I Move Up the Coast, to a Neighborhood That Recently Burned Down

A developer had bought a mesa above Pacific Coast Highway between Pacific Palisades and Topanga, and was building around 60 1500-square-foot homes, every fifth or sixth one identical. Mama had fallen in love with the idea of living there, and she, who wasn’t employed, and my dad, whom Hughes Aircraft didn’t pay very well, somehow managed to secure a mortgage. The house cost $45K. I thought for a while that I hated the idea of moving five miles north (from Playa del Rey), as it would mean I’d lose all my friends at Westchester High, which I’d just started. Then I realized that I didn’t actually have any friends, and found out that we’d be living one street over from my mid-adolescence idol, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Hot Rod Hundley, and sighed my acquiesence.

Sunset Mesa, later briefly renamed Pacific Riviera, was 100 percent residential, which meant no bowling alley or even convenience store to loiter in front of. I found it desolate, but of course I found the whole world a lonely place, as I would continue to for the rest of my days.

This video seems to show only the south side of Castlerock Road. I lived on the north side of the street, at 3821.

As Sunset Mesa was a few hundred yards north of the Los Angeles city limits, I couldn’t enroll at Palisades High, where the Mael brothers hadn’t yet begun to dream of their future as Sparks, and had instead to take the bus to Santa Monica High School, my first impression of which was far from salubrious. The moment I stepped into The Office, someone hooted derisively. I didn’t know at whom, but assumed it must be me, because that was the sort of boy I was (and remain!). At Westchester High, several of my sort-of-buddies had heard that Samohi was aswarm with Cute Girls, as though that did me, the shyest boy on the West Coast, the most microscopic bit of good.

My first class was Geography, taught by an aloof little man with an earlier decade’s pencil mustache, and regularly disrupted by the least shy boy on the West Coast, an ADHD pioneer named Dale White, who I later found spelled it Dail. Three years later, to time-travel distractingly from the subject at hand, Dail’s band The Shanes would deputize me as their drummer for a performance on Topanga Beach, at which Dail would do a remarkable imitation of Mick Jagger’s imitation of black vernacular singing. And a year after that on Topanga Beach, a wild-eyed hippie I’d never laid eyes on, and would never confront anew, would hand me a large bag of psilocybin mushrooms that I would later sell at UCLA for a handsome profit.

But back to the late winter of 62/63, with me walking half a mile down the long, steep Coastline Drive hill every morning to the parking lot of Ted’s Rancho Restaurant, where the following year I would earn treasure and acclaim first as a busboy, and later as a parking attendant. The children of Sunset Mesa not afflicted, as I was, by a fatal combination of shyness and snobbishness, would chat while waiting for the school bus, whose first stop had been eight miles north, in actual Malibu, near where the surfers surfed and the film stars of yesteryear lived together in what was called The Colony.

Oh, the calumny those authentic Malibuians heaped on us Sunset Mesians, whom they’d come to resent after discovering that our mail, exactly as their own, was addressed to Malibu 90265. They would sneer at us hatefully and turn their transistor radios up when the unspeakable “Puff the Magic Dragon” came on, and it was never not coming on, and then down again for the Beach Boys. I adored Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” almost as much as I loathed Puff the Magic Dragon.

After a couple of miserably lonely months, I actually made a friend — a shy, miserable Minnesota transplant whom I met in PE. We had both read The Catcher in the Rye, and identified closely with Holden Caulfield, never guessing that J. D. Salinger had conceived Holden as pathetic. Such was our mutual love of the book that we took to addressing each other as chief, as the pimp Maurice addressed Holden. Chief was an early adaptor of Bob Dylan, whose appeal I wasn’t yet able to perceive, and parlayed his employment as a Ted’s busboy into a regular Saturday evening folksinging slot with his amiable idiot partner George, of whom I was of course insanely jealous.

After school, we Sunset Mesians would clamber off the bus at its first stop, a stone’s throw past the city limits line, and walk up the long steep Coastline hill together. All except Johnny, who, in his shyness and snobbishness, took pride in ascending the hill alone, more quickly than any of those in the reasonably…cute Midge Gale’s entourage.

The house my parents had bought, at 3821 Castlerock Road, apparently burned down this past January. Aside from that of losing (at long last!) my virginity in the upstairs living room, with its view of the Pacific, I had few happy memories of it.