30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twelve: Back in L.A. ??!

Finally, we arrived in LA, and I borrowed my old 1962 Rambler American station wagon from TMAX so I could drive around and run some errands and visit people. I had given him the car when I left for Oregon as payment for a small debit I owed him. I ended up sleeping in the car at least one night while I was down there.

I visited Frank, who had moved into my old rental house to see what he was doing. One thing I did NOT want was to run into Crazy Robert while I was there, so I parked the car up a the Laundromat on the corner, hiding it between a delivery truck and the building, then walked to Frank's. After I left, Robert showed up a few minutes later, so my casino luck was holding.

The major task of this trip was to pick up my car, a 1960 Rambler Classic station wagon that I had left in the parking garage of Woodley's mother's condo in San Pedro. Of course, the battery for this car was in the Housetruck back in Oregon, so I went to Sears and bought a top-of-the-line Die Hard battery. The price? $39.95 (that's 799 nickels).

Someone (don't remember who) gave me a ride to San Pedro and dropped me and the battery off in front of Woodley's mother's condo, then drove away, leaving me to fetch the car myself. Connie (Woodley's mother, also named Connie) was not home, so I decided to see if I could get into the parking garage and get the car without her. As I was rounding the corner of the sidewalk, going to the side street that the garage entrance was on, a San Pedro police car went by, and the cop's head swiveled around like it was mounted on ball bearings. I knew what was coming next, so I set the battery down on the curb and waited for him to do his U-turn. Sure enough, he came around again, stopping right next to where I was standing. When he got out of the patrol car, before he could say anything, I pulled the receipt for the battery out of my shirt pocket, extended it towards him and asked "I suppose you'd like to see this?". Probably a little bit disappointed that he hadn't nabbed a battery thief, the cop didn't stick around to help me get the car, either.

Getting past the motorized gates of the parking garage wasn't too difficult, I simply waited outside until someone drove out, then dived under the gate with the battery before it lowered.

My car was still where I had parked it, covered with a fair amount of dust. Because the front end was parked under an overhead storage cabinet, I needed to roll it back a ways to get the hood open to install the battery. Unfortunately, the day I had driven it into the garage, the maintenance crews had been patching the road outside with hot tar. The tar had gotten on the tires, and although it was a thin film, it was enough to prevent me from rolling the car out to where I could work on it. The tires were effectively glued to the concrete, and working alone, I didn't have enough strength to break it free!

Eventually, I used the bumper jack to raise each corner of the car until the tires were lifted from the sticky patch of concrete, and placed papers and cardboard from the trash dumpster under them to prevent them from re-adhering.

Putting the battery in the car allowed me to start it right up, and once again, I was mobile…

After getting the car running, I dropped in on my friend Mike (known by his nick name, "Frenchy"). When he learned that I had been sleeping in the car, he offered to let me crash that night on his living room couch.

The next morning, I felt like I was getting a cold. By afternoon, it became obvious that it was more than that, and likely was either severe food poisoning or a bad case of the flu. Either way, I couldn't keep food or liquids down, had diarrhea, and a high temperature as well.

I was mortified to be an ill houseguest, but by the time Frenchy got home from work, I was much too sick to be elsewhere. Fortunately, he and his wife were both registered nurses, and weren't put off by my condition. They tended me, fed me broth when I could keep liquids down, and brought me back to health. I was down and out on their couch for three or four days. When I finally had enough strength to get up, I used the shower for the first time in too long, and had to lie down on the bathroom floor afterwards to keep from passing out.

Once I was able to get up and move around without fear of a blackout, I began getting the car ready to drive back to Oregon. One thing that I felt needed doing was to repack the front wheel bearings and adjust the brakes. Working in Frenchy's driveway, I had the car up on jacks and was making some progress when a car pulled up in the street in front of the house and none other than Woodley got out with his backpack! He was about the last person I expected to see, as he was supposed to be 700 miles away in Eugene. For reasons of his own (probably having to do with his estranged wife, Anne), he decided to hitchhike to LA, counting on finding me there for the return trip.

I was actually very glad to see him, because I was still not feeling 100%, and it would be good to have a second driver on the trip back. How, exactly, he managed to find me was kind of a mystery, because Frenchy had moved since we had left town, and I don't know for sure that anyone else even knew where I was while I was sick, or that I hadn't left town altogether. Must have been that TMAX.

Whatever other trouble we managed to get into, I can't remember, but before leaving town, we drove to North Hollywood to a discount RV parts store to purchase materials for our trucks. I bought a cosmetically flawed marine toilet and holding tank. Woodley must have gotten supplies also, because we pretty much filled up the back of the station wagon with RV stuff, and had to strap the holding tank to the roof.

Likely we visited with Woodley's father Wade, and perhaps stayed at Marion's estate for a short while.

I do know that we headed north, and I had to pull the car over in Ventura and remove one of the hubcaps and the dust cover from the wheel bearing because the cotter pin that I had put in after packing the bearings was catching on the dust cap and making an annoying clicking sound.

We probably stayed over with my grandparents in San Jose again. Woodley liked my Grandma Mace quite a lot. His own great-grandmother was a seemingly serious and very proper elderly lady, while my Granny had always been a salt-of-the-earth, give-'em-hell type.

We worked our way northward on Highway 101, heading back to our new home.