Exiles On Main Street

Fridgeir moved from Iceland (he went to high school with Björk) in 1986. He briefly settled with his mother in Pacoima, but the pair left for downtown a year later. Fridgeir was 20 and not really sure what he wanted to do with his life yet, so he followed his fashion-designer mother, Stella, to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse off of Santa Fe Avenue, which cost about $800 a month at the time. That was back when Al's Bar was really happening, when the first wave of artists ran around downtown before real estate speculation priced them out and galleries started moving west, when life down there consisted mostly of parties and underground gallery openings — when Danny Elfman occupied an entire floor of the Canadian.

Six months ago, Fridgeir moved in with Susan Bolles (see "The Expat"). They met at the Banquette, kind of like the neighborhood Central Perk. Sitting in his well-lit, gallery-like loft, he pushes his wire-frame glasses back up his nose and gets kind of excited talking about the old days. "We felt like pirates," he says. "We did our thing in 1989, then the rents went up and the artists moved to Silver Lake or Echo Park."

Fridgeir went to New Orleans to learn how to be a chef, thinking he had finally found his calling. He worked there for 14 years. But life began to unravel for him. "I like drugs and I like alcohol," Fridgeir says candidly. "I got more and more caught up in it. As a chef, it was socially acceptable for me to drink, so I started drinking more and more, until it all crumbled and I came to L.A. to get sober."

Los Angeles didn't prove to be the kind of rehab Fridgeir needed, at least not right away. He ended up on Skid Row, on San Julian and Sixth streets, living in a cardboard box, living only to drink. "I drank alcohol like people smoked crack," Fridgeir says. "My only thought was where will I get my next drink from."

When he finally hit rock bottom, he went to the Midnight Mission. "I crawled into the mission," he says. "I was almost dead." He came back every day for three weeks to see if a cot had opened and waited for hours in a room with 300 people, watching an endless rotation of Chuck Norris movies. Ironically, the room was called the Reading Room.

He finally got in, and at 8 every night he and his 150 roommates pulled their cots out and went to sleep. Slowly, by demonstrating his commitment to staying sober, Fridgeir worked his way upstairs to the bunks. "And when I got a bunk, I felt like I was really moving up in the world," he says with a smile.

Fridgeir got a job that paid $2 an hour, working in the mission kitchen. "It was a start," he says. "I remember when I got that first paycheck, I realized how long it had been since I'd had money to see a movie. That was major." He went to The Aviator.

He lived at the mission for a year and a half and decided to go to film school, winning a full scholarship to LACC. But it was during a prerequisite photography class that Fridgeir discovered the passion and serenity he was looking for.

To support his new love for photography, he got a part-time job as a personal chef to some bigwigs in Venice and moved to the Rosslyn Hotel, an SRO where, until six months ago, he was renting a room for $300 a month. The hotel was 700 rooms of crack, heroin and insane drinking.

"It was hardcore Bukowski," says Fridgeir, who's been sober for three years now. But a cheap pad allowed him to concentrate on his art. "But not to concentrate on it as a means to a paycheck," he says. "Making money is what I do to pay the rent; it's not my driving force." He pauses and then jokes, "That's not very L.A. of me."

Settled in now with Bolles, he's been shooting downtown landscapes, a series of 4-by-5 images of lonely and forgotten buildings and areas downtown that he shoots in a palette of grays, of light and shadow. Life at the Canadian now is calming, filled with little luxuries, such as being able to cook at home in his own spacious kitchen. He'll leave the door open when he cooks, allowing the aromas to circulate through the halls, and generously feeds anyone who shows up at his door. Any inconveniences he's encountered at the Canadian, like the shared bathrooms or the lack of heat in winter, is a drop in the bucket compared to where he's been.

"When I lived downtown here in the '80s," Fridgeir says, "I saw the homeless guys and I thought, I'm never gonna be that. That's never gonna happen to me. Being homeless gave me a totally different perspective. Anything that comes after that you feel grateful for. It humbles you for the rest of your life."

Hacksaw