Nolte - Rebel

T HERE WAS A CRASH AND THEN A WOMAN YELLING. I RAN upstairs through throngs of artists and jazz musicians, all the while following a cascading stream of water that led me to the bathroom. The door was open and my roommate Jeanie was on the floor, next to a broken sink, and her lover was pulling his pants up. She had apparently been sitting on it when his insistent thrusts brought it smashing to the floor. Everyone was laughing riotously while water gushed out of the wall.

Can you take care of this, Younger Brother? Jeanie asked me innocently as she headed back down to the party. I nodded and proceeded to do the best drunken plumbing a twenty-one-year-old Midwestern boy knew how to do. Then I went out into the street and ran headfirst into the side of a parked car to relieve a little stress.

IT WAS THE EARLY SIXTIES AND I WAS LIVING IN A PART OF LOS Angeles called Laurel Canyon with a couple of older gals named Jen and Jeanie. People were beginning to live together in a communal fashion as brothers and sisters, and Jen and Jeanie treated me as if I were their kid brother and they were my older sisters.

I had met my older sisters some months before at a favorite hangout, Barneys Beanery, a ramshackle Santa Monica Boulevard restaurant that had been drawing high- and lowlife clientele for several decades. They both were still in their thirties and they were legends of sorts. Together, the two generated a bright light, a kind of aura that all sorts of people were drawn toward. They took a quick look at me and called me Younger Brother, a role I took on wholeheartedly, and crashing at their bungalow in lower Laurel Canyon was wonderfuluntil it wasnt. The household was a cultural hub of artists. There was a constant stream of amazing people coming and going, and I found myself in an exotic world that I didnt fully understand and began to wish I could be part of.

Although I was never invited to sleep with either of them, both women were very liberal with their romantic alliances. The man who had broken the sink was the gregarious but deeply troubled painter John Altoon.

Altoon was an abstract painter and a big deal in the L.A. art world. Tragically, John is as well-known for the art he destroyed, always his own, as he is for what he created. Either his perfectionist sensibility was incapable of satisfaction, or he became convinced that his art was inadvertently revealing characteristics that hed rather have kept private. Now I can relate, but back then, I had no idea what to make of it.

In addition to Altoons regular visits, actor Lawrence Tierney lived at the house for a while as well, and lots of wild characters used it as a crash pad. Jeanie and Monty Budwig, bass player at the venerable Hollywood jazz club Shellys Manne-Hole, were an item, and every kind of musician, artist, actor, and party person rolled in and out of our pad at all hours.

Jen and Jeanie decided who was welcome and who had to be shown the door, and I became their unofficial bouncer, sending dozens of wannabes and troublemakers back down to the city if they werent welcome. Over the course of my months at the house, every time either gal said a quick word or signaled to me with her eyes, the misbehaving son of a bitch was toast.

One of the perks of my position was that people who visited the house were eager to stay on my good side and quick to offer me every mood-altering tablet or pill I could consume. Uppers, downers, twice-arounders, Jeanie would inspect each and inform me which I could keep and which required a pilot far more experienced than me.

Damn, that house was always happening! One night, the R&B band the Treniers were so stoned they couldnt talk but could play jump blues for hours on end; then the next evening the walls of the house were covered with paintings for an impromptu art show. You never knew what the night would hold except that it would be unconventional and that everyone would be full-tilt boogie.

It was the coolest scene Id ever been part of and Jeanie in particular was a fascinatingly liberated womansomeone living far before her time in many ways. Though the house was the hippest, most creative place in West L.A., I was on the verge of dying. Around-the-clock booze and pills were beginning to take their toll on my soul. And if one more heroin addict needed to be dumped in downtown L.A., I mightve joined him.