One-Year Anniversary in Santa Fe

First.... The Great Escape from LA

It’s true! September 21st! We celebrated one year in The Land of Enchantment!

Hoooraaay!

But WAIT! I never quite told you exactly what a NIGHTMARE it was getting outta LA!

After living 40 years in the Los Angeles desert - 30 years in Echo Park, the former socialist-bohemian-gang-ruled Latino barrio, more recently, the over-gentrified, sky-high rental and real estate destination - forcing a majority of Latinos, socialists, artists, and modestly-paid “bobo” (bourgeois bohemian) university professors, like me - OUT!

(Feel free to read my controversial HuffPost piece on the very same!)

(Or listen to it on my Podcast.)

I DID briefly mention the epic WAR I had with my Echo Park landlady, right? That is, with her emotionally distraught daughter and her Orange County, steel-plated and heartless Italian husband… who had never sat across a table from a liberal New York Jew in his life. Or that’s what he told me at the brunch they both took me to as they tried to swindle and charm me out of the house I’d rented from their mother (and mother-in-law) for twenty-nine and half years, after she’d promised me,

Don’t worry, Eric, you can stay in the house after I’m gone. My daughter lives in Dana Point and she has no intention of doing anything with the house, other than continuing to collect the rent from you. You’ve been a great tenant, other than the few things we both know about over the years.

“Few things”? Like rent the third bedroom out as an Airbnb without telling her? Like marry a wife and adopt a son without informing her or asking her “permission”? Like “underpay” her the going residential rate for twenty years before she tripled the rent as vengeance for the next ten because she “just could” since the house was coded a “single-family residence” by the City. All of which transformed… the former grateful landlady… who used to bring us Christmas cookies every Holiday Season into… the Wicked Witch of the West!

But then, after “Margaret Hamilton” dies of a brain tumor in the summer of 2020, her wicked daughter and evil Italian son-in-law, suddenly blindside me by sending me an eviction notice, to “vacate in 60 days”, which they believe they can do under the law, because I have no rent control or protection under the Los Angeles single-family residential code. BUT, because they do it during Covid, they actually can’t legally evict us at all.

So then, as I said, we begin a highly-venomous, lawyer-led, landlord-tenant WAR for the entire duration of the epidemic.

First, they offer us 2 months’ rent to move out. Two fk-ing months rent! Are they fk-ing kidding me? Over the thirty years that I’ve lived at “Lucretia Gardens”, I’ve perhaps paid, and collected from the various downstairs studio tenants, a combined total of three-quarters of a MILLION dollars in rent! I know, I know, what kind of schmuck rents a house for thirty years? That would be me! That schmuck! The counterculture-artist dude who never believed in ownership, materialism, marriage, family, parenthood, the whole megillah! Now look at me! That dog has certainly come back to bite my idealistic, refusenik ass!

They increase their offer. A pittance. We refuse to move.

They tear out all our front and back yard vegetation - in an attempt to harass us to move. They cut down the most beautiful bougainvillea tree in Echo Park, the one that I planted as a seedling and which both locals and tourists come from all over the neighborhood to photograph. They’re rightfully cursed on Facebook and Twitter.

I report them to the LA Building and Safety Department for “tenant harassment” and for Margaret Hamilton’s renting out the downstairs studio illegally for the last thirty years, making them, Ralph and Alice, the current owners, liable for $300,000 in back rent to over twenty different subtenants. The Building and Safety inspector comes over, writes them a citation for illegal tenant occupancy, and fines them.

We curse and threaten each other non-stop! We bleed and suffer profusely, and both sides make the other extremely, hair-pullingly angry, psychotic, and miserable, for a full year and a half.

Finally, our hero forever, our White Knight and legal savior, Ira Spiro, a Berkeley Law School-educated “peoples’ lawyer”, stubbornly and brilliantly negotiates a hefty “tenant buyout”, allowing me (and The Fam) to buy my first house ever, at 74 years young, in Santa Fe, as we finally agree to move out of Echo Park.

Far easier to write here than to have done so, I promise you!

It takes about six weeks, full-time, to pack up more than half a lifetime of “stuff” collected from all around the planet, all jammed into “Lucretia Gardens” while living in the LA desert for forty years. (Most of my friends tell me it took them only a week, or two, max, to pack up and move out, no matter how long they’d lived in their homes.)

But finally, The Trules send off the moving truck to Santa Fe on August 15 at 2 p.m.

At 2:15 p.m., the Orange County Italian Stallion drives over to deliver the hefty buyout check. (We hope it won’t bounce!)

And at 2:30 p.m., Surya and Exsel take our one, packed-to-the-gills, blue Toyota Matrix, while I and Cassius, the Dog, take our other, packed-to-the-gills, black Toyota RAV4, over to El Compadre, our favorite Mexican Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, naturally also in Echo Park, for our last margarita, salsa, and chips.

Naturally, to celebrate… and to say goodbye to… Echo Park… for good.

We get there at 2:47 p.m. I immediately knock down a flaming margarita, my favorite. We hungrily devour the deliciously warm homemade chips and salsa. We don’t need the menu, we know exactly what we want, “the usual”: a steak quesadilla for Exsel, while Surya and I will split the two chile rellenos dinner with rice and beans. We haven’t eaten all day, who had time? We’re ravenous.

But the waiter is taking too long and it’s getting late. We still have to drive to Coronado Island, two hours south, where our good friends, Jan Hatcher and Ira Wohl (yeah, that “Ira Wohl”, the Oscar-winning documentarian of “Best Boy”), have given us their beautiful home for the four days we have to wait until our “Bon Voyage Party” in Altadena at Todd and Natasha’s on the 18th. I know, it’s neurotically complicated getting out of LA after 40 years, but I can’t just leave town without saying goodbye, can I?

Anyway, Surya and I look at each other at El Compadre, and we’re thinking the same thing. She says,

            “Let’s skip the food and hit the road. We’ll eat there.”

            “Ok,” I say.

We walk through our favorite restaurant with the beautiful Mexican tile tables and singing mariachis for the last time, out to the back parking lot, where Cassius the Dog, is patiently waiting in my RAV 4.

Exsel goes with Surya over to the Matrix.

We head out.

Bye bye…. Echo Park.

And one Jew, two Indonesians, and one ridgeback-pit bull… head south…. out of the Los Angeles desert.

For some strange reason, unbeknownst to us, our two GPS-es lead us to Coronado – by two different routes, Surya’s by the 10 West and 405 South, mine by the supposedly simpler, but definitely slower and more hazardous, 5 South.

Why we don’t carpool, only God knows, since he’s the one leading us out of the desert. No parting of the Red Sea; apparently he has something else in mind, at least for me.

Predictably, the 5 South is crawling, it’s rush hour. The problem is the flaming margarita I inhaled at El Compadre about an hour ago, and our decision to skip the food on empty stomachs. Even though I just had one, flaming margarita, and I usually have two, if I’m not exactly “drunk” now, I’m definitely… drowsy. And this is amplified, tenfold, at the five miles an hour the traffic is creeping along on the 5 South. My head is nodding up and down, toward the steering wheel, like a ping pong ball. I keep lurching it, and myself, violently awake.

            Cassius, man, bark! Do something! Earn your keep!

Where’s a man’s best friend when you really need him?

Crawl… lurch!

Nod…. Lurch!

Crawl… nod…

BOOOOOOM!!!!

I’m lurched violently awake, the head of my RAV 4 buried in the tail steel end of a solid white work truck.

Fuck! I’ve fallen completely asleep from the margarita, and I’ve woken myself up – violently REAR-ENDING the frigging truck!!!

I immediately look to the back seat. Cassius is perfectly fine. He says,

            Terrific, Trules! Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

            “Ok, hound. Thanks, for your empathy.”

I get out of the car and walk up ahead to the white rear-ended truck. It reads,

            “Amberson’s Towing and Repair”.

I can’t help but think that I’m reenacting a very old, black-and-white Orson Welles film, one with a tragic ending.

A round-bellied, black-and-white, mustachioed dude slides out of the truck.

            No bueno, senor.

            I know. ‘No bueno.’

Now I’m sure I’m in a classic Orson Welles potboiler.

My front end is crushed. His rear-ended steel bumper has a tiny dent. We exchange insurance information. Take photos of the two vehicles. During the exchange, two of his amigos, lazily get out of the truck and comment derisively about me and my driving,

We do all that we’re supposed to do - from every angle Mr. Welles requires.

I drive off. Sort of. Every time I go over a bump, I hear my left front tire scrape against my tire well.

I call Surya and Exsel. I tell them what happened.

            “You’re drunk?”

That’s Surya, of course. Ever supportive.

            “Not anymore. Where are you?”

That’s when I find out about the two different GPS routes. They’ll be in Coronado in 20 minutes. Me? Another two hours – if I ever get out of this log jam in Anaheim! (There’s absolutely nothing I ever liked about Anaheim or Disneyland!)

I drive… that is, I crawl, for another hour, until I eventually start moving, with my left tire scraping the wheel rim more and more frequently, until… I finally arrive in Coronado, a little after dark….

…when I discover… billows of white smoke… pouring out from under my hood, like from a RAV 4 white volcano.

I look down at the car’s temperature gauge. It’s completely in the red… to the max! I’m pretty sure my engine is going to explode any second.

I pull over and park the car, about five minutes from Ira’s and Jan’s house on Coronado Island.

I’m defeated.

I never make it to my destination.

I call Surya. She comes and picks me up.

I lock the RAV 4 on the street. (What for? The car won’t drive another foot!)

Surya drives me back to Ira and Jan’s beautiful house. I take a cold shower and try to forget about the whole day. The day I’ve finally left Echo Park and escaped from the LA desert after 40 years!

“OY!”, as we say in my tribe.

Is that what the Jews said on the day the Red Sea parted and they fled Egypt?

The next day. Friday, I begin again. Somehow, I have to get the RAV 4 fixed by Sunday morning, to drive back to LA for “The Great” Bon Voyage Party on Sunday at Todd’s and Natasha’s in Altadena. Good frigging luck!

The insurance appraiser comes out to inspect and assess my parked car with the smashed, but now no longer steaming, front end.

It’s borderline, Mr. Trules. Your car’s probably totaled. It overheated because the collision cracked your radiator. The white smoke was Freon from your AC condenser, right in front of it. You’re going to have to replace both. Plus a new bumper, hood, fender, and whatever else the body shop finds.

A voice is screaming inside my head, punishing me

What a dumb-ass move, Trules, having that flaming margarita!!!! You were almost a free man! You had a fat juicy buyout check right in your pocket! Now look what the hell you’ve done!

I beat myself up good and proper. Then…. I search the internet and find…. “Mike, the Legend, Auto Repairs”.    

That same afternoon, Mike picks me up. “The Legend” is a “mobile mechanic”. He comes to you. He has everything he needs right in his tidy gray van, stuffed to the gills with tools, fluids, and tricks of the trade. “The Legend” is also German. About forty, with a strong accent, close-cropped hair, strongly-muscled, he already arrives with a new radiator and an after-market AC condenser. He magically pops the hood open, which has been jammed shut from the collision, and he detaches the front bumper and grille. He starts pulling the bent metal frame out with a crowbar and pounding it to his will with a serious hammer. Did I also say, “The Legend” is built of steel?

In about four hours, The Legend is done. Not only does my car look like it’s hardly been in an accident... well, ok, the right front directional headlight is completely gone; there’s no bulb for the blinker to work, but hey, that’s a small price to pay for a full-on, front-end collision, right?

More importantly, the RAV 4 is drivable again. It won’t overheat because I have a new radiator, and the air conditioner, with a new condenser, won’t spray Freon all over the highway on the hundred-degree trek across northern Arizona and central New Mexico on the grueling I-40 through Flagstaff, Gallup, and Albuquerque. Hopefully, the bumper won’t fall off and the hood won’t fly open for the next five days and one thousand miles until I can find a body shop in Santa Fe to fix my car, when I can then “negotiate” with the insurance company to save my beautiful RAV 4, which I’m more than a little attached to, from being “salvaged”, thereby making it almost entirely worthless.

The next three days in Coronado are lovely… but mostly uneventful. Surya already wishes we’d driven straight to Santa Fe from LA. She has no need for “my” Bon Voyage Party in Altadena. She’s invited two friends and one can’t come. She makes me feel like it’s an “ego party”, and at this point in time, an ill-considered one.

But we’re two different people. I’ve lived in the spotlight for most of my adult life. I’ve been a performer and a professor. I like acknowledgment, feedback, social media, and press reviews for my artistic work. I like to keep connections. Surya’s much more modest and private. She has no need for any of it. She’s the third of six, third-world children. She was raised to take care of her siblings, not to celebrate birthdays, or to receive presents. I’m the firstborn in a child-centric, Jewish-American family. “My son, the doctah”. Two different worlds. I want my Bon Voyage Party.

SO… at 6 a.m. Sunday morning, the morning of the farewell party, just a few hours before we drive north to his house, Todd, my best LA amigo, Todd, sends me an elaborate text message, the gist of which says,

Sorry, man, I’ve been putting this off all week, but Natasha has Covid. I’ve been following the advice of the CDC, and they say as long as she’s not showing active symptoms and has no fever, you and your guests are ok. She’ll stay in her room, and we’ve wiped down the guest room for you to stay in tonight. For the party today, we won’t let anyone in the house, or you can move the party to a nearby park. I’ll do what I can to help. I get back in town at 11:30. Let me know. It’s your call.

What the f—k! Another plague? God is really making this leaving the desert thing hard on me, man!

My best friend, who generously offered to host my Bon Voyage Party more than a month ago, to whose house I’ve had delivered all the wine, beer, water, and paper products, to whose house I’ve invited a hundred of the thousands of LA people I know at 2 o’clock today, at whose house my family is supposed to sleep tonight before we drive eight hundred miles east first thing tomorrow morning, just tells me at 6 a.m. this morning, the day of the party, that his wife, Natasha, has Covid? Natasha, who’s supposed to set up the house for the party with Surya, and make a giant salad for all the guests, while I pick up 140 tacos, with all the trimmings, from the Tacos Arizas food truck in Echo Park, which I also ordered over a week ago? Natasha has frigging Covid?

Now what am I supposed to do?

I get on the phone with Todd.

Why didn’t you tell me earlier, man? How the hell can I put all my friends in jeopardy like this? It’s a fucking disaster. Blah blah blah.”

 Stop, Eric. I don’t want to hear your negativity.

It’s not going well. I hang up.

What the hell should I do?

I fret. I worry. I’m angry. Very fucking angry.

Then I remember what my long-suffering, ever-reliable, set designer, Hank, always told me, under times of great duress.

            There are NO problems, ONLY solutions.

I speak to Surya.

It’s clear that we have only one choice.

I get on my phone and instantly book a motel in Pasadena for us to stay in tonight. It’s dog-friendly for Cassius, who’s supposed to be staying overnight in Pasadena, nearby Altadena, with a Rover host.

Then I call Todd back. He’s at the airport.

Sorry I was screaming at you, man. I’m really stressed out. Can you give me the names of the nearby parks?

He gives me the names of three parks in Altadena. I hang up and Google all three. I like the Charles Farnsworth White Park best. It has outdoor tables underneath gazebo-like tables. Sort of perfect, if they’re available.

Ok, Todd, here’s the plan. Surya and I will get in two cars and drive to Farnsworth ASAP. If the tables are available, we’ll keep Exsel there as sentinel, and send Surya to your house to pick up all the supplies, make the salad, and then drive back over to the park, hopefully by 2 p.m. I’ll go to Echo Park to pick up the food at Taco Arizos and get back to Farnsworth as close to 2 as I can. OK?”

Sounds like a plan. Anything else I can do?

Yeah, block off your driveway and have Laila (Todd’s daughter) make some signs for the front of your house and the park, to direct people to the gazebo and street parking.”

I’m still pissed at Todd for his last-minute 6 a.m. text, and I’m hysterical about this desperate last-minute plan, but what the hell else can we do?

We drive like a madman and a madwoman to Farnsworth. We find the gazebo and tables. They’re even nicer than the Google photos, but – there are several people at two of the eight tables. I use my stressed-out hysteria, as charmingly as I can:

Sorry, but how long do you guys plan to be here? We have a big party with a lot of food coming in about an hour. We could really use all these tables.

No, problem, man. We’re leaving in a few minutes.

Great! Somebody up there really does like me! Maybe!

We put the plan in motion, putting whatever “stuff” we can find on top of the six free tables to reserve them: sweatshirts, sticks, coolers, leaving Exsel to guard all eight tables with his life, until we get back, hopefully a little before 2 p.m. I tear off for Echo Park, Surya screeches off for Todd and Natasha’s in Altadena.

I’m racing down the local streets of Altadena toward the 134 and 110 freeways that I know so well. Forty years in LA tend to do that for you, but today I’m missing all the turns. I’m making dangerous and sudden U-turns, as I first have to drop Cassius off at the Rover-sitter nearby, and he doesn’t like it one bit. He’s never stayed anywhere other than Lucretia Gardens in all his eight years.

C’mon, Trules, what the flyin’ fur? I may be cool movin’ to Santa Fe. I’ll let you know when we get there. But leavin’ me with some ‘pet-friendly’ stranger in Pasadena while you guys party? That’s definitely not cool. I’m diggin’ in my paws and full-out resistin’!

C’mon, Cassius, man. Give me a friggin’ break. I got enough problems!

The poor dawg has no choice. I abandon “my best friend” with the Rover dude, and start zigging and zagging to Tacos Arizas on Logan Street in Echo Park, where - there they are - 140 hot tacos, with all the fixings: green and red salsa, cilantro, onions, paper plates, etc. I load my back seat with the aluminum trays, stop at the local Von’s for thirty pounds of ice, and tear back off for Farnsworth Park.

I get there at 2:15 friggin’ p.m.!

There’s a big white cardboard sign with pink letters:

            “TRULES PARTY”

It looks great. Thanks, Laila!

But there are… Todd and Exsel… kneeling in front of a sewer on the street.

            “What are you guys doing?” I yell out my car window at Exsel as I park.

            “Bou was mad at me, and she threw her phone at my head. It landed in the sewer.”

Oh My GOD! What else can go WRONG???

My wife (“Bou”, that’s what Exsel calls her) is in one of her moods - just when a hundred guests are arriving for my Bon Voyage Party. She threw her iPhone 11 at my son, because he didn’t listen to her, and it landed in an Altadena sewer!

They’ll NEVER get it out. I have 140 hot tacos in my car to set up for 100 guests - who have already started arriving. Everybody is stressed out; in a foul, foul mood! I know…. LET’S HAVE PARTY!

It unfolds... like the parting of the Red Sea. The long-planned, get out of town, “BON VOYAGE PARTY”!

Whoopdee- DOO!

It’s ok, I guess. The hundred people don’t show up. Not all of them. Not all at once anyway. It’s… underwhelming. But that’s how I arranged it, I suppose. I spread it out over four hours. (It takes a while for Seas to part and for Jews to exodus!) People start trickling in. A few couples at a time. Some leave before others arrive. Some have “other” events to attend. The “Rock Steady Jam” at the Hollywood Bowl. I mean, how can you miss the “Rock Steady Jam” for “The Trules Bon Voyage Party”? Answer? You simply can’t!

At least my sister, Alison, and my brother-in-law, Edgardo, fly in from Northern California. Walnut Creek to be specific. That’s a big deal. They hardly ever come south. They meet many of my former students and friends, most of whom they’ve never met before. My friends and students regale them with flattering stories of “big brother and big brother-in-law”. It’s nice.

But I‘ve decided not to flatter myself, that is, not to read a “spoken word” piece, like I usually do at these kinds of events, nor to make a speech; and instead, I just sort of meander my way through the four hours, greeting old friends and students, some of whom I haven’t seen in decades. I’m grateful that they’ve dropped by to say hello, realizing that in fact, it might actually be more “goodbye and farewell”, and most likely, the last time I see many of them ever again.

The highlight of the afternoon is actually when some good-hearted, well-equipped neighbor walks by the sewer, where Todd and Exsel are still hopelessly poking at the iPhone 11 with various sticks and hand-made rope devices, and the Good Samaritan comes back with a perfectly-designed device, a long, crab-like stick, with a pincer-grabbing claw, which she then expertly sticks down the sewer, and after a few futile attempts, she nabs the cell phone perfectly, bringing my wife’s seemingly lost telephonic organ, back up to dry land. This - the highlight of my long-planned, highly-anticipated, Covid-racked “Bon Voyage Party”!

Hallelujah!

By 6 pm, we’re left with fifty-five, still-delicious, but cold, uneaten tacos, a few cases of undrunk beer and wine, and a few late-coming stragglers. It’s time to wrap up - hand off the uneaten food to the stragglers, have Surya drive the wayward supplies back to Todd’s and Natasha’s, and have me - first drive Alison and Edgardo back to the Burbank airport, next pick up the pissed-off Cassius at the Rover sitter’s in Pasadena, and finally, rendezvous with Surya and Exsel at the weary motel on Colorado Boulevard, also in Pasadena.

What a day!

The motel is – overpriced, noisy, and raucously visited by the Pasadena Police, about 2 a.m. in the morning, who come to the door directly next to ours, where an angry couple have been throwing large and heavy objects at each other, and shouting profanely and profusely, for about an hour and a half straight, non-stop.

Get the hell out of LA, Trules! When the hell are you gonna get the hell out of LA, m-fxxker?”

Ok, not exactly that.

But they may as well have been.

It’s certainly time to go!

More than past the time!

So….

…the next morning – on Monday, September 19, in the year of the Lord, 2022, the Trules Family, in their two, packed-to-the-gills Toyotas, finally get on the 210 Freeway in Pasadena – at South Hill Street - and drive - permanently east – out of Los Angeles.

Not yet to have returned….

To be Continued

One-Year Anniversary in Santa Fe, Part 2

A Lot Has Been Experienced in 365 Days

If you enjoyed this post, or any previous ones, please LIKE it (by clicking the Heart), and LEAVE A COMMENT. It helps build an enthusiastic and interactive readership.

Also, if you have any friends who you think might enjoy Santa Fe Substack, PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THEM.

Thanks so much!!!

Trules

PS. SHOULD I POST THESE SUBSTACKS MORE FREQUENTLY THAN ONCE EVERY OTHER WEEK? HOW ABOUT ONCE WEEK?

WHAT DO YOU THINK, DEAR READERS?