I Lived in a Cult House Next to Dennis Hopper’s Mansion

It Wasn’t the Revelation I Was Hoping For

Venice, CA. Photo by Dennis_TM on Unsplash

Los Angeles is full of cults. Think about it. It’s a place where most people are coming from somewhere else, searching for belonging. Cults are everywhere. Like the Hollywood movies made there, which provide an illusion of glamour, emotional connection, and escape into other worlds, cults provide an illusion of community, connection, and safety.

The year or so I lived in Los Angeles, cults weaved in and out of my life like a bad bout of flu that I couldn’t shake. They were rife, and I must have looked vulnerable, because even when I wasn’t being approached directly, I was being touched by their long, snaky strings of mucus in indirect ways.

I was at the end of my twenties and, like many who flock to LA, just not-pretty enough to be a model, there on my own, scrapping and scrumming with all the other freelance creatives, doing ad-hoc production, writing and waitressing work as it came.

Cults took advantage of people like me, those with no roots in the city, those who needed to be open and make connections in order to establish a social life and to get work. Like many big cities, social life and work in LA were often totally intertwined — it was who you met at a party, who you hung out with, who could become your next work opportunity and literally your next chance to pay your rent.

First, the so-called religion founded by L. Ron I-Came-From-Outer-Space-to-Save-The-World H. These people would stand out on Hollywood Boulevard, right in the section where famous star tributes were laid in metal into the sidewalks, beckoning people in to take a “personality test.” I’d had a brush with this one before; I’d lost an East Coast friend who’d moved West, and when he became involved with them, his brain had indeed seemed to have been taken over by aliens. So I knew to avoid this one, and when they asked me to take a personality test, I moved to the outer edge of the sidewalk.

But that didn’t stop others from approaching me.

I met a woman in a coffee shop in Santa Monica, where lots of writers hung out, it was literally called The Writers Room. She was blonde and glamorous and fine-boned, but way past the very-young “prime” mid-twenties age which Hollywood seemed to cherish, yet she was still living there. She somehow managed to wheedle my phone number out of me. We met a few times. She kept alluding to glittering nighttime soirees, offering to lend me ballgowns for events she insisted I must attend, offering me computer work. I met a male friend of hers who said lots of the same things. “You’re so beautiful, so smart, so…” she said. I figured out in quick succession that she was love-bombing me and never borrowed a ball gown, never attended her events and never did her computer work. She was right that I was aching for connection, but I saw her coming soon after she saw me.

My landlady, who owned the big, rambling roommate house where I lived, decided to sell and give everyone a few weeks’ notice. She also owned an apartment, which Jim Morrison supposedly lived in at one point in the 60s, but I could not make the rent for that, so I was going to be homeless soon. That didn’t stop her and one of the roommates in the house both bullying me while I cried because I was going to be homeless while simultaneously trying to sell me MLM products.

MLMs (multi-level marketing, aka pyramid sales schemes) abounded in LA, so many spoke religiously about their products, hooked on the sense of belonging, the feel-good sales pitch, and the peer pressure to sell and recruit new salespeople. They seemed to be a cult of another kind, their hook being sales and consumption more so than new-age spirituality. But the fervor seemed almost identical.

Even though my landlady was basically forced to sell the house because she really had no other income, she was enamoured of these MLM new-age products as some kind of holy grail, and kept pushing me to buy powders and potions as she and the roommate said they “didn’t need to listen” to how upset I was that I had no place to go. It was a really fu*ked-up encounter but kind of demonstrated how LA worked — a lot of insecurity and bullying, a veneer of niceness, a thrall to glamour, another cult people could hang their delusions on while taking little accountability for their behavior. Oh, and sell, sell, sell, even if what they were selling was a rank illusion.

I began having readings in a famous psychic shop, looking for some kind of direction. Instead, I got one of the psychics breaking a professional boundary, calling me up outside of work after our reading, and telling me, “We could be great together.” Of course, I reported him, but not before I met a woman there selling more MLM products. She pushed me to join her pyramid scheme, telling me how wonderful it would be to get not only income from the products but a cut of income from all those below me on the pyramid selling products as well. She told me how astounding the products were, how much energy they gave her to carry out her daily tasks. I think just to get her off my back, I bought what turned out to be some kind of mango-flavored low-grade speed — fruity caffeine and some other stimulant long before energy drinks were in vogue. I think I took it once, and scared of getting hooked, threw it away.

Right around this time, I worked at a garden party for the movie “Home Alone.” It was summer (I don’t remember what month, it’s nearly always summer in LA), about 95 degrees out, but because “Home Alone” takes place in the winter in Chicago, all the waitstaff had to wear scarves and hats, sweating our butts off in the high-summer heat. It was excruciating. I remember Bonnie Raitt being there (or some other party like it, I worked at several, and it’s a blur) and smiling at me, but what I most remember is how this whole shindig epitomized the LA experience for me, totally uncomfortable, totally illusory, totally fake. Presentation trumped reality every time.

What I remember about LA, too, is that everyone had scripts, even in their bathroom. I remember going to a party as a guest, and the homeowner had put scripts he had written in the bathroom, waiting for someone to discover them while taking a crap.

But I digress.

I was about to become homeless, and I was scared. I’d been driving my old 1960s Volkswagen bus between San Francisco and LA for an editorial job interview, which had turned out to require way more computer-based editing skills than I’d had, and on the way back, the seals on the bus engine had begun to leak in the desert heat, facilitating an overnight repair stop, so I missed a party booking. The party company had decided I was unreliable and pulled all my work. The editor of a music trade mag special supplement I’d written for, hoping to get assignments on the regular mag, declined to give me any more work and refused to tell me why. I had a few production assistant gigs, but they were a day here and there.

Then disaster really struck. My bus was hit by a drunk driver at an intersection. The snub-nosed front crumpled, and the impact barely missed my legs. I was unhurt, but the driver didn’t have insurance and neither did I. I ended up selling the bus to a mechanic for $400.00 because I couldn’t afford to repair it.

Somewhere in this mess, my landlord sold the house. I felt sorry for myself. It wasn’t fair. I had a roommate, a stunning blond man with the intellectual capacity of a potato and the personality of a giant dick (and whose last name sounded suspiciously like “urine”) who was getting production work left and right because he looked like Thor and and was a guy, while I was being told “we put the women in the office and we don’t have anything right now.”

I looked in the LA papers for house shares, but most were unaffordable or taken before the ad even ran. I saw more ads for plastic surgery in those papers than I saw places from those ads.

I had nowhere to go.

I don’t even remember how I ended up in the cult house, just that I was down to using food banks and taking buses everywhere in LA, and it was really, really bad. I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t have a car, and I didn’t have a car because I couldn’t get a job to earn the money to buy one. I was definitely depressed, and managed to arrange some low-cost therapy with a naive upper-middle-class newbie do-gooder therapist whose answer to me not having money to buy furniture (or anything, really) was “why don’t you rent furniture?”

In any case, I didn’t have to rent furniture because I found the cult house.

The cult house lived in Venice, West LA, on a street of blocky modernist mansions. Its rooms were vast, with high ceilings, and nearly empty, except for the rows and rows of bunk beds in each bedroom pressed into service as dorms for its inhabitants. The dorms were single-sex and slept about ten people each in what would have been a bedroom for one or two people under normal circumstances. There wasn’t much other furniture in the house, just lots and lots and lots of people, so many that they were literally like objects — instead of a dresser, every time you turned around, there would be another human staring at you.

The house belonged to a meditation organization, which still exists to this day. Its members wore orange and lived in Oregon a lot. It’s got a new name now, and quotes from its founder are still dredged up by new-age hucksters to this day. There’s even a tarot deck bearing the name of the bearded one at its apex.

But the bearded one was not there, just a group of ragtag would-be cultists needing free accommodations. We ranged from down-on-our-luck young creatives to homeless Mexican families along for the ride. At the head of the house was a tantrum-y middle-aged man who insisted that for our room and board, we had to hold hands and sing nursery-rhymish songs praising the leader every day, and meditate in a group meditation every day as well. We could not defy anything he said, or he would have a meltdown, literally stamping his feet as his grey hair shook. Under his veneer of spiritual do-goodism was a sense of fragmentation and menace.

The place was one of the most constraining I’d ever been in. It was like being in an upscale jail. To be fair, they didn’t ask for any money, but it was stultifying, between the bunk beds and the lack of space and the singing and the menace. I remember going out into the garden, feeling unbalanced due to constantly being around people, gasping for personal space, going behind a tree, and looking up to find some Mexican woman staring at me.

I began to feel a sense of despair. I didn’t know how to extricate myself from this situation. Of course, in hindsight, there are a million things I could have or should have done, but depression is a funny thing — everything seems like a gargantuan effort, and nothing seems possible.

And then there was Dennis Hopper. Except there wasn’t, because we never saw him. We just saw the house that stood next door, supposedly full of fine art. I doubt there were any bunk beds, but I don’t know for sure.

Rumors circulated that Dennis Hopper was crazy, and mean, and maybe even that he would shoot you if you got too close to the house. I was scared to look at the house very much, and I never saw him. The only person I ever saw at the house was a maid throwing out the garbage down the long driveway.

In any case, Mr. Tantrum-y Cult Leader grew more topsy-turvy and petulant and began having screaming jags after the evening sing-song and meditation in the empty living room. I knew whatever was happening in the house was so far away from any kind of true spirituality that I felt at odds with myself continuing to live there. I became so depressed that I tried to overdose on a natural remedy. I lay down in my bunk bed after swallowing a whole bottle and, which, instead of lulling me to sleep the stuff kept me awake, wired, and angry for hours.

At some point, I finally slept. I woke up knowing I had to get out of LA. I had failed at Los Angeles (or perhaps Los Angeles had failed me), but at least, despite all my cultish encounters and even living in a cult house, at the end of the day, I hadn’t joined a cult.