Learning About Dirt

A running dialogue, of a year of life, Los Angeles. The end of the turn of the millennium in the city where someday, I’m sure of it, some day it will all end.

But where to start? Crapulous memories, especially since moving to Hollywood. It started with Les Deux.

Nights at THE WOODS, amongst the fake cabin walls, a happy hour from 8 til 10, why not? We toasted birthdays, visitors, Naval Enlistment officers. Many a fine blackout starts off during The Woods happy hour. The hipsters would roll in so by 11 it was packed with coolies, squares, and us. Fucking hipsters.

Yes, I’m a goddamn hypocrite. I wear a fedora and clothes on the skinnier side. I drink PBR but because that’s the beer of choice on ski mountains. The hipsters started drinking it long after I drank it while logging footage in the TGR logging bays.

I loved the smell of the editing bays. All the flotsam and jetsam piled on desks and crevices and filing cabinets and closets, piled up with posters and old skis and boards. CD’s and DVD’s, all of them, everywhere.

But I’m not there anymore. I'm in the cesspool, the heart of the last vestige of the American Dream - the Hollywood Dream is all we have left anymore. The white picket fences have been foreclosed on. The squares who committed themselves to the workaday have all been fired. Temperance is futile. Depravity is all that will get us through this rotten night.

BOARDNER’S is just around the corner. Found it one night, walking home - or walking out? I don’t much know. It’s all a blur now. Red leather booths and the statue of the woman, the naked woman with the wings, holding a pink globe. Hide in the darkness, drinkin rusty nails with the family when they're in town, last-minute shots of cheap rum on Biggs' birthday with Sexy Lexy.

A back patio, with candles melted into lace curtains, folding into a fountain, a frozen curtain, endless skies, open skies, a canopy above the stage. We sit on the stage and laugh over whiskies and she smokes cigs and I keep staring up and so does she. Then I stare into her eyes and she smiles softly, shrugging her shoulders, a tender, flirty sigh. One sigh fits all. Love in L.A. What a foreign concept.

When we come back we find out the back patio is a different club, a S&M joint for the gothic type but like everywhere in Hollywood BAR SINISTER defies convention and mixes it up with hot, whitebread all-American girls. One night punk rock erupts from the stage into the awning above. Another night it's a DJ. They close the outdoors but inside we grind in the darkness surrounded by gargoyles and pilled-out derelicts and I imagine this is a good place to start a threesome as bass pumps and the DJ pushes it past 2 AM, but just barely.

Some clubs are needed in a person's life. Some aren't.

JANE’S HOUSE – Jane’s House, an old Victorian mansion we found wondering Hollywood Boulevard hungover one morning, stumbling for food. After eating an empty breakfast at LOTERIA, everybody says it’s great but apparently we're not everyone as our waiter was coming down off coke or meth – all morning waiters always seem to be coming down off some sort of late-night stimulant – and our service is bad and the restaurant looks like a cafeteria inside. But Jane’s house, we stumble by, try to discern what the fuck is this thing? Try to break into the Victorian manse with the heat lamps turned off for the daytime. Low-teria, below expectations, leads to exploration for fulfillment, simple enough.

And a few nights later, a random Thursday, we find ourselves there. Becca is the only girl in jeans, she forgot to not wear pants as all the other girls gyrate to the rhythm while Hollywood hip hop clubbers in designer shirts and tight haircuts, all much more with it than we ever have been, pretend to be somebodies, looking around for somebody who is somebody in the see or be seen mix. Becca goes up to the bouncer and asks him to play Michael Jackson, since Michael just died. The DJ is a sturdy white boy dressed like a 1997 Naughty By Nature video extra, mixing the current standard and hip hop. The place is practically empty. He refuses to play Michael. Jane’s house isn’t that hot anyway. Jane’s house is a second-rate club with third-rate DJ’s.

CITIZEN SMITH, now that’s a fucking party. One night, after hopping from the swingers at VELVET MARGARITA to the dregs at BURGUNDY ROOM Becca’s 2-thirds of her way into a blackout and drags us into Citizen Smith, looking to dance, have a good time. The 4 of us make up two thirds of the white population and it’s not weird as Becs dances with the rhythm accorded only a few white girls (a result of frequent acid usage and an Earth Wind and Fire addiction) and tells the DJ to play Michael. This one complies, impressed by the blond-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian bitch and the roof fucking blows off as Bec gets into a booty-shaking contest with two higher-skilled black girls who tell her later that they had been in rap videos and one guy krumps with the best of ‘em. The skill level on the dance floor is high and what I lack in skill I make up for with the sweet fluidity of drunkenness and Citizen Smith is a goddamn fine American club joint.

To b continued, goddammit . . .