Daily Overview for June 19, 2005
You might not believe what you’re hearing, but be patient and give it a chance.
Restless much? Your brain is craving some stimulation, so much so that you’re feeling itchy inside your own skin. Get out and see some art or go to a lecture — or do whatever floats your intellectual boat.
Plant your feet and ask for what’s rightfully yours. Work matters become crystal clear when you realize that the only way to get your just rewards is to demand them. Ever heard the saying, ‘you get the government you deserve’? Well, you deserve a lot better than the treatment you’ve been currently getting. Go about it in a calm fashion, however — draw up your achievements and accomplishments and present them with your demands. The rest will fall into place from there.
BOOM! A shotgun goes off and I am painfully awake. Screams, yells about god knows what are filling my tender matuninal ears. After a few panicked seconds I start to recognize the room I’m in, then I remember the warmth against me legs is not convulsive pools of urine from being scared to death, but the residual heat signature of my favorite portable heater, Amy. The shotgun was the front door slamming closed with all the subtlety of a demolition crew. The screaming, no more intelligible now for having identified the source, is coming from Ray. He is trying to tell me what a great night he had in a voice that would fell timber. “Night?” I ask, incredulous, “It’s 8 o’clock in the morning!”
Ray is not a small man; standing perhaps 5’9″ he outweighs me at 6’2″ 180 lbs. by at least 80 pounds. To see this man after an entire night of imbibing high dollar alcohols and playing with Hollywood starlets is a thing of rare comedy. I head for the bathroom to brush my teeth, rounding for a last glimpse to see Ray fall onto the mattress supporting tiny little Amy and with a squeal she is airborne. Ray’s monologue never breaks pace.
Exiting the bathroom, inside of my mouth now sufficiently scraped clean of toxins, I stumble back into the middle of the thoroughfare that is Ray’s recounting of his evening. This continues for some time occasionally slowed by my insistence that Ray get some sleep and his insistence that he couldn’t sleep right now if he wanted to, he had so much fun. Ray walks into his room to get something and I hear an audible thud, like someone maybe kicked a dresser or knocked over a chair and considering his current state either is plausible. Investigating reveals Ray, face down on his bed, snoring as loudly as he was yelling earlier.
Starbucks is right up the street and quite accessible from the apartment so I take this opportunity to run up there and get a couple coffees, black. I’ve been experimenting with bad tastes since my sister and I were children, a contest of sorts in always trying to find something that tastes worst than the last. Dirt sandwiches, burnt food, worms, Prune juice and Tabasco sauce concoctions to name a few, but coffee is only a recent endeavor of mine. I have had it before and always embellished it with sugar and cream enough to choke a horse. Recently I started experimenting with how little of either I can get by with. Through corporal mortification and willpower I have accustomed myself to a mug of coffee with one teaspoon of sugar. It’s actually ok, and it takes a lot less time to prepare. I’ll drink it black, but I prefer just that faint hint of sweetness in all that bitter. Whenever I crash at Ray’s place the morning run to Starbucks is part of my ritual. I am not at his house often enough for the workers to remember me as a regular, but often enough to remember them: in particular one short guy whose parents did him a great disservice. With a face so misshapen he makes Mr. Potato Head look like Denzel Washington his glasses sit askew so as to give the impression he was just punched in the face by a Winnebago. I can only imagine the level of disregard a woman must have for her offspring to imbibe the red sea of Johnny Walker necessary to produce such a pathetic and disfigured creature. Regardless, he is married and works well at his job and I have no qualms with the coffee he pours. Giving him a “cheers” on my way out the door, I’m back in the sunny Pasadena morning.
The walk back is brisk and maybe a bit more than I need at this early, hung over hour, but it does clear my head up a little. We lay around until the coffee does its magic and we can move and speak coherently again, wending our way to the car.
The directions from the night before were circuitous at best. Still, I imagine that I could reverse them and get back with minimal incident. I am wrong. Directions bad to begin with become insurmountable when you reverse the polarity. We are driving streets that neither of us recognizes the names or appearances of. However heading in a general southwestern direction and sitting across from Amy, I’m hardly concerned.
We are still roughly a thousand miles and an ocean from the Peoples Republic of China, but you couldn’t prove it by me. Dragons chase each other through stone and sky on every side. English has become a perfunctory formality, sparsely populating the walls and street signs around us with haphazard infrequency, replaced by the esoteric characters of Chinese kanji and all their embedded symbolisms. Sitting in my car I am almost the height of the average pedestrian. This is new. Grabbing my cel, I dial Nina to see if she can shed some light on just where the hell I am. Nina’s voice assures me through the odium of dead air and static that all I need to do is find the 101 and I’ll be en route to our destination. 30 seconds later, I hit the 101. North sounds good.
Leaving china and the 101 behind, we decide to drive through Mexico. Hey, why not? Stopping at a panaderia to find some form of nutritive sustenance aside from the black rocket fuel swilling around in the pits of our near empty stomachs, we manage to procure some donuts and a muffin despite the cashier’s aversion to anything remotely resembling an accepted standard of communication. She doesn’t respond to my Spanish or Amy’s English, so we are reduced to grunts and pointing. When all else fails, go caveman.
Noon has come and almost gone by the time we return to the hotel. Parking is again surprisingly easy, parking even closer to the hotel at a derelict parking meter on a street barely 5 car lengths long. Entering the room to Sona’s scolding me for keeping her out all night, I get the impression that is not all she wanted to say, but she leaves it at that for both our sakes. A little clean up, a change of clothing, and we are on our way to Hollywood Blvd. and all the starry goodness its walkways entail.
As we pass my car, Sona remarks, “You are going to get a parking ticket there.”
“I’m not going to get a parking ticket.”
If you have ever been to Hollywood Boulevard, you know what it is like. The sidewalks are usually crowded, peppered with transient thespians dressed up in all manner of costume trading dollar bills for photo opportunities. Barkers announce vouchers to come see a TV show being taped. You may also know what I mean when I say I love it. Walking that street, staring at all the names affixed to the hearts of those stars, I get to relive all the moments I had watching them as a child. I am reminded of long Saturday evenings after the day’s chores had been finished and suppers repast was through, sitting in my grandfather’s house watching Gene Autry, John Wane, and Humphrey Bogart embody all the things I wanted to be. I get to remember the cartoon characters that fueled my out of control childhood imagination. See Snow White’s star and remember the first time I met her. My favorite stop is Graumann’s Chinese Theatre. The hands and feet provide such possibility for entertainment that anyone can play around in those shadows of greatness past for hours.
Finally breaking away from our idolatrous indentions we make our way up and down the Boulevard pausing and snapping pictures on occasion, posing for our favorites and marveling at the pool of pop culture radiance that flows around us; up and down the street. Amy needs to have some proof she was here, so we stop and buy some typical touristy t-shirts at a store selling purloined photographs of movie stars and a cacophony of Betty Boop and Elvis attire. One of the major planned stops for the afternoon is Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum. Sona foregoes the $12 cover charge to stand outside and people watch whilst I have to practically chase Amy through the turnstile she is so excited. It is a good time all in all, but I have seen bigger freaks on myspace.com. My favorite section of the building is the medieval torture chamber. I want a torture chamber, now, Daddy! I can see it now… The Rack: Raising the bar on Bedroom Olympics!
Departing the deviant dungeon of disfigurement and disbelief, we hook back up with Sona and decide our coffee meter is running a little low. Bouncing into the Starbucks I am greeted by a sight stranger than any costumed performer could conceive and am forced to assume that it must be the way this woman really looks. Cobalt blue dreadlocks spill off of her head in a cascading rush of nastiness that rivals the black death of Exxon-Valdez. Her face, ears, and neck (yes, NECK) are pierced in more places than I believed manageable for daily operation and maintenance. She has tattoos above her eyes in a strange mockery of eyebrows and numerous others scoring her arms shoulders and one across her chest emulating an ornate necklace. Her height is enough to give me pause until I notice her boots add about 6 inches to her. Averse to showing her my impression of an ant under a bicycle tire, I step out of the way as she tromps past. Her pants look like she stitched them out of decommissioned army surplus and dyed it black. Billowing and oversized in every direction, they are affixed with strange yellow pieces throughout. Being followed by what I can only imagine is her girlfriend, only slightly less inordinate, they walk back out into the early summer sun and don’t quite get lost in the crowd.
Latte in hand, we swing by the Snow White café on our way to the car only to be severely disappointed. The only thing this place has to do with Snow White seems to be that the owner, either stricken with severe color blindness or a crippling inability to make a decision, has chosen white as the ONLY color to grace the interior of his misnomer.
Finally back to the car, having navigated the labyrinth that is the parking garage with some degree of success, we are off to the Sunset Strip. We are all but starving at this point and as such are salivating all over the windows of the rented cavalier as we try unsuccessfully to find a place to park. Directing Sona to a parking lot hidden away behind a mini strip of stores, we patiently wait whilst she decides on the parking space that won’t get us a parking ticket. Arbitrarily deciding on a quaint little solarium of an eatery, we are greeted by the icon of Los Angeles. The actress/waitress. You couldn’t mistake her from a mile away. Sultry character, a sort of subdued swagger, eye contact and a stage voice that had, “Hire me, Please!” written all over them. Our food is a little slow in coming, but tasty enough to warrant the wait. The place in itself is quite nice, if not by comparison to some of the other more swank joints bordering it with their patrons dressed entirely in trendy black clothes despite the warm summer day. Excusing myself to hit the head, I am amazed. The men’s restroom is barely larger than an airplane bathroom and more colorfully decorated than the undersides of most bridges in L.A. The sink is being held to the wall by what looks like chicken wire draped over a nail and the toilet might as well be a hole in the floor. Incongruity surrenders.
Our recently realized mission to find some scary large boots for Amy has taken us to a store that I could waste many long hours in: Hustler. Browsing a shirt rack I am greeted by the image of a particularly attractive female lovemound and the face of another woman getting a mouthful. The tagline: Eat Me! I love it. Perusing the lingerie and bondage equipment brings back fun memories of college parties I’m amazed I lived through, but the store is lacking in boots so we evacuate in lieu of the pizza place across the street. Sona making a brief sweep by the car to check for tickets, once more.
Our waitress is Avril Lavigne. Aside from vestiges of difference in the face, and a different voice, she could have been a doppelganger. We order a pitcher of something and I harass her about her bracelet from Spain she got off eBay, the fact that she has more rubber on her arms than the Michelin man, the writing on the walls, whatever comes to mind. She is a decent waitress for as young as she is, but aside from her uncanny resemblance to a certain Canadian punk rocker, not remarkable. Amy seems to have taken a particular interest in her, because she comments on my flirting. What can I say; some days ya just got it.
Halfway through our pitcher of liquid refreshment, a particularly underdressed young thing walks through the restaurant from the restroom in a skirt shorter than my attention span. Nice, but not necessarily unique. For some reason, god only knows what happens in the panties of women like this, she is suddenly seized by a need, a burning need if you will, to ram her right hand down the back of her skirt so far that it is visible out the bottom and begin tugging and scratching away. She must have forgotten something. Upon fixing whatever problem was ass-aulting her hindquarters, she walks back to a table opposite the room from ours and sits down. Thinking she worked there at first, I was very relieved we weren’t eating. She appears to be just another tasteless patron like me, as Amy informs me, but the groping is entertaining enough either way.
