Tag Archives: Dave’s Villa Caprice

Goodbye to All That, part 3.

my living room

This photo is from the real estate listing for my recently-sold condo in Palm Springs. My realtor told me people said it looked like a New York loft! (Maybe discounting the heat-blasted bougainvillea outside.)

I bought it in 2001. At the time, I was living and working in San Francisco, and had recently sold a place in West Hollywood (which I now regret, but isn’t that what hindsight is all about…).

I couldn’t afford anything in San Francisco. One room studios for $300K and up just seemed pretty ridiculous to me. I entertained the idea of buying a place in Guerneville (the Russian River), and looked for awhile there, but in the end decided I wouldn’t probably want to spend weekends up there for most of the year. Besides, it was difficult to find a house in the forest which had a) any sun and b) was not on the floodplain with a watermark on the facade – in my price range, anyway.

So it dawned on me that Palm Springs might be a good place to invest. Prices were so much less there than in the cities, and truthfully, the climate difference between SF and PS is profound. I am a warm weather lover. I adored going down there for long weekends. My job at the time also allowed me to visit the L.A. office (Dolby Laboratories) in Burbank, so most often the travel back and forth was “subsidized.” Ah, the good-bad old days of corporate largesse…

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And the truth is Palm Springs put out quite well for a weekend getaway. That’s just long enough to enjoy the pool and the sun, the insane amount of quiet, the party that happens on Friday and Saturday nights and ends about Sunday at 4. My coworkers thought I was crazy to make the 525-mile drive each way drive every other weekend or so, but to me it seemed worth it, depending on the month and the amount of rain in San Francisco.

It all changed a few months after I bought the place when I came down with cancer. I spent a couple of months in the barely furnished place to recover from an operation, and what a wonderful experience that was. But what it also brought with it was an intense realization of mortality, mine yes, but everyone else’s, too.

I ended up leaving that job the next year as my priorities for life had changed rather dramatically. I moved first to the condo in PS, and realized after just two months there that there was no way in hell that I could live there full time. I first rented a room back in LA, then a converted garage, and finally a flat in Los Feliz and then in 2006 put the condo on the market.

Bad timing! After a year, it not only did not sell, it had no offers, and no prospects. I had already moved full-time back to Los Angeles and pleaded with the realtor to find a tenant. We ended up with two over the course of two years: “Deadbeat Darlene,” who just decided to stop paying the rent with no explanation, and then a gay couple who always paid the rent – no matter if it was 2 days or two months late, they always, eventually, paid it.

In March of 2010 when they gave their notice, I was unemployed and responsible for both that mortgage and my L.A. rent. Weighing the options, I decided to move back out to the desert, get the condo ready for a sale, and hope the market might provide me with a window.

Long story long, it did. I even made a tiny profit on the place, but only due to the fact that I bought it 10 years ago.

So, what’s it like to live in P.S. full time? Let me say some people – of all ages – love it. They love the quiet, they love the heat, they love the convenience (like, no lines, easy and free parking, no traffic jams, etc) or they love the specific amenities like golf or tennis or if GLBT, the GLBT population.

What I can say about it is, it’s astoundingly hot in the summer, and it’s colder than the coasts in the winter at night. It is a year-round place now, so not everything closes up in the summer though there is a noticeable drop in the population, traffic, and people out and about.

There are ways to make a living out there if you’re in one of a few special categories, like tourism, health care, or real estate or anything that supports real estate like AC, plumbing, interior design, furniture sales, pool maintenance, etc.

There didn’t seem to be much call for corporate PR mavens. Or even non-profit PR mavens. Or filmmakers. Or novelists. Unless, of course, you had an income coming from somewhere else – like social security, or a pension. Sorry to say, I’m not there yet.

There would be days, particularly in the summertime, when I’d be inside the condo, closed up against the frighteningly strong and deadly sun, and the air conditioning would be humming (and I’d be praying that today would not be the day the unit would die, forcing me to spend $5K on a new system) and it would otherwise be so quiet, so still, I could hear a clock in my head. Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

Perhaps I’d look out the window and see one of my neighbors navigating her wheelchair along the pathway to the mailbox.

Tick-tock.

Again it would be silent and I’d think, what will become of me here? It was like I had abandoned my life. Loneliness does not really describe it. It was more a combination of panic and a deep realization of being stranded 100 miles from civilization.

I’m not sure what I think about being retired, and wonder if this will even be possible, or desirable, for members of my generation and those that follow. It’s a recent invention, only made possible by things like advances in health care and pensions. Totally, a 20th century invention. In the past, people who couldn’t work were cared for by their extended families and most did not live to be old. If you were single, there was the poorhouse. It was bleak. It may be very bleak again, if anti-social safety net folks get their way.

But what I realized about all that was that even if I was ever retired, I’d prefer the city. I figured I’d had the PS retirement experience, as I lived there for a considerable time without working. So I know what it’s like.

I don’t have to do it again.

So again, Goodbye to All That, and I look forward to the wistful visits to come.

Goodbye to All That, part 2.

Hiking on top of San Jacinto, above Palm Springs

Me and PS, continued…

My recollection is that the early 90s is when the area around Warm Sands in Palm Springs became the destination for gay guys. Cathedral City revamped their old (and decaying) downtown, and places like Daddy Warbucks were razed. They built the little racetrack and Target and Trader Joe’s and all the other stuff in front of the Villas and Desert (Desperate) Palms, and last I looked (a couple of months ago) both properties appeared like they had been abandoned (The DP was actually for sale).

I spent much of the time in PS during the late 80s early 90s with my sometimes-boyfriend sometimes-frenemy Jeff King, who had lived there for a time in the late 70s or early 80s. He had been a waiter at places like Jeremiah’s and Hamburger Hamlet (now, both long gone) and he knew people, he knew where things were. More importantly, he knew the social rules, such as they were, about where to go at what time on what day. Complicated. Good to have a guide.

He told me he’d been a member of something called the D.O.D., which stood for Daughters of the Desert, a loose (in many ways I’m sure) group of gay dining/partying buddies. His friend David was a bartender at Daddy Warbuck’s so for anything Jeff didn’t know about, David would.

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We stayed most often either at the Villas in their declining years (read: cheap rates) or at the new hip place over on Warm Sands, which was the Atrium/Vista Grande. My best memory of those years is sunbathing with Enigma playing over the sound system at Vista Grande while the misters kept me fairly cool in the 100+ heat. The place is still very much there, and expanded, though I know the shitty economy has taken a huge toll on those resorts.

My friend Jeff died there in Palm Springs, in a horrible car crash in 1992. His friend David died a couple of weeks later from AIDS. That was a horrible time, obviously, for so many in our community and also those early 90s years saw a crash of housing prices in Palm Springs, due to a recession and L.A. riots and PS riots (remember, the students used to go there for Spring Break!).

There had always been a lot of gay people in Palm Springs, but more of an influx with guys who had HIV and were looking for a peaceful and cheap place to spend what days they had left. And guess what – there were many, many days left, that continue to go on, because the retro-viral therapies for HIV, launched in the mid-90s, have made the infection mostly manageable. So those guys stayed, bought up cheap houses and helped build a gay infrastructure. And more followed, as well as other older men and lesbians who were now going to make this place a retirement destination – as had the straight population for years and years.

To be continued, the 2000s…

Goodbye To All That*

*apologies to Robert Graves, Joan Didion, and anyone else who has used this cool title.

Mountain, clouds: Palm Springs

The first-ever time I was in Palm Springs was in July, 1981, right about 30 years ago, when I drove out there with a group of guys from the Gay Student Union at USC in Los Angeles. It was the 4th of July weekend, and the leader of our little group (who, I kid you not, had “Gay” as his surname) had been there before, knew the “lay” of the land, and promised delights lurked behind every cactus.

Our specific destination was a gay resort called The New Lost World, which was, I know now, basically right on the border between Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert. It was a derelict property which had been owned at some point in the past (long, long past) by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

It had a lookout tower, a bar and restaurant, numerous buildings with guest rooms and several pools. It had abandoned volleyball courts, and an enormous firepit and shuffleboard course which was now a racetrack for a roadrunner. It backed up onto a giant wash, separated only by a low brick wall to keep out the wildness, of which, in 1981, there was still plenty.

On that particular weekend, there was a men’s fashion show around the pool. I only remember that caftans were among the items being shown, and the brave “models” were heckled incessantly by an audience stoked on Margaritas and 110 degree temperatures.

The pools, I remember, were cloudy; I came back with an ear infection but nothing worse, thank god, considering my youth, the year and nighttime activities. That trip began my association and love/hate relationship with Palm Springs.

Throughout the 1980s, I would go up to “the Springs” maybe once or twice a year. We really (we, meaning friends in their 20s, early 30s) could not afford anything more than that. It was then, as it is now, a getaway for a sex and sun weekend for guys from the cities of California. It seemed then, that everyone who went to Palm Springs was my age, whatever it happened to be, whatever year. It seems the same now, that the group that liked the desert was my specific age group which has grown up with that desire for dry heat.

The places that were popular then were all in Cathedral City, clustered around Dave’s Villa Caprice and The Desert Palms motel, way before anybody ever thought of building a Target there. An old date palm grove between the properties provided ample cruising space, as did the bars – I remember Rocks, Daddy Warbucks, the disco Cathedral City Construction Company, and there was a Club Baths next door. At that time, there were only a couple of gay places in Palm Springs proper. That, of course, has changed. Just a bit.

Up next: the 90s and 2000s, Goodbye to All That part 2.

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