Doheny Plaza is the high-rise residence that anchors the adult Bret’s return to the memories of 1981: from his apartment there, an attempt to write about the Trawler and Robert Mallory provokes a medical-emergency-level panic attack. The building’s concrete geography—its eleventh floor, the doorman who admits the EMTs, and the short trip along San Vicente Boulevard to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—makes the past’s return a bodily crisis in the present.

Setting and Emergency

In 2006, while living alone at Doheny Plaza, Bret began making notes about the autumn of 1981, a period he had spent years trying to forget. He had been writing specifically about the Trawler, the serial killer whose presence haunted the San Fernando Valley and whose story was entangled with Bret’s former classmates. As he worked, memory overwhelmed his attempt to proceed: he moaned with fear, collapsed, and vomited the tequila he had been drinking to steady himself. Three Xanax tablets did not act quickly enough to reassure him, and he called 911, telling the operator he was having a heart attack before fainting.

The apartment’s practical details shape the rescue. The landline supplied the location, and an alarmed doorman escorted the EMTs to the eleventh floor and unlocked the apartment. They found Bret on the bedroom floor. He regained consciousness in the ambulance as it sped down San Vicente Boulevard toward Cedars-Sinai, only a short distance from Doheny Plaza. Once the Xanax had taken effect, he became calm and embarrassed, recognizing that nothing was physically wrong and that the attack arose from memory—especially memories of the Trawler and Robert Mallory.

A Home Near the Hospital

At Cedars-Sinai, a doctor examined Bret; the hospital proposed an overnight stay and tests, including an MRI, and his primary physician agreed. Bret declined. He felt that the crisis was not a bodily illness to be identified by tests and feared that remaining in the hospital would make him slip into madness. The decision draws a boundary between the physical emergency and its source: his body has collapsed, but the danger he recognizes lies in conjuring the past.

Doheny Plaza therefore serves as more than an address. Its closeness to the hospital makes urgent care immediately accessible, while the apartment is also the private setting where writing reopens the buried year. The episode ties an intimate interior—the bedroom floor, the nightstand where the Xanax was kept—to the public route of emergency response through Los Angeles.

The Apartment and Traumatic Return

The attempt to write at Doheny Plaza did not lead directly to a completed book. Bret abandoned the project and wrote two other books over the following thirteen years; only in 2020 did he feel able to begin The Shards. The unfinished effort remained part of the story of the apartment: in 2006, notes about the Trawler led not to mastery of the material but to an attack that sent him to the emergency room.

The account also places Doheny Plaza within a longer pattern of recurrence. Years later, the writing of the book again strained life in the condo on Doheny: Bret’s partner left for days at a time as the manuscript approached its ending, while Bret worked among old journals, the school yearbook, and notes filled with song titles. The apartment is thus both a home in the adult present and a threshold through which the traumatic past repeatedly enters—not as a safely completed memory, but as an experience capable of disrupting the act of narration itself.