June 4, 2007

Time alone. Finally. What do I do? Well, imagine a geyser of whole milk. There you go. No tissues in the room and I don’t want to stain a sock or a blanket, so I use a plastic Ralph’s bag for cleanup.

Another first.

Liz, one of my WKU friends, calls to tell me she likes the blog mucho. Thank you, Liz. You have a sexy voice.

I catch the bus around 12:17 and transfer at Crenshaw.

Yes, the ‘hood movie Crenshaw. Tre and O-Dogg and Cain’s Crenshaw. But to be honest, I’m not deep up off in the ‘hood. No, deep Crenshaw – South Central Crenshaw – is for when I’m in a car. That I can lock. And duck down in. All Eyez On Me and the Menace II Society Soundtrack are tucked away, waiting for that day.

I ask a nice old lady with a face that’s wrinkled like my nutsack if I’m standing in the right place to catch the next bus. I am. By the way, that’s not a dig at the old lady. She rules. But her face honestly is wrinkled like my scrotum.

The bus takes me up Crenshaw, towards Hollywood. I go through an area of Bel-Air. Everything is gated. Most houses have Beware of Dog signs. Lots of campesinos doing yard work. An aside: can yuppies brag about their lawn to their neighbors if they’re not the ones mowing it?

I get off on Santa Monica Boulevard and actually sing to myself, quietly, “… until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.”

I locate Gold’s Gym Hollywood. There’s a personal trainers wall. Their headshots on are it.
The gym overflows with twinks, hyper-lean Abercrombie wannabes, and aging, over-tanned muscleheads who are darker than most airport employees. I notice two seventysomethings in turquoise tanktops and short shorts flexing in the mirror.

They wear bottle-blonde toupees.

People look at me strangely because my shirt has sleeves and I’m pale-ish and wearing glasses. I guess in Hollywood that’s about as rare as having a vagina on your forehead.

I hit up a leg/shoulder workout and go to rent a shower towel, figuring it’ll maybe cost a dollar. Or five. $5.13, actually. To rent. A fucking. Towel.

This means that if you have five dollars you are going to be wet. Like a forehead-vagina. I have five dollars, but fuck them. I barely ever pay five dollars for dinner.

So what do I do?

I dry myself with my gym shirt. I don’t wipe. I pat. All over. Like a baby’s rashy asshole. I still can’t get my crotch dry, so I pull a stack of paper towels from the dispenser to finish myself off with. I notice that I should probably trim my pubes soon. They’re looking very Julius Erving.

I take a few minutes to force one out in a large and comforting stall. The toilet pressure sucks, but that’s Marisol’s problem; not mine.

Since Alex and I forgot to bring Q-Tips with us and are too lazy to buy a box, I gank a few (a shitload) from the jar by the sink. Fuck your $5.13 towel rental. Again.

Originally I was planning on job-hunting after my workout because I figured there’d be places to work around Gold’s Gym Hollywood, but the area is not glamorous and surrounded with menial job opportunities like I thought it would be.

Too bad derelict lots aren’t hiring.

I head up a few blocks to Hollywood and Vine, snapping pictures like a Japanese man.

Charlie Tuna is a deejay, not Charlie the Tuna. But since I eat tuna and it’s just one article, I can pretend and chuckle at the first-gradeness of it all.

Once at Hollywood and Vine I realize there’s not shit for me to do. It was swelling on Saturday, but you can count the people on a Monday around mid-afternoon. I walk around for a little while, admire the Compton tattoo on the back of some porky cholo’s neck, and then decide to catch the subway to North Hollywood to see what it’s like.

NoHo looks more suburban-ish and would probably be a nice place to live if I wasn’t dirt fucking poor. An old man with an oak cane (or is it pine?) exits a weird, pod-looking thing. Is it an elevator? No.



A quarter to piss. Now I understand why people just go on the sidewalk.

I walk down a few blocks, past a Ford dealership. The Mustangs and pickup trucks lined up out front remind me of Kentucky. I’m hungry and I want to eat, but I don’t see a chain restaurant anywhere. I think I see some sort of taqueria or whatever the fuck, but it’s very far down the road and I think my Achilles is strained. I’m not fucking kidding.

Back on the subway. A pair of black teenagers dressed head-to-toe in dark blue get on and sit down in front of me. Omigod.

My first Crips!

I almost tap one of them to ask if they’re real Crips, but a small Hispanic lady sits down next to me and I’m forced to move to the seat on the inside, out of tapping distance.

I gawk at the teenage gangsters for the rest of the trip, awestruck. Every time I muster up the courage to say something, I picture one of them lifting the wallet off of my bloody, bullet-riddled body in a back alley. Then my courage runs away.

But wouldn’t it be so fucking cool if I had a picture with one of them and both of us were doing the Crip sign? With both hands!

A girl can dream. Also, good thing I'm not wearing red. Talk about an elephant in the room...

I wonder how the teen Crips feel about this snitching campaign.

I get off the Metro and walk to Sunset Boulevard.


Rich-looking people sip lattes and talk on cellphones at the Coffee Bean on the corner. I want to go up and ask one of them for representation.

I eat dinner at a McDonalds. Good thing I didn’t get the McNuggets.

The dipping sauce policy may work out here, but it would never work in the South. Fat blondes will riot if they can’t get their daily gallon of ranch dressing. Pizza Hut would lose most of its business. There would be no vegetables, because what’s the point of a vegetable if you can’t drown it in a pool of calories?

On to my next thought: is anything fucking free out here? I almost buy some fries but I’m afraid the manager will make me tongue-polish his brown-eye. He comes over and tells me not to take pictures, by the way. I say I’m visiting from Tennessee and he goes away.

I catch the bus back to Crenshaw and miss the bus that goes by my apartment. The guy waiting with me at the bus stop says my bus, the 305, won’t be around for another hour. Fuck. So I reinforce the theme of my trip. I walk. I pass a Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles and promise myself to eat a meal there.

I make it to Cochran Street and pass this alley:

I think there’s a chop shop down there. Is it normal to hear Tupac and power tools coming from a condemned building?

Shit List:

June 1: Held it
June 2: Walgreen’s on the Miracle Mile
June 3: Best Buy Culver City
June 4: Gold's Gym Hollywood

June 3, 2007

So Alex and I have shared a futon mattress two nights in a row. I’m starting to get used to his smell. I have no doubt that it will soon grow to replace the endearing scent of my girlfriend’s drool on a pillow, thereby unofficially terminating our relationship.

Maurice also probably thinks we’re gay, but as long as we’re alive I’m okay with that.
It’s been three days since I last jerked off and I’m starting to feel like Elaine, not George. Creativity is running low. Can’t think. Must. Blow. My. Load.

Alex and I catch a bus on Cochran and head west towards Culver City. And...

Yes, finally! But how was it? Not bad. The fries looked and tasted like those fake fries that come with play food, but the burgers definitely elicited Samuel L. Jackson’s “Mmm! That is a tasty burger!” response. In my head. The line was long though. Women’s restroom long. All in all it was more like In…………… N Out Burger.

Next, Culver City.

We hit up Sony Pictures. I notice that all security guards are black in Los Angeles. If you’re tall, fat, and black you’re probably a bodyguard. I ask a guard how he got his job.

“My friend.”

The world in a nutshell.

This was taken by the curb outside of Sony Pictures. Insert obvious fired screenwriter/executive joke here.

There’s a middle-aged leather-skinned woman crying on the bus to Venice Beach. I don’t know if it’s because she’s just found out she has melanoma or if she’s going to have to finance a hood memorial for her recently slain son. I look at a skater couple instead. The guy is straight out of the movie Wassup Rockers and the girl looks like she gives head for facial piercings. I wonder if she can kick flip.

And then we’re at Venice Beach. An older black guy – one of the loud, cool ones that everyone always laughs at because he’s loud and cool – calls me out on my Gold’s Gym t-shirt.
“You need to stop lifting weights man. You huge. I’d rather slide down a razorblade into a pool of alcohol than fight you.”

Would that alcohol happen to be Schlitz?

The boardwalk is a carnival of hippies and Rob Zombie look-alikes. If you do drugs, were in a war, or can make a funny shape with your tongue, then you’re down here trying to get paid. Lots of tattoo and piercing parlors and airbrush artists, which means you can get Hepatitis and then buy a t-shirt with a hot pink dolphin on it.


I see a fat woman with tits that look like they start on her belly. I see punk rockers with edgy haircuts that shock old people. I see Amber alerts waiting to happen. Seriously. If you want to nab a kid, go to Venice Beach, although I don’t know how much a small Hispanic child will fetch you in ransom. Maybe a pair of Dickies and a few coupons to Pollo Campero.

We walk the entire boardwalk. And then some. Eventually we find Gold’s Venice, the Mecca of bodybuilding.

This sign is a perfect example of the meathead mentality. You could be homeless, diseased, and have a gaping wound in your chest, but as long as that wound doesn’t make your pecs look small then you’re fucking set.

I use my travel pass to go in and dick around.


This is probably the messiest gym I have ever been to. At the Gold’s back home, most of my work consists of indulging the owner’s OCD (not you, Greg. And Doug, you fucking rule) and making sure every piece of equipment has an equal amount of weight plates, which have to face the inside. This place is like a fucking freshmen dorm.

I see a giant, sixty-something bodybuilder who will soon be frittering away his social security on juice and more barbed wire-looking tattoos. He has bulging roid-eyes and zero percent bodyfat. I think the ‘92 Camry I saw in the parking lot is his.

But it’s the size of the arm that counts.

Alex stands with his arms folded and looks uncomfortable while I grab a few light sets. He’s never lifted weights before and he’s the only person in the gym wearing a backwards fitted-cap that matches his Pacific Sun skater outfit.

We head back to Culver City and stop at the only American strip mall I’ve seen thus far. It reminds us of home.

We roll up in a Best Buy so I can shit. There is no lock on the bathroom door, but it’s clean.

There’s more scrawling on the toilet. Hector rules or something. I feel a sense of accomplishment when I go to wipe and nothing’s there. Ghost wipe, for the win.

Alex and I hit up Panda Express for dinner and it makes me miss the Asian I’m not eating: Kimberly.

We ride the bus home.

PS -- For fun (and a possible germ record), I’m going to be “keeping score” of where I shit.

Here’s the list so far:

June 1: Held it
June 2: Walgreen’s on the Miracle Mile
June 3: Best Buy Culver City

June 2, 2007

That’s a picture of a picture of a guy trying to escape through a window in our room. The picture is in our room. We don’t know why it’s here.

But there’s a box in the freezer.

We come back today and Maurice is in the garage making room in two large meat freezers we didn’t know he had (our graves?). He looks surprised to see us. One of those guilty, “What are you doing home?” looks. Stammering follows.

I’m scared.

I think the picture might be a sick but fair warning from the Dr. Jekyll side of our roomlord’s twisted mind. After all, his side of the fridge is loaded with expensive, organic foods. There’s only so much of that shit a man can eat before he starts craving flesh (human???).

Anyway, I wake up this morning around 8:30 and there’s a sharp, heavy object that wants to escape through my asshole. Feels like a set of black knives glued together. I’m tempted to break my no-shitting-in-the-apartment rule, but figure it would be a lot like having unprotected sex with a person who has crabs – a moment of pleasure followed by many, many moments of pain and frustration. I do not want to spend my day plunging.

Here’s the shower, again. I accidentally twist the pliers off the cold knob and have to hide in the corner while I reapply them. Reapply pliers. Reapplier. Har har. Stupid, I know.

Before I left Northern Virginia, I posted a “Going to LA” thread on a rap message board welcoming suggestions from natives and urban youths. Somebody said I shouldn’t wear red, but I decide to wear my red Special Olympics t-shirt I got at a Tennessee thrift store because it makes my arms look fucking huge and I figure that’s a good look for me since I wear glasses and am insecure.

Alex and I walk down Pico looking for a metro bus stop since the ones in our immediate area don’t accept our passes. I ask an old Hispanic man pushing a grocery cart for directions to the depot, but since I’m not a can I don’t interest him and he mumbles something in Espanol that a Spanish professor wouldn’t understand.

There are a shitload of wig shops in Los Angeles. In fact, if I had to sum LA up in six words I’d say, “Wig shops and check cashing places.” I’m guessing the whole 100% Indian hair wigs inspired the Cherokee hair tampons on South Park. Lolocaust.

We find the depot and board a bus that accepts our pass. It’s headed for East LA. A browner LA than the one we’ve seen thus far? Hard to believe, but true. Alex and I are the only white people on the bus, which I mention not because I’m racist but because it’s uncomfortable. The bus starts to fill as we approach downtown. Alex gives up his seat to an older Korean woman who, twenty years younger, would look almost exactly like the lady who gets capped at the beginning of Menace II Society. No old lady comes along to take my seat so I look like less of a person than Alex, which is not far from the truth.

We get off the bus somewhere downtown, near the Staples center, and we walk towards some tall buildings. Obviously we should have taken a different bus, but we’re new to town and fucking retarded. I’m wearing the Special Olympics shirt to prove it.
Hungry now. In and Out Burger, where are you? We stop in a Quizno’s and ask Cesar, a sandwich artisan, if there’s one nearby.

“No.”
“Are there any LA only places to dine around here? We’re from the DC area.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why, because this is Quizno’s? We’re not going to tell your manager.”

He laughs nervously, looks around, and looks me over to make sure I’m not a secret shopper.

“Carl’s Jr. is in the Macy’s plaza.”

Great. Fucking Hardee’s. Never had that before. But I’m hungry and want something full of calories and protein, so we go to Carl’s Jr. and overpay for burgers that are half the size the menu advertises. At least at Hardee’s the burgers are tumor-sized.

The dark child in my stomach wants out but a Carl’s Jr. bathroom is no place to give birth. He’ll have to wait a little longer.

I ask a professional-looking Hispano-Asian with slicked back Wall Street hair how to get to Hollywood while Alex hangs back and looks embarrassed. I have no shame in being a tourist. Alex is dressed like a skateboarder, though, and his street cred would take severe damage.
We get on the metro, which is pretty nice and not ghetto-ish like I thought it’d be after watching Predator 2. No hoods with neon bandanas and open leather vests pulled switchblades on me.
After misreading the metro map – actually, no. We did not misread that motherfucker. Apparently the red line train we were on went through a magic tunnel and turned into a purple line train without us knowing it. Some serious Willy Wonka type shit. We ride to the end of the line, then back through the magic tunnel. Get off the train, yada yada, and get on another headed for Hollywood.

Yay. More white people.

There’s a hot, tan chick on the train flirting with her overprivileged pseudo-skater boyfriend. I stop looking at her when I notice her upper back is covered with fur and acne scars. Why are you wearing a tank top? If you’re okay with your lycanthropy, that’s fine with me, but this is LA. We’re headed towards Hollywood. Let’s be a little more insecure, okay?

This is the Hollywood and Vine metro station. Very touristy.




Alex and I walk some more, see some more wig shops. A lot more in the Hollywood area. Lots of straight up bong shops also. Couldn’t take any pictures, but imagine a gun shop then substitute bongs. Wall-to-fucking-wall. An Asian-ish guy straight out of an Entourage episode shows us a digital camera you can smoke weed out of. I call and tell my pothead friend Jeremy, who demands to know if the camera actually takes pictures.


We go into the Scientology "chapel" next, and a spaced-out chick with braces asks me if I know who L. Ron Hubbard is. She wants to take us on a forty-five minute brainwashing tour. We politely decline. I guess the Christians have the South, the Mormons have Utah, and the scientologists have Los Angeles.

We walk some more. My feet are starting to blister and feel like I’ve been stomping babies and old people all day long. There’s a side-warehouse that’s selling rare, gaudy sneakers and since Alex is a wigger when it comes to shoes (“Do you have the white uptowns with the blue stripe?” – or some shit like that) we go to check it out. The Fast and the Furious extra at the door stops us:

“Five dollars.”
“Sorry, we didn’t know.”

Paying to shop. That’s a first for me. Alex has vowed to return.

More walking. Check out Kodak, all that.






Some rappers from Detroit give us their shitty album and shove a headphone-end into our respective ears (“We gettin’ muh-neeeeee”).

Not mine, motherfucker.

I’m friendly of course, but when they suggest a $10 “donation” and I don’t bite, none of us pretends to give a fuck about the other anymore.

We take a piss. The line for the Women’s restroom is longer than a mandingo cock. Moments like this make me thankful for my dick.

Hop on a bus. Get off in what we think is our general area, walk another mile, discover Maurice and the meat freezers.

Later, we go out in search of dinner, groceries. Feet are dead. Still have to shit. We go into a Walgreen’s. A decent bathroom at last. But I can’t get in. There’s a fucking keypad lock on the door. I imagine this is what the bathrooms at Jurassic Park must be like.

I tell the girl at the register I have to drop a T-Rex. She gets on the intercom:

“Code ten.”

The bathroom is clean, but there’s gang scrawling and etching everywhere. Even on the toilet seat. I put one asscheek on Latin Kings 187 and the other asscheek on Slob Killas 4 Lyfe and start my Lamaze breathing. The good thing about shitting in a limited-access bathroom is the comfort of knowing there will be little-to-no interruptions. The result is a painful orgasm.

Alex buys a fan. We eat at Burger King when we see there’s no fucking In and Out around.
The grocery store is next. Ralph’s. Basically Kroger with a different name. I notice a middle-aged gay dude checking me out. I think he actually aisle-stalks me – like I used to do to girls when I worked at Blockbuster – and buys a jar of peanut butter just so he can say hi/pick up my scent.

By now my feet hurt so fucking much that I’m seriously considering posing as a bi-curious mouth-for-hire just so I can get rides. Either that or I’m going to try to befriend every clean-looking Caucasian I see. “Hey, I see we're both white. Do you have a car?"

A mile-and-a-half walk back to our room with five heavy fucking grocery bags. Each. A douchebag in a Ferrari passes us. The blonde woman riding with him does not look as good as his car.

Alex says this:

“Twenty-four hours ago I was driving around in an ’07 Lexus.”

I complain about my feet some more.

June 1, 2007

I walk off the plane around 5:15 and the first thing I see is a Starbucks swarming with mostly-overweight Nicole Richie stunt doubles. LAX is big and dirty; not the palatial airport I thought it’d be. Of course I did fly Southwest, so maybe I’m just in the poor wing.

I meet my friend/roommate Alex at the baggage claim. Like me, he’s another white suburban kid who takes things for granted, except his family is richer. He came in on an earlier flight (United) with his dad’s frequent flyer miles. I tell him about the batshit crazy old woman on my flight who wouldn’t shut the fuck up and he pretends to be amused, which is enough for me. My bags, thank God, don’t take long to come and then we’re outside
For the first time in our lives there’s nobody to pick us up at the airport. We don’t know the city. We know almost no one. We joke that it’s like college.

We’re real world freshmen.

At the curb there’s a long line of people waiting for cabs. Alex has a list in his pocket of the cheapest companies, but we soon learn that the list doesn’t mean shit because the airport-curb guy is going to put us in whatever fucking taxi pulls up. The couple in front of us gets the bright green cab that we want – the cheapest company on our list – and we get a Yellow Cab bus.

The most expensive one on our list.

The airport-curb guy’s helper, a short, cock-eyed black guy who looks like a handsome version of Beetlejuice from the Howard Stern show, looks in our general direction and mumbles something about the cab. Of course we think he’s looking at airport-curb guy so we do one of those awkward, look-look away-look-look away things that people do when they’re not sure if they’re being addressed. Plus there’s a Hispanic family behind us with more people than there are items on Taco Bell’s dollar menu, so we figure they’re going to get the bus.

After calling us for the third time, Beetle-eyes snatches our bags and starts to load them into the cab. Alex tries to save the situation and mentions something about thinking the Hispanic family behind us was going to get the cab, but it’s too late: he knows it’s his eyes. Sorry, dude.

Our cab driver, from the best I can tell, is a Persian-Mexican hybrid. He has a leather jacket. A smoker’s voice. He drives fast and reckless like everyone else. Alex, for some strange reason, asks him if he knows LA. He gets kind of offended. Meanwhile the fare climbs like cholesterol.


The time doesn’t reset on that 47.5 seconds, by the way. If you stop for 40, go, then stop again, it only takes 7.5 seconds to fuck you out of more bubblegum money.

Outside, storefront signs fade from English, to English-Spanish, to all Spanish. Alex has a baseball cap-wearing friend who goes to USC, and this kid told him that where we’re staying – in a room in a duplex on Packard St and Cochran – is in a good part of town, but when we get out of the cab we realize that it’s really just a not-bad part of town. Our cab driver helps unload our bags and then Alex and I are out $22 a piece – a big black cock up our virgin whiteboy assholes.


This is our porch. The GI Joe is doing yoga; not bending for Satan. Maurice, our roomlord, is a part-time yoga instructor and full-time Zen guru or whatever. Alex thinks he looks like Moby with the lead singer of Nickelback’s hair. I think he looks like a hippie pirate. We agree it’s probably the same thing.


Maurice answers the door with a smile. He’s friendly in a serial killer/employee of the month kind of way. We go upstairs and he shows us around the place: his yoga studio living room, our room, the bathroom, the dining room, the kitchen. Pictures of everything below.












You can probably tell that we’re staying in a place where it takes really, really long for the water to get hot. I’ve already decided that I won’t be shitting in the toilet. There’s little to no suck-power and I have a history of birthing Titanics.

Our room is smaller than we thought it’d be, but it’s a decent, size and having lived in a dorm room for five years I really can’t complain. We start to unpack and I see that my bottle of cologne busted and leaked all over my shit, so now everything smells like fucking Obsession (please no “You wear Obsession?” jokes). Unfortunately, my only good sports jacket, which I just had dry cleaned, absorbed most of it. Now it’s hanging in the closet like a giant car air freshener.

We’re starving so we ask Maurice if he has any suggestions.

“Little Ethiopia.”
“Sounds good.”

We don’t go to Little Ethiopia. Instead we head south a few blocks. And right into the movie Training Day. Well, the Hispanic portion at least. For the first time I realize that I’m the minority in Los Angeles. I know I saw the storefronts from the cab and all, but I might as well have been watching TV. You can nod your head and pretend to know what things are like, but until you’re really living them, walking them, worried about getting shot, you just know what your eyes tell you.

We walk and walk and walk some more. We want to eat at an In and Out Burger because it’s supposed to be a California institution (we think) but we can’t find one anywhere. All we see are Mexican restaurants, liquor stores, and check-cashing places. One after the other, all the way down the street. Like a DMV line. We finally find an Asian-run American restaurant and order a pretty good burger there, eating mostly in silence and cursing our departure from the suburban paradise that is Northern Virginia.

On the way back I see my first hood memorial.






We walk faster. Get “home”. Pass out.

PS - RIP Marcos. And Fidel.