"Isn't that something?  Middle of a drought and the
water commissioner drowns.  Only in L.A."
Chinatown

In the spring of 2005, I lived in a defunct motel in Malibu for 2 weeks, free of charge.  It wasn't a motel in the traditional sense, but rather a series of bungalows built in the 1920s, just across PCH from the beach.  I was a movie extra at the time, living in my car, and met a guy on set who still had the keys to bungalow 11 of the Topanga Ranch Motel.  We became friends, and he sympathized with my plight.  He gave me the keys, which were still attached to an old-school keyring, the kind you could put in the mail and the post office would ship the keys back to the hotel at the hotel's expense.  You know, like this:

My keyring is blue, and all the letters have worn off, but my keyring from the Topanga Ranch Motel is my keyring to this day.  My movie extra friend gave me the key and said, "I don't know if it still works, and if you get caught you don't know me, but here you go."

I drove out to the motel after work that day.  Bungalow 11 was at the end of the first row, all the way to the right.  I parked my car and walked up to the door.

The luck was unbelievable.  Not only did the key work, but the place still had hot water, and cable TV.  Nobody was there.  Some caretakers, a guy with a truck, who lived way in the back.  I would have to stay covert.  A small price to pay, to live in a private bungalow with hot water and cable TV, on the beach in Malibu.  The place was abandoned.

I brought a few things inside, and settled in for the hottest shower of my life.

"Either you bring the water to L.A.
or you bring L.A. to the water."
Chinatown

Because, y'see, the place had hot water, and hot water only.  The cold water had been turned off, or perhaps the pipes were leaky.  There was no way to adjust the temperature in any way.  But it was worth it.  You could take a hot shower, if you were willing to dance under the cleansing flames as they poured down on you from the showerhead, like a premonition of the wrath of an omni-potent God.  It was excruciating, and wonderful.  I'm not sure which is worse, a pure hot shower, or one that's freezing cold.  I've taken enough ladle-baths in freezing streams in Colorado with chunks of ice floating by to genuinely wonder if a purely hot shower is worse than one that's freezing cold.  By "worse," of course I mean "immeasurably better."  Transient life is defined by the inability to be picky.  A place to take a bath of any kind, especially one that's not outside, is a gift from God.  By those standards, I suppose I would choose a hot bath over one that's freezing cold.

It was a long drive back to Malibu from the set, wherever I was working, but who is going to sympathize with that?  And anyway, the 10 melts into PCH like a stick of concrete butter.  Or you could take the California Incline, if you got off the freeway slightly early.  It was a privilege and a pleasure.  If you were really in the mood for a scenic drive, you could take Sunset down from Hollywood, the beauty of which can be inconvenient if you're only passing through.  Sunset loops around the hills like the singsong path of a butterfly, all the way to the ocean from Beverly Hills.  It's not the world's shortest drive.  But it's beautiful.  Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and finally the Palisades and the salt spray from the sea.  The sunlight shining through the hills,

Golden reflections of the heavens,

Gleaming off the palm fronds

Like incandescent chrome.

The loss of the Pacific Palisades to the fires this week is hard to overstate.  The only way to make it worse would be to measure it in casualties, or set the rest of the city on fire.  Which, of course, has happened.

But the problem isn't new.  Roman Polanski's Chinatown tells a story of murder, incest, pedophilia, and greed against the backdrop of a war for L.A. water rights in the golden age of Hollywood.  According to Wikipedia, the L.A. water rights "were acquired through chicanery, subterfuge ... and a strategy of lies."

I'm not going to ruin the film for you, but listening to people talk about the politics that have led to dry fire hydrants and the woke, DEI policies enacted by L.A. politicians drunk on extreme environmentalism while taking private planes to Ghana, made me think of Chinatown immediately.

It would appear that little has changed since the golden age of disingenuous chicanery.

I would have stayed at the Topanga Ranch Motel indefinitely, but after 2 weeks, somebody noticed my car and called the sheriff's office.  I returned to my hot-water bungalow on the beach one night, but the door had been boarded up.  Someone had turned the door into a wall, while I was off doing whatever.

In a mistake that led to a lesson learned the hard way, I had grown comfortable at the bungalow, and had actually unpacked my car.  Personal items, such as my guitar, were locked inside the room.  I had to call the sheriff to break me in, so I could get the items out.  It was a rookie mistake.  If I hadn't unpacked the car, I could have simply driven away.  Bad move.  But what was I going to do.

Buy a new guitar?

The cops arrived, and gave me a ticket for trespassing.  It wasn't a big deal, but my free ride in Malibu was over.  The surfboard of opportunity had crashed against the rocks.  The life raft had been splintered.  No more hot showers for me.

I bid the cops farewell and drove back into the city, to sleep inside my car.