Places Where We Live

The place where Barbra Streisand used to live is a 22-acre outdoor cathedral of trees and ferns, and of flowers in cool glades beside a flowing stream.

It is an area of almost spiritual beauty tucked into the hills of Malibu near an indentation in the coastline aptly named Paradise Cove.

Autumn is a golden time there, gracing the brick pathways and sloping hillsides with leaves of exquisite colors, creating a still life of serenity that is rarely achieved so close to the anguish of a big city.

The place where Charlie Sampson used to live is a doorway in an alley of Skid Row that smells faintly of stale wine and urine.

There is no beauty there, no birds or trees or bursts of flowers, and it is about as far from paradise as anyone could possibly get.

Autumn is about the same as any other season there, because L.A.’s weather is fairly constant, except when it rains and the alley gets even more soggy and dismal than it already is.

I visited both places the other day, the Garden of Eden where Barbra used to live and the doorway where Charlie used to live, and I wondered at the disparity in the homes that society creates for its citizens.

Even in an area of so much, there is still so little.

*

I started thinking about this when I stopped by for a cup of coffee with Clancy Imislund at the Midnight Mission, a place where “God’s failures,” as he calls them, can find a place to start again.

Clancy is director of the mission. He was thrown out of the place himself once as a hell-raising drunk and now, with a kind of gruff sweetness, offers hope for those who thought they’d never experience it again.

A guy can get something to eat and a place to stay at the mission, and maybe even a job if he’s willing to work. You don’t have to pledge your life to Jesus, Clancy says, you only have to be willing to put effort into your own rehabilitation. “Work,” he says, “is a kind of prayer in itself.”

There’s truth to that, and later at the place where Barbra Streisand used to live, I tried to put it in some kind of perspective. Streisand, by the way, gave her paradise to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency working hard to preserve whatever natural beauty we have left.

It’s called the Streisand Center for Conservancy Studies now and is managed by the nonprofit Mountains Conservancy Foundation. Ruth Kilday, who founded and directs the foundation, showed me around that wooded wonderland of gardens and houses, where filtered sunlight and yellow autumn leaves make it all glow with a kind of dreamy iridescence.

The estate is valued at about $15 million, and if you’re of a mind, you can fume and sputter at the gap that separates people like Barbra Streisand and Charlie Sampson and the kinds of places where they live.

But the comparison falters when one considers Streisand’s enormous talent, and the work she put into developing it, and Charlie’s lack of any skills and his utter unwillingness to help himself.

*

I met Charlie years ago when I was writing stories about the serial killer we called the Skid Row Slasher. Charlie was a Vietnam veteran who was getting a small pension but blowing almost all of it on booze. Occasionally, what little money he had left was taken from him by others who beat him bloody and left him scarred and bitter in the alley he called home.

I used to go back to the alley and see him every once in awhile and sometimes bring him food. He asked me never to give him money because he knew he’d just use it to buy wine. At least he had that much of a fix on himself.

I tried to get Charlie to go to the Midnight Mission, but he’d have none of it, even though the Slasher was doing in guys just like him. I went looking for Charlie one day when it was raining because he hated rain and I figured it might be a good time to lure him off of Skid Row, but he was gone.

I never saw him again, and I’ve hardly thought about him at all, except on the day I was at the place where Streisand used to live and began wondering about the enclaves people call home.

We all live in different kinds of emotional places. Some are pastoral and serene, others dark and full of peril. They’re states of mind that make us who we are, dreams that lure us to gardens of beauty or nightmares that lead us down alleys of despair.

I don’t know where Barbra Streisand is living now, but she’s doing OK wherever she is. Charlie’s alley is still there, as bleak and dangerous as ever, but he’s nowhere to be found. Too bad. I’d like to take him to where Barbra used to live just so he might know there are better things in life than alleys. He’s probably never seen paradise before.