The "Birdhouse," or Canadian Building: Photo courtesy of www.you-are-here.com

 Fearlessly, I rented a two room loft space in “The Birdhouse” the former Canadian Embassy building at 432 S. Main Street, about a fifteen minute walk from the Temporary Contemporary.  The building’s nickname, I was told, came from the fact that until a few years before the only tenants had been flocks of pigeons.  For about $350 per month I got high ceilings, aged hardwood floors and even a kitchen sink. The shared bathroom was down the hall, and my parking spot was on the roof of the Greyhound Bus terminal a few blocks away.  After finishing grad school I had moved back in with my parents in Brentwood, and I was anxious to have my own space, however gnarly it was. 

Before signing my rental agreement, I hadn’t thought too much about the neighborhood. Getting to know it was a reality check. On the first floor was an adult theater, and also a pathetic little market that sold dollar wine. My loft was on the third floor of the building, over the alley in back, so at least I didn’t have to listen to the sad, grinding soundtracks of the porno movies as those living on the second floor did. Of course, that might have been preferable to living over the alley. As I soon learned, the building behind the Birdhouse was a shelter for American Indians, and I soon became accustomed to the screams of the angry drunks who pounded at the locked front doors late at night. The other tenants of the Birdhouse were artists and architects, but the Union Rescue Mission was just a block or so away. Flophouses and wholesale toy stores lined the nearby streets, which were peopled with clueless immigrants, ex-cons, transients, mentally ill Viet Nam veterans, and drug addicts.

The desk in my loft, with poster of MOCA's planned Isozaki building pinned to the wall.

I moved into my new loft quickly, as I had little furniture except for a particle board desk and a used sofa provided by my parent’s next door neighbors.  Soon I had a routine, leaving the building at 8AM to make the 15 minute walk to MOCA. Often there were drunks passed out by the entrance, and the same two tough looking women flanking the front door. I was innocent enough that I had lived in the building perhaps a month before I realized that the women -- whose features resembled those of ancient Olmec heads  --were prostitutes.   The front steps always smelled of state urine, and were oftern littered with shards of broken glass. It was weird to walk by all the beer and wine bottles in the gutter and then arrive at work where Jasper’s John’s bronze “Ale Cans,” insured for a quarter of a million dollars, were secured in the plexiglass box where I had placed them with white gloves.

On weekends, I would explore the nearby streets, sometimes taking in a movie on one of the dilapidated movie palaces on Broadway. Panhandlers were everywhere, so I took a practical approach and carried quarters every morning to give away. When I ran out I learned that if I stared at my feet and strode with purpose I would be mostly left alone.  I should have been more scared of my neighborhood, but naivete protected me.  The streets surrounding the missions on Los Angeles Street teemed with homeless men, and bag ladies, and it was common to see men stretched out on blankets on the sidewalk, or peering out of cardboard boxes. One day a frustrated panhandler approached me while I was carrying a Coke away from McDonalds and grabbed it out of my hand. He slammed it into the sidewalk and glared at me. “I want some,” he muttered, and walked away.   

Once, when leaving the birdhouse through the side gate, I managed to be a hero. Noticing a man running up Winston Street with a purse under his arm, I found my deepest voice and yelled “DROP IT!” The man followed my direction, and then scrambled down the alley behind my building. Moments later a grateful elderly lady told me, as I handed her purse to her: “Good cop voice." I used the same voice a few days later when a man opened the passenger door of my truck at a stoplight and asked for a dollar. It was scary, but a strong "NO" sent him packing.

Gettng to know downtown had wasn't all about fear: downtown food could be a pleasant surprise. The omlettes at Gorky’s, a faux-Socialist café near the downtown flower market, were topped with sour cream and caviar. I don’t think Stalin would have approved. On Second Street there was a Mexican seafood place where I would order a single deep-friend fish, served surrealistically atop a mountain of fries. Best of all, right around the corner from the TC was the Far East Café, an archaic Chinese restaurant hanging on in Little Tokyo, where the Black Mushroom Chow Mein had an unforgettable, smokey flavor.

At the TC I soon had a new job. I became the supervisor of the information counter where volunteers greeted visitors and sold exhibition catalogs. As I gradually learned, many of the volunteers were themselves art collectors, and most were quite wealthy. They tended to be the wives and ex-wives of some of the richest men in Southern California. It was a very pleasant job, and I genuinely came to like many of the volunteers. I remember one of them, Yvonne Segerstrom, offering me a ride home one day: she was ashen when she saw where I lived. More and more I was realizing that MOCA was a kind of gated community. The exception tended to be the guards: African-American and Hispanic men and women who lived nearby and found their place of work as weird as a newly landed spaceship.

The main room of my Birdhouse loft, with a window that looked out over the alleyway

Sometimes, living downtown could be funny, in a very dark way. At night I would close my windows but could still hear arguments and tantrums in the alleyway three floors below.  There was one man whose distinctive complaint caused me to nickname him “Mr. Nobody Fucks With.” Late in the evening I would hear him in the alley, howling a variation on the same sentence, sometimes for hours.

“NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY STUFF!”

“N-O-O-O-O-BODY FUCKS WITH MY LADY!”

“NOBODY FUCKS WITH MY BROTHER-IN-LAW!!!”

I swear, I heard him scream “Brother-in-law” one night.

One evening I heard the wails of a blitzed couple, shut out of the Indian mission, who were having sex on an abandoned sofa in the alley. They weren’t screaming out of passion: another drunk had set the sofa on fire. After some scuffling and yelping the fire was put out. Another disconcerting thing about the alleyway is that it was sometimes used for movie and TV shoots. When  I heard sirens, screams  and racing motors I never quite knew if it was a real cop chase or a crew shooting “Starsky and Hutch.” When I heard gunshots, as I did from time to time, I told myself that it must be a TV crew shooting blanks. When I played Italian operas on my phonograph to mask the sounds outside, the screams outside sometimes blended in oddly with the cries of the opera singers.

Work had a touch of Hollywood as well. I remember, for example, seeing George Lucas with his friend Linda Ronstadt admiring Doug Wheeler’s light installation. Along with other members of the MOCA staff I was invited to the lavish homes of some of the museum’s patrons including those of Eli and Edye Broad and Marsha Weisman. It was a very schizoid way of living, attending a holiday party at a billionaire’s house, then driving back downtown, parking my truck on the roof of the Greyhound bus terminal, and watching the rats dart in and out of the gutters as I walked apprehensively to my loft.