MI CASA ES SU CASA

I was alone in my apartment, enjoying candlelight, Beethoven, and the solitude of the wee morning hours, when I heard it: “Get out of here, you motherfuckers!” followed by the sound of a Dresden pitcher smashing against the wall. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “it’s that time again.” The source of the disturbance was the apartment immediately adjacent to mine; my father’s residence. The old man was screaming at his ghosts again.

After several years of abject poverty, my father and I were enjoying a greatly improved standard of living supported by selling off the Barrymorabelia we had purloined from my recently deceased grandmother’s estate. There was literally a ton of shit. Georgian silver, first editions, incunabila and illuminations, Czarist Russian goblets, furniture from Versailles, Louis XV and others, china and porcelain by such manufacturers as Meisen, Dresden, Beleek, pre-war Japanese, ancient Chinese, Lalique crystal, etc. Family treasures of every description. What we weren’t selling or giving away, Dad was breaking up.

We were both one or two steps away from shopping-cart status when we came into this windfall. It wasn’t a fortune, but a tidy enough sum to enable both of us to establish respectable lodgings. We rented adjacent apartments, numbers 110 and 111, at 8440 Sunset Boulevard. It was one of those huge concrete monstrosities, formerly the Breymar Towers, and these days the site of the chic Hotel Mondrian. My father called it “cell block twenty one.” And so there we were comfortably ensconced, our front doors but fifteen feet apart off the common corridor, yet definitely two separate residences. We had peacefully co-existed for several weeks, suffering only a few minor border skirmishes, when Dad’s trouble with the ghosts began.

We were both doing a lot of speed in those days, the major difference being that Dad would wash his Desoxyn down with room-temperature tequila, while I would chase mine with ice-cold vodka. I was drinking about as much as he was, and doing twice as much speed. But try as I may, I couldn’t seem to get as twisted up as he could. At any rate, I never saw the ghosts.

They sure bothered the old man, though, and I could tell from the sounds of shattering glass and crunching furniture coming from his pad that it was going to be a long night, or rather morning. I decided the only sane course of action was to pull back as far as possible from the combat zone to avoid the physical and psychic shrapnel that would be flying around for the duration of the battle. I left the building, sneaking by Dad’s open door commando-style, and walked over to Ben Frank’s to see if there were any other refugees desperate enough to brave food poisoning at 4:15 on this lovely morning.

There were only a few customers, a booth full of black pimps waiting for their girls, a couple of narcoleptics nodding into their coffee, and the waitress who had been there since The Creation. I had a cup of coffee and walked home. By the time I got back, the door to apartment 110 was closed and all was quiet. Dad had either repelled the invaders, reestablished domestic security and/or passed out cold; or else he had suddenly “regained his senses” and might be preparing a late snack. Anything was possible, but it really didn’t matter, since he would have no recollection of the freak-out the next day.

So it went for the next several months. There was a great deal of traffic in those days to, from, and between our respective apartments. Dad had a circle of cronies he would regularly hold court with. I referred to them as the Old Men’s Catholic Association. And I had a pretty steady stream of young ladies coming and going from my pad. So while I spent many hours in my apartment playing the guitar or piano, reading Shakespeare or poetry to some young lady or other in an effort to get into her pants, Dad would hold his Court of Fools next door. Whenever he got bored, or whenever his audience started to wane, he would throw a “psychotic episode” which would totally clear his apartment of all unwanted guests in a matter of seconds. Inevitably, he would then walk down the hall to my crib “just as sane as could be” to see if he could wreak just a little more havoc with my life before he retired for the night. Maybe even catch me with some impressionable young “actress” he could terrorize.

Don’t get me wrong; the “psychotic episodes” Dad would throw to get rid of the company were simply his flair for the dramatic. They had nothing to do with his battles with the ghosts. Those were serious.

Sometime during our residence there, 8440 Sunset Boulevard was purchased by Ashkenazy Properties. They had big plans to turn it into the lucrative Hotel Mondrian, and they just loved Dad. His screaming and breaking furniture and priceless porcelain at all hours of the night and morning with all his doors and windows open was evicting tenants from the building faster than they could ever hope to. It was all getting to be too much for me, though, so I decided it was time to burn this camp and move on. Like most of the other tenants, I just had to get away from Dad.

Please don't misunderstand. I love my father. I even love his, well, eccentricities. But some things are best loved in small quantities and/or from a safe distance away.

I moved two blocks away to a building on Harper called the “Casa Real.” It was the seediest building in West Hollywood, straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Full of dope fiends; the kind of place where when someone moves out it’s usually in a zippered plastic bag. But what the hell it was mine, and it was relatively peaceful. Two blocks was too far for Dad to walk just to terrorize me.

I was there about a month when John Donovan, the retired mortician who managed the building said to me, “I have a nice surprise for you. I rented the apartment next door to yours to your father.”