Into the Mystic

The rhythm, the sounds, even the smells of places where we’ve lived can evoke memories that are nourishing for the rest of our lives. One of those places for me was a hilltop cabin in Los Angeles’s Mount Washington. 

I have always lived in great places for absurdly low rent. In 1972 I met a woman who told me that she was moving out of a house on Crane Boulevard in Mount Washington, a rustic enclave just north of downtown Los Angeles, and I could take over the place from her. It was one of those circle-of-life encounters: like a relay race or treasure hunt in which a person you barely know leads you to something (or someone) important and then vanishes forever.

Mount Washington was just on the other side of freeway from the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers where I’d been exiled into hiding when I was a pregnant teenager. But my season on Crane Boulevard was contemplative and lush. The cabin I rented was pretty much just a shack; it had single plank walls that let in both the daylight and cold air, but it had also been refurbished by the previous tenants to include a second bedroom under the house, a chicken coop covered in grape vines in the back, and a rotting deck that I christened my moon-viewing platform which offered an expansive view of the city.

The monthly rent for my cabin was just five dollars more than my apartment in Hollywood had been, and I furnished it with items I’d liberated from there, along with other stuff scavenged on weekly runs through the neighborhood the night before the trash trucks came. I also acquired a second-hand waterbed that took up the whole downstairs. Bricks, boards, and wooden Seven-Up crates filled in for bookcases and end tables, and I acquired a yellow tabby cat (or maybe he acquired me) to whom I granted the self-determination of choosing his own name, a little clicking sound.

With my fireplace, cat, and moon-viewing platform, I was serenaded every afternoon by the warning bell of a guardrail coming down and the clanging thunder of a freight train that ran just below. No sound apart from music has ever moved me the way a train does. It’s that same yin-yang thing I feel about the blues: screeching steel meets lavender and lace.

The arrival of the afternoon train provided the opening act for the big finish of sunset, and dependably applauded my activities of the day. Mornings, upstairs in my studio, I ventured into Van Morrison’s "Astral Weeks", wrote cosmic poetry, and practiced my calligraphy at the funky wooden drafting table my father had given me. Later, outside in the sunshine with a glass of Mateus rosé in hand, I awaited the train’s imminent arrival to the wails of my old friend Otis Redding bellowing “Lover’s Prayer” from stereo speakers inside the house.

I wanted to go headfirst into my pursuit for something deeper, something beyond where I’d been. But I had no knowledge or understanding of what that might be, or what spirit made one “spiritual.” So I embraced the earthly manifestation of things that seemed transcendent—the liturgies of love, poetry, art, and music—and made them my religion. Mount Washington was my temple, Van Morrison was the preacher, and Otis Redding led the worship.

Life on Crane Boulevard was full of lessons. I learned them from my neighbors, from Van Morrison, from the celestial skies I watched atop the moon-viewing platform, in the walks I took up the mountain, and in one instance when I foolishly befriended a moody Jamaican from whom I learned about Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, and also why you should shouldn’t invite people to live with you.

Because it’s really hard to get them to leave.

What memories and lessons have you taken from your journey?

Keep your head to the sky,

From SINCE I LOST MY BABY: A MEMOIR OF TEMPTATIONS, TROUBLE & TRUTH