The Crack of Dawn #775

6/17/2025

6/17/2025

Newsletter #775

The Crack of Dawn

For twenty-five years, on and off, I lived in the broiling heat of Hollywood. My last apartment in Hollywood was located in a rundown, ugly part of town, above a decaying coach house, and behind an abandoned house. It was a very creepy set up, but only $400 a month.

That summer L.A. endured a prolonged heat wave. Temperatures soared to 110. My apartment above the tan stucco coach house became a clay oven hot enough to bake bread. The walls were so hot you couldn’t touch them. All I had was a squeaky, 1940s, oscillating fan that was a very cool prop, but did nothing to alleviate the heat. The situation was unbearable. And being outside in the glaring sun was even worse. So, I spent two miserable weeks ensconced, all day and all night, at the nearby Denny’s Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. It was both air conditioned and open 24 hours. Also, as far as I know, it was the only Denny’s with a bar.

Somewhere during the hundreds of cups of coffee, interspersed every couple of hours with a beer, I came to a life-changing conclusion—Hollywood is fucked! I hate this fuckin’ place! I’ve gotta get the fuck out of here!”

That was in 1988.

In 1994, rejuvenated, and ready to rock and roll, I returned to L.A. for the fifth time. However, this time I somehow finally used my stupid fucking brain, and instead of living in the inferno of Hollywood, I rented an apartment in Santa Monica, where it’s ten degrees cooler. I found a one-bedroom apartment in the crappiest part of town. But it was the crappiest part of a nice town, right near the ocean. Even where I lived at 26^th Street—26 blocks from the beach—you could still feel the cool ocean breeze.

All of the apartments in the building faced west, toward the ocean, which was perfect because the wind blew in from the ocean all the time. Plus, most evenings we got to see a spectacular sunset over the Pacific Ocean.

I lived in that apartment for seven years—1994 to 2001.

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The cities in Holland (where I’ve recently been), as well as many other European cities, were laid out in the 1600s and 1700s. All the Dutch cities contained pliens, or squares, all over the place. The buildings were constructed with the understanding that they formed a square. A square was where people could meet, pubs and coffee shops and restaurants could put out their tables, and buskers could ply their trade. The pliens weren’t there by mistake; they were put there on purpose. People needed squares.

*

Entirely unplanned and certainly not on purpose, a square formed of its own accord behind my apartment building in Santa Monica. The center of the square was a large parking lot, where I parked. The lot was also used by two other apartment buildings. Those two buildings formed one side of the square, my building was another, making an L.

Along the other two sides of the L, enclosing the parking lot, thus completing the square, were rows of small, cheap, single-family houses, that all faced out to the street. Their backdoors opened out to the square. Large Mexican families lived in most of these houses, so it just naturally became a Mexican square. In Holland, they intentionally built their squares to accommodate businesses. In America, zoning rules don’t allow mixing businesses and residences. The Mexicans solved that problem by having a Mexican food truck show up every day. The truck had cooked food, as well as a bit of everything, Tylenol, diapers, shaving cream, fruit and vegetables. So the Mexicans inhabited the square, sitting on cheap lawn chairs or boxes, eating tamales, drinking Tico Tico soda, everybody hollering Spanish at each other at the same time. I didn’t know what they were saying, but they sure had a lot to say.

To alert people of their presence, the food truck played a tinkly, electronic bell rendition of the Godfather theme—dum, dee-dee-dum, dum-dum-dum—over and over again, for hours at a time. Every day.

A couple of leather-clad dudes kept Harley-Davidson motorcycles parked in that lot. The sound of Harleys going through that alley, right outside my bedroom window, any time of the day and night, was so outrageously loud, so ridiculously brain-rattling, that it shook the whole building.

A Mexican family in one of the houses backing the alley had a big Doberman. The dog was locked up in an area so small it could barely turn around, enclosed by a six-foot wooden fence. My heart broke for the dog’s sad situation, but that fucking dog never stopped barking. Never. 24 hours a day. Occasionally, it would stop for a minute. Sudden relief. When the dog remembered it was locked up, ignored, and probably underfed, it always started barking again. As the dog barked all night, I would lay in bed fantasizing I had a hunting rifle with a scope. I could open my window, lean out with the rifle, fire three quick shots into the side of the wooden fence, certainly hitting the innocent dog, duck back in and shut the window. La! I hated myself for thinking such a thing, but I did anyway. Every night.

Worst of all, directly outside my bedroom window, across the alley, lived a large Mexican family in a tiny, possibly 600-square-foot, bungalow. My small apartment was 550 square feet. I never did figure out exactly how many people lived there, but it was at least seven or eight. Every morning at 6:00, the father of the clan would begin his workday by pouring metal trashcans full of bottles and cans into the back of a pickup truck, ten feet from my bedroom window. The painful sound of bottles and cans falling on metal is what jolted me awake every fucking day for years.

The building’s manager, Robert Johnson, was an old man who lived right below me. If I couldn’t find my cat, Stevie, I’d always find him in Bob’s bed. Bob’s crazy, middle aged daughter, Alice, lived at the end of the upstairs hallway. Alice never went out. Alice had an unknown number of tropical birds. Judging by their loud, annoying, caws, squawks, snorts, and the occasional blowing of raspberries, we the other residents of the building construed that Alice had Parrots, Cockatoos, Macaws, and very possibly a Toucan. But who knew? Each bird squawked in its own particularly irritating way, all the time. On behalf of her of her elderly father, Alice took our rent checks from a half-opened door. Even from the half open door you could feel how hot she kept it in there; and it stunk like a zoo.

Add to this soundtrack the standard background sounds of L.A.—sirens, helicopters, honking horns, and thousands of cars whizzing by on the I-10 freeway, conveniently located one block away.

According to the renowned picture editor/sound editor, Walter Murch, who cut picture and sound on Apocalypse Now, we humans can only hear two and a half sounds at one time. Helicopters, machineguns, screaming in the background. Machineguns, screaming, helicopter prop whoosh in the background. Two and a half. After that it gets muddy, then soon becomes noise.

That apartment in Santa Monica, part of an ersatz square, was a constant, never-ending assault on my auditory system. After seven years, I finally found the noise so deafening, so painful, that it was unbearable.

I left L.A. for the last time, coincidentally, two weeks after 9/11.

I’ve lived in this house for 23 years. And guess what? It’s really quiet.