Backstory

The road to the park began many years ago in old New England, twisting slowly to the Barbary Coast then backward toward the Big Apple. Compelled by a masochistic streak and a inkling for warm weather, I decided to navigate the entirety of the Devil's Triangle and drove to the City of Angels three days before 9/11. I made home in a little K-town studio that was glamor free, and none too cheap on a working man’s wages, but it was a logistical upgrade from my previous place along South Central. Muscle from the Latino drug gang down the hall at first seemed poised to step to me for returning their leader’s stares in kind but el jefe seemed to admire my pluck and periodic hallway confrontations with the big, crazy, Mexican dude just below me who kept blasting his horrendous music every payday in howling reverie. While his tweeters didn’t make it through the floorboards so good, the bass shook liquids in my room like he was down there doing the Macarena with T-Rex. It was so loud the cops could barely hear me on the phone but - bless his heart - he was as crazy and aggressive with them as he was with me. Either he had memory issues or took a fondness to the beatings because I always gave him plenty of notice the LAPD would be invited thusly. Plenty. Management and law enforcement eventually tried to talk me into starting eviction proceedings against the man but he was a pretty decent fellow except on those bi-monthly Fridays when homesickness, alcohol, and the big city lonesomes abducted his soul.

Having conquered Hollywood, and getting word on a cheap pad in the East Bay, I packed up my kitty and shot up the 5. My old buddy, let’s call him Lech, was living in a cheap house for years and the main tenant was moving out so I moved right in with him, his daughter, and the other woman roommate who was soon gone herself. The whole house rented for eleven hundred dollars so we could have managed expenses quite nicely ourselves but Lech is a scheming Irishman and started thinking. Then he started holding constant roommate auditions for the most desirable Berkeley co-eds and hippy chicks Craigslist could muster up and began filling every nook and corner of the house the biggest fools among them. We even had one over-aged, mid-western, runaway renting out a closet she thought it was the best place she’d ever lived.
Lech built himself a yurt in the backyard and moved into it, renting out his own room and followed this experiment by concocting and leasing out an igloo thingy right next to it. While my rent got cheaper, the house got messier and turned into a crash pad and party spot for the benefit of Lech and his insatiable, cradle-robbing, desires. It was a fine little business he was running. There were about seven adult sized humans living there when I moved out after coming home repeatedly to find all the lights on and the doors open and nobody home or maybe just some passed out indie-boy curled up on the floor amidst beers cans and dried up food particles stuck in creative assemblages throughout the compound.


It’s hard enough finding a room if you’re a guy but if you have a cat as well the classifieds are virtually useless. If they don’t have a cat they don’t want one. If they do have a cat the cat doesn’t want one. You must control the lease or find a big old mess of a place with tons of young roommates who couldn’t care less about anything, which is one situation I have permanently and resolutely outgrown. Studios in San Francisco were too expensive. The ones down the peninsula were too small and depressing. Of course I looked into moving onto a boat again like I had in LA but the nearest available live-aboard slip was in Richmond. I even considered buying a cheap motor home and parking it. Slim, my homeless-guy, graduated from SFSU last year living by sleeping on BART so I figured living in a converted bus would be interesting, money saving, and excessively luxurious compared to old Slimbo’s collegiate digs. But the alpha-kitty is not fond of moving vehicles and wouldn’t have it. I discovered a couple of trailer parks close to campus and the rest is mystery - at least for today.

Here's a little Cecilia (cha-cheelia) Bartoli for you, singing Sposa son Disprezzata,
Vivaldi's song about a very wounded wife.