Everything in LA is fungible. Not even the hillside is still there.
In search of Lost Angeles, January 12, 2026
In late April of 1966 I hitchhiked from a friend’s place on the edge of the UC Santa Barbara campus down U.S. Highway 101 to the Southern California Regional Office of SDS, which Mike Davis had recently opened in Los Angeles on Miramar Street, just across the Harbor Freeway from Bunker Hill. I’d heard he was welcoming volunteers, and since I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I decided to answer the call. It certainly beat the past couple of weeks I’d spent lemon-picking in the Goleta Valley. (55 cents a lug, and would you ever have guessed that lemon trees have these inch-long thorns?) God, I was awful at it. The real farm workers working beside me were kinder to me than I deserved, but what was I thinking? Still, the ten to fifteen bucks a day I managed to earn was money I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and it was only a temporary gig—for me, if not for my fellow pickers—something I knew even then that you’re obliged to keep in mind if you plan to be any kind of leftist.
1132 Miramar St. The street lights were already on when I finally arrived there after nearly an entire day spent standing with my thumb out in the brutally strange concrete landscapes of the LA freeway system. What I saw wasn’t at all what I’d expected. More apparition than office building, it was one of some half-dozen decaying Edwardian mansions set on the north-facing slope of a hillside a block off Third Street, one of LA’s major crosstown arteries. What distinguished it from its neighbors was the gigantic ball of ivy which had completely engulfed it.
Whatever the intention had been when it was first planted, this ivy had long since ceased being merely decorative. It had become muscular, druidic, inexorable. Over the years it had insinuated itself between window frames and walls, driven up under the eaves, and now, almost certainly more than a half-century later, appeared fully committed to the Ozymandian task of dismantling what the nouveaux riches who’d originally commissioned their grand bourgeois palazzo had undoubtedly believed was being built to last.
Like the outside, the inside of the house was both ostentatious and derelict. Dark mahogany wainscotting covered the bottom third of the walls, above it the original silk damask covering still clung to the walls, water stains in places changing its rich burgundy color to a lifeless brown. Higher up there was a line of picture rails no one had hung pictures on for decades. Previous tenants had left patches of damage to the walls in the parlor large enough to reveal an ancient lath and plaster structure no modern builder could affford to replicate.
The electrical wiring was probably not original, but both the outlets and light fixtures were definitely older than anything I’d ever encountered before. They were probably added in the Twenties or Thirties, but all we knew is that they looked scarily old, but they more or less worked, and that good enough. Somehow we got used to replacing the fuses when they blew, which was a regular occurence, and made do with lighting that left us in an eerie twilight even when everything was turned on.
The most elegantly decadent room in the entire place was the master bath, and the most elegantly decadent thing in it was the tub—a huge, claw-footed monstrosity of porcelain-coated cast iron, its chipped spots confirming that the coating was a full eighth of an inch thick. The spout was a sensuously curved, nickel-plated, solid brass chunk of the nineteenth century hydraulic engineer’s art, the handles on either side resembling steam-punk control valves with their matching button-like porcelain H and C inserts in the center. The free-standing sink on the other side of the room was equally substantial, differing only in its separate hot and cold faucets. To complete the atmosphere of genteel decay, a branch of the ivy outside the house, as thick as my wrist, had forced its way past the edge of the frosted glass window’s frame, spreading outward, fan-like, along the interior wall, until it ran out of light from the window and halted its advance just before reaching the ceiling.
Taken altogether, it was surpassingly strange, that house—strange enough to have been inhabited originally by a family of vampires. It was nothing like what was then being listed as the ideal Los Angeles commercial or residential property, but it worked nevertheless, and so did we. We handed our leaflets out to the part-time volunteers for distribution, phoned prospective donors, organized rallies and demonstrations, imagined the shiny new world to come. I taught myself how to print our regional newsletter on a newly donated mimeograph machine, and to prepare copies for mailing. Mike, when he wasn’t out organizing, was assigning tasks to the volunteers, fighting Pacific Telephone over the billing for our WATS line, making his reports to SDS national headquarters in Chicago and dispatching news of our collective adventures to New Left Notes, the national SDS publication. For a moment, for that one brief Los Angeles summer, it was glorious.
Once I’d settled into the routine, which often seemed more like chaos than routine, I discovered that I was almost always the first of our live-in crew to get up in the morning. Since there was usually nothing pressing to do until Mike made his appearance, I developed the habit of heading to the kitchen in the back of the house as soon as my feet hit the floor, knowing I would find a dented kettle and a few cups there, along with at least a partial loaf of Wonder Bread, and family-sized jars of Folgers instant coffee and peanut butter.
After I’d made myself a cup of coffee, I’d carry it back to the front of the house, through the massive front door, and down to the bottom of the two stage flight of concrete steps that led to the street below. There I’d park myself eight or ten steps above the sidewalk and begin admiring the scenery in Echo Park and Angelino Heights to the north. nodding a good morning to the incognito drag queen walking her poodle east along the street, which she did almost every morning, and basking in the hum of the Harbor Freeway to the west, which on weekdays would already be in the grip of the morning rush hour,
One morning about a month after I’d first joined the office, I arrived at my favorite spot to find an old man already standing at the foot of the stairs. He was thin, wiry, with a full head of graying hair, and a deeply weathered face. I guessed him to be somewhere between sixty and seventy years old. He introduced himself as our next door neighbor, and told me he’d come over because he was curious about who we all were, and what our deal was. As near I can remember after sixty years, the rest of our conversation that morning went something like this:
Motioning him to take a seat on the steps with me, I agreed we must look out of place, being as young as we definitely were, and the house looking more or less uninhabitable, which it definitely did. I explained that we weren’t squatters, or drug addicts, and told him who we were and what we were doing.
He thought about that for a minute, then said, “So you’re against the war?”
I nodded.
“Me too,” he said, surprising me. “I was a little too young for the first one, and a little too old for the second one, but I agreed we had to get into them. This one I don’t understand at all.”
I nodded again. “We don’t either, but we don’t think it makes any sense. We’re afraid we might even be on the wrong side.”
He said he didn’t know, but he thought that could be true, and asked me was I working. I said I wasn’t at the moment, but that I had some money saved up from a previous job. That was a gross exaggeration, if not an outright lie, but I really didn’t want the old guy thinking I was someone to worry about.
“Me neither,” he said. “I haven’t had steady work in years. I did odd jobs mostly, but now I’m getting old, they’re not so easy to find.”
“So what do you do, you know…?”
“To keep body and soul together?” He laughed.
“Well, I mean….”
“Listen kid,” he said, “I’ll tell you something I learned a long time ago. You don’t need to work for some boss man to make a living. There’s ways, there’s always ways. Like for example what I’m doing now. You ever hear of pay phone plugging?”
“No,” I said, what’s that?”
“Okay,” he said, holding up a match book, You see this?”
I nodded.
“Well all you need is this, a plain old shoelace, and….” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of thin, springy steel about eight inches long. It looked a bit like a flattened knitting needle. “Know what this is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a bristle from a street-sweeper brush. They’re always breaking off, okay? Walk along the sidewalk for a couple of blocks anywhere in LA, and you’ll find one of these lying in the gutter.”
“Okay,” I said, “but….”
“So here’s how this works. You with me so far?”
I nodded again. (I was doing a lot of nodding, and my coffee was getting cold. Surely there had to be a punchline at the end of all this.)
“Well, you know how when you make a call at a pay phone, and it costs more than a dime—maybe it’s long distance, maybe you didn’t have the right change, so you put in too many coins? When the call’s over, the operator dumps your change into the refund slot, that pull-down thing at the bottom, and you scoop it out and you’re on your way?”
“Okay.”
“But sometimes, the refund doesn’t drop—happens all the time actually. So when it doesn’t, you flip the flipper and yank the phone hook down a couple of times, cuss Ma Bell out maybe, then you slam the door open and you go on your way. What’s a quarter, fifty cents, right?
“That’s the key, nobody’s gonna bother to report a coupla lost coins. So what a plugger does, what I do, is this: I tear off the cover of a matchbook, roll it up tight. Turns out, it’s exactly the right width to be wedged into a pay phone’s coin drop. Then I take this shoelace, wrap it around the rolled-up cover, take my finger and wedge the cover as high up into the coin return as I can, and carefully tug the shoelace free. That unrolls the matchbook cover a little, just enough to block the coin return.
“Then all I gotta do is go back to the plugged booth every so often, take the street sweeper bristle, and push the unrollled matchbook cover aside just enough to drop all the blocked coins into my hat. Then I push it back in place. I gotta make sure I get back often enough to empty it before there’s enough for the weight of the coins to push the matchbook free and make somebody else’s day, If I do everything just right, the matchbook stays where it is, keeps working for me, and I head off to the next booth. Right now I got seventeen working for me downtown, twelve in Hollywood, and six in Santa Monica. Don’t even need a car—city busses work fine. Keeps me busy, but it’s a living. A pretty good one too, if I can avoid the ones the cops are watching.”
“They know about this scam?’
“Oh yeah—cops’re never as stupid as we like to think. If you stick with any one phone for too long, eventually there’s complaints, and it gets flagged, but the cops and company watchers can’t be everywhere. I always set up on a booth for a couple of days before I plug it, and I never let one stay plugged for more than a coupla weeks. Haven’t arrested me yet, and I been doing this a long time. You ever get caught short in a city, this ain’t a bad way to get well—if nothing else, it’ll get you enough to pay for a bus ticket outta town.”
All I could think of to say after this masterful presentation was “Wow!”
The old man got up then, dusted off the back of trousers, and left me with these parting words: “I gotta go, son. Duty calls. Just remember if you wanna try this yourself, doing it right takes skill, and skill takes practice. Nice talking to you….”
Eugene V, Debs once said “”Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth… While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free…”
More succinctly, there’s this from Peter O’Toole: “I’m not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.”
I admire both these quotes, and I’ve tried to live up to their spirit as best I can. I first learned these principles, though, from an old man in Los Angeles. That’s one of the many reasons I’ll always love LA, why I still honor that old man in memory, and why I celebrate him today, almost sixty years later, as the bodhisattva of Miramar Street.