Before all the recent massacres, we went with friends to see a movie, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," after consuming way too many plates at the Albuquerque sushi joint we like to patronize. It's on Tramway just below the rise of the Sandia Mountains, and like many areas of 'Burque, it reminds me a lot of parts of LA a long time ago. V. B. Price calls Albuquerque "City at the End of the World" partly because of those mountains rising heavenward on the edge of forever. Los Angeles, where he and I both had shallow roots, has many similar mountains, and when I was a kid in far eastern LA County, the mountains I saw out my living room picture window were the San Gabriels, with Mount San Antonio ("Old Baldy") gleaming with snow all year long as the anchor to the mountain range. This is a Google street view of the mountains from the vantage point of the street where I lived from 1954 to 1959. The yellow house on the left is where I lived.
Imagine the scene without the trees and you have a good approximation of what I could see out my living room window.
Well, when I could see the mountains at all. It was a smoggy era, and more often than not, the mountains and everything else were obscured with a thick, choking yellow-brown haze. The smog defined what you could and couldn't see and more often than not, you had a very limited view no matter where you turned. The smog was worst on the still summer days when it built up so thick and heavy, you could feel it pressing down on you and you hesitated to take a breath.
I left LA in 1959 and didn't go back until 1969 when on a whim one
We wound up sitting in front of the house where I'd lived from 1954 to 1959. How I was able to find it with hardly a wrong turn on the road after ten years away and never having driven in LA before, I can barely imagine now. But there we were. The house had been painted yellow and looked much shabbier than I remembered. The whole neighborhood was shabby it seemed to me, and it seemed almost as if the life had left it. The smog was as thick as ever. It was a little before noon. I asked Ms. whether she wanted to see Hollywood and Beverly Hills and all that. She said "Sure."
This was Ms. Ché's first trip to LA and she seemed to like it. It was my first trip back but my umpteenth time in the City of Angels. And I didn't like it much.Which surprised me, because I'd long felt that LA was my home, and I had faced extreme culture shock leaving for Northern California when I was 10. Yet coming back when I was 20, more of a hippie rebel and wanderer than not, I felt it was a phony and dismal place, ugly at heart, and as we toured the sights in Hollywood, cruising Sunset, I got this notion that's never left me: LA is a killer culture. I was lucky to be out of there. I doubted I would have lived had I stayed.
I didn't tell her at the time, though. I'm not sure I ever have.
The Tate-LaBianca murders hadn't happened yet [*See below, yes they had], but there was definitely something in the air -- besides the smog -- that presaged a coming bad thing, something spiritually, psychically foreboding.. I attributed it at the time to my own personal sense of that killer culture I'd never quite grasped before. [As I've thought back on it, the murders may have been an underlying reason why I wanted to go back a few weeks after they happened, even if I wasn't consciously motivated at the time. Maybe I wanted to see for myself...]
I showed her places I recalled in Hollywood and up into the hills [was I looking for Cielo Dr.? Could be...], but mostly we just drove around at random and finally wound up at the ocean at Santa Monica Pier. A brief stop there, and then it was back up the coast, headed north, spending the night in Santa Maria, then in the morning driving nonstop up 101 to San Jose again then across the Valley to our home. An almost three day adventure.
So when we went to see the movie, before all the recent massacres, it was with a sense of anticipation and not a little dread. We knew what it was about --or thought we did. We were not Tarantino fans, but at least I had an open mind about what the picture might have to offer.
It didn't disappoint.
Though its climax shocked and appalled and horrified, it was a cartoon, and because it was a cartoon, the horror of the climax ultimately evaporated almost like a dream. This didn't happen. You imagined it. Or rather, Tarantino imagined it for you.
The climax is very bloody and worse, but... it wasn't real. That's not what happened.
The Tate-LaBianca murders really did happen. They were a pivotal event and not only in Hollywood. They began to bring the curtain down on an era. The Counterculture had run amok. Woodstock was yet to come and the dreadful Altamont. We continued to protest and march against the Vietnam War. Nixon was a lightning rod for youthful anger.
But after the murders, something changed --again, not to forget all the psychic changes after the assassinations and insurrections of 1968 -- and there was no going back.
Tarantino is too young to remember much of the '60s, and yet he recreated a version of Hollywood c.1969 that mostly felt right. I'd put it this way: we didn't know what was to come, and because we didn't know, we put on a brave face and continued with our lives regardless. That's the case for the characters in the movie as well..They could feel that things were changing, particularly the main characters, but they didn't know what or how. My guess:50 years on, and they still don't know. They're in the business of creating illusion after all, an illusion which reality rarely penetrates.
After the movie, I said to our friends (all much younger than us and with no memories of the '60s or Hollywood as it was or... well, you get the idea ... that what really bothered me about the picture was the license plates on the cars. (They were the right color/style for the era -- black with yellow letters and numbers, though they would start changing to blue and yellow in 1969) -- but Tarantino was fucking with our memories by jumbling the letters and numbers, instead of having plates with three letters followed by three numbers the way they were in California back then. He was fucking with us.
Yes. Yes he was. Quite deliberately too.
Things really did change in 1969. Nothing would be quite the same again. LA and Hollywood wouldn't be the same again.
Having someone too young to remember tell us old farts what happened -- as he sees it -- is really more valuable than not. No, his history is skewed, but what if...?
What if...?
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* Ms. Ché and I were talking about it the other day, and she remembered something that was going on at Cal Expo the day we left, so she said we could probably figure out the date from that. Sure enough, it was September 4, going into the weekend after Labor Day. This struck me as odd at first because I thought we were still taking classes and would have to be at college. She said, "don't you remember?" I graduated that June and she'd graduated the year before. We were done with our educations for the time being. Oh. No. I didn't remember. Later that month I would take a job in Stockton and we would move there.
September 4 was several weeks after the Tate murders, so obviously, they were on our minds. No one knew who had done it, though the caretaker had been arrested. At that time, the Tate murders were not officially connected with the La Bianca murders nor with a string of other murders the Manson followers would be accused of. Arrests of Manson Family suspects for the Tate murders would not come until October.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere in LA, heavy with smog as it was, let you feel the burden of death. How much of it was on our minds, I don't know. But Ms. Ché confirmed that we went out to Santa Monica before leaving, and it was a relief to be by the ocean and feel the ozone wash over us, almost cleansing.
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