by A M Homes
Inside the museum, a set of windows overlooks a turtle pond. I overhear a mother excitedly explaining to one of the staff members that her family has a turtle that’s gotten a little too big. She asks if the museum accepts local turtles. Her two little girls stand nearby, the elder seeming stricken that her mother is contemplating giving the family turtle away. “Sure,” the man at the museum says, “we’d be happy to take your turtle. When do you want to bring him?”
“Well,” the mother says, “I could go home and get it. I could bring it today.”
The elder child looks to be on the verge of tears, filled with betrayal. This is not at all what she had in mind when she agreed to come to the museum. The oblivious mother finally picks up on how traumatic and unexpected this must seem. “Is that too soon?” the mother asks. “Do you need some time to say good-bye?”
The little girl nods, still speechless.
“You know,” the man says to the little girl, “you can come and visit him any time you want. And he’ll have a really good time with all the other turtles.”
The girl, trying to be brave, nods.
“Great,” the mother says, “I’ll bring the turtle tomorrow.”
The highlight of the museum is the paleontology lab where, through glass windows, you can watch people working to identify the various fossils recovered. The lab is filled with bones, with bits and pieces, with scientists seeming to work. While I’m there, one picks up a bone and shows it to another—presumably a visiting scientist (he’s got a Visitor tag on his shirt). I’m the only one around watching through the glass. In front of each of the workstations is a homemade sign—IAM SORTING THE MATRIX OF THE SABER-TOOTHED CAT VERTEBRA. On each workstation is a container of picks, used toothbrushes, and other tools fashioned to clean the fossilized bones. Each worker seems to be vying for attention, begging to be watched.
The lab here reminds me of the tour of the FBI Building in Washington, D.C., where, in theory, you see FBI agents working to identify evidence. There, a sneaker sits on top of a desk, a plaster cast of the tread nearby. It is haunting, menacing. Did something happen to the other shoe? To the foot of the person wearing the sneaker? What can the sneaker tell us? The FBI tour, with no homemade signs, is less convincing. It’s beyond unlikely the FBI would do its evidence-collecting and analysis in public view for tourists from around the world to watch—the real work is done behind closed doors at the lab in Quantico, Virginia.
At La Brea, every year from July to September you can visit the pits as they’re being excavated and watch paleontologists recover bones from the saber-toothed tigers, fifteen-hundred-pound ground sloths, and dire wolves that died here thousands and thousands of years ago. Among the conclusions that the scientists have made is that the climate was wetter and cooler 28,000 years ago, and that many of the animals they’ve found ate a type of grass no longer found in the area—a grass that was dependent on summer rain.
From here I go on to a more modern archeological adventure: I go to Ralph’s, the enormous grocery store on Sunset. We don’t have grocery stores like this in New York—there isn’t room. The Ralph’s on Sunset is so big that it’s not really a store but a working museum of American life. Here you’ll find every product, every variation on every product, health foods, prepared foods, organic foods, frozen foods, dozens and dozens of kinds of milk, juice, soda, beer, and wine. I buy things I don’t eat at home, Strawberry Pop-Tarts, knowing there is a toaster in the hotel room. I buy tea bags, orange juice, Coke, water. I go up and down the aisles, mesmerized. I go up and down thinking, didn’t Joan Didion write an essay on Ralph’s? Didn’t Joan Didion write an essay on the horrible headache I have right now—the flying migraine I get every time I take a plane? Didn’t Joan Didion write everything about Los Angeles that needed to be written, and if she didn’t, Mike Davis did? I am having a moment of terrible doubt, of low blood sugar, the last thing I ate was the snack on the plane. In the candy aisle, I pick up a chocolate bar and eat it as I’m prowling. I feel both a lack of self-consciousness—I am so out of my element that I am invisible—and a certain self-doubt that being a total outsider I have no business attempting to make sense of this place. I am not from here; I don’t know anything about here, I don’t even know where “here” is.
“None of us know where we are,” a woman in the cookie row spontaneously says. I look up to see who’s talking. An older woman with thick gray hair stands in front of me, blocking my path. “You can get lost in a place like this,” she says. “Any idea where they keep the frozens?”
“I’m always seeing those pictures in the supermarket papers,” says Griffin Dunne. “Actresses who just pile in the car, they want to go to Ralph’s, and then these horrible pictures are taken of them. Because there really are people that hang out in Ralph’s parking lot with telephoto lenses.”
One enters the Chateau Marmont through the garage—you drive in, drop off the car, go up a couple of steps, and make a right if you’re going to one of the bungalows or a left if you’re headed into the main building. The elevator goes all the way up, so there’s no need to pass through the lobby, no need to stop at the front desk. This means if you want to be alone, you can be alone—it also means that a great place for spotting people is in the two chairs on the small patio between the main building and the garage, but in fact everyone is too cool to be seen just sitting there, waiting.
“And you would get on the elevator and there would be like the most historical and famous person in there. That’s why it was kind of great,” John Waters says. “And still when I come there I see all kinds of people. It’s stars you’d want to meet!”
However, if you’re looking for a little entertainment or a sociable snack, the lobby area is a lot like a living room filled with youthful, good-looking William Morris agents, courting their equally youthful, if more beautiful, clients. The clients lounge on overstuffed sofas while the agents lean forward in their club chairs, looking/leering at them, taking purposeful sips of their martinis before continuing to chart the course. From about 4:30 to 9:00 the lobby and courtyard are a kind of display case, a short course in how the young both date and do business in L.A.
The scale of the living room, the dark coziness of it, in contrast to the palm trees, the hard sun, outside, is relaxing. The room is always cool, cozy on even the hottest day and at night glows with the exotic, out-of-time, quasi-bordello lumens thrown off by the enormous Victorian lamps. Outside there is a colonnade with wicker chairs, large leafed plants, echoing of straw hats, strong cold drinks, and another time, almost tropical, almost deeply southern, and the prospect of dropping into a lovely late afternoon liquored sleep. The tan and brown awnings over the balconies flap in the breeze. With its European arches and architecture, the feel of the Chateau is so other, so starkly different from the Mondrian—otherwise known as the Mind Drain, where your name has to be on a list to get into their bar, and the bellhops routinely forget to deliver important messages. One time my rental car arrived and they forgot I had checked in and simply sent it back to Enterprise.
The Chateau, with its heavy beamed ceilings, moody wall sconces, and small tightly manicured front garden is a place where those who are so inclined sometimes erupt into impromptu improvisational modern dances across the grass.
Being at the Chateau is like being in a place that exists out of reality, a sacred place, like a church. And it is like not just any church, not just another California mission, it is the church—Our Los Angeles Lady of Creativity.
Jennifer Beals has a sort of theory about it. “In the United States, and especially in the West, there are so many structures that are devoid of any kind of history. So any time you walk into any structure that has any semblance of history, I think you start to feel the effect of all those other people who have been there. So I don’t know whether it’s by virtue of being on a vortex of energy, or whether that energy was created by virtue of all the people that have stayed there. But just walking into the lobby, you get the sense that yo
u’re part of a continuum. And you feel just really privileged to be part of that continuum. And you want to contribute to it in some way.”
I am by the pool, prowling, when out of the corner of my eye, I see a man reading one of my books. It strikes me as strange. A waiter passes by; I ask him who’s the man. He says he doesn’t know who the man is but that the author of the book is someone who stays here a lot. “In fact, she was recently here,” he says, as if letting me in on a secret. “He’s reading the house copy, but we have it for sale upstairs as well.”
“Thanks,” I say, “I was just curious.” I can’t bring myself to tell him that it’s me, that in fact I’m still here—I want to spare both of us the embarrassment.
I return to the lobby, take a seat in the living room area, and order a Cosmopolitan, even though I don’t really drink. The Cosmo is a bit like rocket fuel with cranberry juice added for color—no wonder some people stay on these sofas all night. I love this room. I love just sitting here and watching. The lamps, which are turned on around dusk, are a deep antidote to minimalist cool. A couple that I know from New York, who happen to be staying at the hotel, join me on the sofa. We’re having a nice conversation when a man sits in the empty club chair next to us. This is the hidden danger of vaguely communal seating groups, but usually people are self-conscious enough not to want to join a party to which they weren’t invited.
“This seat taken?” the guy asks after he’s already seated.
“It’s yours,” we say and then return to our conversation. He’s clearly listening in. He nods along, we try to ignore him.
As we talk, he plunges himself into our conversation, offering his commentary on the subject we’re discussing—British ex-patriots. Within moments, he has changed the subject entirely; we are now talking about him, about the script for a pilot that he’s working on. He keeps interrupting himself to make hostile references to his wife. At a certain point I ask if he’s staying at the hotel. He says, yes, he’s been here for several months, in a bungalow out back. He’s been brought out here to do some sort of a rewrite. I ask if he’s here with the wife. He mentions that his wife is the author of a kind of handbook for nerdy types hoping to improve themselves. He says they’re recently separated. And while he could well have had a wife who wrote such a book, he is the kind of crazy who scares me most—the kind who doesn’t seem to know he’s crazy. At a certain point he offers a copy of his script—he’ll just run to his room and get it. He leaves. We talk about him behind his back, we speculate that he’s not exactly for real. The gentleman among us is annoyed—we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He returns a few minutes later, hardly huffing and puffing, and hands me his script.
“Thanks, I can’t wait to read it.”
I glance at one page. The only thing on the page is the word “you.” You. All the way down the page, written as dialogue, one “You” per line, fifteen lines each attributed to a specific character. It would be Mametesque except that it’s not. I turn the page—“Suck,” again all the way down the page, fifteen lines, each attributed to a character. “You Suck.”
“Looks interesting.”
I am now afraid of the document I am holding. I am afraid of the person sitting before me and worse, he knows who I am. He knows that I am actually staying in the hotel.
“Well,” I say, checking my watch, excusing myself, winking at my friends. “I’d better get back to it—expecting that conference call any minute now. I’ll call you later.”
On my way to the elevator I stop at the front desk.
“See that guy sitting over there?” I say. The clerk comes out from behind the desk and takes a good look. He nods.
“Is he staying here?”
“Nope, I don’t think so.”
“Well, he thinks he is. He thinks he’s been living here for several months, in a bungalow. You might want to keep an eye out. He gave me this. I show him You Suck.
“I’ll let the security guy know.”
I nod. And take the elevator up.
When I think of living at a hotel, I think of Eloise at the Plaza, Nabokov coming for a visit at Le Montreux Palace in 1961 and finding it so much to his liking that he stayed until he died in his suite at the hotel in 1977. I think of how exotic and fashionable it is to call the Carlyle or the Sherry-Netherland in New York home. I think of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley holding court at their Algonquin Round Table. I think of parties, the high life, jet-setters coming and going, shopping bags, room keys, bellhops, porters, housekeepers, room service waiters, telephone operators, night auditors, house doctors, overnight shoe shines, morning papers just outside your door, the gentle tap, tap of breakfast arriving at a preappointed hour.
“You feel you’re in a private club,” says photographer Todd Eberle. “You feel you’re richer than you are—it’s so glamorous, just driving up, from the neon sign to the Gucci billboard over the pool to the striped awnings, and it’s got incredible charm.”
CHAPTER FIVE
On the Eighth Day
My message light is blinking. It’s Dr. Fred Kogen, the mohel of Beverly Hills, returning my call. I’d heard about him from friends in New York, who’d recently returned from a bris in Beverly Hills.
“If you’re going to L.A., you have to meet this guy,” they said. “He does all the big circumcisions. No pun intended. He has his own website. Here’s the web address, his phone number, and his cell phone. If you’re looking for people to talk to about L.A.—this is your guy. He is L.A.”
“I’m flattered,” Dr. Kogen said when I called him back, after I told him how highly he’d been recommended. “Can you come here? How’s tomorrow morning?”
“Sounds good, Dr. Kogen.”
“If you keep calling me Dr. Kogen, I’m not going to talk to you anymore—my name is Fred.”
“Yes, Dr. Kogen, I mean Fred,” I said as I scribbled down the instructions to his Woodland Hills home.
I set out first thing in the morning, and take a long winding ride from my spot on Sunset Boulevard up into Woodland Hills. The exterminator arrives just as I do—smoking a big cigar. As Dr. Kogen and I settle into the living room, I cannot escape the surreality of watching the exterminator through the picture window, walking around with a gas mask on, pumping toxins into the air.
“Ants,” Kogen says. “I have really bad ants.”
Kogen is an affable guy—a few years back he was named one of Cosmopolitan magazine’s most eligible bachelors. At the moment, he’s exhausted, tousled—he’s just gotten up. His schedule has him running to all ends of the state, performing seven to ten brisses a week—there’s a lot of baby boys being born in California. After asking if I’d like coffee or tea, he brings out a pot of green tea for himself, pouring it into a small blue and white china tumbler. Ceremony is important to Kogen. We sit discussing the ancient rites of circumcision as practiced in modern day Los Angeles and what it means to be a mohel in the year 2001. We talk about his website, contemporary spirituality, and about the big issues in circumcision—the use of local anesthetic as well as the importance of holding a good parking place for the mohel just outside the house (emergency supplies are kept in the car). It is only long after we’re done and I’m back at the hotel that I realize I forgot to ask him what he does with the foreskins.
MS. HOMES: How did you become a doctor?
DR. KOGEN: I went to the University of Illinois at Champaign for undergrad. I’m from Chicago. My mother raised me alone in a one-bedroom apartment—very middle-class. People, when they meet me, assume that I’m from a similar background as most of the clientele out here. They’re usually second-generation nouveaux riches. I paid every dime, loans, the whole thing. I worked as a waiter. I was always very proud of my Jewish heritage. And I came out here as a resident in 1984; I was training at Cedar Sinai, all excited to be in L.A., gynecologist to the stars, the whole deal. Doing my residency I’d see these guys who were fifty years old, with ten patients in a row. I didn’t love it that much that
I’m going to be wanting to get out of bed every morning and roll into the hospital.
MS. HOMES: Right.
DR. KOGEN: So, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Meanwhile, someone who was a few years ahead of me started the first training program outside of the state of Israel to train doctors or nurse practitioners, who already knew how to do a circumcision, to be a mohel. And they were looking to actively train individuals who were in the doctor community. They said, you’re new in L.A., you’re Jewish, and you’re single, you do a nice circumcision, and if you get in the community you’ll meet a nice Jewish woman. And I thought, you know what, this is a kick. I’ll put it on my résumé, it will be a good time for me, so I took the training class. I was in the second class. At the time there were only eight of us in the country. I was the youngest physician mohel at the time. I was twenty-six years old when I completed the program. We were terrified. In some ways more terrified than if my life was actually in danger. I couldn’t have been more nervous.