Freeloading Bed-Hopper Flits and Flops All Over

Call me L.A.’s guest.

Go ahead. That’s what a friend did when he heard I was moving from San Diego to Los Angeles for a three-month assignment--with no place to stay. “You’re a man without a home,” he said. “You’ve turned into a bloody freeloader.”

He had a point. But I chose to see it another, perhaps more romantic--even cinematic--way. This, after all, is Movie Town.

Blanche Dubois, that character in “A Streetcar Named Desire” who came to stay with her sister and loudmouth husband, Stanley Kowalski, a.k.a. Marlon Brando--suddenly, she was me. Poor Blanche, what was her line? Something like, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

In my case, it was friends and co-workers. I had to quickly discover just how many friends I really had in the L. A. area. So I whipped out a calendar and got on the telephone to book my “Blanche Dubois 1992 Bed and Breakfast World Tour.”

Scuffed-up suitcase in hand, I invaded people’s homesteads, apartments and condos with my pre-ironed clothes, plastic “Playmate” lunch box and microwaveable dinners. I pushed aside the milk and eggs in their refrigerators to make room for my apples, oranges, bananas and pre-cut carrots.

My stays lasted one week, maybe two. Well, OK, three, tops--counting the editor who went to Bhutan and needed someone to feed her toothless, 18-year-old cat named Zeke who screamed forlornly at night and liked to sleep on my neck like a tumor.

In all, I flopped at more than half a dozen households from Bellflower to Hollywood to Mt. Washington. My life consisted of Thomas beds, fold-out “mother-in-law” couches, wafer-thin guest pillows, skeleton keys, babbling babies, Buddhist masks, family fights, stepping across cat litter boxes in spare bathrooms and avoiding those blasted street-cleaning mornings so I wouldn’t get a ticket. (I got two.)

Before I left San Diego, I set some rules for my stay. I was to be as self-sufficient as possible. That means bringing my own linens, towel, toothpaste, toilet paper and home-cooked meals. I still harbor this childhood nightmare of my Uncle Everett and Aunt Wanda overstaying their welcome by at least two weeks--each night bellying up to the table as my mother rushed off to her waitress job, saying “So, what’s for dinner tonight, Mom?”

Twenty-five years later, the spirit of my mother’s patient hospitality lives on. In every house where I stayed, I was invited to forgo my dinners and break bread with the family , to sample a casserole, freshly made soup or order-out pizza.

One fine man on a diet even offered me the case of beer in his refrigerator. Every night, he’d watch thirstily as I snapped open a couple of his Beck’s or Heinekens--while he sipped some non-alcoholic brew. It broke my heart. Burp .

There were some unsettling moments. Like the time my host from Mt. Washington showed me where to park my 1990 Honda Accord, with a snide smile warning me that his mother-in-law’s Honda had been stolen from the exact spot a few weeks earlier.

Then there were the hours laying awake in bed in my home-away-from-home Hollywood apartment--wide-eyed as those creepy, gaping, Buddhist masks stared down at me from every conceivable angle, scaring the living daylights out of me during nocturnal trips to the toilet.

One night, a police helicopter flew overhead for hours, its searchlight piercing my bedroom window, no doubt in search of the kind of lunatic, escaped ax murderer you read about. All night, I shuddered at the chop, chop, chop of those blades, like some scene from “Boyz N the Hood.”

Me, the suburban rube used to leaving his front door, windows and garage door open all night in safe-and-sound San Diego, found himself praying to Buddha for protection. For once, I thought I saw the masks crack a sardonic smile.

There were, of course, better times. With the kids and dogs and cats, I became plain-old Uncle Travis--feeding Milk Bones to the bowsers, letting the cats perch on my lap, telling jokes and stories to the kiddies, playing the court jester.

They disarmed me. Like little A J, the 4-month-old who slobbered in my face when I held him close. Or the girls, ages 4 and 6, from Long Beach who rode my legs around the kitchen and defiantly peeked around the hallway corner at me hours after bedtime.

One night as we sat on the couch looking at pictures, the 6-year-old whispered in my ear that I was cute. And that she loved me.

And then there were the mornings I crept through another room of children to use the only bathroom in the Mt. Washington house, only to see tiny 3-year-old Bobby, in his 4-foot bed, contorted in the weirdest Houdini-like position, fast and comfortably asleep.

Some places, like the house in Playa del Rey with its palatial bed and huge shower, were more comfortable than my own digs. At others, I had to make do, such as the night I drained spaghetti without a colander and watched dinner slide down the garbage disposal.

In the end, my stint as an L. A. freeloader taught me something about myself. I learned that this Jethro Bodine was a fool for slobbering babies and little girls who mark their good deeds on a refrigerator calendar to prove they had earned their allowance.

I also learned something about this city and the people who forge an existence here.

Los Angeles has a heart. And it’s found right there at home.