"Planning My Escape"

"Planning My Escape"

Hollywood is a terrible place to get old. Dave had to get out.

After 40 years of living in Los Angeles, I escaped.

I had to. It was life or death.

My decision to cut and run came from a vision of my death on streets where I’d walked and lived. Sounds overly dramatic, but I work in entertainment. I know drama.

You wouldn’t know me, but you’d recognize my voice on radio, TV, the Internet, narrations, documentaries and cartoons. I’m a professional voice over artist, aka “VO.” I do other things, too. I have talented hands; I can paint portraits and I write, produce and mentor.

In my last decade in LA I moved once, from the San Fernando Valley to the Arts Districtwhere rents were cheap and the spaces were perfect for my studio. The downsides:live/work lofts are commercial property with no rent control and landlords can charge what the market will bear.

Two years after my move downtown, people were paying twice my rent for a 1000-square-foot loft with concrete floors and a counter for a kitchen - a box with no interior walls or privacy. My old nemesis, gentrification, had officially arrived. I’d see Bentleys, McLarens and Land Rovers parked next to my cheap Fiat. Property value rose so fast that building owners made money on empty lofts.

To say it wasn’t artist friendly would be a vast understatement.

My epiphanic moment of clarity came while choking on toxic diesel exhaust. I was walking my little rat terrier at 7:00 am, and we had stepped out of the gate onto 6th Street. The produce warehouse across the street was noisy and moving at full tilt, my dogyanking my arm out of its socket to reach that first tree, when I noticed that the crawling masses of tens of thousands of homeless in tents from Skid Row were now within 40 feet of my front door - along with the smell of urine and excrement.

The man I’d seen yesterday, screaming in an expensive business suit, railing at the world’s injustice while standing on the soapbox pile of his life, was now sleeping peacefully, tucked up against a red brick exterior wall. Yesterday it was obvious he was evicted from wherever he’d lived with all his possessions: a cappuccino machine, a stack of stereo equipment and a lot of other nice clothes and stuff that looked like he’d lost an upper management position. Probably never saw it coming. That morning it was just himin a blanket. Most of his belongings were gone, his stereo, all the nice stuff, poof, gone. He had a bag of clothes for a pillow and his now filthy double-stuffed too-expensive down comforter was wrapped tightly around him. He probably didn’t know he’d lost everything, sleeping peacefully on the concrete. This was happening regularly since the depression of 2008. It is, has or will dramatically wound everyone but the very rich.

The reality of my age and his situation hit me like a bucket of cold water. I was one month, maybe two from being him. I’d barely pulled off rent a couple of times recently over parking tickets gone to collection, or union dues, or unexpected car troubles.

The immense financial depression had given people permission to do horrible things and act like heroin addicts, chasing profits with monkeys on their backs. I was witnessing the end of...