One cannot judge Mrs. Gavrus too harshly. This was, after all, a full 25 years before Alice Cooper recorded “Dead Babies,†his warning against just this sort of occurance.
But it was 1947. A time when not only were there no childproof caps, but all seemingly harmless drugs contained deadly poison.
Nice to know the pair in question will be played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey in the MOW.
What burns me up is that the papers don’t mention in which hôtel Graeff shacked up the young bride. There are many. Here are a few.
Despite my love of the Mills’, after having blogged about nurses a scant two days ago, I was hoping Kim would go with this story:
-because I’d hate to see another nurse, of whom I love collectively, whose mints on the pillows of the ol’ Hotel du Crazy are always fresh, fall through the cracks of 21 December 1947. That a blarney-smooching nurselet shall hang from a kookootown window, turning herself that particular shade of necrophile grey, is to be forgotten on my watch? Think not, dear reader.
Christmas shopping represents nothing more than a Consumer Confidence Index precisely mirrored against the Death of the Earth. When our last National Treasure, the choked and gasping American Landfill, dies via poison spilled from Christmas’ gaping chasm, we shall recall the time when the only terrors visited upon us were those involving popgun-wielding desperadi. As we suck in our final breath of outgassed CFCs we will beg for the Kress bandit’s bullet to put us out of our postmodern misery!
On behalf of the 1947project, I invite you to consume as hard as you can, while there is still time. Thank you for your attention.
In any event, the Nurse: like the Cop, she spends her days with her head in the human toilet, seeing people only at their lowest ebb. Is it any wonder they garb themselves in black and take in a lonely GI ACP as their only friend?
Here’s where my new delightful intended Fay Young lived:
Note her small apartment building just there to the left of the Gates Hotel. Both of which are gone, having been replaced like so:
(Orient yourself in the two pix via Wurdeman & Becket’s 1946 Mobil Oil/General Petroleum bldng peeking from the corner.)
And where Fay boosted some schmendrik who so dearly deserved to be relieved of his nine dollars:
Relatedly, on a Los Angeles streetcorner I recently reacquainted myself with M—– R—–, former nursing student and former girlfriend of mine at that, who now panhandles to support her, uh, nursing habit.
But Longshoreman Rufus came up he did, just a few blocks from where Simon Rodia was toiling away on his towers, to set a house full of children (plus one old lady) ablaze.
Fifty-eight years later, and still no-one’s built there.
There are a number of lots empty in the neighborhood, not just ’65-era commercial blocks-come-parking lots, but vacant plots of residential, like this lot two doors down from Vera Dudley’s.
The work of longshoremen, no doubt.
And the road she walked down:
The streetcar mentioned in the story was probably on Fletcher. A road near a streetcar, that’s good. A road with hidden brain-beating, cranium-crushing madmen lurking in the shadows, not so good.
And a block away, poor Rodman the Grocer hunkers down to wait out the storm. Maybe he was padding the grocery bill. Or maybe there was something else. Something more lurid. Or something insane, on somebody’s part. The wife is more involved in this than we are led to believe, and Esther’s lucky she didn’t end up with poisoned meat, and the market has had some sort of mock-Mansard roof attachment, and one way or another, this is going to end in tears.
And one must remember, that in the time of Cain and Abel, murder was not forbidden by God. Blam. Blam. Blam.
And here is where the earth was stained by bloodshed.
Once a Van Nuys lean-to, it is now a house abandoned, sick, wrong. Why? When life was first shed, God said “And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth.”
And where did the fratricidal tiller go? Where is the land of Nod? La Habra?
Where Calvert once cut through the Valley, it has been torn up and replaced by the Civic Center.
Harold’s house was on this spot, now the Van Nuys Branch Library (Glenn Arbogast & Assc., 1963). Fitting, as he was progenitor of Lamech, father of music and meteallurgy. (Note the Van Nuys City Hall, nee Valley Municipal Building [Peter K. Scharborum, 1932] looming in the background like the Tower of Babel.)
Most cities are made up of collected Seth, borne to a chastened and humbled Eve. But LA’s angel is the boastful, prideful mother who gave us Cain, the man who settled in the land of wandering. The man who, sometimes, just has to strike down his brother.
After having set four blazes at the Palms Wilshire, it’s a wonder it’s still standing:
She also did some drape-ignitin’ here, or perhaps near. The address in the Times is 1272, and the address on this building is 1250, putting 1272 about where the TV-VCR repair bunker quivers behind the tree.
And on Oak, where we picture her writhing in ecstacy over burning case headings and bubbling pencil pleats. How her blood would boil as hot as the flames engulfing the valances! How only oceans of beer could quell the inferno in her soul!
But revisiting that room, to feel the hot madness of her throes- I don’t have to tell you that Oak, which used to run blithely up to Pico, got wiped out north of the 1400 block by the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
