I’ve lived out west in some sort of instinctual manifest destiny of the modern era for almost 10 years. Over that time the fantastic has faded into the everyday and it’s a damn shame that a man has to become so jaded with the banalities in places such as these. But sometimes you get a visit from some happy bastards from another part of the country spending their vacation time in the city you call home. The good thing about heads coming out to visit from the real world towns left behind is that it makes you get out there, splurge on some good old-fashioned debauchery, and rediscover the shithole paradise you call home.
~
What would a trip to L.A. be without a trip to a Jewish deli of the wealthy? Linz and Boots and Bec schlepped their rotten selves into the 90210 to meet me for a lunch at an old eatery of yore and I greeted them with hugs on a typically sunny lunch break in the most famous of zip codes at one of its most famous delis.
Nate N’ Al’s is an atavistic time capsule of old Beverly Hills on Canon St., an enclave of former rat-packers and liver-spotted richers looking for fine meats and cheeses. Fresh off their flight Linz and Boots were waiting with Bec and I for a booth at an old-world deli founded in the Beverly Hills of 1945. Good way to begin the games.
Linz and I ordered overloaded pastrami sandwiches, Bec a thick beef brisket sandwich with cole slaw on it called the Brentwood while Boots savored a chicken burger with a side of 3 or 4 Coors. Piles of pickles and sauerkraut, the vile foods of a Polish or Jewish upbringing, replaced bread in this corner of the 9-0 so I was already half-stuffed when the sandwiches arrived, overflowing with meat. I unhinged my jaw and tore into a thick pile of pastrami. We made small talk about our jobs and our lives and about the plans for the night before I got up to leave, throwing a 20 spot on the table for their troubles. The most expensive lunch I’d eaten since I moved to California. Fuckin’ fine meats. I was filled up for the rest of the day, my stomach gurgling and struggling under the weight and gas of too much smoked corn beef sitting like a hunk of lead in the pit of the stomach. And admittedly I liked Bec’s Brentwood better than the pastrami.
Regardless, I said goodbye to my fianc and our friends and headed back to the office to stare at my computer, counting down the hours until the bell rang and I slid down the tail of my Beverly Hills brontosaurus. Then it was on. Lift-off.
~
I get home and run up the stairs to find Bec and Linz and Boots finishing a veggie wrap and drinking beers. I’m sweaty and tired but I have a fire in my blood for tonight so I pour myself a tall glass of Sailor Jerry and savor the burn of the booze as it flows down the gullet, the swig I would be chasing for the whole rest of the night.
It’s a birthday party for my work friend at the Edison Downtown and all are invited, provided they dress the part. No slouches in this place, collared-shirts and leather shoes, please, yes, thank you sir. I’m sporting my finest sport coat and my most trustworthy fedora amidst girls dressed for a club and Boots gentrified in a sweater as we take off in the Black Pearl towards downtown, towards city hall where everything’s going down in an old power plant and it occurs to me why does every city turn its old power plants into clubs? The electricity must still be jolting through the walls, the potential energy, yeah, Tesla had it right.
We circle the block a few times as Sinatra croons over the truck’s speakers and they talk about how Downtown Loa Angeles is reminiscent of Downtown Baltimore and I don’t know if I agree because Downtown L.A. has a classy old feel, like a city built during the gilded age with all the flourishes and flares to show for it while Baltimore was a city that never much
valued such things, a city built on bricks and practicality.
We find the valet on the curb in front of a sushi place and walk down a back alley to a black doorman who says my friend’s birthday didn’t have reservations but we could go in anyway.
“Wish him well for me,” the doorman says before ushering us in and then down stairs to a massive underground cavern of pipes and furnaces and generators with bars that used to be speakeasies bedecked by old-timey drink fountains as the absinthe faeries walk around with green wormwood juice ready for the hipsters who have taken to the newly-legalized drinks.
Massive walls with black-and-white silent films and even a strange exhibition of shadows and monsters and creepy trees intended to freak out the geek-outs are blasted onto the lounge room while in the back a dining quadrant is hid amidst old generator machines that at one time powered an infant city on its way to world domination. We walk around like we own the joint,
scotch and soda for me and vodka drinks for the girls and Boots will have have a beer, until a call comes in from my friend that he’s arrived and we text back and forth until I see him, just like old times.
Our party is escorted with him to a booth behind the DJ by a black man who’s a fresh concierge on the high-class scene, ready to make your dreams happen for that unforgettable night. The friend’s entourage follows with 4 bombshells dressed like fucking rockets rounding out the group. The scene here is a good mix of clubbers and hipsters, people gyrating to tunes and swigging cocktails in a seamless blending of the old and the new so it can be described as nothing but L.A., past, present, and future. Two more of Bec’s friends join us, the flapper-looking tall-girl Meg and her short Chicago friend we’ll just call Chicago. The booze flows as new friends meet and we’re all shouting to drown
out the loud music and the noise of several hundred of L.A.’s most discerning night-owls. I make my way upstairs with the birthday boy and another work friend to a small lounge that’s well-enough ventilated that people can smoke in it and that’s the secret that nobody knows about. That L.A., while being one of the first to ban smoking and an outspoken enemy of the cancer stick has also adapted to this rule by opening up rooms that feel like they’re indoors but fulfill enough safety requirements to be considered smoke-able. 2 L.A. local girls with Cheshire smiles talk to my friends and I and after wing-manning my buds enough to get them at least a good convo I’m back downstairs amidst Boots and Linz, two lovers swinging away the night, and my love Bec as well as of course Meg and Chicago, laughing and drinking as the night slips away from us.
Birthday boy is back down as the concierge rounds his crowd up for a limo ride to Ecco and we have a birthday shot of Jamieson that I bless with an old Irish toast I lifted from BLOW and then it’s just Bec’s
crowd, of which we’re all simply members. And we’re fiending for some good old Wendy to sharpen us up and keep the night together. 
We find our way outside as Boots buys a fine CAO cigar for he and I and once the valet pulls up the Black Pearl I tip my hat and it’s back on the road, plus two new hitch-hikers, careening from downtown to Silverlake Los Feliz for greener pastures.
Ecco’s not what we’re feeling, though. We’re in search of the elusive Wendy darling and Bec and I know she’s probably hiding at Hyperion Bar. Meg and Chicago don’t know our intentions and ask if we can go to the Cha Cha lounge but that’s not possible, not tonight, thank you kindly. I park across Fountain from Hyperion, my secret backroads space that’s just a quick drive up Effie to my spot so we park and make it down a cracked sidewalk, the riff-raff accompanying me complaining about a 2 block walk and then we’re at a non-descript little rancher that would have been unnoticeable to a first-timer except for the couple people milling about in front.
We step into my own little slice of subversive heaven, a forgotten den of depravity and hipsters that serves only 4 or 5 types of beer and only accepts cash the derelict bartenders can stuff in an antique till behind the bar. One of the walls is a bookcase filled with thick yellow medical encyclopedias from a time before computers replaced booklearning.
A DJ spins in a corner elevated above an old out of tune upright piano while all the anti-scenesters of Silverlake and Los Feliz converse and make merry on 3 dollar PBR’s and 32 oz Carta Blancas. I spot across the way a girl from work I never thought socialized in public forums and my respect for her shoots up as I give her a nod and she gives me a questioningly eyebrow shrug. This world is small and it’s fancy seeing you in such a place.
I’ve been to Hyperion Bar more than almost any other bar in L.A. It doesn’t open until 9 and once Brendo and I went there for drinks at exactly that hour. We were the only people there, us and a 42-year-old bartender who once wrote a script that got optioned by Larry Charles. He spent a few months developing but nothing ever came of it. That was 12 years ago, he told us. He was working on his next one, still living the dream, still happy with his life though possibly that was just a story he told to keep off that bridge. Another night we went there and some oddball was hosting a variety show that was painful to watch. Bec and I walked in, drunk from the previous bar, and then walked right back out, not drunk enough to listen to that unfunny bastard talk any more. The last time we had gone there some artistic type had been drawing on an overhead projector that was blasting onto a screen behind the stage. When he went to the bathroom, Bec jumped in and drew a stick figure followed by the words “Fuck You” for the whole bar to savor. An ethnic hipster girl told Bec she could get us drugs and it was just such a whisper into the ears of a stranger that brought us back to the wretched hive of scum and villainy. We walk in the door and it feels like we’ve discovered some underground hive of depravity from the days of yore. We’re home.
Then the dancing begins, the whole dirty saloon salted with our little crowd. Tall Meg was dancing and Almost as Tall Bec and Short Linz and Bearded Boots, all but Chicago who demures on a stool by the bar, bored at the frivolity of life in the city of angels.
“What’s wrong, Chicago?” and she launches into a tirade about the windy city and how its men are tougher and more manlier and certainly it’s a place one will find better conversationalists. I turn to a scrawny emo with hair like a Simpsons character and oversized Jermaine Clement glasses and tell him she doesn’t think anybody in Los Angeles can hold a good conversation and he rises to the challenge. They talk for the rest of the evening as I dance in an ocean of freaks and geeks and Boots talks to the sketchiest-looking folks searching for dingdongs, a futile effort, possibly since in this world of hipsters and SoCal derelicts a bearded guy in a sweater looks a little like a cop. Then it’s closing time and Boots as a last resort asks the emo in the Jermaine glasses and he says he can get some, he just needs to go to Studio city.
Meg and Chicago pour themselves into a cab as the bar clears out and then the streets are dead and it’s just us fiends and the emo’s two friends looking like metro Davey Havoks hidden beneath well-coiffed heads of hair, our ding hostages, it would seem. Boots made sure to get all the identification cards and credit cards from the emo with the Jermaine glasses but that wasn’t enough – if the kid ran off with Boots’ hundred and forty bucks it would be repaid in the flesh of his compatriots left behind, the night turning sinister, as happens around 2:30.
The wait goes on and we run out of things to say. Run out of patience. Our vibrations growing angry, tired, the booze dripping out of some of our systems and we’re waiting on this bastard to return. A lady comes out and tries to start her car but when it doesn’t turn over, doesn’t even make a sound, she gives up and we wish her better luck next time. We grind our knuckles, bite our nails, nervous twitches as the sickness leaves our bodies and we find lucidity’s glaring light which wants only to pre-empt the savage debauchery we’re waiting on this dirty Silverlake street for.
Close to 3 Bec sends me off to pick up the car and drive it across Fountain. I decide to pick up a few ham and cheese croissants from Tang’s and enter the light of the small Asian bakery where a crowd of multi-cultural strategists gather around two tables watching the rock stars of logic duel it out in heavy competitive chess matches. I admire these things and hope that someday I get into chess and find myself in the middle of such matches. Once my croissants are warmed up and ready I thank the small Asian woman behind the counter, saunter back to the black pearl and peel down the street.
I pick up a distraught Bec walking alone down the street, wailing about having been accosted though when I press for further details she can’t give many. I swing by the Hyperion and the emos have left so it’s just Linz and Boots, their faces twisted into maniacal smiles as we go bouncing through the streets, Bec’s cries of being accosted being laughed off until she throws the croissant I gave her out the window. That shuts us up, sure enough, as she slips further into the ether of blackout. Our rage at the late-night sustenance being thrown aside so cavalierly piques when we mount where Effie hits Micheltorena and then it’s a final descent down our street into the depravity that awakes those with rocket fuel in their pockets and the anger is quickly left behind.
Linz and Bec are in the bedroom as Boots unpacks his pouch like a deranged Santa Claus and pours all of its contents onto a shiny compact Bec got for free with her last order from Sephora. Then it’s the quick sniff of life, the demons now inside the castle walls and running through our bloods so that our veins are on fire and our words pick up. We decide to bring it back to the girls.
“Yeah, I’m sitting here while you all raw dog that baking soda those emos gave you,” Bec says before letting out a mad shriek of laughter and grabs the rolled up 5-spot and it’s on as the night shifts on us yet again and we drink the beers and rum that are left in the house as conversations get more intense and the edges get sharper. Speak of friends. Of relationships. Of California versus Baltimore and climb onto our roof to stare at the Griffith Park Observatory in the distance, staring at us, Big Brother’s watchtower over the city of Angels.
As the sun peaks above the foothills to the east and the last of the electric substances in the room are consumed Bec and I decide to take the dogs for a walk up the street. Strobe light vision is closing in fast, the world a series of flashes and visions like a television that’s out of whack and on the border of short circuit. We don’t remember cresting the hill next to the old monastery owned by an atheistic hatemonger who asked to have all the beautiful stained glass removed when she bought it. We don’t remember the magnificent blast of sunlight that explodes from behind the U.S. Bank building and the downtown skyline. And we certainly don’t remember how sleep overtook us, how the bag got finished, and when our greens had been smoked to near-depletion. All we know, upon waking up to a house in shambles and animals who desperately want to eat, was that somehow that had all happened.
To be continued in Hungover Burgers, Wooded Silence, and Swingin' Drinks: Linz and Boots in the City of Angels Part 2
