Leaving Venice

The apartment--vacant of furniture, windows bare, utilities disconnected--nevertheless felt inhabited. By ghosts. By memories.

By time.

After 20 years, I was leaving my Venice apartment. Twenty years in a rent-controlled ($175 in ‘77, $475 by ‘97) two-bedroom, three blocks from the beach, on the edge of Santa Monica’s Ocean Park community. Was I crazy to give it up? Standing in the moonlit study, I listened to noises in the wood that hadn’t been audible for decades because of my books and papers. It sounded as if the apartment whispered, “Stay.”

I inherited the space in 1977 from my youngest sister. At the time I was a card-carrying member of the counterculture, having fled Southern California in 1968 for Haight-Ashbury to realize writing dreams inspired by Jack Kerouac. I embraced my own generation’s creed, best expressed in a song by a former Venice band: “Break on Through (to the Other Side).” I had vowed never again to live in materialistic Southern California, but Venice seemed like a fine blend of L.A. and San Francisco: artistic, humanistic, a community divorced from the Great Basin’s car culture.

In the late ‘70s, Venice was primarily populated with a mix of Jewish and Latin immigrants, longtime African American residents, and artists and writers. Many of Main Street’s stores were boarded up, but not Buffalo Chips--with its 99-cent Johnny Walkers--where several women I know claimed to have lost their virginity after closing hours. Better yet, the Circle had the coolest bartender west of Sardi’s, a retired carnival performer calling herself “Gypsy.”

I loved talking politics with my neighbors, mostly Jewish refugees from Europe, some with tattoos from concentration camps. It felt comforting to wander past Ed Ruscha’s studio and wonder what that quintessential L.A. artist might be creating. It was always a pleasure to accidentally meet John Densmore of The Doors on Main Street. When I drifted into Dennis Hopper’s loft, I never knew what to expect from the most emblematic actor of the 1960s. I was also developing more than a few bad habits, especially at the West Beach Cafe while drinking among artists, actors, musicians and writers. But such problems were “cool,” a “necessary” result of a writer’s life in Venice.

It was the apartment that allowed such a life. With its low rent, I could live on the edge and write what I cared about. Much writing went on, but so did much drinking. And a marriage, a divorce, two living-together relationships (one doomed and one heartbreaking), stupid promiscuity, much brooding and many parties. Shellac was peeling from the wooden floors, something every woman who entered the place complained about but which I thought declared my independence. From the study windows I could watch the sun sink into the Pacific, but during the day the apartment received minimal light and remained in shadow--another effect I loved but women dreaded. Yet they continuously fell under the spell of romantic Venice: we rode the bike paths, swam in the ocean at the end of Rose Avenue and strolled along the Boardwalk.

Drawn to “Greenwich Village by the Sea,” New York artists trying to escape Manhattan’s summers and winters or seeking work in Hollywood, littered my floor. Eric Bogosian, Lee Breuer and the Mabou Mines theater ensemble, the doo-wop a cappella group 14 Karat Soul, playwright Eric Overmeyer, actress Ruth Maleczech--everyone was welcome to crash. Many found Venice life invigorating, but some New Yorkers, accustomed to the artificial drug of Manhattan’s manic pace, disintegraed. Stunned by the sun and palm trees, they suddenly couldn’t figure out how to operate the answering machine, lost their keys, lost their way and became problem children.

As actor Spalding Gray and I sat on the beach, he stared with some horror at the G-stringed roller-skaters before gasping, “How do you get any work done? I’d be here all the time.” His question couldn’t have been more perplexing if it had been spoken in Eskimo. The only time I came down to the beach was when a New Yorker visited.

The gang wars came and went and came again. Like seasons, they were something you prepared for and hoped wouldn’t be too disastrous the next time around. A woman at the end of my block was murdered--she a newcomer reportedly “in love” with the area, her killer caught within a minute of the crime. Occasionally police helicopters would zoom down low, their searchlights scanning the roofs. One night, police sealed the block and ordered everyone to remain inside while trained dogs sniffed under buildings in search of another killer. Neighbors treated such dramatic interruptions as a minor distraction. Violence and crime were small prices to pay for life in Venice.

But Venice was gradually taking on a new character. In the early ‘80s, I explored a new office complex behind the Rose Cafe, pausing outside a spare office and peering at a blowup of a huge bodybuilder. “Is that the guy who won all those awards in bodybuilding?” I asked a secretary, and was incredulous when she explained that, yes, Mr. Universe was trying to break into Hollywood.

The empty Southern Pacific lots on Main were taken over by developers. I lost my view to restaurants and gyms and hair salons. By the mid-’80s, shacks on the canals that couldn’t sell for $45,000 in 1977 were receiving bids over $350,000. That bodybuilder became a superstar and opened a restaurant, and on Monday nights the odors of cigar smoke drifted into my apartment. When I first moved to Venice, I left my windows open to smell the ocean; now I closed them to escape the sea’s odors. I had stopped swimming offshore because virile lifeguards were developing gargantuan tumors.

By the late ‘80s, I became a connoisseur of gunfire. I could identify a semiautomatic, a .45 pistol, a .22 rifle, an Uzi. Gangbanger funerals at the Spanish-speaking church on the corner, once spectacular floral processions, became grim, routine burial treks. During my first years in Venice, Halloween had been an enchanted parade of ethnically diverse costumes; by the mid-1990s, no trick-or-treaters--none--ventured down my street. Just across Rose, drug dealers were cutting power lines so they could trade in darkness.

In the ‘90s, the nation’s homeless seemed to be marching straight to Venice. I recognized in the street people all the signs of die-hard believers in the 1960s, and I wondered how many could quote Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Soon I couldn’t park on the street at night without risking a broken window or stolen battery.

One night, a neighbor phoned to warn me there was a prowler on our stairs. I opened the front door, flipped on the light and interrupted two strangers injecting heroin. They were very polite, apologetic and asked if they could finish. I said yes, but please don’t leave the needles and clean up the blood. The next day, the blood was still on my stoop, but the needles were gone. One morning, I glanced out my bathroom window to see a man’s head above the building’s dumpster--a homeless man was defecating in the garbage. He grinned and waved at me, ecstatic with his ritual.

Despite this influx of the perverse and the weird, the desperate and the addicted, I still believed that I was living in the one authentic creative community in a too-often prefabricated city. At least the grit was real, man.

Then the Main Street scene started spreading into my street. Limousines parked, waiting for their masters to finish a meal at Schatzi’s. Weightlifting gyms bumped shoulders with international advertising companies. The border between the chic beach scene and my community grew increasingly nebulous. Hollywood elitism reigned: Local artist Robert Graham was dating Anjelica Huston; neighbor Dennis Hopper was suing Peter Fonda over profits from “Easy Rider.” I felt more and more isolated. Finally, as the last of the Jewish emigres died or moved into retirement communities, my apartment building was surrounded by a new breed of Venetian.

Money was coming to Venice, brought by my fellow boomers. Driving four-wheel Range Rovers and Jeeps and BMWs, they descended. For the first time in 20 years, I argued with neighbors. One couple, who had been in the adjoining building less than a month, informed me that I could not park in my driveway because it inhibited access to their “personal space.” This late-’90s wave of immigrants wanted Venice “colorful,” but with hot and cold running Starbucks. It wasn’t real anymore. I began to suspect that, like my childless neighbors, I had been indulging myself as if I were my own spoiled infant.

The final, fatal change wasn’t out there in Venice--it was in me. I had grown disenchanted with the myth of the starving artist, drunk on words, women and wine. At age 50, I experienced an epiphany, the sort I had back in high school when I first read Kerouac: I’d been a conformist. But this time I realized I’d been conforming to nonconformity. Drugs, drunken debaucheries, impulsive adventures: I’d been there, done that. The counterculture had become my suburbia, secure and predictable.

But falling out of love with Venice led me to fall in love with a woman from a younger generation. Like others before her, she visited my apartment, listened to my tales of excess and risks, but was less than impressed. “I couldn’t live here,” she said, “even if you hired an exorcist.” Could I finally embark on another adventure, one more unknown and challenging to me than bohemian excess? I had broken on through to the other side: fatherhood. I realized, late in life, that you could be a writer and have a family. I felt as exhilarated and intimidated by the future as I had been the first time I stepped onto Haight Street.

Alone in my empty apartment, these memories swept through me. “Twenty years.” Almost half my life. “$475 a month.” Allowing for mad money and freedom. “The beach, three blocks away.” I had loved Venice, but like all love affairs, the relationship had to grow more serious or end. It was past time I left. Locking the door and dropping the key in the mailbox for the next tenant, I thought, “Don’t look back.”