I started to spew out my apologies even before I got to the counter. The woman behind it had a bleached Joyce DeWitt mullet with the damaged back locks cascading down just past her shoulders. She wore it, alongside her unconcerned stare, with confidence.
She asked me for my vax card and my ID, and I handed them over. Calmly, she peeked over the counter sneeze guard across the way as she stuck a finger under her mask to rub an agitated spot on her nose where a piercing showed signs of early infection. She told me to hold on; she’d be right back.
“Hello,” came another voice behind me moments later, a South African lilt. I only recognized the accent—they’re hard to pick up and often mistaken for something else—because I worked with a Boer in a previous life at the tiny but mighty Point Reyes Light newspaper in coastal Marin County.
My South African coworker was the collector for ad money, unofficial office pixie, and knower of all things around town. Her path to those rarified shores was so circuitous you could only say she’d been dropped from the sky, and there she landed as if in a puddle. Dater of famous men or at least sort of notable studio musicians, maker of banana bread, part-time painter or glassblower or potter on the weekends—the glue guy of a small and dysfunctional newsroom. But her sing-songy accent like reeds through the wind turned the garbled parts of this clunky language into something lyrical and fading vowel sounds which signaled the end of sentiment never left me.
“Come with me,” the woman with the accent said, snapping me back to the present. She held out her hand asked for my ID again.
She was the buyer and led me through racks and racks of used clothing. Live extras picked through them; they were all dressed cooler than me or, rather, just end-times chill.
It’s as if everyone in there was dropped off naked into a dumpster filled with discarded togs—a too-small 49ers mesh jersey from the late eighties paired with shortalls and deck shoes. A long sleeve baggy ribbed turtleneck, some mom jeans cinched up five inches above the waistline, and a backward union plumber and pipe hitter mesh hat. One just had a tank top of Gallagher cut up with razors, a pink sports bra, and some spankies or some type of boy shorts that were barely visible under her bare-bones couture. For an October LA evening, warm enough though the nip of fall could be felt in the air, this was a choice to not be close to the correct amount of layers.
We settled at the sell-back station, and I could see the disappointment in the eyes of my buyer as soon as she unloaded my little duffel. They took me, she said, despite my tardiness because it didn’t appear I had much to sell. Indeed, my counterparts came in with entire large-sized U-Haul boxes, sometimes filled with what looked like designer bags and vintage T-shirt hauls that would fill a small apartment. I shrugged, “Just down here for a couple of days trying to get rid of some stuff that’s been sitting in my garage.”
She made pleasant conversation as she carefully unfolded, examined, and told me what was wrong with the piece—a stitch off here, a button sagging there, a small mustard stain (my bad!) on the cuff; or sometimes, it was just too basic for this place. “Where’s home?” she asked politely. I was focusing on her own outfit, a pair of coveralls like the kind Fletch wore when he paid a visit to the private airplane hangar of the guy he was investigating. The name patch on hers had been removed, but I’m sure at one point it said, Jim or Bob or Tommy. She had a matching mask made of the same material and long strawberry blonde hair with a few gray strands mixed in for good pandemic measure.
“I live near the beach on the Central Coast,” I coughed out. “But I was here for a few years a long time ago.” In LA, I feel the need to tell strangers I lived there once. I know the deal.
“Visiting friends or business?’
“Sort of,” was my answer. I’m bad at chit-chat in regular times but was so out of practice I couldn’t even pick up on the rhythm of idle conversation. She was a multi-tasker, however, and ignored my hiccups to keep things moving.
She unearthed a couple of garments from my pile, a few old-man shirts I’d gotten for a quarter each at an estate sale. One I kept for myself, but the others were just a little too depressing and perma-smelly to live in the house. She looked at them like gold nuggets. “Ah,” she beamed. “Where you been hiding these boy?”
And then it loosened up. She talked about a recent camping trip up to Big Sur with her significant other and a cousin who was in the Peace Corps who now resides in Cambria. I nodded along; that’s just about twenty minutes north of me.
“There’s no water there,” I said smartly.
“Yeah, that’s right,’ she replied as she moved a beanie to the no pile. “We had to fill up the bucket in the nearby stream. They live off the grid but not intentionally.”
I let that last statement hang in there when she inspected a four-panel jersey shirt from Brooks Brothers, which had distinct markings to show it was made in the early-mid nineties. She nodded in approval and folded it carefully to add to her buy pile. “We took African showers,” she said. I wondered if that was some kind of pejorative, but then I remembered she was from the continent of, and I let it slip away.
She tallied up my total and entered it into an iPad. “You can shop around and use credit, or just cash out up front,” she slid back my bag of unwanteds, all the stuff from Banana Republic or business casual Ben Sherman I’d at one time paid too much for to fit in at meetings. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip,” she said, her voice suddenly muted if not a little chilly as the next guy, a six-foot-five, one-hundred-and-forty-pound beanstalk in v-neck t-shirt and Dickies khakis cut off at the knee rolled up. He was wearing an old cyclist's hat and sucking on a lollipop and edged over two moving boxes in her direction, “Hi Sam,” she said. “Whatcha got?”
I collected a little cash and then walked up and down Melrose for a few minutes. It’s always been a hodgepodge of clothes shops and small restaurants that won’t last more than a year and weirdly nice PR firms in the middle of the liquor store swarm. There was some kind of art gallery opening where the people were more uniformly dressed, the guys in their stomp clap hey beanies and pea coats which surely they’d been waiting to dust off and women in their too-short skirts and painted red-soled heels with blown-out hair going everywhere; it might as well have been 2012 forever with this crowd. I peeked at the art inside; it was appropriately gritty and chaotic and end-times bland; the real rigor on display seemed to be in the form of the catering staff, masked up and moving at half speed. One abruptly set a tray down and walked out the front and down the street; I’m not sure whether she returned. I didn't linger long.
I got in my car and took a left up Wilcox to pause at my old apartment building long enough to take it in. Everything that had grown around it was that generic brick and glass and contemporary concrete boxes—wifi cages for the young professional. But my building, the turn-of-the-last-century Egyptian-themed jewel, was an old henhouse for Paramount where mostly girls on contract lived which had the execs came knocking during the day.
Natalie Wood allegedly did a few months in the dorm, as did James Dean. I don’t know how much of that is true; the landlord told me one morning when I was up on Wilshire in her office hand-delivering my $450 rent in cash a couple of days late. Based in fact or not, I still tell the story as if it’s true.
There are ghosts in there for sure, peeking from behind the rounded edges of the doorways, hanging from the century-old light fixtures, drinking and carrying on and crying out in the middle of the night for the atrocities that occurred in the town’s golden age, for the ones that continue today.
1117 46th St Sacramento, CA 95819
Sometimes the neighborhood of your Hollywood fever dreams resides far north of LA Basin, 384 miles north, to be exact.
Sacramento’s Fab 40s neighborhood, most of it built pre-World War II, has been the backdrop for the idyllic suburban enclave, or at least what late-20th-century ideal of big homes, wide streets, and well-loved foliage looks like in big features for close to a half-century.
You may recall those streets from "Frances Ha," or "Ladybird," or "American Beauty," or "Cool Hand Luke," or "On the Road," or "When a Stranger Calls," or "Pleasantville," or "Almost Famous," or even "Phenomenon," or "Howard the Duck."
Any time a sort of suburban comfort meets things that aren’t quite what they seem behind closed doors needs to be conveyed; these well-manicured arterial roads seem to take center stage.
I have to admit, this one—even at a discount—is out of the usual price range for this feature, but I just can’t help it. Stop and give a closer look to any of the aforementioned, and this Spanish Colonial Revival from 1925 will at least make a cameo.
I can tell the five-bedroom four-and-a-half-bath showpiece has been left relatively untouched. It’s got the original hardwood and tiling throughout the main living areas and stairs. The built-ins are intact, as are the French doors and the tiled flooring, including the terrace.
The redwood beams that hold up the thing are also original, and the wrought iron interior gate is the stuff that shows you some dreams never die. A thousand toes have been stubbed in this home, all forgiven.
The bathrooms haven’t escaped the ravages of time and (minor) updates, but still look like they’ve been relatively untouched for decades. There's some bland kitchen upgrades that are sort of expected at this point—the Wolf Range and the stainless dishwasher. It all but cheapens the experience. The multiple fireplaces down below, including one in the dark and cozy back seating room, make up for the incremental dips in design choices.
The front door might be the showstopper. A robin-egg-blue fortress entry with an iron cage over the peephole riveted together and standing sentry over what appears to be a 4,300-square-foot fever dream of what life ought to be if we didn’t constantly try to do our worst to others selling whatever it is we can find for a pittance and moving on into the night.