WELCOME TO BRENTWOOD

When our friends heard Rita and I were moving to the Brentwood district of Los Angeles the jokes began. We didn’t have to be reminded Brentwood was the home of O.J. Simpson and the controversial trial that took place nearly 20 years ago. It had been mentioned in my novel THE MOUNTING STORM—until a bright-eyed agent made me replace it with something less controversial.

            

But Brentwood doesn’t need any apologies. Brentwood is home. Brentwood is beautiful. Brentwood is fun. And after 10 years of living next door in Santa Monica, Brentwood is where two Philadelphians are going to enjoy the Southern California experience to its fullest.

           

We don’t have the Third Street Promenade where every kid in the world wants to drag his parents and grandparents and spend the day shopping, eating, and going to the latest Harry Potter flick. Brentwood is on a smaller scale. But we do have a farmer’s market, a Whole Foods, a Ralph’s, a delightful library, and a dozen terrific coffee shops, including the Café Literati, where laptops are busy and photos of writers, living and dead, line the walls.

           

So we’re saying goodbye to the television footage of that white Ford Bronco shooting down the 411 freeway on its way to Mexico and being chased by a dozen police cruisers. Tom and Rita are here. And determined to enjoy every delightful corner of the new Brentwood.       

MY SHORT LIFE AS AN ARTIST

“Do you want to save your painting?” Rita asked last Saturday, after we’d ransacked the basement storage areas in preparation for the move from Santa Monica to Brentwood.

“What painting?” I asked, wondering what the joke was.

“The ‘masterpiece’ you saved in Philadelphia. You threw the others out.”

My memory cells jumped to life. Arriving in Philadelphia as a writer some thirty years ago I had a sudden urge to paint. It came when I visited the annual art show in Rittenhouse Square with the idea of buying something but couldn’t even come close to finding it. Then and there I decided I could paint a better canvas than anything I’d seen—and would prove it in my spare time.

Once a week for six weeks, fighting the April winds, I brought home a five by six foot canvas the art supply store had stretched for me. I bought gesso by the gallon.  I am sure many of those small tubes of oil paint are still lying around my one-room bachelor pad on Locust Street.

The paintings that resulted moved with me to breathing room in the Spruce Street floor-through, then on to my fancy duplex walk-up on Delancey Place. They eventually found the perfect setting lining a full story of stairs leading to a penthouse in Alden Park.  And it was there in the middle of a September night that my career as an artist soared to a height I could never have foreseen—someone pried the downstairs door open and stole one of my paintings.

When it came time to move to Santa Monica and begin my career in earnest as a novelist, only one painting survived.  But the subject of serial killers hiding in art galleries and a Monet stolen by evil Nazis along with a gallery owner whose beauty men would die for would blossom in my novels.

And, yes, I’m taking that ‘masterpiece’ with me to Brentwood. But please avoid questions about what school of art I practiced. Just remember that someone stole one of my paintings—how many of you artists out there can say that?

ROOTS

Sometimes it takes a jolt to make you realize how important it is to have that root in the ground that provides security about life—especially if your career is filled with the kind of insecurity that comes with being a novelist.  

A jolt like being evicted by your landlord.

“I’m completely renovating all the apartments,” his letter said. “So I’m giving all of you exactly five weeks to get the Hell out,” was the vein in which it continued, though in more lawyerly words that we later found were absolutely illegal when it came to the five weeks. (Eight weeks is mandatory under California law.) On everything else his fingers were gripped tight around our throats.

So after a month of looking Rita and I are moving from our beloved Santa Monica to Brentwood. It’s the distance of a whole mile and a half. A seven-minute drive. But with the emotional toll it took we might as well have been moving to Bangkok.

I’m sure I will come to love Brentwood and its sophistication as much or more than Santa Monica and its proximity to the ocean and its Third Street Promenade, so handy for turning visiting children and grandchildren loose for a whole afternoon.

But the agony of feeling rootless for three long, miserable, frightening weeks made me realize how important that root in the ground is—having a comfortable place to live that you can call your own.

Sure it makes for terrific storytelling—being forced from the castle or kicked out of the house by the evil stepfather or sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread or simply being forced to relocate across the country or around the world and finding yourself without a proper roof over your head.

As for me, I need that roof above and that root below.