Memoir: My $20 / month apartment in Echo Park

I keep thinking about My 20 dollar a month apartment in Echo Park in 1967, in fact the memory is coming up so much that I thought maybe my brain is trying to tell me something. So I started this Word file to journal about My 20 dollar a month apartment in Echo Park and see what comes up.

Echo Park photo credit Conde Nast Traveler

You entered from Laguna Lane above Sunset 

climbing down through shrub and overgrown trees

Or you could climb about a hundred steps 

up from Echo Park and the lake across the street. 

There were so many empty homes in 1967 in that area of L.A. between downtown and Silverlake that the county was doing outreach to find people to rent them. I went to an office, filled out a form, and that afternoon the bottom half of a duplex on a hill overlooking Echo Park Lake was mine for twenty dollars a month. They even gave me my first three months free.

The guys upstairs told me an old woman died in my apartment and they did not find her body for months. I treaded lightly down the crumbling stone steps to my half of the building, which was shaded to near darkness from all the overgrown bushes and drooping trees.

But it was home. I was 19 years old and I guess this was my first apartment out on my own.

I was scared to go in the bathroom. To get to it, you went through a long narrow unlit hallway to a tub and toilet in a window less room.  I don't think I ever took a bath there, it was too old and stained. I hope I went to my sister’s apartment in Hollywood to bathe but… some of the things people said about the hippies might have been true.  I did not bathe a lot until I got into my twenties.

I was raised by a really strange family and since I was in the middle of it, I didn't realize how strange they were until I got to my thirties and by then it was almost too late to compensate for all the damage. I know I did not start bathing regularly until about a year later when I didn't live in that apartment anymore but had a roommate in Hollywood.  She showed me the ring I left in the tub after a once a month or so bath and it hit me that other people know more about how to live than I do. Maybe for the first time in my life.

I put a mattress on the floor so I was sleeping inches from a rug that had been there for years and probably had absorbed the odor of the previous tenant’s dead body.

You could go down the hill to Echo Park down about a hundred more of those crumbling stone stairs with so much overgrown brush it reached out and batted you as you passed.  It was easier to go up to Laguna then down to Sunset and onto the rest of the city.

From this home I went out on temp jobs, so I must have gotten a phone installed.  During this time in my life I had discovered amphetamine. I don't think it was even illegal back then, the 1960s. In high school one of my friends used to bring the diet pills she stole from her mother and hand them out. When I worked at an all night restaurant waiting tables, a lot of customers tipped with these little rolls of Bennies. Benzedrine pills, White Crosses, came in rolls of ten wrapped in tinfoil. You could buy the rolls for a dollar each and they were everywhere in the all night world of Santa Monica boulevard.

At the bottom of the hill at Sunset just east of Echo Park was a doctor’s office kind of renown for prescribing drugs. He gave me a monthly supply of these- eh- not so great diet pills, not as good as the rolls of bennies, but –

So I’d take transit all over the city, doing temp jobs, and I think I was also auditioning now and then for acting jobs from that apartment as well.

Then, naïve flower child that I was at the time, I went to a love in at Griffith Park and when I saw these two real straight looking guys in suits, I floated over to them and said, “Wow, you guys need to get mellow, here smoke some of this,” and I went to jail for a night.

While I was in my cell, I heard some women come out of the TV room wailing crying, “Martin Luther King has just been shot.” The words echoed through the jail “Martin Luther King has just been shot. Martin Luther King has just been shot.”

I did not even spend the whole night. My sister called my parents and I had a lawyer from Arcadia and I was soon back at my little home above Echo Park.

My stash of Acapulco Gold was still there even though the cops who arrested me had searched the rooms. Hahaha 

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Continued

Memoir 2:

 Memoir 2

The cops who arrested me had stopped at my apartment on the way taking me to jail, and while I waited locked in their backseat they searched my 20 a month Echo Park apartment.  On a table near

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By Kay Ebeling, weblogger