Say Goodbye to Hollywood

On Fairy Lights & Roses & A Series of Hellos & Goodbyes

Let me begin by apologising for missing a couple of weeks there … I literally stepped back in time and was swallowed by the universe and couldn’t lift a finger to push a button.

You see, way back in the before times of early March 2020, my family and I were living in sunny Los Angeles, kids in school, as settled as people like us (musician/actor) could ever really hope to be. In an effort to get into the spirit of things in LA we’d finally decided to put together our earthquake kit, and spent a lot of time researching and buying life straws that turn dirty water from puddles into delicious spring water and food that rehydrates and tons of cans with long expiry dates and sanitary pads for filling wounds and emergency flares and so many spare batteries etc etc etc. Finally satisfied, we’d put it safely in a cupboard by the door and just had to hope that when the big one hit it didn’t hit exactly where that cupboard was. That is the bit that has always confused me about being preppers - how can you ever plan for where the emergency will occur??

Anyway we were just in that golden twilight moment of feeling pretty smug about our organisation skills and being on top of all the grown up life things that we generally weren’t so great at when a ‘stay at home’ order was announced for two weeks to clear up this potential pandemic thing. Although slightly alarmed, I was also somewhat excited to not have to drive to schools and supermarkets and what not and decided I would take the opportunity of staying home to focus on learning how to be a writer. After years of dabbling away with stories and articles that never left my computer, I had decided to reinvent myself and become a hot shot freelance journalist writing about whatever took my fancy - starting with how to make up the wild world of home schooling, which I had plenty of experience with, having lived much of our kid’s lives on various filming locations, attempting to turn supermarket trips into learning games and cooking and doing dishes into educational ‘Kitchen Math!’ sessions. So we went back to the stupor market and stocked up again on enough food to last a family of four at least two weeks. That’s a lot of food.

Then we shut the front door and I made a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk and wrote my first paragraph and what feels like five minutes later my husband came in and asked how long we had left on our visas. We’re Australian. Plenty of time I assured him. Then I checked. Oops, only a couple of months left. A little concerning as getting visas takes quite some time and being in the US of A without one is definitely not wise. I vowed to sort it quickly, and then discovered the consulates had all closed, with no reopening date in sight. No consulate means no visa. Not much later we heard that flights between Australia and the US were being cancelled and if we needed to go back home to the land of Oz we’d have to do it in five days. After weighing up our chances of surviving with no incoming income and no visas we realised we just had to cut and run.

So my glistening new career as a writer flew out the window and we spent the next panicked four days packing boxes, finding movers who were willing to turn up during a stay at home order in a pandemic, finding a storage unit, booking flights, returning a just leased-for-three-years car, extricating ourselves from our rented home and organising to return it clean and ship shape, finding accomodation in Sydney, finding friends willing to drive by and take our mountains of food, and various guitars and toys and books, finding masks to wear on the plane when finding a mask in LA was like finding gold, even for our nurse pal at Cedars Sinai emergency department (eternal thanks to our neighbour Pete who took care of us - and her - there) and so on and so on. Our packing was understandably bonkers and most of our boxes were helpfully labelled with things like ‘RANDOM BITS’ and ‘VARIOUS’ or ‘TOYS & KITCHEN’ or just generally illegible (see below). We put things we loved on the street for people to take home and packed stupid stuff like fairy lights and fake roses.

Goodbye to all that!

The movers came the same day we were leaving for Australia on a late night flight and left around 3pm. We had less than two hours before leaving for the airport when we realised the movers had mistakenly taken one of our suitcases - also kindly supplied by our neighbour Pete when we realised we didn’t have enough and all the stores were closed so we coudnt’t buy one - to the storage unit. It was of course the suitcase with our passports safely stashed in it, away from the chaos. My husband and son took an Uber to the storage unit and my 12 year old Spidermanned his way across the dark web of boxes and furniture and located the errant suitcase. They somehow managed to dig it out and race back to the house just in time to wave goodbye to our dear neighbours from a safe distance and head for the airport, which smelled like panic and felt like we were in a very creepy dystopian sci-fi film. When the plane touched down in Sydney, the pilot’s voice cracked and we could hear him stifling a sob as he announced that was their last flight for the foreseeable future.

And so, as tends to happen, life just rolled on and we found ourselves clothing and furniture and food and schools and a roof over our heads and ours was just one little story in a never ending rising tide of stories of displacement and loss and turmoil and the unknown, we were some of the lucky ones and were able to get on with things and then we spent getting close to four years talking about how we really needed to return to LA and deal with disposing of the entire contents of our former home at some point - or shipping the important stuff - but it was always too overwhelming, too expensive, too incomprehensible. Our other friends who had dealt with similar uncertainties and enormous moves urged us to deal with it and assured us it was going to be great for our mental health. We finally bit the bullet and have just returned from doing it.

Such an odd feeling to step back into your life precisely as you left it long ago.

It felt so sad and wasteful to open and throw out boxes of hopefully stored food with long expiry dates, packed with the expectation we would probably be returning to our regular lives in six months. The half-used bottles of shampoo and cleanser, the bucket of beers, the kids’ soft toys and books and pyjamas they had long ago grown out of. We had had to store everything because all the Goodwill stores were closed down when we left and the trash was groaning and couldn’t take anymore. We discovered many of our clothes had been eaten away by some tiny hungry insects, including this beloved 1940s handknit by my great aunt. We rediscovered things we’d forgotten and never found some of things we were looking forward to seeing again. We rescued archives. We laughed and got sentimental at old schoolwork and photos and paintings and gave away as much as we could, which also provided good excuses to say a quick hi to our friends amidst stacks of boxes. My son was ecstatic to be reunited with his Nerf guns.

We booked an Out of the Closet pick up for much of our furniture but they were far more finicky than we were and many items were rejected, deemed too wonky or weird or scratched to be sold by them (see above), including my treasured clothesline, a birthday gift from my husband because I could never understand why Angelenos didn’t hang their clothes out to dry in the sunshine instead of using the dryer. So we paid a junk collector to come and take the rest away, including our plastic wrapped mattress, which was definitely the fanciest, most expensive and comfortable mattress I’d ever owned. We helped load it right on the top of the mountain of other stuff in his beat up pick up truck and it balanced improbably there as he drove away into the sunset, a poignant visual confirmation of how nothing is forever and that maybe LA actually is the place where dreams go to die. As we sat at a stoplight in a hot new rent-a-car headed back home from the storage unit shortly after, dusty, dirty and beyond exhausted, we looked out the window and nearly died laughing as we saw our mattress, lying abandoned half in the gutter, half in the street, obviously slid off from its moorings, much like us.

Jose the junk collector told us when he went back to retrieve it after noticing its absence when he got home, it was already gone. The laws of the street. That made me happy, and I hope someone is having soft dreams on it right about now.

Despite my husband’s protestations, I couldn’t help myself from stashing a large sandwich bag of nice expired herbal teas in my suitcase that I was determined would be absolutely fine after four years in a dusty storage unit. I was right. The day after our arrival back in Sydney I made myself a cup of that tea. It tasted just like it was meant to - robust and spicy and delicate and satisfying - like the places and people you learn to hold within you, the little things that matter, the good stuff you treasure, the things you carry, the stuff you don’t give up on.

Having kept a mattress and a soft place to land in Los Angeles for close to ten years now, there is a sense of finality to letting go of it all. I want to be like my beloved Ronnie Spector and say a dramatic goodbye to Hollywood full of sexy E Street horns and nostalgic montages of Sunset Blvd and never ending freeways, but one thing I’ve learned is to just to say farewell for now, nothing is forever, life is a series of hellos and goodbyes (thanks Billy Joel) and we’re always traveling through other dimensions into wondrous lands bound only by our imagination (thanks Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone) and who knows how and when our worlds will turn upside down or inside out and we’ll meet again. I’m ready to buy new fake roses and fairy lights and keep both feet in the world I’m in for now.

So farewell til next time friends and goodbye Unit 197.

I’m happy to report I’ve emerged from a state of total exhaustion and I’m back on track in the land of the living, and will return next week with an exciting announcement...

til then, soft dreams to you all x