This Place in Pacific Palisades is Better Left Alone
...Though someone, something is surely currently plotting its demise
Because of a dire circumstance that has befallen an old friend this week, I'm thinking a lot about whatever time we've got left and what we can actually do to be of help to one another while we're here. Real help. Not just the I’ll talk about it in the wake of doing nothing help we’ve grown accustomed.
This particular friend was like Billy (Rob Lowe) in St. Elmo's Fire, a really bad (read: unfair) analogy, unless you view it the way I view Billy—because I was a BIG St. Elmo's Head from about the age of seven (which, in and of itself, is problematic, I get it.)
I saw him as an unstoppable force, boyishly handsome, clever, and charming on top of that. Everyone wanted him or wanted to be him.
It's inferred, if not shown outright, that he was a raw, stellar athlete (and sax soloist.)
He could do things that mortals, even the privileged few in his group, simply—couldn't—and then shrug and laugh about it. But beneath it all just under the surface of all this devil-may-careness—a goofy kid, a good guy, a tiny but piercing beam of light.
When he goes back to campus, into the fold, to see whether he can do anything to "help out" at the frat, that some legends, as legends do, fade over time. But then again, they're still them. And there he was, final scene, doing what he does best, putting it all on the line during a cocaine emergency and letting himself just—be there.
That’s also the thing with the folks in our lives who are larger than life, or at one time were. We tend to turn them into caricatures when they're simply mortal. We tend to project our own insecurities and shortcomings on them and look to them as a kind of beacon, and sometimes, when they mess up or fade, we quietly approve because we know ultimately they’re just as fragile as the rest of us.
Anyway, I'm thinking about my friend, the man who everyone at my college (EVERYONE!) knew or knew of for a handful of years, who's now in the ICU fighting for his life.
I'm thinking about his family, his other friends, and the community at-large who knew him or knew of him. I'm thinking about the last year (but really the last several decades) and how little we value individual lives now.
…The people who shine bright enough that the memory of them and their brightness eclipses whatever mundane task we’re trying to swallow our pride or better judgment enough to complete at any given moment.
What’s stopping us, I wonder, from bathing in that light all the time?
We did it at one point.
But also, why can't we recognize them, what they mean to us, and how much they are a part of the better things that we're a part of (I still teach my kid sayings he made up, still joke with those on my main text thread about situations we were all in together) while they’re here?
I wonder, if he makes it, or if any of us do, will there be salvation, a reckoning, or at least recognition?
Or have we all lost out permanently—through the time- and the greed-fueled brutality and banality and boring lack of originality that has infected every moment of daily life and commoditized any last semblance of creativity or craft?
I guess the answer is some things, some folks maybe, weren't meant to thrive in this system anyway.
They are, there is no doubt for me, too good for what we've got for them here.
631 N Marquette St Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
Pacific Palisades is also a place that exists, shines really, mostly in memory for me.
I have a handful of friends who were raised there and visited often in my late teens all the way through my thirties. While the lucky few who call it home sprinkle in their tales of growing up next to the progeny of the famous (who later became famous themselves), the stories were mostly of beach access, really good but also SoCal-comfortable slackery public schools, and a quiet downtown village that hasn't changed much in three-quarters of a century—frequent run-ins with Vin Scully or Kobe Bryant getting ice cream or shopping for a hammer.
These are, I realize, overly simplified tropes to explain a place that went from being a really lovely neighborhood hidden from the view of a vast mega-metro to basically unreachable for all but the .5% within a generation.
And every rotten executive who came in and made his thumbprint has now changed, permanently damaged, literal paradise.
Even so, I often check in on Pacific Palisades in attempts to find a bit of the old, and unfortunately, more often than not, I see a mangled version of what was.
All the money and access in the world, and the best they’ve come up with is to remodel a joint to look like workout or conference space in a convention hotel.
Like this:
Or this:
Or this:
*These are all from current listings in Pacific Palisades in the $4-$6m range.
There comes a time in everyone's life when he has to reconcile with what's here and what's gone.
Legends can and should follow us for all time, become stitched into the stories we tell. But all things, especially as the Earth tilts us off the board for playing too rough, must pass.
Maybe that’s why I write about the sentimental and the good with a too-easy detachment—and that's something for me to work on.
But also, when you've watched the whole thing get taken down, brick by brick, nail by nail, board by board—in your lifetime—and the forces of evil continue to do their worst so that even low-key misogynists and pillagers are rewarded on the daily with brand new mechanisms to break it down even further…and the nice things that come with it—well, it’s exhausting.
So maybe the best among us choose, somehow, to leave because they’re too tired to stay.
For now, this place will do for a temporary glimpse back, for some recognition of what once was. It shows us how things weren’t just more realistic—they were better. Open space is a good use of space. Hidden, overgrown gardens are good gardens. Secrets are best kept as secrets.
Almost four acres in the heart of Pacific Palisades, cordoned and gated off from the rest and barely noticed from eye-level. It's all but camouflaged from the street view.
Inside the gates an overgrown lot with a tiny (relative to today's standards anyway) family home and a guest house with a three-car garage. There's even a Joan Didion Corvette in the driveway—non-op, I'm sure.
See if they'll throw it with the asking price.
The listing doesn't even pretend to give a fuck (or think that anyone will) about the main house, which was built in 1940 and has just under 3,000 square feet of living space.
I think the assumption is that nothing less than 30,000 square feet will go up on the acres and acres pristine land in one of the three most desired neighborhoods in Los Angeles proper.
But also—and I don't have the, discounted, six million dollars to throw at finding out—but this property begs the question: just because you can, should you?
Nobody who can buy this is going to keep the home intact. And that says more about who we choose to give access to places like this in the first place.
And, really, it gets down to the real question: why would you want to live amongst the people who can afford live there now anyway?
All of our best, it seems, have otherwise left without warning.