessed this up close and painfully once. She was talking to an agent when Norm McDonald’s name came up. “Did you see him on Leno last night?” she asked him. “The guy was out of it!”
The agent responded, “He’s my golfing buddy.”
Getting back to the name-dropper finger-pointers, they do have a point: Famous people are just like the rest of us, so why get all animated when you see or hear about them doing mundane things? Good question, yet we’re still fascinated when we hear stories reiterating this. To give just one random example of boring celebrity normalcy, I recently heard on good authority that an A-list movie star was permanently banned from a local spa because he kept asking the masseurs to massage his rectum. Now, I ask you, what’s so interesting about that?
At this point you’re probably wondering who the movie star is. And if there were any way of telling you without getting sued, I’d do it. Why? Because we’re fascinated with famous people. This is why name-droppers drop names, why name-dropper finger-pointers are jealous that they don’t hear such stories, and why insiders volunteer either that it’s old news or that _____’s rectum is looser than the Cahuenga Pass.
And these are just my stories. Everyone in town has their own. And as interesting as the stories are, it ultimately doesn’t make much difference if you have a brush with celebrity not. Would my friend Max be a lesser friend if he hadn’t played darts with Eric Idle one night at a pub? Would my friend Sally have a void in her life if Tobey Maguire hadn’t flirted with her at the Oscars a few years ago? Is my friend Jennifer a better person because George Clooney once bought her a drink at the Formosa Café?
No, no, and no. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to my coffeehouse to see if the star of Bring It On Again shows up so I can hit on her. With any luck at all, she’ll go with me Saturday night to a club to see an actor/musician friend of mine play. And who wouldn’t want to go? My friend, it just so happens, is the guy who says “Toasty!” at the end of the talking-baby Quizno’s commercials.
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