Home, Sweet Mobile Home

I was distraught, adrift. Too much was gone. I’d just walked away, at the first serious wrinkle, from my first serious love affair. I’d graduated from the cocoon of UCLA two years earlier and still had no real career. My landlord of several years was kicking me out to turn his Beverly Hills duplex into a private-care center for ladies post-opping from plastic surgery. And my grandfather, the patriarch, our captain, suddenly died. My family decided that until life smoothed out and I was on my feet, I should live in his mobile home in Topanga Canyon.

For several years my grandfather had lived in Palm Desert, the Southern California equivalent of staking out an ice floe--his way of drifting off so as to be, at the end of his life, no burden. While visiting late one night, I’d seen him sitting alone at the head of the dining room table (oh, those Passover dinners for 20, those obstreperous family barbecues!), with a pink disk of canned salmon overturned onto a plate before him and a pile of saltines. His few hairs, stiff with Vitalis, were tousled; he wore a tank undershirt, gray and thin with wear. He sat, an old man with a can of salmon, gazing into space, chewing a stale saltine. When he saw that I saw him, he was embarrassed.

He was ready to get back to life, we’d thought. He’d suddenly announced the sale of his Palm Springs place. He’d informed us, moreover, that he’d bought a mobile home. Near us. He was going to live in the Woodland Park Mobile Estates in Topanga Canyon.

This seemed odd. My grandfather was conservative, a Reagan Jew. He always drove a Cadillac (bought used, yes, a man who liked getting a terrific deal, but still). He was a man who navigated his spotless, gas-gulping boat through the flat and linear San Fernando Valley with lordly ease. Topanga Canyon was bohemian, winding. And a mobile home, to us, meant bickering, alcoholic neighbors and mangy dogs. We couldn’t see it; he must, we figured, have gotten a terrific deal on the place. At least he was coming home.

He moved in on a Wednesday in late December. My sister-in-law and I had planned to help him unpack and settle in over the weekend, but on that rainy Thursday night, not feeling well, he drove himself in his Cadillac from his new mobile home to a hospital in Panorama City, suffered a heart attack on admission and died early Saturday morning. We buried him next to my grandmother, in a nice double vault at Groman-Eden Mortuary he’d purchased 30 years ago--a terrific deal, really--overlooking the San Fernando Valley. He’d steered his ice floe back to us; he’d wanted, we realized, to come home to die.

Topanga Canyon. This would be good for me. The legendary floods and mudslides and fires aside, it promised healing crafts and brown rice, a land of hippies and herbs, a utopia nestled between the gleam and salt of the Pacific Ocean and the safe familiarity of my parents’ house in Woodland Hills. On long, scent-filled walks through the chaparral I’d discover, and be befriended by, an artists colony; we’d tie-dye sheets, make cheese and crushed-ice candles, pound silver wire into jewelry and pose nude for each other to the gentle strumming of an acoustic guitar or the bubbling sound of a redwood hot tub. Neighboring musicians and I would hang out at the Topanga Corral, get stoned, get in touch, astral project. The Byrds would be forever posing for album covers near the canyon’s stables and horse trails. I would be a Lady of the Canyon--yes, I knew, the wrong canyon, but still. I would grow my hair long and ripply, wear Indian cotton, drink goat’s milk, stop shaving under my arms, dance like Stevie Nicks through a Renaissance Faire life of incense and mandolin music. Everyone I met would have a horse. I would become a regular at the Inn of the Seventh Ray. I’d fall in love with a man both burly and sensitive, whose sweat would smell of patchouli and wild mustard. I’d discover an artistic tendency, discover meaning deep within the canyon’s nurturing embrace. Topanga--”where the mountains meet the sea.”

I drove blithely past the Woodland Park Mobile Estates at first, heading deeper and farther into my canyon. A mile later I arrived at the “Top o’ Topanga Estates” and, remembering my grandfather’s descriptions, realized I’d gone too far. I headed back toward the Valley. Just past a “guest ranch” where city people could rent, breed and groom horses by the hour, I found the entrance; the circular gravel driveway, a tiny three-tiered fountain and a sign warning “No Solicitors--Private Property” led to my new home. I was a mere mile from Ventura Boulevard.

The main building--communal lobby/recreation room--was white with turquoise trim and had a Tomorrowland-style roof. There was a cement shuffleboard court, a Coca-Cola vending machine, a dumpster. No gentle lap, lap, lap of bubble against redwood, only the sound of a sixtysomething lady in a flowered bathing cap slowly stroking her way across the turquoise tile-ringed pool to Karen Carpenter singing “Top of the World” on a tinny transistor radio.

Barely paved pathways were arboreal: Sycamore Drive, Oak Street, Willow Road. My grandfather’s mobile home was at the corner of Cypress and Maple. It looked like the others: a painted aluminum box perched on a concrete foundation, low-roofed, with thin, twisted metal railings leading up the three steps from the driveway to the front entrance. Each home boasted its own front yard--a tiny gravel patch individually themed: cute ceramic bunnies and skunks, Southwestern cacti with a sleeping sombrero’d Mexican, an Oriental pagoda and Buddha. My grandfather’s patch had a pile of flattened cardboard boxes, packing tape freshly ripped, and a rusting bicycle I recognized as mine. I’d loaned it to him a few years earlier. I remembered urging him to get more exercise.

The inside smelled of him, of Old Spice, tomato soup and aging skin. Or did it? His presence could not have seeped so soon into the pile-free avocado carpet and shiny, faux-oak paneled walls. Perhaps his smell came from his things, from the velvet fleur-de-lis sofa, the Queen Anne chairs, the collections of beer steins and English commemoratives and elephants. But only a few of these things were unpacked; there were many, many more sealed boxes to rip open, go through, repack and distribute, dispose of. This, I knew, would be my job, the price of living free in his mobile home. In the kitchen, a brown paper Ralphs bag was leaking onto the counter top; inside were the aluminum foil remains of a Hungry Man TV dinner, gravy congealing.

Everything felt hollow, and rickety--the walls, the cabinets, the bathtub. I was afraid to lean on anything; I was sure a loud sneeze would bring the place down. My steps made the ceiling creak and the pantry door swing open. I took the grocery bag into the bathroom and started throwing away my grandfather’s toiletries: denture powder, Right Guard, a black comb clogged with scalp flakes and Vitalis, the Old Spice.

The Woodland Park Mobile Estates was peaceful. I rarely saw anyone, even my neighbors; they were elderly and quiet--a few visiting, polite children roamed the shuffleboard court on weekends--and kept to themselves. I never saw a musician or a hot tub or a goat. Friends were reluctant to come visit; it’s too far, there’s nothing to do out there, it’s depressing, just come meet us in Santa Monica. They joked about my “trailer,” their tones implying the drunken neighbors and shiftless dogs; I grew defensive, grew tired of explaining the difference between a trailer and a mobile home and stopped inviting them. I stopped going into the city, too, preferring my little mobile home. I decided its flimsy construction was, rather, a delicacy of design. Once, by myself, I drove deep into Topanga Canyon to the Inn of the Seventh Ray. Feeling uncomfortable at the sight of couples and threesomes and foursomes waiting for tables, I left and went to the Rib Ranch BBQ, back down near Ventura Boulevard. Soon I stopped going out at all, except for groceries at Ralphs. What difference did it make? I was alone and would always be alone, and could just curl up forever on the fleur-de-lis sofa in my little mobile home, living out my days in peace and solitude, burdening no one. Late one night, hungry, I found a can of salmon in the pantry. I dumped it on a plate and ate it with saltines, sitting at the dining room table, staring at my rumpled reflection in the sliding glass door.

One day in March I exited with a bagful of trash for the dumpster; the second I stepped on the driveway, my feet flew out and I landed, arms jerking, on my back. There was a thin, slippery layer of snow on the ground, coating the entire Woodland Park Mobile Estates, the ceramic Buddhas and bunnies. I’d lived 22 years in the Valley without ever seeing snow. This was a canyon experience: snow. My spine felt cracked; there was no one who heard me fall, no one to come get me. The air was hushed, icy. I gripped the twisted metal railing and slowly pulled myself up.

My grandfather had been at the end of his life; I was at a crossroads. I called a real estate agent. It was time to come out of the canyon.