Heartbreak Motel : Lifestyle: Survivor of a bygone era, the El Royale is home to people down on their luck and a playground for urban adventurers.

There are lights that twinkle like stars on the rusty marquee of the old El Royale Motel, but nobody wishes on them.

This isn’t a place where dreams come true. Fantasies maybe, in the small rooms with mirrored ceilings and pornographic movies shown on televisions mounted high on the patched walls.

But not dreams.

Amid the sprightly mini-malls that cover Ventura Boulevard in ice-blue neon, the El Royale is a tattered-looking remnant of the time when the boulevard was a dusty road winding among orange groves. A semicircle of stucco bungalows crouch around a courtyard dotted with trees in a scene straight out of ‘40s film noir. And, in fact, the El Royale was built in 1937 as a link in a thriving chain of reasonably priced motels that sprang up to attract tourists stopping off to see the sights of Hollywood, as well as families in need of temporary quarters while completing moves to a booming Southern California.

Conditions deteriorated over time and prostitutes swarmed into the area. In the ‘80s, rising property values and a crackdown on pimping brought in new, upscale businesses to replace many of the old motels.

But the El Royale hangs on as a reminder of the time when tourists from Kansas and Illinois arrived in Roadmasters and Bel-Airs that barely fit in the small covered garages attached to each tiny bungalow.

Spending a night in El Royale today reveals the changes that have taken place on the boulevard, from the four-lane roar of traffic outside to the proliferation of eateries, both classy and declasse, to an eclectic motel clientele made up of people who can’t afford anything fancier and those trolling on the seamier side of life.

There is John Colonna, an admitted former speed freak on Social Security who peppers his nonstop conversation with endless references to movies; Don Prince, a middle-class husband who comes to relax and sometimes have sex with men--he and his wife have an understanding, he says--and Billy and Andrea Jenkins, who have been married five years and have three kids, but have had their own place only once in those years.

“Once you’re down in the dumps it’s hard to get back up,” Andrea says brightly amid the clutter of her tiny room.

And when the bars begin to close, men and women come in two-by-two, carrying plastic bags of toiletries.

“The El Royale is one of the old dives,” says Rex Anderson, a foot patrol officer for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Those who stay there say the motel serves a nobler purpose as a home for the poor and the transient as well as a playground for urban adventurers. Watching over everything like a housemother is Julio Aguilera, the 31-year-old manager in shorts with keys jingling at his side. He fixes plumbing, repairs carpet and keeps a wary eye out for trouble. The rooms rent from around $35 to $50 a night, but weekly rates are as low as $110. There are cheaper accommodations in the Valley, but El Royale tenants say those places are in higher crime areas.

Julio doesn’t judge his customers, so long as they don’t break the law, and pay their bills on time. “They’ve all got problems,” he says of his tenants. “But they’re nice people.” If they have trouble coming up with the cash one day, he has been known to be generous.

Inside the rooms, simple cloth curtains hanging on windows set in small alcoves look over the parking lot. The dense atmosphere is enhanced by a sense of looming violence. The deadbolt locks in some of the rooms are missing, leaving small holes in the frames, as though the doors had been kicked in so often that security was given up as a lost cause.

More-modern touches include mirrors on the ceiling and on the wall at eye level with the bed. The motel shows X-rated movies on Channel 3 at night, heterosexual and homosexual, depending upon guest preference.

Julio says a lot of mainstream movies have been shot here to take advantage of the historic look, but he is able to name only “Archie Goes Back to Riverdale.” Apparently based on the Archie comic-book series, it doesn’t sound like film noir. Tom Petty shot a video here, he says.

“All kinds of people stay here,” Julio says.

Colonna’s thoughts bounce around like rolling dice. His brain sucked up so much speed over 13 years of constant use--”I wanted to be up all the time”--that the cross embossed on the tiny white pills has left its stamp on his personality. Or maybe, as he says, he’s just “got a lot of energy.”

“I got a mind for Hollywood,” says the heavy, 36-year-old man in a dirty yellow slicker. Then he proves it, telling a story about a car accident that killed the other driver while he received just a scratch. “It was like ‘Sudden Impact,’ you know that movie with Clint Eastwood? Bam!” he shouts, slamming his fist into his hand to mimic the sound of crunching metal. He almost falls over the bed in the tiny room where he has been living for the past two weeks.

He doesn’t work. He says his wife left him because he beat her up too much. “Bam!” he says, demonstrating how he punched her.

He used to come here years ago when he was flying on speed, to watch the porn movies. But now he avoids them along with the drugs. He’s trying to be healthy now. He takes lithium. Soon, he hopes, he will move out of here and into a place with his mother.

“I want a stove and refrigerator,” he says.

A few doors down, Prince is a man of almost staggering openness. He comes to the El Royale regularly, sometimes to watch gay porn movies with men he meets in bars along the boulevard. Sometimes he has sex with them, though he says that is not his primary reason for coming here.

The El Royale is “an escape, a place to get away from home.”

It’s not that he doesn’t love his wife. “We have an excellent relationship,” he says. It is based upon mutual trust.

The agreement is that he is “clean, sensible, not irresponsible.” In other words, he is careful not to pick up anything he might transmit to her.

Prince, at 35, is a handsome man, with dark, wavy hair and a trim body. Dressed in a purple shirt, he sits on the bed of one of the nicest rooms. The fake wood paneling is intact. A hockey game is on TV and he sits cross-legged on the bed, watching while a man with a beard who is dressed in shorts sits in a chair beside the bed. The other man declines to give his name, but Prince even poses for pictures.

Prince got his openness from his parents, he says, who actually stayed in this motel when they moved out to Los Angeles in 1952.

“My parents feel this place is disgusting,” he says.

Prince is a debt collector for a law firm. When a debt goes bad, he is the person who decides whether to seize property. “I will wipe out a bank account if I need to,” he says.

He says there are no better places in the area to do what he enjoys. And as for those who think the place is tawdry, “I bet there are people who call this place repulsive, yet they frequent it.”

Perhaps he is right. As the hour grows late, the small courtyard begins filling up with cars. A cream-colored Japanese luxury car pulls into a space and a blond woman in heels and a tan business suit steps out. With a cautious, sideways look, she clatters briskly over to the office to get the key to a bungalow.

More than an hour later, another Japanese luxury car arrives and a man in a tailored business suit gets out, looks cautiously around and goes to the door. He knocks on it. There is no response, so he knocks louder. Then he begins calling her name. “Sally,” he says, in a voice that is trying to be a loud whisper but begins to sound like a hurt whine. Perhaps she is angry with him for being late. After keeping him fidgeting on the steps for several minutes she lets him in.

A yellow Cadillac pulls up to the next bungalow. A woman gets out and hurries into the room while her companion, a middle-aged, paunchy man in slacks and sports shirt retrieves from the trunk a plastic bag full of toiletries.

In the corner at the back is Billy and Andrea Jenkins’ small room, crowded with two double beds, one for them and one for their down-on-his-luck friend, Michael Ettestad, 21. Michael is out of work, has no money and seems down in the dumps over it, especially since he considers himself to be a man with promise.

“It’s even worse when you have a certain amount of knowledge to get a job. I went to apprentice mechanic school,” he says. What money he earns, he brings in recycling cans he picks up on the street.

But if he is down, he doesn’t have to crane his neck very far to look up to Andrea, 24, and Billy, 25. After five years of marriage, with children ages 1, 3 and 6, they haven’t been able to accumulate enough money to rent a house. In only one year of the five have they even had their own place, a small apartment in Burbank.

Andrea was laid off recently as a directory assistance operator, and Billy works part time as a painter. They pay $40 a day to stay here. Over a month, they will spend as much as they would have on rent for a nice apartment. But they have to have somewhere to stay while they save up. The kids are already staying with her mother in Simi Valley and she can’t take more people. Andrea says she won’t have the kids here.

“They show porn movies here,” she says matter-of-factly. She has an engaging way about her. Her hair is cut birdlike, long on the sides and cropped into a little tuft on top. Billy and Michael just got out of jail. They were arrested a couple days before on suspicion of grand theft. The police were real nice. “They came back to make sure I was OK,” Andrea says.

The police dropped the charges, her husband says. For him, this is only the latest trouble. On Halloween, when they were staying in a room at the Charles, which adjoins the El Royale and is owned by the same people, someone broke in and stabbed him three times in the hands and made off with his $300 stereo and $58 in cash from his dresser. His wife was out trick-or-treating with the kids in Simi.

Michael shakes his head. “The soap opera of life,” he says.

Andrea agrees. “You get to the point where you’re almost used to it,” she says. “You forget sometimes there’s a real world out there.

“At least you’ve got each other,” someone volunteers.

Andrea looks over at Billy, sitting on the edge of the bed with his cap turned backward, full of life, smiling crookedly, mischievous and open, like a dead-end kid. “We have our ups and downs,” she says. “I guess we can’t do without each other.”

Amid the troubled waters, Ron Bartoli is an island of contentment, a symbol of the possibility of redemption. “Blue skies and green lights,” he says. “I’m happy right now.” Bartoli, 52, is a sign and set painter for the movie studios in Culver City. He did the big billboard through which Richard Dawson was thrown in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man.”

Once he had a conventional life--a wife of 25 years, a house in Orange County and his own business. Then his wife asked for a divorce and remarried.

Bartoli ended up homeless, living in his car. Eventually he decided to change his life. He did it without changing his circumstances much. His room at the Charles is not that far from the street, but where he was hard before, he’s now at peace. It’s almost as though--like they teach in that New Age, Buddhist-tinged philosophy so popular on the Westside--by losing everything he regained himself.

“It’s like I programmed myself,” he says. The only way he can describe it is to say: “It’s like I died and came back physically and mentally different.”

“He’s one of my best friends,” says Maria Arnold, who gave him the silver and gold lapel tips on his trademark leather jacket. “Do you think I would come to a place like this if he wasn’t?”

Arnold, who works in the animation department on the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” cartoon show, met Bartoli in Residuals, a bar across the street that is a movie industry hangout. She says that in Residuals, Bartoli, the once tough businessman, is regarded with all the affection of Norm from Cheers.

Soon, Bartoli says, he’s going to have to find a more permanent place to live. But he’s in no hurry.

Julio just put in cable for him.