In Los Angeles, the pulsing city traffic sharply cuts through the morning air as I watch a shopkeeper open the shutter doors to a stripper’s costume shop. No one cared to show up to work or even show up at all. Some places didn’t even open their doors that morning. In the city, people were just going through the motions with their eyes locked to the television, trying to keep the day as normal looking as possible. I drove around Hollywood Boulevard searching for vacancies and found nestled in the center of Tinseltown, the infamous Hollywood Studio Club. The club was rumored to be a hotly disputed shrine to budding artist and a home for future starts and faster crooks. It was insanity. While the tourist of Hollywood Boulevard drank in the sweet illusion of fame, the working natives nearby felt a moral battle raging every day. It was in the clubs, the grocery stores, the local parks and the schools. It was fear. Every out of work prom queen came flocking to the poolside of the Hollywood Studio Club Apartments, to seduce an imaginary audience. Brilliant but socially tortured agents sunbathed shaking hands and clutching phones while secretly summing up your net worth. Producer’s assistants debated the new arrivals fresh off the LAX runway, to later hand deliver them personally to the suits nearby. The starlets came in busloads, dressed in torn Prada, coyly begging for their supper inside the mildew of decadence. I had a week to check out Los Angeles. I had to find a place and a job before my buddy’s train came rolling back into town. The landlord agreed on a big deposit and my good word to let me live in the unit for a week, as long as I had a parent co-sign by the end of the week. Without a dollar to my name, all I had was this empty apartment with the light traces of unexplained sage while I unpacked and gently hummed to myself to drown out the muffled screams of spousal abuse down the hall. My buddies from the bay, convinced I was making the biggest mistake of my life, blamed the move on “the fallen hybrids.” They all wished me well but agreed that inside the westernized, paternalistic nature of Tinseltown, lay an economy of bloodsuckers ready to promise little salvation from the oppressive heat and building dream homes out of the stolen dreams of the naïve, but hey, it’s nothing personal, that’s Hollywood.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 16:39:12 +0000
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