Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  The homeless, too, were always out, regrouping their tenuous community. The cops didn’t roust them, but the lawn where they slept had sprinklers that switched on in the middle of the night, so they’d wake and cough and shiver in their rags until the rising of the sun. Sometimes they got a free ration of food in the afternoon, and at dusk they collected again around bonfires, positively upbeat if they had a joint or a poorboy of wine to pass around, all memory of the sprinklers apparently banished from their heads.

  Santa Monica had the effervescent mood of a seaside resort. A long pier functioned as a boardwalk, and there you could ride a carousel, toss a softball at weighted milk bottles, or eat homemade potato chips from a greasy bag. After dark, a stroll on the pier was like a journey back to an age of uncomplicated pleasures, when soldiers kissed girls against the trees, and victory was eternal.

  The fancy waterfront hotels and restaurants on Ocean Avenue had big glass windows that looked out at the surf and reflected the rippling breakers. The Pacific was the ultimate symbol of sanity for Angelenos, a final refuge for their overheated brains. Everybody longed to be close to it, to merge with it and possess a tiny piece of it as a good-luck charm. It worked against the terrors of the land—against the hazardous air and the random shootings—cleansing, invigorating, and assisting in the process of forgetting.

  A swim in the Pacific took on aspects of the ceremonial. Swimmers turned their backs on the ghost ships of the Puritans and instead looked west toward the mysteries of Asia, toward the future. We dipped into a timeless flow and made a spiritual connection. Yes, the ocean was our benefactor. Even the pedestrians on the boulevard had a strange buoyancy to their steps, as if friendly underground waves were massaging the subsoil to provide a cushion for their tired feet.

  AROUND THE CORNER FROM THE SOVEREIGN, Pat Gigliotti, an old friend of mine, was enjoying the sort of big life that everybody hoped to have when they took a chance on California. He and his wife, Judy, and their six children lived not far from the ocean in a fine, three-story house that had a swimming pool in the backyard, and also a paddle tennis court and a wood-burning brick oven where pizzas as authentic as any in Naples were cooked of a summer evening.

  The Gigliottis were well within the Hollywood aura. Judy had two half sisters, Daryl and Page Hannah, who were actresses, and some of the children had worked as extras in their aunts’ films. Other movie and TV stars owned houses on their block, but the neighborhood was not so much flashy as substantial and family-oriented. Its glamorous elements were held in a rough balance with its mundane ones.

  Pat Gigliotti had grown up in a blue-collar Italian family in Kansas City. When we had met twenty years ago, he was managing Cody’s Books in Berkeley and wore a beard and longish hair and liked to foment the impending leftist revolution and discuss radical politics with his customers while chainsmoking cigarettes. He had a nervous intensity and the romantic good looks of a doomed Sicilian anarchist.

  Now Pat did something called land assembly for Jupiter Realty and put together tracts to be developed in Los Angeles. The company was huge, based in Chicago, and operated by Judy’s father. Instead of blue jeans, Pat dressed in Ralph Lauren suits and drove to his downtown office in a white BMW convertible. He had not touched a cigarette in years, ran six miles on the beach every day, and sometimes spoke favorably of the Republicans.

  Like the rest of us in California, he had been transformed. What he really wanted to do was to write or produce movies.

  I had never been to the house in Santa Monica before, so on the first night I came over for dinner, Pat gave me a tour. The place was a fixer-upper when they’d bought it, he said. The previous owners were foreigners with an extended family, and they’d done some cooking over the fireplace and had stored meat and vegetables in the closets and, in general, had left the house in a shambles. The Gigliottis were able to steal it for just under a million dollars.

  When I heard those words, a million dollars, I felt a shock run through me, but then I remembered where I was, and I imagined how much John Landis must have spent on his seven-thousand-square-foot home and realized that a million dollars was not a meaningful figure in postapocalyptic L.A. Money was everywhere in the city, miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.

  I enjoyed the sensation of being in a real home for a change. The Gigliottis’ place was comfortable, roomy, and unostentatious, and a guest didn’t have to worry about spilling some wine on the furniture or knocking over a Ming vase. They couldn’t have had a Ming vase even if they’d wanted one, really, not with so many children dashing around.

  The energy of the kids throbbed through the house. The oldest child, Aaron, was a senior at Santa Monica High, a public school, and occupied a teenage province of his own, but there were two preteen boys, Noah and Gabriel, and a pair of twin girls, Katie and Annie, who put out enough electricity to keep everybody on their toes. The kids were interested in normal pursuits. The boys liked sports and rock music, while the girls were fond of horses and dolls.

  They all pitched in to help look after their youngest sibling, Michael, who was three and had temper tantrums, his clenched face streaming tears beneath a frame of cherubic blond curls out of a Renaissance painting.

  Aaron stopped by the kitchen that evening on his way to an ill-defined somewhere. He was a sweet-natured youth, a little baffled about his future and acting out his confusion in not-so-subtle ways that gave his father indigestion. Pat was busy concocting a pizza from cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and he asked Aaron to name for me some of the stars who had children at Crossroads School, where Noah went.

  “Cher,” Aaron said dutifully, weary of having a dad and of having to carry him around on his back like a forty-pound homunculus. “Gary Busey, Harvey Korman. Mel Brooks.”

  Pat was not starstruck or shallow, but he had the same tireless appetite for Hollywood gossip as everybody in town. He saw it as the true currency of Los Angeles and was both fascinated and repelled by it. The very best gossip combined sex and real estate, but a story about sex or real estate alone still counted, and Pat got to talking about a house—the mother of all houses—that Aaron Spelling, the TV impresario, was building, a behemoth of approximately 56,500 square feet in Holmby Hills.

  John Landis must feel virtuous, I figured. Here before us was the crutch that supported the shamelessness of L.A. Somebody would always be more outrageous and recklessly spendthrift than you, would seduce more women or marry more men, would surpass you in terms of wretched excess and relieve you of the burden of thinking that things could ever have been otherwise.

  There was another Aaron Spelling story in Pat’s repertoire. It had to do with a visit that Pat had made to a friend in Malibu, where Spelling had a beach house. While out for a walk, he had come across some exotic shells in the sand, delicate and multihued like the shells from a tropical isle, and he had picked up a few to show to his friend.

  “Those are Aaron Spelling’s,” the friend had said. “Somebody buys them for him at a specialty shop. He has a daughter who’s into shells, so they hide them for her to find.”

  The entire Gigliotti brood were summoned to the table for dinner. We ate our pizza and a salad of exotic lettuces, and I saw how very far from Levittown I was, as far as Pat was from a tough Italian block in Kansas City.

  Both Pat and Judy were brought up by caring parents, and they were caring parents in turn and had put together that unusual thing, a reasonably happy family. They had problems, naturally, but they were not at the mercy of them. They seemed forever fixed at a perfect point in time—fit, dark-haired, slender, attractive—and were supple enough in the bargain to handle the arduous demands of raising their children. Such lives did not exist when I was a boy on Long Island, I thought, California lives that were as charmed and golden and yet as fragile and transitory as any other human creation.

  BARRY YOURGRAU, ANOTHER FRIEND OF MINE, turned up in Santa Monica, staying at a motel on Ocean Park to do some work for an L.A. magazine. Yourgrau wrote su
rreal, funny, wonderfully cadenced stories, sometimes only a page or two long, and had started performing them in cafés and in theaters. That had led him into acting, real acting, and he had just completed his first part in a major Hollywood movie, Fat Man and Little Boy, and was waiting out the weeks before its release to see if he’d be transformed.

  Yourgrau was South African by birth. He had gone to high school in Denver, where his father, a theoretical physicist, had worked. It was a quirk of fate that he had played the part of Edward Teller in his first featured role.

  He lived mostly in New York now and came to California only to read and perform. He mistrusted California—Los Angeles, that is—as many New Yorkers did, but he still swooned over the surf, the weather, and the physical beauty. California was too good to be true, he felt, so he would always return to his apartment in Manhattan, a city of stone and broken glass whose tactility was never in doubt.

  Yet California was slowly getting to him, undermining his resolve. He’d made friends on the Coast and had done a scene with Paul Newman. He had even fallen in love with a young painter, but the romance had bottomed out, and its aftermath and the tension over his movie debut had left him in a jittery, self-reflective state.

  We arranged to take an evening walk on the beach. When I arrived, Yourgrau was in the motel office agitatedly complaining to a swarthy man behind the desk, who seemed to have just awakened from a glacial sleep and dressed himself in a hurry.

  “No, I did not bring them in with me,” Yourgrau was saying in a dramatic way. “Somebody must have had a dog in that room.”

  “We don’t have fleas here,” the swarthy man said, in defense.

  Yourgrau plucked a tiny something from his forearm and put it on the desk.

  “Do you see that?” he asked, pointing. “It’s a flea. Let’s have no more of this. I want another room.”

  I helped him transfer his bags, and then we took our walk. Evening was slowly bleeding into night. Stars shone above the black Pacific, and along the tide line there were phosphorescent glimmers, luminescent charges in the foam. A half-moon was suspended above the palms. You couldn’t have wanted a more romantic setting, but it only accentuated Yourgrau’s heartache.

  He was obsessed about breaking up with the young painter, heaping all the blame on himself. If only he’d listened to her, if only he hadn’t been so arrogant—I knew the litany well, being a world-class denier and having recited it myself.

  We talked about love and writing and acting. We talked about Paul Newman. I was as venal as the rest when it came to gossip about the stars. I kept hoping that Aunt Daryl Hannah would show up at the Gigliottis someday while I was there and decide that she’d had quite enough of John Kennedy, Jr., and was really interested in a road-weary, middle-aged writer six inches shorter than she.

  Yourgrau scratched at his flea bites now and then. He stopped by a shuttered concessions stand to use a phone and check his messages. Maybe the painter had called, maybe there would be some word from his agent.

  “I am nothing without my answering machine,” he said, with full ironic intent.

  Something was shuffling about in the dark by the stand, making strange noises, so I backed away. An animal, I thought, maybe a dog, but no—it was a homeless man camped in a niche. He was bundled in a blanket, but he shed it to reveal a T-shirt from UCLA Medical Center. His face was tanned to an umber color, and his eyes were squinty little beads. An amulet of some sort hung around his neck, but I didn’t like to think what might be in it.

  “If you give me a dollar,” he challenged me, “I’ll recite you a poem.”

  I gave him a dollar. It seemed the wise thing to do. He recited a poem for me about man’s first landing on the moon, one that he’d written himself. The gist of it was that human beings had no business in outer space when they had already fucked up so badly on earth.

  “That was good,” I complimented him. There we were, three poets under a half-moon.

  He shrugged it off. “I’m a second-generation poet and a third-generation artist,” he said. “Give me another dollar, and I’ll recite the story of my life.”

  I gave him another dollar.

  “My name is Olivero,” he began. “When I was in my teens, my father put me out in the desert with a buck knife and sixteen ounces of water. Thank God for that knife, because the water”—he gestured at an empty Evian bottle in his hovel—“well, it didn’t last long. I survived on cactus and cactus moisture. And once God saw that I could make it, He took care of me.”

  Olivero wiped his mouth on his forearm and skipped ahead in time without a segue.

  “Well, I was walking around Santa Monica one night not looking for trouble or anything, and a guy was passing by, and I said to him this perfectly innocent remark, like ‘How’s it going, pal?,’ and he reached out and stuck a knife in my neck. And wouldn’t you know it? With my luck, he hit an artery. I was bleeding like a faucet. I must have lost seventy-five percent of the blood in my body. But the doctors did a good job.”

  He stepped closer to show me a jagged scar that ran from below his chin almost to his clavicle.

  “They sewed me up, and I can hear everything fine.”

  “You can hear everything fine?”

  “Yes. Give me a dollar, and I’ll recite a poem for you.”

  I was out of dollars, though, and Yourgrau had finished with the phone. No important messages.

  “Okay!” Olivero yelled as we walked away. “I forgive you! You can come back tomorrow for the poem!”

  A California of the brokenhearted, a California of the deranged.…

  AN IMMENSE SUPPORT STAFF OF WORKERS descended on the wealthy districts of Santa Monica every day but Sunday to prop up lifestyles and do the menial chores. The workers were unobtrusive and skilled at the art of being invisible. Pool boys skimmed leaves from pools, au pairs delivered children to summer camps, maids did the laundry and the housecleaning, and gardeners did the gardening. You heard the hiss of sprinklers and the clack of pruning shears.

  Sometimes the gardeners were Japanese, but more often they were Mexican. They answered questions with a smile. The maids were Mexican, too, or Central American. Their English was better because they studied while they worked, learning from TV. Many maids were devoted to cartoons because the characters used simple sentences and were easy to understand. It was another curious aspect of life in Los Angeles that so many domestics had been instructed in their new language by Bugs Bunny or the Smurfs.

  There were moments around Los Angeles when it seemed that Hispanics must be doing every scrap of labor, legally or illegally. The city might collapse in a heap without them. They were like the turtles and the elephants who held up the world in Indian mythology. They never lived where they worked but commuted instead from downtown apartments, far-flung suburbs, or the barrio of East Los Angeles.

  Their jobs were not always onerous or underpaid. The Gigliottis’ Salvadorena housekeeper drove to work in a new Bronco and had saved enough money for a house in Pacoima, but other domestics had to rely on public transport and were probably not much better off than the men who stood on traffic islands selling bags of oranges.

  I rode a bus from Santa Monica to the barrio one afternoon with some maids who were going home. It took about an hour, but the trip felt much longer because of the heat, the crowding, and the diesel fumes. As the ocean disappeared from view, the sky lost its idyllic marine blue and grew dingy and impervious to light. When the bus crossed the old bed of the Los Angeles River, now a concrete flood-control channel, toward Boyle Heights, the look of the city turned industrial. The landscape offered no comfort. It made you rest your head against the seatback like the maids did, and close your eyes and try to sleep.

  In East Los Angeles, the main streets were dense with businesses packed into storefronts. Many things were going on at once—an overwhelming rush of the energy that was restrained or repressed in the white world came bursting forth in torrents. Colors burned. Spanish was the lingua franca,
a melodious burble, a stream.

  My Anglo face stood out on the streets. It was as if I’d journeyed to another country rather than just taking a bus ride across town. Elderly women in lace mantillas, vendors of melon slices, roadside taco trucks, warm tamales, stores dealing in botanicos and votive candles, an impressive Catholic church in the midst of poverty—East L.A. was Mexico picked up and transplanted, as vibrant and alive, driven by the same forces.

  I walked down residential blocks. The playgrounds and corners swarmed with activity, with flirting boys and girls, teenagers courting, and with older guys in their twenties and thirties, the gang veterans who were the true keepers of the flame. Graffiti swirled across walls in declarations of turf and swells of boastful poetry, and music blared from powerful stereos in low-riding Nissan trucks, a pulsing, all-encompassing beat.

  Everywhere I could feel the weight of the neighborhood, the press of its history. It offered sustenance, surely, but it could also be a noose. How to escape, to break the cycle? The dropout rate among high-school students in Los Angeles County was 39 percent, but among Hispanic children it ran much higher, almost to 50 percent.

  So in the morning the buses would roll, off to Santa Monica, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Beverly Hills.

  CHAPTER 21

  FROM HIS PERCH in a fiber-glass lifeguard tower, Captain Don Rohrer had an unobstructed view of Santa Monica Beach, the most popular and crowded beach in Greater Los Angeles. He could see the kids buried in sand and the babes basting in coconut oil, the muscle boys and the bearded swamis and the teenage gangsters smoking reefer, each a potential victim of the swirling tide.

  Here, at the beach, an abiding part of archetypal California was reinvented faithfully every day in ritual applications of tanning butters and unspoken acts of communion. On such a beach, Gidget (short for “girl-midget”) had romped, countless ingenues had posed in bikinis, and many a tourist had gone totally brainless in the seductive undertow, adrift in a vision of salt, sex, and sunshine.