Weekly Roundup: A Failing Flip At The End Of The American Dream Edition

Last week my doctor pronounced my thumb mostly healed, and had some encouraging things to say about the previously-detached end of my radius, now migrating into a sort of Anschluss with the bone whence it sprang. This was good, because I had some motorcycles to ride: the all-new Ducati Monster, the wacky $1,807 looks-like-a-Grom-but-is-really-a-scooter Honda Navi, and the frankly wicked Harley-Davidson Sportster S, now sporting about 120 horsepower and visual aggression to match.

We had other bikes in our Winter 2022 group bike test as well, but they didn't interest me much. And that was good, because while my left flipper is kind of healed, it's not good for much more than an hour of riding at a time before it becomes too painful to pull in the clutch. So three bikes was about all I could do. I did spend some time on a dealer-provided Live Wire ONE, but due to some industry politeness I'll wait until I can get a "proper" loaner before I tell you too much about it.

Our motorcycle group tests are fairly ambitious for a digital publication that, prior to my arrival, was perfectly content to publish just four pieces a day, usually reheated freelance stuff about old cars. To head off any criticism that our new direction is not worth the time and effort, we do what we can to save money pretty much everywhere but the dinners. We fly at odd times, carpool from the airport, get meals at the grocery store.

Oh, and we did one other thing to really save some money: we rented a two-million-dollar ocean-view mansion.

I'm not kidding. Only in the modern overheated, tech-infested, dollar-printing, clown world could such a thing happen. Here's the deal. Back in March of 2020, someone paid $1.67 million for this home. It's a nice place, but it's twenty-seven years old and many parts of it have clearly seen better days. Fourteen months later, presumably after some refurbishment, they listed it for $2.495M.

It didn't sell.

In the nine months since, the seller has lowered the price five times. It was a no-sale at $2.2M a month and a half ago. Now it's off the market again. In the presumable interest of keeping the wolf from the door, it's on AirBNB for... well, let's just say it's about as expensive as two hotel rooms in a middling LAX airport hotel on a daily basis.

It has an ocean view. Not much of one, but it has an ocean view. The house next door apparently burned to the concrete pad during the wildfires; my Uber driver tried to drop me off there before I suggested, rather seriously, that I had not hired him to take me to an empty concrete pad in the middle of a canyon.

"This isn't Yellowjackets, you know." I said.

"I don't know what you mean," he replied.

Much of it was lovely. The home was built to maximize airflow, sunlight, and access to the outdoors. While I am not a particularly important person at my corporation -- last time I checked I had as many people over me as under -- I am the director of this ragtag band so I took the master suite, which occupied the entire top floor and offered a splendid view to go with my private fire pit. There was a bed but no night stand. In fact, the home had very little furniture in it, and what was there had clearly been provided by the lowest bidder. The coffee table in the living room was entirely homemade, and not well, using brackets, screws, and unevenly glued boards.

"Bash it up," I commanded my troops, "so we can see what the owners think it's worth." They ignored me, which is usually, but not always, safest in these situations.

Everywhere you looked, however, there were signs that whoever owned this home could not afford it. The Sub-Zero was half broken, and rather than fix it they'd just put a $500 Chinese fridge in the dining room. The walls were dingy, the windows were leaky, the HVAC was a complete mess. There were two custom built-in fireplaces, neither of which worked. The front door didn't latch, so every time I took a bike for a canyon run I'd come back to find it blown wide open.

In the afternoons the wind off the ocean would literally shake the house. I'm a veteran of many Ohio storms in my current crib, some of which felt like they should have had an F-number, but rarely have I experienced more wind noise than I got in my furniture-free little garret over the Pacific. The shower could only dispense a water fountain's worth of pressure through a sextet of pissing streams, and the temperature of the water was seemingly dictated by astrology rather than by the three bent-up levers in the wall.

Downstairs, the oven knobs had all been snapped off then gently placed back for strictly ceremonial purposes. From my ducklings I heard some complaints about conditions in the lower bedrooms, which I cheerfully ignored as they did not affect me.

And yet. In the evenings you could watch the sun set in weather that let you have every window in the house wide open, and it was difficult not to feel truly #Blessed. What a joy it would be, to live somewhere like this! And what a sorrow, to have to rent it to scruffy strangers at a fraction of the mortgage payments because you couldn't actually afford it!

That would go double for someone who loves to drive. The roads surrounding the house were perfect, magical, so high above the ocean that you appeared to be facing a deep-blue Super Star Destroyer as you rode down the hill to the Pacific Coast Highway. Anyone could feel like a hero on the tight sweepers and steep drops. Even the 110cc Honda Navi was exhilarating in these conditions.

Of course, the canyon road wasn't an option. It was the only way to get anywhere. No doubt you'd often be thrilled at taking it down to the coast, but just as often you'd curse the twenty minutes it took to do so. Not to mention the fact that getting down to the PCH didn't actually get you anywhere. It just put you in a position to ride or drive another twenty minutes to the nearest fast food restaurant. Which, naturally, is what I did more than once.

Not surprisingly, the minute you leave the canyon and its (non-existent, for me on this trip) ladies behind, you run smack dab into the face of Dysfunctional Current Year California. There are homeless people everywhere, some of whom can be quite serious about engaging you in conversation. The Malibu Jack In The Box looked like a toilet inside and out. There were two people working there. Neither spoke a lick of English. A balding thirtysomething manchild was asleep on a table, in blatant contravention of the totally unenforceable policies laid out by the signs. He smelled at a distance.

Gas was five and a half bucks a gallon, everything cost half again what it costs at home. The smallest bottle of Tito's Vodka, hardly enough to occupy an evening above the ocean, was eighteen bucks; in Ohio you get the 1.75-liter for that price. The roads out of Malibu were lined with homeless camps. When I headed down south of LA to spend some chat time with a fellow Radical owner, I couldn't help but notice that there's essentially no enforcement, and therefore no observation, of the traffic laws.

I've been coming to SoCal for fifteen years now as an autowriter, longer than that on my own nickel. Just infrequently enough to escape the frog-boiling effect that keeps my California-resident friends from seeing what's really changed. In 1996, the first time I ever traveled to Los Angeles, it was heaven on earth, and hardly any more expensive in parts than the Midwest. Now it's a gladiator academy where the cost of entry starts in the seven figures.

While we were there, the "Ukrainian conflict" began.

"Can you imagine what it would be like to just wake up one day... and your city has been invaded?" I laughed at the writer who said it.

"Dude, look around you. That's what's happened to LA! Oh, they didn't fly an Su-29 overheard so everyone would notice, but how does this city, this state, remotely resemble what it was when they filmed On Any Sunday? It doesn't. It's become a dystopian nightmare operated by a caste system in which white people have everything and brown people do everything. Most of it is in the process of being sold off to China. There was an invasion here. And it was a success."

Once upon a time, let's say 1965, California was heaven on earth. It was cheaper to own a home in Van Nuys than it was to live in a manufacturing powerhouse like, say, Ashtabula, Ohio. There was limitless natural beauty. Limitless human beauty. You could make ends meet working pretty much any job. You could commute in a Meyers Manx or meet the nicest people on your Honda. It was the finest place on earth in which to be wholly, completely alive.

And look at it now. Nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. And neither does anyone else. This article says the quiet part out loud: in any year where California does not have significant international migration both documented and un-, the population will decline, because American citizens are running away at the speed of an overbooked U-Haul fleet. They're selling their homes, collecting million-dollar paydays, and heading off to Texas and Idaho and Tennessee so they can unselfconsciously promote and support in their new hometowns every single initiative and policy that made California an open sewer during their previous residence there.

I like California in four-day doses. Not long enough that I stop seeing the ocean the way I no longer truly see any sort of tree that lives in the Midwest. Just the right amount of time to be enchanted for every possible moment. Before I lose my patience with the bums and the hateful restaurant staffs and the combat mentality of the average embattled LA resident. While I still view each hubcap-less Altima racing down the shoulder at 115mph with wonder, not sorrow.

My last ride down the canyon was in a Jeep, heading to the airport. I doubt we'll return; at those rental rates, the house will be in foreclosure before April. Or maybe it will just burn to the ground in August. Or the encampments will come to the Malibu canyons, allowing the hills to really have eyes. Ah, but I had my precious collection of moments. Running at solid pace in a new McLaren. Watching my young writers really ride the heck out of some motorcycles. And the occasional moment for just me and my Harley Sportster, making some pace but in no particular hurry, the wind behind and the sun-soaked ocean ahead. You really can't get that in Ohio, you know. It's no consolation to think that pretty soon, once all the mandates and emergencies have their full say, you won't be able to get it in California, either.

For Hagerty, I reviewed a Roller, discussed some burning questions, and went back in time to meet a particularly lovely Durango.