More of My Pasadena History

If you are a frequent reader of the blog, you know that much of what appears on here is an exploration of two of the main characters of my life, my mom Jill Crane and her best friend Bill Tunilla, and the years spent with them in Pasadena.  

Whenever I walk around my old Pasadena stomping grounds (often), I take note of the changes versus all the things that have stayed the same, and I take it all so personally, thinking things like “When I was a kid, I had no idea they would build a Target on this block someday.”  I have a hard time keeping up, and often give Geof (who is unfamiliar with the area) directions that apply to the Pasadena of two decades ago, like the other night when we went to a movie at a Pasadena theater he hadn’t been to before and that I guess I hadn’t been to since I saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” which seems like just last year or something but was actually released in 2005 (I looked it up).  I told him “Just park behind this building,” but there was a structure in the place where I’d imagined the old parking spaces to be, but that was okay, because there was a brand new parking lot the next block over, where I’d imagined a building to be – when was the parking lot put there?  How and why do things change in the place I feel to be mine?  I used to think my fascination with walking the same blocks of Pasadena I used to walk as a kid and revisiting the mostly completely changed old spots I used to know had something to do with my interest in time travel – I believe that time travel is possible, and to some degree, when I re-walk the same paths from my childhood, I get the feeling that such repetition and circling back will someday be a part of what makes time travel possible.   

But I have totally done too many drugs, and I think my belief in time travel sounds like a drug-person’s thoughts, right?  I just recently discovered a different way to describe my fascination with Pasadena as it relates to my childhood -- Metaphysical Solipsism, "a type of Idealism which maintains that the individual self of an individual is the whole of reality, and that the external world and other persons are representations of that self and have no independent existence" (http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_solipsism.html).  It’s true that to some degree, when I walk around the old streets I used to walk with Bill (dead) and mom (dead) it seems weird that the place exists when my old Pasadena companions don’t exist anymore, and I do sort of believe, against logic or the decent amount of self-involvement, that Pasadena is mine.  

I’ve been sort of researching my personal landmarks for years, for facts to flesh out my own personal Pasadena, and in particular, facts about the location of House of Fiction, Bill’s old bookstore, where I spent so much of my childhood just hanging out and getting primed for a bohemian adulthood (I remember sitting at the store and pondering the poster for the 1980’s Bukowski biopic Barfly that hung from a wall, thinking it was pronounced “Barflee” and wondering what one of those was, and then, years later, when Bukowski-literacy was a necessity to a writer-drinker, thinking “Oh, it's Bar-fly”).  Every so often, I’ve done internet searches on Bill’s name and the House of Fiction, as well as other of my own landmarks, partially to satiate my old curiosities about certain places I remember, and partially to help flesh out my writing when Pasadena appears in my writing.  I didn’t used to be able to find much, but about half a year ago I stumbled on http://pasadenadigitalhistory.com/, which provides history and photos of many of these landmarks of mine.   

For instance, when I was a kid, it was one of my – goals?  predictions? – that I’d be familiar with gay culture someday, and there was a gay bar called Nardi’s next door to the bookstore that I was always so curious about, always trying to see inside, and excited when I’d hear their Juke Box through the wall, often playing that Smithereens’ song “A Girl Like You.”  I  am so intrigued by the Pasadena Digital History information on the bar: 

from the site: 
Only infomation given on envelope, is Nardi's bar. Do not know whom the people are in the photo. Date taken: 4/14/1945. Nardi’s existed at 665 E. Colorado Boulevard under a variety of names. In the 1943 Pasadena city Directory it is listed as Elmer Nardi Liquors; 1947 Nardi-Waldorf Cafe; 1960, the Waldorf Café, and in 1970, Nardi’s. As near as we can tell, the bar was demolished in 1998 to make way for the Laemmle theater complex

I also had a childhood fascination with flophouses and there was one two doors down from the bookstore, “Crown Hotel,” which was destroyed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.  I'd gotten to go inside it when it was a filming location for a while, and one of my grown-up friends, Michelle, used it to film her short film Pin Feathers, but it was just an empty building at that point -- none of the rumored hookers or their imaginary retired hobo flatmates lived there anymore.  
  

I don’t know – I’m writing about my solipsistic nostalgia sort of jokingly above, but the fact of the House of Fiction having been demolished (currently the site of the movie theater where I saw Me and You and Everyone We know), and of Bill and Mom both being dead, of course gives me a feeling of deep sadness, and I am both pained and grateful for the constant dreams I have of us all spending long hours hanging out at the bookstore together, though the store is usually partially demolished and often under new management.  I found a short film (below) on Vimeo the other day (by film-maker George Porcari) that is about the House of Fiction and Bill, and it is the jewel of my Pasadena-personal research – my poor mom and poor Bill leaving their sanctuary at the end, on the day the store closed, slated to be torn down and turned into something more profitable, the way it always goes in this fucking country.  

All generalizing aside, nothing special ever survives, ever.



The House of Fiction from George Porcari on Vimeo.

A Compendium of Well-Worn Memories: Youth: Precocity

  "cheer up, son":  Apocalypse Now Death Cards scene

Sad:

-In fourth grade my teacher was a flamboyant gay drama coach whom I adored even though sometimes he was high-maintenance, requiring constant attention and adoration from his students.  He had a very lesbianish friend he'd known for forever who was a part-time flight attendant - because she loved adventure - and also a substitute teacher; she taught our class whenever our teacher was out sick.  They were probably both in their forties.  He wore a professorial cardigan and a goatee.  She was tiny, with thinning short hair and an appealingly ugly face, and when I saw Rocky Horror years later I was reminded of her by the character of Columbia.  I was very attached to them and always imagining what they were like in their regular lives outside of school, just hanging out with their friends, and what their respective apartments may have looked like and what music each listened to.  One day, the woman must have been on campus to sub for a different class, and she peeked in on our class to say hi but the door was this really heavy monstrosity, made of iron or something instead of just a regular wooden door, and when she poked her little head in without securing the door open with her body, it closed on her head and it looked like it hurt so much, but you could tell she didn't want to turn it into a big deal so she was just sort of like "ouch" and said goodbye -- but you could tell it really hurt.

Pride mixed with a Sense of Foreboding:

-When I was an older kid, like twelvish through my teens, and I'd be super-bummed and pouting, mom'd say "Cheer up, son," quoting a line from "Apocalypse Now," the scene where Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore is putting "death cards" on the bodies of Viet Cong civilians his platoon has just killed, and one of the soldiers looks really sad and scared about it.  The perfect gallows-humor irony of this private joke of hers coupled with the fact that she'd groomed me to pick up on it made me feel proud of our household, but also, uneasy with the certainty that this would be me someday, a cool, depressed mom with an impressive appreciation of film.

Guilt:

-In college my freshmen and sophomore years, there was a kid named Rory who was in many of my classes.  He was very quiet and looked like Kurt Cobain (same hair and clothes but without Kurt's handsome face), and I was always curious about him and wanting to be his friend, but I was sort of a jerky punkish girl so I would be mean sometimes when I wanted to be nice instead, and one time when I was with a friend who also knew him from classes, he was petitioning to legalize weed, on behalf of a socialist group he must've been a member of, and even though I was probably stoned at the time he approached me for my signature, and I believed in all the good, kind generosity that comprises socialism, I made some crack about him being a hippie, and blew him off.  The following year, he killed himself, jumping out of his window in the tallest building in town, which happened to be the dormitory he lived in.  I should have been his friend.

*Side Note:  Painful Awareness of Mortality:  I was a campus janitor at the time of his death, and in fact, the Janitorial Headquarters were located in the basement of the building he'd jumped from, so I'd actually seen his dead body covered up with a sheet before I knew it was him.  In a very understanding way, my supervisor had asked if any of us would be willing to help clean the blood off the pavement with the pressure washer.  I didn't offer, but I'd considered it, and then felt guilty about it, realizing how much I'd enjoy the sympathy and gratitude of being one of the brave ones. 

**Further Side Note:  Coincidence/People's Interwoven Experiences in Some Grand Cosmic Design of Interconnectedness:  I'd had an awful on-campus psychologist who'd threatened to have me put on a 72-hour hold in a psych ward, clearly on a power trip and not because I was a danger to myself or others.  I remember being truly scared of her and the damage she could do to me.  Later, it came out that she'd been Rory's counselor and had possibly sort of fucked him up by pushing him to come out of the closet when he was still figuring out his sexuality.  She was put on administrative leave or fired or something. I guess I dodged a bullet. I had survivor's guilt, though.
 

  Little Nell as Columbia in "Rocky Horror Picture Show"

Marengo Apartments

When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena.  But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel.  It was this building:

  

My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends.  I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet.  She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years.  In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful.  In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t open the door to get into (she opened it just enough to push a new acquisition in there and then closed it up again).  she had trunks and toy chests and glass-fronted shelves for her tin wind-up toys and spinning tops, Little Golden Books,  small vases full of cat's eye marbles and some of her more interesting jewelry and Beatles stuff.  Even her little collection of pigeon wings was kept tidy, each wing wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a special little trinkets box I knew to stay away from, since the wings grossed me out. 

There was a Murphy bed in the little living room and during the four or five years she was there, she had two different people stay with her (for long short terms), sleeping on that hideawy bed.  The first was Bill.   

Mom’s two best friends were named Bill, and to distinguish between them in conversation we called them Old Bill and Young Bill; the names stuck even when Young Bill wasn’t a part of our life anymore and Old Bill became such a part of our lives he spent his last months in mom’s apartment, dying from cancer, finally giving up the ghost on the bed in the room that ended up being too full of stuff to enter.  For a while I tried renaming Old Bill “Cat” Bill, out of decorum, but it never took and he liked his old nickname the best, anyway.   

It was young Bill who lived with mom for awhile at the Marengo apartment; it’s hard to describe him.  If I’d led a more sheltered life and was some Ohio Writer’s Workshop-trained novelist describing him, I’d say he was artistic.  And it’d be true:  he was an artist.  But I wish I could dissect that term and explain just what he was like.  He was still in the closet.  He was from a slightly rich family, and lived with his mom, who sounds like she was the stereotype of a mom living with her artistic closeted son – she was indulgent but clueless and was famous for her red lipstick, at least as a detail in her son’s few descriptions of her.  He wore the same clothes every day – a dingy long sleeved that always smelled freshly laundered (but it must have been more than one shirt?), corduroy pants and Birkenstocks with socks.  This uniform of his sounds really obnoxious when I write it down -- he sounds like some aggressively mellow hippie, but that's not how it was -- on him, this outfit looked just like the natural second skin of a smart, often unkind, bipolar young man.  I LOVED when he lived with us, as I loved his visits when he still lived with his mom.  There was a Denny’s-like 24-hour restaurant down the block from mom's apartment, where she used to meet up with him often during the week (even going there just to look for him sometimes when she couldn't get him on the phone, often finding him there). Every once in a while, before he lived with us, we’d also go meet up with him there on a weekend, like at midnight – or maybe it was 9 pm for all I knew, but it felt exciting and secret as something that could only occur at the witching hour.

their restaurant

 

A series of photos mom took of Young Bill

I guess he stopped staying there when my mom’s boyfriend David moved in.  David was homeless when mom met him – he was a drunk Vietnam vet who mom realized had embellished his tour of duty once -- it was before there was an internet – she was reading some nonfiction about the war, a pet subject of hers, when she accidentally found some information about the date of a specific battle that contradicted the timeline he used in his stories of abjection.   

Young Bill would have left the building if there was any kid around other than me – he was a sourpuss about the mainstream, including families and children – but he and I were very close and he sometimes found a way to express his fondness for me, like the time we sat on the ground in front of a grocery store and he put quarters in the same vending machine until I got the toy I wanted.  Not so with David – I thing he was ashamed of being a do-nothing drunk liar so he kept to himself when I was around, though my dad will attest to the fact that David perked up whenever dad picked me up and we were heading out the door – he’d always say the same thing in the same way, ‘you come back now, y’hear?’  It must’ve been some personal joke of his – he sounded like a happy southerner when he said it, and he wasn’t either of those things.  There was nothing wrong with him, though.  I liked him pretty well.  He was handsome and the tv-watching silence between us was companionable enough.

Then here’s what happened.  My mom set fire to the top story of the apartment building.  She'd always had tons of these catholic saint-decorated candles she kept lit in the bathroom all night.  Now there are slightly different versions of the story – the one she told most was that the wind blew the candles over and set fire to the curtains, but there was also mention of David getting up to pee in the middle of the night and knocking them over without realizing it at the time.  I think this story of her creating a cover story for him is the real cover story.  I think she did it herself, on accident probably, in one of many devastating moments of unadulterated carelessness.

Well, the fire was a practically unbearable tragedy for her for a long time.  Old Bill took her to Catalina Island for a few days right after the fire, a place I’ve never been to though it’s so close  -- I gather it was an occasional sanctuary for her back when Old Bill still had money to indulge her like that.

I really had loved that apartment.  It was only her and one other apartment on that floor, and the two places were so separate from the rest of the building, like a tugboat wheelhouse.  

The roof was all covered in tar paper, with turbines and vents and pipes all exposed -- we were not supposed to be walking around up there, and had to freeze for a moment whenever we heard someone walking up the stairs, in case it was one of the people who told on mom to the landlord.  There was more than one pink smoggy sunsetted night when we were just up there on the roof,  blowing bubbles or something dopey like that, just enjoying the night.

I used to always go back in circles to the same places from my past.  I lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood twice, once in my roaring twenties and the other time in my staid early thirties with my husband.  That’s the most extreme case of me circling back, but I dream all the time about revisiting the same places – I dream of moving back to Olympia or Philadelphia all the time, almost nightly in fact, and I sometimes tour my old dwellings.  I work far from home but close to where I used to live for a couple years in my early twenties, and I’ve gotten off the freeway to drive past that old apartment once or twice.  I have driven past my first childhood home on Wagner Street several times over the years, sometimes taking pictures of it -- I used to imagine being able to buy it and live there again.

the wagner street house

inside the wagner street house 

Once, when I was apartment-hunting, I even went to look at place in the Marengo apartment building.  I used to have such a self-mocking sense of humor, and thought to myself when I was standing there in that old familiar hallway next to the wall of mailslots:  wouldn't it be weird if I moved in there and ended up starting a fire as well?    

For years I’ve gone out of my way to drive past that building when I'm in the neighborhood.  I used to look at it and feel wistful about my childhood, mixed with a near-obsession over how my mom had marked me for doom so early on – she’d given me absolutely blissful nights of staying up all hours watching late night shows, eating oranges and popcorn, with her unhappy men sitting with us sometimes, me feeling like the luckiest daughter in the world, just getting to stay up late with her.  Then she’d burned it down.

I've been driving past it almost nightly on my way home from work these nights since she'd died, just to make myself a little sad. I feel the wholeness of her death when I pass by the building, and I feel that same old anger at her for her careless life.  Then I feel sorry for her for this same carelessness. 

 

 

marengo rooftop