LA ... but confidential: a cherished memory

LOS ANGELES. A chance remark on another Substack brings a flood of them

Over on pics and words, Robert Rado has put up some garbage. That’s what he calls it, at any rate. I liked his words. I actually felt drawn to the photo. I asked him where it was of. He replied, Los Angeles.

That made me sit up. I said I’d noticed the telegraph poles, which Los Angeles commonly uses to distribute power. But the rest was blurry. Robert replied with an explanation of how he works in photography sometimes:

The photos are images that you’d remember for no obvious reason. A favourite photographer of mine has this method of working: he goes back to photos he made a long time ago, pictures he’s set aside, then he spreads them on a table and tries to find a narrative for them. In other words, go back to images you made a long time ago and try to figure out why they mattered to you at the time or why they’re meaningful to you now. I hope this has not been a complete waste of your time.

No, it was not a complete waste of my time, far from it. He couldn’t have known, but he’d brought a tear to my eye. No reminiscence of Los Angeles is a waste of my time.

Image: the interior courtyard at Los Angeles’s Coral Sands Motel. It was once exclusive.

They call it the City of Angels. Of course, it’s not named after angels. It’s named after Mary, mother of Christ. She is the Queen of the Angels, and it is for her that the city was named. But the short form is also appropriate: for there are many angels in Los Angeles.

At the moment, she, the city, that is, is suffering. Water is short. The heat is getting worse and the fires are a constant threat. A spiritualist once confirmed my own view of LA, won by hard experience, that, like a number of very select locations on this Earth, it seems to never settle at a midpoint, but gravitates around polar extremities, like good and bad trying to outwit each other whilst balanced at the ends of a see-saw. Always at the outer limits, never in the middle ground. You can find—and I have found, I can assure you—the very worst of mankind in Los Angeles. But you will nowhere find people more generous, sincere, giving and wholesomely helpful than Angelenos—for the best of mankind is there as well. It is in part my brushes with LA’s more colourful characters that have convinced me of the city’s angels, not only in name but in person.

For all that, nonchalant I was not: over on the East side, we had to batten down our windows and avoid eye contact: Crips country. Now, they’re in Westlake, with MS-13 and the 18th Street guys as well. Watts is now relatively “safe”, but I wouldn't book the motels down there. They’re busier than an Amazon packing warehouse, so you’d likely not get much kip.

I must’ve stayed in LA ten or 15 different trips. I always stayed at the Coral Sands Motel, which is still there: up on North Western at the street Robert said he’d taken the photo on: Hollywood; it’s at the point where the hill rises up towards Griffith Park. Back when, it sat in isolation, a remnant of historic LA, which time and LA herself forgot. It was built in 1929, as the auto-court or motor-hotel (motel wasn’t settled on until after the war) were just getting started. It’s an unusual motel configuration, with the cars parked around the outside (rather than inside, on a courtyard) of an oblong formation, which, once inside, presents one with pretty gardens (Charlie, the gardener, was up at the crack watering his plants, and they looked a real treat, and I told him so), a swimming bath and a hot tub, a sort of enclave—far from the madding city.

They extended the Metro and, in latter years, the Sands and the Metro station shared a somewhat desolate location, into which gradually came Blockbuster, Ralph’s (where I learned my first Spanish), a juice bar and Deutsche Telekom. The Sands was a mecca for the gay scene, who, in the US, love their resort hotels: dolce far’ niente—a place to chill, chat, mingle and while away the time. It got busy at the weekends, mostly the guests were Angelenos, so we Europeans were a talking point and the friendly welcomes meant you were never alone there.

It wasn’t a gay hotel, just gay friendly, but, of course, romance was always in the air, so Felix, Kerry, Rob and their teams would field enquiries at reception, carrying out astute compatibility checks with potential guests as a pre-filter to ensuring a harmonious ensemble within. The unlucky were turned away with profuse apologies and a hot recommendation to go across the street to the Bel-Air. If you watch the personal holiday films of Dirk Bogarde (they’re on the film star’s retrospective website, or on Youtube in the BBC’s The Private Dirk Bogarde), then you’ll see I’m not fibbing when I say that Dirk Bogarde himself stayed at the Bel-Air: it’s recognisably in shot. So, like the parson’s egg, the Bel-Air wasn’t itself half bad. Ironically for Bogarde, however, it wasn’t remotely gay.

On my last occasion at the Sands, of which more anon, I saw that the Bel-Air had become a gap site. But the Sands is still going. Not as strong as it did before, but, in all likelihood, stronger. No more back in my day than now, the Sands wasn’t clothing optional by any means, but some guests did tend to lose track of their towel. Unfortunately, since 1929, the Sands had acquired neighbours, in the form of a block of flats, and some residents were unaccustomed to the outlook over a gay friendly hotel. They called the cops, who promptly carted off nine of the guests, who were supposed to be guests and not to be saying “be my guest.” Their release was secured by an undertaking by the management to erect a screen awning on the north side of the courtyard, at a princely cost of $20,000. I suspect that a good many of the guests at the Coral Sands Motel over the years never knew or conceived of the travails—and expense—that Felix had to endure in order to secure their little plot of enclave, for them, them alone, and certainly not the prurient regards of the neighbours.

The cleaning column was headed up by May, who, like most of the team, was Taiwanese, and a dab shot with a broomstick at hitting cockroaches beating a hasty retreat from her ever-present anti-bug attacks (I think she took them as an affront to her personally). I reckon she must have lived through Hiroshima and survived. Because something akin to Hiroshima was often the spectacle that greeted her when she went to do housekeeping duties of a Monday morning.

But not chez moi. One year, after I booked, she told me Felix had installed a new toilet seat because they knew I would look after the room. I certainly looked after the toilet seat. My room that time had pretty chintz curtains and a tasteful bedspread, had freshly painted woodwork and rose-motif wallpaper. Upper storey (that meant you had an aerial view of the goings and comings. In that order.) The staff knew their guests. Which is why some guests got the ground floor and had to like it. And close to reception, to save the cops too much of a trek.

When my partner quit me and Belgium in one, I needed to get away, far, far away, and LA beckoned (Enrique Iglesias actually: California Calling). I booked ahead, three weeks, and planned to chill big time. The crowd had changed, however. It was no longer a gay mecca, but a mecca for small families. I bought a trash novel whose last page I accurately predicted at the end of the first chapter. It was set during the Rodney King riots, so it felt right to be reading it, even if it was all too predictable. Hollywood, as usual. I settled myself, book in hand, by the pool. Talked to a guy who told me about Boney James, who’d come on the radio (hear him in LA and you’ll never think of anywhere else when you hear him). Some of the old school were still there, at least.

As I sat chatting to these guys, I noticed Felix, the manager, walking down the sidewalk. Our eyes met and I raised an eyebrow of recognition. He looked again, shook his head in wonderment, and came over. “Felix, how are you?” said I. He remembered my name: “Vincent! Nice to see you back!” he said. And immediately: “The hotel’s changed ...” His voice fell: “Are you disappointed?”

I was so taken aback by such a kind enquiry, I mumbled, “Er, er … It’s not exactly what I had been expecting.” “How long you here for?” (Felix is from Taiwan: he got his travel agent brother to get me airline tickets one trip, when I did a side excursion to Portland, and he didn’t charge me for the room while I was away, even though I left my stuff in it; he got another friend to give me a lift to Chinatown to collect the tickets — we spent three hours in his AC-less Toyota pick-up in rush-hour traffic, and had a great time). I told him (how long I was there for), and said it wasn’t a problem. “I give you refund if you wanna go somewhere else?”

I said it was funny he should say that: I’d been thinking maybe to pop over to Palm Springs for a few days. In the end, I stayed at the Sands a week, he refunded me two weeks, cash, and I booked into All World’s on Palm Springs’s Ramon, where a light-shade crashed from the bathroom ceiling and the AC packed up the first night. I felt they would think I was some Euro-football hooligan, but, if they did, they didn’t ever say so. After all those trips to LA, it was not long before PSP also became as familiar as the back of my hand.

The next few trips, I always flew into LAX and then hired a car for the 2-hour drive to PSP. A buddy there asked why I don’t just fly to PSP, and part of me wanted to say I hadn’t realised they would have the connection; but another part wanted to say that I just enjoyed the landing at LA because LA is so important for me. I feel as at home there as I feel in my own house. They call New Orleans The Big Easy, and I sometimes feel LA should be called that too.

You can go for one day to LA and get mugged and hate it for the rest of all time. But I’ve been in LA so often, and always loved it, no matter what I was doing. Mostly, meeting people. Exchanging views. Feigning understanding at the widespread lack of awareness of anything outside California, let alone the States. And always sharing experiences. Just as I am doing with you now.

I will probably never return, and there’s a lump in my throat as I write that. So, now you know: you will never waste my time with Los Angeles.