WhutsHappening

Hungover Burgers, Wooded Silence, and Swingin' Drinks: Linz and Boots in the City of Angels Part 2

Continued from An L.A. tour through time, from the Atavistic to the Deviant: Linz and Boots in the City of Angeles pt.1

I woke up to a loud knocking on my door. My tongue was sandpaper and my eyes stuck to the inside of their lids. My nose was stuffed. I knew my reckoning was afoot. It was the apartment manager, kicking us out for our carousing last night, absolutely. No, fuck that, it was the police, the pigs had heard about our lawbreaking – drunk driving, drug abuse, hell there might have even been a hostage situation. Let’s not forget about the food Bec hauled out the window, probably at some hapless passerby none of us had noticed.

“Hi, do you know which unit is the one for rent?” It was a girl in her late 20’s, in khaki shorts and a Polo and behind her stood a large confused man. I felt like a barroom floor that hadn’t been fully swept yet. Who the fuck do these people think they are knocking on random doors at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday? I pointed down the hall and they disappeared.

Bec did not feel well as I roused her from bed. All we had eaten yesterday were massive pastrami  or prime rib sandwiches and I had a late-night croissant. Considering that, the state of relative functioning I inhabited was near-miraculous. Bec was hanging in there as well. Still, food had to be found or we wouldn’t last long like this. After an hour or two in this state with our bellies empty a rapid deterioration of brain stem and motor-muscle connectivity was sure to afflict us. No, greasy food, that was what we needed if we were to survive. And the only place for such a time in such a city is In N Out.

*

Boots and Linz are still asleep. Bec is barely functional but agrees to go with me. We set off on a tough drive towards Hollywood, plugging down Sunset on the border of severe nausea. Traffic bottlenecks around Vine and I begin swearing at the other drivers. Evasive maneuvers, down back alleyways as Bec puts her head down and the one vein running through my forehead bulges. And then we hit a blockade, a re-route. Skinny healthy types jog by wearing similar outfits. It’s some goddamn marathon and who the fuck are these bastards to be exercising on a day such as this!

Then somehow we’re in Glendale, parking somewhere around the Galleria and the city-built-into-a-mall-Americana. Bec had suggested we not make the journey here from WeHo, that we stop at McDonald’s instead. But I have never been one to quit on a mission.

It’s a massive In N Out, filled with Asian-Americans and I remember that it’s quite a different world this side of the hill. LA is a city of differences, of blended cultures and ever-changing styles and it strikes me how different this scene is from the tourist and yuppie-infused WeHo which is different from the hipster intelligentsia in Silverlake.

Then we’re racing home, Bec and I eating our animal style double doubles ravenously on the drive. We get home fast but not before finishing the burgers. The combination of fine beef and sauce, fountain diets and a couple bingers revives us, returns us to the living and after an hour or so of digestion we take the kids to Griffith Park to see the Hollywood sign.

“Griffith Park is the largest urban park in the country, maybe the world,” I tell them.

“Bigger than Central Park?” Linz asks. We walk up a slight hill to a promontory overlooking folded lands dotted with scrubs and desert trees, rising to meet the Hollywood sign that’s so close you think you could almost touch it.

“Yeah, bigger than Central Park.”
 
I like Griffith more than Runyon. Runyon’s too crowded, too many rich assholes with too many dogs who don’t like mine. Elysian is the least crowded but it’s also the least scenic, a dirty swab of grass with views of power lines and the  5 Freeway.  Griffith falls between. Just like the third porridge, Griffith is just right.

 

We have a photo shoot, posing like tourists because why not? The observatory looks magnificent against the sprawl and we catch a brilliant sunset, partially obscured by clouds. Bec takes nature photos. We realize how loud the city is by us being so far from it. Bec and I savor the silence. I don’t think Linz and Boots realize how rare that is in L.A. Maybe they do, but not to the extent that a person subject to the constant motion and pulsing of the city does.
 

We’re still mostly  filled from In N Out but need something to soak up the booze we’re about to slough down our gullets so we stop at El Siete Mares, home of the best fish tacos in L.A.. The girl’s a fan of SWINGERS and who isn’t? We decide on a little voyage to the legendary Dresden on Vermont for appetizers and swing music.

The ambiance is old L.A. cool, big white leather booths and gaudy oversized white leather seats with old curved wooden dividers splitting the room. More drinks, more or less our standards from the night before. The food is overpriced and greasy. Poorly-made calamari and fried artichokes that are mostly bread crumbs. The escargot is palatable but escargot’s just snails and butter, how could anybody fuck that up? We hear the music in the room next door, the bar, listening as they play a Richard Cheese version of “Staying Alive” and though enjoying the conversation we want to move on over to where everybody’s alive.

While Boots and Bec walk down to a corner store for cancer sticks Linz and I order drinks and watch Elayne dancing on the bones while Marty smacks the skins and some tall kid in his early 30’s who’s not wearing Marty and Elayne’s matching black and gold outfit plucks a tall, fretless stand-up bass. Full-on swing music, SINATRA to SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS and then back to the jazz age as we snag a booth just next to the band. I don’t smoke cigarettes but I wish, for just this night, that this bar could be full of smoke. Encircling our heads. Reaching to the ceiling, like some incendiary fog that ripples through such a joint as martini glasses swill and booze spills  and swinging music pummels our ears.

More drinks when Bec and Boots return and we all talk about how this is the best night of the trip. Boots says if he lived here he would make this his regular bar. Linz says this is her best trip to California yet. We stare at the paintings on the walls of people carousing and flirting at the hallowed joint and we all consider emptying our piggy banks to take one home, a memento infinitely more valuable and impressive than one of those “All I got was this lousy t-shirt” shirts.

Marty and Elayne are the shit. I’ve never seen anyone as happy as Elayne is when singing and playing her piano at top volume. Nobody smiles like her. It looks like the happiest any human has ever been is Elayne wailing on the piano there at the Dresden in a Los Feliz Saturday night.

The place closes as we all order a final shot and then it’s a roller-coaster ride, up Micheltorena as it coils back and forth through the hills from Griffith Blvd to Sunset.

We peak next to the monastery and the car slows down, a roller-coaster hitting the crest and rolling with the last bit of potential energy just getting it over the hump with the city splayed out in front of us as the moon ducks behind clouds and Goddamn! What a beautiful fucking place is this!

Then it’s a free-fall, all of us screaming and hands up as we hurtle down the street. Now we’re inside  and the music is full-blast as we dance and drink more beers and Sailor Jerry and whatever else we can dig up. Cigarettes and hitter are smoked and we make our way up to the rooftop and I point out where the Hollywood sign would be if it wasn’t blocked by that church’s fucking trees. Boots and I puff cigars as we swig beers and howl at the moon in a wild booze-drenched joie de vivre.
 
And laughter envelopes us all as we revel in our debauchery and again the evening slips away from us and again we fade to black in the city of Silver Screens and broken dreams.

To be continued . . .

An L.A. tour through time, from the Atavistic to the Deviant: Linz and Boots in the City of Angeles pt.1

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

"Lemonade! Lemonade!"

“What kind of music you guys play?”“Reggae.” “Reggae? Aah! Reggae!”

The Sublime Stylee took reggae, island music that floated on good vibrations mixed with chords of dissidence, and mashed it up with punk and rock to create an earth-shattering new sound grounded in 40-ounces and phillie blunts. When this little interaction quoted above was dubbed into a song on their second CD, “Robbin’ the Hood” the guy responds to them “I don’t care much for reggae”. And at that time, a lost teenager in a blue blood feeding tank, I didn’t care much for reggae myself. But I’ve changed. I’ve repented. Sure, I may be limited to Tosh and Cliff and Damien and Ziggy and “Presure Drop” but I get the joke, that such peaceful music is really an underground expression of anger, frustration, and rebellion, laced throughout with the hope for a better day. And the greatest part is that the white squares put it into tourist commercials airing on travel planet and unknowingly get a little cooler and more free-minded without knowing it.

“One good thing about music – when it hits you you feel no pain.” – Bob Marley

Where’s this bastard going with this? Sublime and reggae tastes and  . . . just what the fuck is Unkal Ryno talking about?

The Sublime Stylee is still straight from Long Beach and since those demonic skater rockstars were the folks who first introduced me to the jah sounds, it should only be fitting that I come full circle and find myself in the parking structure of the Long Beach Convention Center on a cloudy February day, wishing we had brought our wooden piece and whatever was left in it from the night before.

The Long Beach Arena is a massive round holding tank that smashes into a few square buildings on the harbor in Long Beach, an area much more Miami than L.A.  We watched as the other cars and trucks pulled up, people puffing joints and bowls in their driver’s seat, completely unworried by the cop cars at the entrance.

We made brave steps out of the structure, past people who were either younger or mellower or dreadlier than us. Certainly much more stoned. We got in the line for Will Call to pick up my ticket as Bec’s friends had hers. We lined up behind a short, fat black man with red eyes and a couple college kids wearing colorful sweatshirts with shaggy hair and skate baseball catp. We saw a crowd of three young boys and three girls. These were the bad kids in high school, that little crowd who all the parents knew were trouble and told their respectable, jock children to stay away from. One of the boys, the shortest and the one who looked most distrusting of mainstream society, had dreads. The girls all dressed wholesomely but with thick hemp necklaces and Jerry Bear pendants. These were the high school stoners. Harmless, but stigmatized nonetheless. 

“Bec, was that you in high school?”

“Yeah. Kinda weird. We’re old.” And so we were as we waited behind various assorted derelicts, more younger than older. A few older black men walked around, usually walking with canes and an air of authority, the grand poobahs of these things, reggae men of yesteryear with class and presence.

We got the ticket and made our way back to the parking lot when Bec’s friends arrived bringing good vibrations, a concert ticket, and two fresh stalks of some dank. The one girl had been going for years, she said, and as such knew the ins and outs of sneaking smoke into such a place.

They patted us down at the doors, long lines into glass portals into a world of hippies and trustafarians, worshipers of the good king Tafari every one. There were pigs posted at the doors too, tall bastards in blue uniforms just waiting for the body searchers to snag an ounce of herbs off some poor little high school kid, then throw him in the back seat and watch him squirm as they talk about how his mom will look when she has to pick him up at Long Beach central booking. Sure, I’ll take out my wallet and my cellphone as you slide your hands up my legs – men checked men and women women, two lines as it were – and then I was through the doors, in the main room and surrounded by booths selling all sorts of hippie reggae shit a man could imagine. This was the Ragga-muffins event, a Bob Marley memorial overflowing with little leather wristbands in black and yellow and green and wooden head carvings and wall hangings and posters, all the crap the campus stoners buy to decorate their dorms.

 

Out back was where they kept the food vendors. It smelled like the old Tex-Mex restaurant I cooked at in Steamboat Springs some 10-odd years ago, fresh pork and beef and chicken being cooked over dirty grills that showed us the way forward through pulsing throngs of stoners stuffing their fatty faces with Jamaican jerk chicken and twelve-dollar Heinekens pints. A DJ spun reggae riddims in the corner while a dreadlocked black man spat iry rhymes. Nearby was a booth handing out Hemp gummies, sour- patched kids that tastes like stems plucked form the bottom of the bag and a hemp tea which tasted like a clean pothead’s gym socks. One of the guys I was with said that his man told him that Joe’s Jamaican food stand was the best there and he got in line for a jerk chicken kabob over rice and plantains served in a Styrofoam container that a more opinionated person would point out ran contrary to the professed hippie way of life. But maybe that was the whole tip here. These weren’t hippies, not in the traditional vegan jamband Colorado-Birkenstock-wearing “save the environment” way. These were reggae fans, revolutionaries who smoked pot, and certainly it needs to be noted we were in Long Beach. I pointed to two cops standing in the middle of the crowd, passersby giving them wide berth as the swine’s jowls were twisted into smiles. This was like fishing from the ocean floor for these bastards. I felt like they were just waiting for that moment when some poor 17-year-old deviant in a tye-dye t-shirt with Che Guevara on it would light up a spliff within eyeline so they could club the poor bastard into a fetal position and throw him in the back of the car. My friend who ate the chicken assured me they didn’t do that for weed but I wasn’t so sure.

 

Inside I perused the stands selling their hemp necklaces and wooden pictures of Bob Marley. One stand was full of Barack Obama plaques. All of them sold hippie t-shirts with pictures of Marley and weed and “Trenchtown” and tie-dyed flowing dresses and sarongs and Jamaica sandals and hempen wall-hangs, college dorm room stuff. A charismatic teenager came up to me and told me that in the next room a doctor had set up a booth and for $100.00 I could get my medical marijuana license. This was the spot, alright. We had been there for over an hour and other than the DJ outside hadn’t seen any music. But that wasn’t really what this was about for most of the people. This whole reggae thing was a cover. What it really was, what most of the people were really here for, was a celebration of weed smoking and what it means to us bastards living in the unholy land of Southern California.

 

Eventually we decided to walk into a gymnasium where the music was and the second we walked in the air was one massive cloud of THC and all of my thoughts and prcognitions were vindicated. This place harkened back to an old Bob Dylan classic, one embracing the lifestyle that these pot-smoking derelicts had taken to with a renewed vigor of which even they were unawares. At the Rag-a-muffins festival in Long Beach, everyone must get stoned.

 

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A sea of bodies bobbing up and down, mostly white teenagers eschewing their suburban splendor to pretend they were part of yet another culture which was never meant for them. Not that it was to exclude them, but what was originally based on the principles of a unified African and black community to strengthen against the white oppressors had become the anthem of their children. It hadn’t been meant for white middle-class teenagers with felt, psychedelic posters of gnomes sitting on mushrooms hanging on their bedroom walls. But just like rap and, before that, blues, it was looking like the white man was stealing even that.

 

Just past the crowd The Wailing Souls, 3 aging rastas strong with Jah, belted out some roots reggae as  our little group sat down in a circle on the fringe of the crowd. My friend who ate the jerk chicken earlier, a big man who said little because he didn’t need to say much, took out some papers and placed them in his lap, on top of his Indian-crossed legs. His girl, a spunky LBC local with hipster glasses 

gave him one of the two tree stalks she had snuck in for him by tucking it under her right tit. He crumbled off a massive pile and rolled it up into a tight small cigar. I was looking around, up into the stands and at the security guards by the doors 30 yards away, where the slight bit of light streamed in, and then at the people dancing near us. I felt exposed, like there was no way we would get away with this and I imagined telling my boss I was late for

 work on Monday for being in possession of copious amounts of doge. But nothing happened as the thing was lit and passed around to the chicken man’s sister and their LB local friend and the girl with the hipster glasses and Bec and me. Coughing. Burnt windpipe. Then the edges softening. Reactions slowed, smoothed out. No jerky motions. Just a simple flow to everything within and without.

 

A large black man danced in front of us with a 40-year-old divorcee with too much plastic surgery trying to gyrate like she was a Trenchtown local when the only time she had been to Jamaica was to stay at the Negril Sandals. We spoke about the scene and Bec and I leaned in to whisper how old we felt and how she remembered doing this so long ago. We talked about back in the day when we would fight to the front of the pit, get in the crowd and just dance for hours, off in our own stoney worlds amidst the chaos of a ganja-smoking public that time had forgotten. We talked about crowd surfing. I think the last time I crowd-surfed was 1995. Another lifetime. It felt strange to be back there but on the outside looking in as none of us dared crawl into the group. That was not our world anymore. Leroy Sibbles got up there and hit us with some more dance hall sounding reggae, though it was certainly all blending together, as was the air and the walls and the tall ceilings and even in the dark I felt like my vision was able to pick up the sharpness of color difference, shade difference, the observations gleaned at the benefit of the details of the outlines of things.

 

The re-emergence into the outside world was a painful one. Like a flop emerging from his dank basement epicly toasted, I found it hard comprehending the world of light which existed outside the concert room’s doors. My first stop was at a food stand where the girl behind the cash register asked me what I wanted in slow motion. I struggled to mutter “2 waters” and gave her a $20, conscious as I was digging through my wallet how long that was taking me, too long, I seemed stoned to be pawing through my empty billfold like that. She gave me back change for a $10. I pointed this out to here, wondering if it was because she thought perhaps it would slip past a stoney red-eyed Caucasian. Or maybe not. She was young, frazzled, braces and all. Probably first job. After some confusion and supervisor aid I finally got my correct change and my waters. Bec and I finished them quickly as we hunted for food outside on the patio.

 

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I thought to myself, was navigate through this pulsing crowd. It was much more crowded than it had been earlier, a maze where the walls were constantly closing and it didn’t help that my depth perception was all thrown off, my motor skills hindered and my judgment slowed. Bec and I had to hold onto each other because we were of the same mind and all I could think was “Goddamn, that bastard has some pharmaceutical shit.” It had been laced with purple and dipped in crystals, a pothead sundae for the finest of connoisseurs. And it was precisely because of this potent plant that I found myself in awkward situations where I was too close to people while trying to navigate the place, trappied in the middle of 3-person conversations as I realized I chose the wrong way and found myself at a human dead-end. I would tip my fedora and back up, lost, awkward, until I could right myself, like a car pulling out of a spot, and then we were outside. So many food options. All smelling good. All with long lines and lots of strange people surrounding us. Bec and I froze at the head of the stream. This was it. This is what all these freaks looked like.

 

“You always have to note, before you get into Orange County from L.A. you have to go through Long  Beach,” Bec said and I nodded. This was it. The great crossroads, a city with its legs planted firmly on either side of the LA/OC border. A strange conglomeration of all the freaks and geeks of a city that hasn’t gotten its own reality TV show sandwiched by two which have, both of which starred Lauren Conrad. LC won’t have a show in Long Beach any time soon, I should think. A square couple, a tall, lanky white husband and wife with short haircuts and khaki shorts and polo shirts – I think the wife was even wearing a fanny pack – walked around, holding hands, cautious and scanning like those National Geographic reporters when they first descend into a primitive village. It was a beautiful irony. In the outside world these people were it, they were the society and all the freaks had to play by their rules. Wear conservative clothes with collars and maybe even leather dress shoes, with white eyes and clean-shaven and all respectable-like. But now the mainstreamers were in the land of the lost, a thriving sea of stoners and derelicts and this was their world – the squares were guests and it was certainly a strange feeling for them judging by their faces.

 

As I stood there, my body melted into the concrete and I stood unmoving while my mind raced off to parts not visited for quite some time. I thought about Hemingway’s shortest story, a 6-word tragedy he wrote as a bet with his friends. “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn”. He said it was the best story he ever wrote and as I thought about it I realized it was. Because you could take those words and think deeper about it and you could find a story of loss, of excitement turned into panic turned into despair turned into sadness and then finally an emotional numbness that called for a woman to sell the shoes she had bought for her miscarried child. Hemingway always said he would leave certain details off the page but think about them enough while writing so that the reader could feel them. I understood that now.

 

I climbed back into my body and stared out at the scene unraveled before me.  Hipsters walked around next to fatties sporting hip hop t-shirts and crew cuts and bloodshot eyes heavy in their sockets. A group of high school kids, coping with being baked in public for one of the first times in their lives, were followed by a white couple in their 20’s. The man had on a t-shirt smeared in barbeque sauce with a gut bulging out underneath and a scraggly goatee on a face with looked like that of a simple grossero made human while the woman was a little thinner but certainly still thick by conventional standards with brittle, ringed hair and too much foundation. They were followed by a black couple, a tall ripped man in dark sunglasses and a Clippers jersey with a svelte little girlfriend with large, natural homegrowns. A boy dressed in a giant felt hemp  leaf walked around, advertising a weed legalization company I'd previously only seen advertised in Los Feliz, took pictures with random festival-goers and impressed impressionable young baked heinas. Bec and I did a lap of the food and still could not decide. Bec said she would eat whatever I wanted so I went back to the stand where my friend had bought his chicken earlier and bought some beef ribs which you had to tear off the bone and they tasted great and made me feel carnal as I savored the juicy flesh lathered with jerk seasoning. Bec didn’t want that – she had hoped I would buy a dirty dog. She bought another 12-dollar beer and we shared that.

 

The whole day had been soundtracked by the shout of grown men  hocking “Lemonade! Lemonade!”, a sweet concoction for the stoners who wanted sugar in their water to quench their thirst and their sweet tooth at the same time. One nearby was an older, thinner black man and he exuded more class than most of the people I knew on the outside. Next to him a mom held the hand of a 9-year-old boy whose eyes were dried and watering. It was obvious she had taken him into the concert hall. He was small, no more than 60 pounds. All the smoke that had congregated in the place would have easily pumped into his nose, into his lungs and his bloodstream and it was probably a scary experience for a boy in single digits to be stoned for the first time without knowing what it was. He probably thought something was seriously wrong with him. Hell, sometimes I think I’m dying off strong dank and I’ve been around it for almost half my life. I looked around at all the other parents carrying babies or escorting various other young ones and wondered if they got it. That perhaps the babes aren’t ready for this life of compromised morals and freaky, THC-filtered lenses. I saw her turn to the old man yelling “Lemonade! Lemonade! Lemonade!” and buy a  massive dose of the sugar water, which the kid downed quickly and without fear.

 

It was getting late. We all decided to go back inside and watch some of the next act before splitting out. We were tired. The ganj was wearing off, wearing down, and it was certainly warm despite the fact that it was cloudy. We had spent a lot of time on that back food patio staring at the outside of the round arena, painted with a seascape reminiscent of a half-rate  aquarium and the whole grounds opening out to the scenic Long Beach harbor that looked like Harborplace – or maybe more Annapolis. No, more Lauderdale. We had eaten and drank. In fact, the thing we had done the least was listen to Reggae. So it was once more into the auditorium, though now we ventured to the upper deck to sit down in the stands instead of the floor, to take a load off.

 

Pressure was performing now, more of the same though he threw in a riveting cover of “Three Little Birds” as the friend who ordered the chicken rolled another blunt and passed it. From the top we could see down into the crowd. The individual white kid, tripping on boomers, hopping around without any thought or semblance of a connection to the rhythm of the music on stage. A tall thin black man in an all white suit with a white robe and a hat covered in what looked like white terry cloth walked through the place like he owned the joint. We wondered if it was Snoop, in classic Doggfather mode like we hadn’t seen him in years. The man spoke authority with his mere existence and I thought that if he was a nobody outside of the Rag-a-muffins festival, he was a goddamn king there.

 

Some other girls had arrived earlier, friends of the girl in the hipster glasses. They were much younger than us, back in the yesteryear of the early 20’s when there are still no consequences but for the first time you can buy booze without a fake. The wonder years. They turned around with a bottle of vodka snuck in from a friend of theire working security for the event. I said no, I had to drive but Bec, channeling her best Chelsea Handler, grabbed the bottle, swigging it strong and shuddering after a heavy gulp of vodka. As we sat there my head trembled under its own weight, falling onto Bec’s shoulders as far away a black man with a British accent emceed the evening and more black men with Jamaican accents released flowing rhythms blending hip hop and island vibrations. With all signs pointing to the door we said our goodbyes, hugged and thanked the kids who had gotten us out of our normal zone and into the mayhem, and crawled out to the car.

 

We were there for almost 5 hours. Over that time we saw - I mean really listened to and watched – about an hour of music. Even when we were in the concert room that was mostly to roll blunts and hide from the sun and foot patrols. In the end that’s the rub, I suppose. Music festivals aren’t for the music, at least not exclusively. I thought about Bonnarroo and all the little bastards running around all weekend tripping face far from where the music was actually happening. It’s the scene, man. Music festivals, like everything else in modern America, are no longer contained to or even centered around the music. Like the people who go to Big Bear to put on snowpants and drink Bloody Maries at the lodge, these assholes are here for the ancillary, a new dynamic where the by-products are king. Just like HST first noticed at the Kentucky Derby, nobody’s watching the horses anymore. Everybody’s just there to get drunk in the infield. And that includes myself.

 

Now certainly there are still music fans who come to hear Roots reggae, who know every song and every performer, sure enough. But based on the disparity between the small numbers in the auditorium listening to the bands amidst an all-engulfing cloud of blue smoke and the ravenous crowd perusing the paraphernalia stands and food carts, I am led to believe very few of the people there really gave a fuck about the music. It’s just a neighborhood festival, like the Ventura County Fair but indoors and without a large ferris wheel. As I dug deeper into a teeming convention center populated by derelicts who all smelled like skunks it becomes apparent what the central theme of this festival is. They say it’s reggae but that’s the smoke screen, the secret word uttered by dopers all over for drug fest and goddamn! do we show up in big numbers, all clambering to be stoned together, in a place where we’re no longer the freaks, if only for a few hours. It’s like Mardi Gras for potheads, a place where you can be publicly intoxicated on your habit of choice and find it’s accepted if only because its an unspoken that the headfuck is really what we’re all there for. Doctor's smoke it. Lawyers smoke it. Judges smoke it. It's good for tuburculosis. Good for halitosis. Fat Tuesday? Never heard of it. The Wailing Souls? Wasn’t that Bob Marley’s group? No, they were the Wailers. Hmm.I have heard Peter Tosh's NORML anthem, though.

 

In the end, what we’re really all looking for is a departure from the norm; from the tedium of a life spent working too hard, relaxing too little, and too easily accepting the tedium of everyday life. Maybe the “Reggae Fest” is a misnomer just as is “Sundance Film Festival” and “The Preakness”. Sundance is really about the Hollywood scene taking a little ski vacation; The Preakness is (or had been until the bastards just passed some rotten law forbidding outside beer in the infield) really about getting violently wasted in the sun in Pimlico, watching drunk private school girls flashing their tits, and celebrating the beginning of the summer; and Reggae fest is about celebrating the life of RasTafari and, more definitively, smoking a lot of weed.

 

On our drive home we took Sepulveda up from Long Beach instead of the freeway. I don’t know why I decided to take the longer road, through little  neighborhoods I had never seen before. But nevertheless I did. We bought some tallboy PBR’s for the road as we passed the lights of Long Beach refineries and then small, dark communities far off the beaten trail of Los Angeles proper.  We stretched out the day as much as possible. And maybe what we really got from the reggae fest was a reminder of our youth. A reminder that sometimes the experience is more important than the destination. And that you make the best observations when you allow yourself to wander aimlessly and slowly, deliberately, from time to time. And if there’s ever been a music that fueled a lifestyle that’s about slowing down, feeling the flow, and appreciating the now while hoping for a better future, it’s those sweet island riddims. It’s always been about the reggae, even if it’s not necessarily about the music. About Songs of freedom. Cuz all I’ve ever had . . . redemption songs.

Top 5 Reasons Why SoCal Riding is Better than Anywhere Else

Top 5 Reasons Why SoCal Riding is Better than Anywhere Else

5. They have the parks down to a science. The crazy shit these rake-wielding bastards come up with are unnatural, frightening, and often the type of shit a sane man’s nightmares would be filled with. But for the shredder with his shit dialed in as well as the young jibber looking to improve quickly, laps of the park will take you to JP Walker status after a few dingers. And even if the snow sucks, you can still have fun fucking around on the various creative booters, hips, jibs, and pipes. For those faint of heart, though, you’ll find yourself fucked up mad quick.

4. The nightlife. Everybody down here is a fucking derelict at one time or another. If you latenight it at the Block or get twisted with Wrightwood locals in a small cabin, you’re sure to have a good time. But even better, you can charge the hill all day, then take a quick après drive and find yourself on the Sunset Strip surrounded by the retarded, saline-chested bombshells (or, if you’re a chick, the rugged rich boys who run around town looking to please you with their money and life experiences) who frequent such a place. Other days, you can just après at the beach, catch a quick surf session after a day of shredding. Yeah, that’s kinda cool, I guess.

3. You fucking kill it. In destination mountains, like J Hole and parts of Colorado, people have to go a ways to get there so they take it seriously, charging it hard and spinning switch 7’s off 30-foot cliffs like you pull boot grabs. But down here, a lot of SoCal gapers roll up to the mountains who suck. Like, atrociously so; like you might have skied when you were 10. While they can get in your way, there’s also a certain level of pride you can take when rolling up, casually throwing a 3 or a 5, stomping it, and riding away knowing that most of the people on the hill know not to fuck with you.

2. Powder Days. People in SoCal don’t like to drive in the rain. And they don’t know how to ride powder. So not only do you get assholes who can’t make it up because their 80 thousand dollar German automobiles can’t handle the snow, but if and when they do get there they’re content  shralping the groomers with a few inches of dust or even continuing to session the park. You can ride whatever trees there are with knee-high fluff all day without hardly seeing a single other person except at the lift lines.

1. The SoCal Ski Bunnies. Ski towns are legendary for saddling a large group of active, fit, hard-charging fun guys with a small amount of fat, ugly, and generally un-fuckable girls. Sorry but that’s just the honest truth – when girls leave Jackson they’re ugly again. But in SoCal, all the beauties from such legendary metropolises as San Diego, Newport Beach, and Los Angeles dress up in their hottest snowboarding outfits and head up to the mountains to look hot and pro-ho it up. Sure they might occasionally get in your way when weaving through the gapers on the flat beginner slopes you have to pass to get back to the lift, though usually you'll find them spending most of their days at the lodge, sipping coffee and hot chocolate mixed with bloodies and cosmos. Their real time to shine is usually at night. And when you consider the prospect of charging good mountains all day and then charging hot tail all night – well that’s just the way it should be. A man shouldn’t have to choose between the mountains and hot vag. In SoCal, you can have both.

Wake Up, Assholes, We Actually Have to "Change" Too

Last week Obama addressed the country with his first ideas for the new world, “CHANGE!” and all the other great exclamation trumpeting the arrival of America’s best liberal poster boy since Kennedy. He presented ideas of corporate responsibility. He presented ideas of creating a sustainable economy with exploration of new fuels to create a new fuel infrastructure but the one thing I wanted to hear him say is the one thing he could not because saying it would destroy every business wisdom that has been preached to us since the Depression. I have a simple idea for what America needs to do but with our bourgeois hatred for getting our own hands clean this would never fly for corporate America. Our problem isn’t necessarily corporate irresponsibility, though that is certainly a symptom. Our problem is our corporations; moreover, our problem is that our country, once the great provider of all that was good and new in this backwards old world, has become a middle man and, well, it’s always very easy to cut out the middle man.

The middle man does not provide goods, he provides a service. Like anybody knows if they’ve ever tried to sell their own house, their own car, or even something as small as an Xbox, it may take a bit more hassle but normally the buyer and the seller are better off without the middle man. The thing is, we’re also the buyers, though, so we’re 2 sides of the equation – the two weakest sides. Without the product we’re nothing. A producer can survive without a middle man; a middle man cannot survive without a producer. The middle man is like a remora or a leach, the food can survive without him but he can’t survive without the food, simple Darwinian economics, man. But how did this whole flawed middle man system come about and what kind of idiots would train a whole age group to aspire towards being little more than snake-oil salesmen without the gumption to make their own snake-oil? People who realized that when you’re smart, you can make a lot of money as a salesman – provided, that is, that not everybody else wants to be one too. If that happens, the ship is sunk.

I was fortunate enough to have grown up alongside people considered by the great judge to be the best and brightest, young Americans who would excel at almost anything they would do. Most of my high school friends are in finance (read: making money off buying and selling other people’s products) or real estate (read: making money off buying and selling other people’s homes or land). Some are DJ’s but while that is a product, there is a question as to how effective and necessary such a thing is; art will always be a commodity and unless you’re big enough to be reproduced in high enough numbers to be cheap enough that the masses can buy you, you may be obsolete in a world that no longer throws as lavish of parties. Most of my college friends have gone into real estate. Some are in the military and a few have gone into engineering or electronics but the general adage that has been pounded into my generation is that if you want to be somebody, you have to sell something. Not make something – sell it. We’ve become so enthralled with fast-talking Italians in designer suits wearing Rolexes and bragging to their buddies at the martini bars about how they closed 80 deals this past month and in all of them came out on top that we stopped thinking about what the fuck we’re selling. And even more, how sustainable it is to continue selling these things. Arthur Miller was wrong; the salesman never died; he’s alive and well in every little kid who watches BOILER ROOM with a tightened fist going white because watching Vin Diesel sell fake stock is beautiful. But that little bastard misses the whole point. Or maybe he just gets it inherently, subconsciously, and has too limited a view way to comprehend what it really means. Wake up kid. BOILER ROOM is America. And it ends poorly.

We’ve been paying so much attention to the shine we forgot to worry about what we were shining and just now, as we’re getting called on it, we’ve realized that we were selling nothing. Just semantics, numbers without hard material to back them up. America went off the gold standard a long time ago; so too has our way of doing business and it will be interesting to see how this whole thing turns out when we realize we went from being a bunch of producers with real products to a bunch of talkers holding an empty sack when the very producers we set up decide to go elsewhere to sell their products for a better cut.

Look at these goddamned banks. What the fuck is a bank? It used to be a simple tool, a facilitator of the greater society. Now it’s trying to paint itself AS the society and what these bastards will never admit is that they’ve made what should be a social institution into a goddamn industry. That would be like milk cartons becoming a drink. Think about it – milk cartons were invented to hold milk. That’s their whole purpose. But let’s just say one day the milk cartons began to feel so self-important they began bulking themselves up and fancying themselves and trying to make themselves seem more amazing, more individual than they really are. Someone needs to tell them that the milk is what’s important and they’re just an afterthought. Because without the milk, they’re fucking nothing.

So what’s the solution? Let’s start by castrating all these assholes who have the audacity to demand their $50 million dollar jets and $10 million dollar bonuses after laying off 500 people who all made about $50 k a year. These corporate criminals are like rapists, looking for any opportunity to dip their proboscis into the innocent just because they like how it feels going in and more importantly they like proving that they can. It makes them feel like men. More often than not, they know their position is tenuous. They’re smart enough to know they’re selling bullshit without anything to back it up. That’s why they demand so much money up front – because if anybody figured out they didn’t have any real product behind them but an uncanny and soulless ability to spin words and peddle pink elephants, they’d be out. Like is happening now and yet still these assholes have managed to bamboozle us into letting them keep their ivory towers, all grinning at us because they know we’re fucked but they’ll be okay; that while we suffer for their lies, they thrive. Is it comical to anybody else that we let these assholes run around waving the “free-market economy flag” and then they turn to the government when things get bad? They’re like that kid who makes more than enough to support himself, brags about how his parents can’t tell him what to do, but then spends it all on blow and expensive nights at Teddy’s so he has to borrow money from Daddy. Only in this case, Daddy is funded by that bastard’s less fortunate younger siblings who have to work all day to keep from losing the farm.

Next stop, bring back all the call centers from India and all the factories from China. If any goddamn bleeding heart says that’ll crush their economies I’d tell them to take a long hard look at their own company. Yes, I saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and life’s tough in India but times are tough here too. Everyday I find a new article about Mexicans living in tunnels because they can’t find work and I read about some new middle-class murder suicide by somebody in the Valley because they’ve completely let their family down buying into an “American dream” that was never real in the first place. We need to get back to making things, to building a strong exporting economy. Our strongest export now is culture and art, movies, and even that’s weakening as people elsewhere catch on to the scheme.

So now we’re producing it hear and sure, it’ll make shit cost a little more but that’s what we need. There has to be a serious cost-benefit analysis undertaken where we figure out that having less shit of higher quality is much better than having more junk that may give our kids lead poisoning and will definitely break within a year. We have to realize that our computers may cost a little more but at least when we have a question we won’t have to wrestle with somebody looking up English words in the dictionary while trying to help us with a product they’ve never seen. Plus it’ll bring jobs back to the U.S., money back in our pockets, and create a future surplus. Sure it’ll mean getting our hands dirty again, less bastards in fine Gucci linens and more men and women in foreman’s gear. It’ll also mean a return to the pride we used to take in hard work, the American way, all that.

Finally, we need to start moving towards building infrastructure instead of immediate wealth. There was once a time when people understood building something that benefited a society and getting wealthy off that. The railroads, a newspaper, a city, something that served a long-term purpose. Nobody wants to do that anymore. Everybody looks for the short-term now – God forbid a company takes a short-term hit for a long-term gain, the board of trustees and stock-owners will eat them alive. At the same time, when a company lies or covers things up or makes things good for the short-term, almost always at the detriment of the long term, it punches the stock up a few points and they get lauded by the pundits. Serves the bastards right that it should come back around to bite them in the ass – maybe then investors will realize that the short-term straightjackets they put on publicly-traded companies are stifling long-term growth and ruining everything. And while there are still real estate developers who are honestly trying to build infratructure, it’s about a half and half split as to why they’re building it. Some build things because they serve a purpose, the right reason and the best way to ensure profits. The rest build just to make money and as we’ve seen, building for the purpose of profit without thinking if it’s something anybody needs is backfiring on us and leaving overpriced homes and office spaces empty, real estate companies scrambling to give out handies in bathroom stalls to senators in exchange for taxpayer money because their free-market policies, well, just didn’t work.

So where does that leave us? What’s next for the American public to do – not Obama, us. He can create policies and reprimands for the companies that are fucking everything up but we’re gonna need to do some serious thinking, a paradigm-shift to use everybody’s favorite silent-G buzzword, and adopt a new view of our role as members of the great state and our roles as producers, consumers, and investors.

First, it is not our right to consume to our heart’s content, and certainly not to consume disproportionately to our production. Some may say that’s being communist, that consuming is good but it isn’t when what we’re consuming comes from elsewhere. If anything, it’s the most un-American thing to do because it’s actually putting our money into the coffers of other countries, none of whom are us. The only Americans we’re helping are the middlemen, the slimy bastards who skim their money off the top while peddling another country’s products, similar to a coke-dealer or a smuggler of Thai hookers. Consuming can be addictive, a drug that satisfies in the short term and in the long-term leaves us empty. That movie, CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC, is like TRAFFIC but in pink with a goddamned designer lace dress wrapped around it. It’s not funny, it’s hideous and it’s that attitude of never-ending consumption that has labeled us the overweight gold-chain-draped South Beach papi of the world. It’s also what has caused everybody to overextend themselves for German automobiles, Italian bags, Scottish booze, and Chinese electronics. These aren’t inherently bad – but eventually, when we’re sending all of our money over there it’s emptying our banks over here and while those banks keep touting themselves as great institutions with massive overhead and absurd fanfare they’ll be investing less of the money that’s already dwindling out of them.

These purchases do show something, though – people still desire quality. And people can obviously make themselves afford it. So if you can afford a G for a bag, you should be able to spend that same amount for a computer which can help you at their job, your education, your home management, whatever. So maybe instead of Dell farming out their customer service to Mumbai, they can bring it back home here and price their computers a bit higher. Yes, it will cost us more, in the short-term. But in the long-term, it will lead to more jobs here so more money flowing into our local infrastructure and, through basic trickle-down economics, this will improve our whole economy. So the lesson is this – over-consumption is bad. Healthy consumption of necessities and a few frivolities is good, but only if it is mostly American-made goods. Not American-mediated. American-made.

Might doesn’t make right. Just because you’re in charge of a company doesn’t mean you can boost your own salary at the pain of all those below you – and even more, when your company runs out of money, use the taxpayers to cover your salary. Take a fucking paycut and move the factory from China to Flint, Michigan. Then maybe you’ll be able to sleep at night without two packets of Zanex and a big black bodyguard whose job it is to protect you from your disenfranchised workers and an increasingly-impoverished American public. Teach your kids this  - the Elephantine Business philosophy of “if it’s not illegal, it’s okay” is akin to business nihilism and in the end can only lead to what we’ve got now. Teach them that to be rich and “successful” are not the same thing – and even more importantly, getting the most points isn’t everything and sometimes can be worse than getting less because your overabundance which makes your life ust a little better makes the lives of thousands much worse. Teach them that in real life winning isn’t measured in who has the most points but also who plays with the most fairness. This may not be true but the only way we’ll be able to improve our society is by embracing this ideal – otherwise, it’s the way of the Romans, the most successful society to fall victim to its own decadence, depravity and self-importance, for us. And teach them that the middle man is expendable – if you want to be valuable to society, make something, something real and something valuable to society. And make it because it will serve a good purpose, not just because it will make you rich. And teach them the value of getting your hands dirty – that’s what America was founded on.

The greatest thing about America is that we can always re-invent ourselves. We can always become better, always fix our wrongs, and we have enough minds and hearts here to actually try and figure out what we need to do. We’ve recovered from many financial disasters before. Everybody remembers the Depression – well maybe not remembers but has heard about it – and watched the WIZARD OF OZ, the great analogy for how we rusted when we first forgot about industry and lost our heart, boasted our strength when we were really becoming cowardly because of our comfort, left farming because it was brainless and, to us, unimportant, and eventually found our way back by following the hard strength of gold. In the 70’s, a slowed economy coupled with double-digit inflation coined the term Stagflation. It was the result of years of prosperity (leading to complacency and corruption as regulations loosened) and, for the first time, the oil companies wielding their power. The 80’s had a Republican named Ronald Reagan, another regular cowboy whose policies of creating tax loopholes for the wealthy including capital gains fucked over the average American. While unemployment dropped, the economy grew even slower than in the 70’s, our national debt and trade deficits ballooned, and the number of people below the poverty line increased for the whole of the 80’s. What did it take to fix all the financial issues of the 70’s and 80’s which specifically affected the lower and middle-class “Average” Americans? A smart Democrat who actually cared about his people and wanted to use the government as a tool for improving the lives of his constituents, not as a piggy bank to hook up his friends from neighborhood cotillions and deb balls.

So it’s time to rally. It’s time to sacrifice some of our bad habits, our lack of willingness to get our hands dirty and our disdain for the word “moderation”. Let’s show that America is something more than a bunch of assholes who fill up the emptiness in our lives with expensive goods as the foreign producers laugh at how well we funded their economies. We’re the laughing joke of the business world. Let’s try, once again, to show that we do have what it takes to be the best goddamned country in the world. America!

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 2: Frozen Smoke and Drunken 3-Man

Continued from A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 1: Sleep-Deprivation

So now we were plugging for the mountains, Peter and I driving Dan’s car while he rode with his friends in their Jeep and all of us tired and refreshed and excited at what the world held for us. Route 70, winding through old mining towns like Georgetown which traced the sheer cliffs of the front range and past the turn-off for Golden where the Coors brothers are beer-brewing bastards and Loveland and all along rapping about nothing and smoking sweet herbs and hiding from the reality of our lives.

 

Then we were at Vail, drinking coffees and croissants from a skinny mountain-girl barista who was happy to serve us while Peter accosted a friend of his, a rich girl from CSU who had extra tickets she sold us for 20 bucks a person. We all proceeded to ditch her and load our derelict asses, dressed down in our finest snowboard gear while Peter clicked into two planks, and we were riding the gondola to the top.

 

Vail is a national treasure, an amalgam of massive powder bowls that weave back and forth through a vast ridge in the middle of Summit County though it’s also a tourist town long-since overrun by gapers and Denverites who ski in vests and button-downs and are too proud of themselves.

 

Still, it’s a good time and so we made our way to the newly-opened Blue Sky Basin, to Lover’s Leap, a thick untracked wall with a couple foot drop off a cornice at the top that turned into 5 friends laying in perfect wide curves with the frozen smoke behind us as we bathed in the white room.

 

At the bottom we found a little booter into powder and I launched an ugly 360 as I had not yet learned to throw a grab into my tricks. Then I threw an ugly tucked frontflip and though I landed neither I still felt proud of myself.

 

We descended through the trees, flat high-speed close-corner powder slashes and all of us were in Heaven but Dan who broke his shitt Morrow board as such cheap plastic-capped pieces of shit are not made for real riding. But with Dan being ever the optimist he just rode down with his tail broken, re-arranged his bindings and rode for the rest of the trip backwards with the tail-cum-nose duct-taped stiff.

 

The powder was amazing for a few days after Thanksgiving, surely better than any Sierra Cement a man could find at Big Bear. We rode hard and laughed loud and at the end of the day, as we struggled to catch our collective breaths and rubbed our sore legs we knew it had been a good day. We drove around looking for hotel rooms to find they had all been checked out for some wild international downhill competition and we were growing disheartened before we found a nice condo almost slopeside in Beavercreek and with Dan using his scheming ways to swindle the front desk clerk into a discounted rate, still pricey but what did we care? We were young scions of industry, golden children with all the potential in the world and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

 

We drove to a little pizza joint for dinner followed by a run to the liquor store for Gentleman Jack and Natural Lights. Then it was back to the hotel room, puffs of the ganj, and heavy drinking to follow.

 

Dan invented a game called squirble which had no rules but instead we decided to take an existing game and just change the rules as we went along. What followed was one of the most raucous games of 3-man ever recorded in the annals of modern debauchery, with absurd categories and rude, racist, sexist, hate-filled rhymes and questions in which we insulted our own races and gender most of all.

 

Around midnight Dan jumped on an exercise bike in the hall and had an epic biking session. We knocked on the door of the French ski team, staying across from us, and then ran. We walked in front of the hotel, beers in hand, and peed in the snow and yelled very loud and saw a fox scurry by. And that night we all drank until the sweet death of sleep came as a thin layer of fresh snow fell.

 

We decided to ride Beaver Creek the next day as I’d never ridden BC. I found it flat and unchallenging, the perfect place for wealthy financiers from Southern California to spend a week at their condo cruising down the groomed blue squares and bragging about their prowess to their mistresses while their wives fuck ski instructors named Hans in employee housing.

 

Still, we found some tight trees the way that only Aspens can grow in perfect halls of trees with gladed powder turns . Even a day spent riding shitty terrain is better than a day spent doing almost anything else and when you throw friends and powder into the mix it becomes nearly ejaculatory, transcendental cumming in your ski pants.

 

Around 3 in the afternoon we convened for a last mountain meal in the base lodge. Beers and overpriced grill food. Then it was back in the red infiniti for Dan and I, still sporting our snowpants, as we chugged for Southern California on an Eagle Sunday afternoon.

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 1: Sleep-Deprivation

The year was 2002. Murder was running rampant through the streets. I didn’t own a cell phone, as Verizon had dropped me for non-payment of a $1000+ bill. I was doing a lot of cocaine at the time. It was a great year.

 

Dan was a snowboarder who had a car and his parents’ credit card to purchase gas and supplies with. I was successful as a knife salesman and had a voracious appetite for the mountain. For this voyage we weren’t joking around. We weren’t making a day trip to Big Bear. Not even a long drive to Mammoth. No sir, we were going to drive from San Diego to Colorado for the weekend, logistics and limitations be damned and we were just young and crazy enough to make this a reality.

 

Dan picked me up in front of my classroom on Alcala Way. We had already loaded our gear into the back of his cherry-apple red Infiniti and he had spent the last hour picking up booze and weed. We stopped at a supermarket on our way out of town and bought a twelve of Mountain Dew for him and of Code Red for myself. Dan started off in the driver’s seat and after picking up Starbucks to fire us up I fashioned an empty Code Red can into an aluminum bowl and puffed strong.

 

I was feeling good and toasted when traffic slowed to a hault and we realized that the I-15 checkpoint was running. We opened the window, scared but not really because when you’re 21 and 20 you fear nothing, especially if you’d never hit any brick walls of consequence.

 

“Where are you boys headed?”

 

“Colorado” the stoned boy in shotgun said.

 

“And where are you coming from?”

 

“Uhh, back there, we’re from back there,” the stoned boy said, turning his head and pointing down the 15, at the end of which lies his college, the name of which he couldn’t remember.

 

“We’re from USD” the driver, a short distinctive man says, “Just going away for the weekend.” The pig points forward and neither boy can tell if he means for them to pull to the side or to just drive through but taking no chances, the driver feigns confusion and drive through. And then they’re out.

 

When I woke up it was2  in the morning. I had felt fine letting Dan start out and I hadn’t even though what that meant for me. Running with adrenaline and purple crystals and Code Red I was awake for most of the first shift, talking to Dan about our trip and the audacity such a voyage took and how we were the only men with real balls anymore.

 

I passed out for less than a half hour before Dan pulled over to fill with gas, threw me into the driver’s seat and quickly fell asleep in shotgun.

 

Now here I was, somewhere in the desolate wilderness of Utah where the 15 meets the 70 and I was halfway through a 12-pack of Code Red. The road took on that eery sentiment of another universe inside one’s skull where stalagmites grow down from midair and scorpions morph into armadillos which morph into boulders which morph into mountains as the sun begins to peak above the horizon, burning Eastward! My friend as I guzzle some more caffeine. In those days Dan was a drug-free soul and so there was no desire to subject him to the white demon who would have made me right at this moment. No, I had been driving through the night and my only choice was to continue on until my shift was over.

 

When Dan woke up we were just outside Eagle. My eyes were pasted open and I was craning my neck forward through the steering wheel, planting my face on the windshield to keep myself awake through the rockfields of Western Colorado. When he spoke to me I could only reply in tongues, gibberish. I was hallucinating a purple tint to everything around me.

 

I woke up as we were pulling into Fort Collins. In a dream we had pulled over at a gas station and in that same dream Dan ran in to buy jerky as I climbed into shotgun and in that dream I couldn’t even fall asleep at first. Not until Dan started moving and then the chemicals gave out, the great halls of light opened up, and I was off to another place where darkness reigned.

 

We were meeting up with two friends of Dan’s from back home in Connecticut. They were good fellows who enjoyed the high life, went to CSU, and liked to snowboard. I took a quick nap as Dan hung out with the kids. They woke me up with bowl tokes and I accepted this as a gesture of friendship. At that time I received a phone call from my ex-girlfriend, the VD referenced in previous stories, on Dan’s phone interestingly enough and so Dan took me to meet her for lunch but at the last moment refused to come out of the car as baked up as he was.

 

I was sitting at a table in a patisserie with eyes red and shriveling into my skull, reality pinching tight with a soft layer of foam between it and me and across the table were my ex-girlfriend, more of a raving bitch than I’d realized at the time, and her fiancée, a strange troglodyte from money with teeth like he’d been chewing rocks. His face reminded me of the cartoon Matt Biolos in all those old …lost paintings. Jesus I was baked. I could hardly hold a conversation. Damn you to hell, Dan, for ditching your boy in his 11^th hour of need, an awkward moment made more awkward by the THC running through my body and after eating as fast as possible and watching the hideous life that I saved myself from Dan came back and we returned to the house.

 

I was crashing hard. We would be meeting up with Peter in Denver and he was babbling about some indoor lacrosse game with free beers and I had to get ready. I could barely hold my head up, the darkness closing in. Then a pill of adderal appeared, somebody chopped the designer coke up and I snorted down a line of synthetics.

 

That night we found ourselves at a convention center in the heart of the mile-high city, watching lax-heads run around green astroturf during the inaugural game of the Denver Mammoths, free admission and flowing brews for all. The lights were bright. Walking through the hallowed concrete corridors of the sports plaza,  a crowd of 5 guys on a strange trip and the night before I’d been in class in San Diego, almost a thousand miles away. The wild west.

 

Peter was there, a shaggy-haired derelict friend from San Diego who had spent some time running into and through brick walls though always with a heart of gold. He would be coming up to Vail with us so he came back to the Fort Collins house where we drank brew and smoked green and then the night grew fuzzy as the world shut down for the night and I fell comatose onto the floor. Tomorrow we would be going to Vail. God Bless . . .

 Continued in 

A Depraved Journey into the Rockies Pt. 2: Frozen Smoke and Drunken 3-Man

Snowy, Drunken Turkey

Thanksgiving, that time of year when we gather together with family, friends, displaced out-of-towners you feel bad for, and everybody else you can cram into your house to stuff unhealthy amounts of rich, heavy foods into our cavernous American stomachs. Yes, Thanksgiving is a great holiday.

 

I’ve been cooking for Thanksgiving for the last 5 years, ever since I moved to Jackson Wyoming and threw down my first epic spread while my roommates hid in the other room and watched football. That’s the normal way to do it. Find a house. Get some friends together, don’t expend any more energy than you need to, stuff yourself.  That’s fine and for 4 of those years that’s been the modus operandi, All-American as apple pie and just as lethargic.

 

But 2 years ago we decided to change it up. Bec and I convinced two derelict friends, Mike and Brundl to accompany us up to the high country for a little shralping and turkey, Thanksgiving in Mammoth 2k6.

 

This is a guaranteed winner for those brave enough to try it. Get a bunch of friends together in a nice mountain cabin. Make sure it has a big kitchen and a fireplace, yeah, ample room for nefarious drunkenness. Hot tub is crucial because, fuck, what good is the cold if you can’t get in a hot tub? Throw in your parents’ epic 5-page thanksgiving recipe, from turkey to stuffing to creamed cauliflower, the peace pipe to be passed around like the Pilgrims and the Injuns, and a trunk full of food and booze. Lots of booze. Snowboards and skis too.

 

We left Wednesday night around 6 or so. We stopped in City of Commerce for Carl’s Jr. beside a Casino and then once or twice more for gas or more food stuffs on our way up 395, the desolate 2-lane highway that weaves through the western edges of the Mojave and up into the southern Sierras. At night you can’t see anything but you can sense there’s something outside the car that’s massive and powerful. An energy collects against those jagged peaks – Mt. Whitney stabs into an endless sky and  you can see it during the day from Lone Pine, though as we drove through close to midnight it was just a sleepy one-horse town with all the windows and doors rolled up, 4 tired SoCal travelers and a dog rolling through the Inyo National forest. We pulled into Mammoth Lakes close to 1:30, driving around in a daze to find the rental office where a late-night key was being held and then follow the map to the cabin.

 

It was a 2-bedroom condo in a complex by a chairlift that wasn’t yet running because of the dry fall, thus the cheaper rates.

 

The place was decorated in the finest of 70’s ski lodge chic, with old leather furniture like the kind grandma had, paintings depicting nature in low light and shag carpeting. Ina word it was perfect.

 

We all had a late-night beer and did whatever prep we could. Then we said good night and crashed hard.

 

The next morning we woke up to a big breakfast. Always good to open the stomach up before a feast. We helped Bec cook a few more things as Mike, Brundl and I ran around collecting our snow gear, checking our boards and gloves and all. Becca had told us she just wanted to hang out with Annie the dog, drink wine, and cook and, like the amazing woman that she is, she wanted us to have our guy-riding day.

 

The snow was shitty. “Packed powder” which means near-bulletproof and if only a few runs were open, as was the case on that particular year, any remnant of grooming was long gone, especially with the gapers who all converged on such a place at such a time. Still, it was snowboarding and there’s truly nothing in this world I’d rather spend a day doing than snowboarding.

 

I found a couple hidden “powder” stashes in the trees. The main runs were hell.

 

I’m going to preface this next part by saying that I’m stating a fact, not a racist generalization.  But the mountain was full of Asian snowboarders, many of whom were snowboarding for the first or second time. People like that, you know, the ones who turn sideways and slip down the mountain, grinding most of the snow off, can ruin a slope.

 

A friend of mine from work and her husband had decided to come up to the mountain. He worked for Fox mountain biking and, like most extreme sports industry men, was ephemerally young. When his wife got pregnant she bought him “Punk Rock Dad” written by the guy from Pennywise. He wasn’t that experienced on a board but made up for it with tenacity, balance, and drive. So while the snow was shitty and the mountain was crowded, the company was great and we charged it as hard as the mountain would allow. Working up a good appetite. Feeling the air blow by us as we flew mach ten, weaving in and out of all the gapers falling down and slowly learning to turn in front of us.

 

We closed the mountain with Bloody Marys. By the time that Mike and Brundl and I made it home, Bec was almost done dinner and feeling great. She’d taken to cooking like an artist. It was her masterpiece and she felt the pride I had a few years before at putting together such a massive spread by herself.

 

We showered up and everything was done but the bird. We hadn’t taken into account the fact that a 25 pound turkey takes a little longer to cook at elevation. My friend and her husband, call them the work crew, showed up and we had a few beers as the dinner finished. As I said, they’re a few years older. They brought Jaeger thinking that’s what the kids drink. They were surprised when they found us drinking wine and scotch and listening to Sinatra. We keep it classy, that must be noted.

 

Then we ate. Plates overflowing with food. I ate seconds. Then thirds. We passed the peace pipe full of greens to commemorate the Pilgrims’ slaughter of the Indians

 

After dinner, the fire roaring and our food digesting, we sat around the living room and talked through food comas. I wasn’t very talkative. I’d eaten too much. I decided to go throw up. Afterwards I felt much better and even had room for pumpkin pie.

 

The work crew left as we smoked a final pack bowl and gave a final thanks for being with such great friends before the night won.

The next day the snow wasn’t much better and we were a little tired and still stuffed. We ate a quick breakfast of handfuls of stuffing and some turkey and Brundl, Mike, Becca and myself went to meet up with the work crew at the mountain.

 

IT was good having a girl for Bec to ride with and this is a tip worth noting. If there’s a disparity in the skill level between you and a partner, find somebody of a similar level and gender to ride with them. It makes the difference between a fulfilling day of charging mixed with cruising and a day of frustration and possible break-up.

 

By the end Bec was riding the Gondy up with us and everybody was having a good time as I sprayed all the gasianpers sitting down all over Broadway.

 

We finished again with après Bloodies. That night we humped ourselves to the hot tub, walking in shorts down a snowy lane to a little wooden hut with warm waters to soothe the body and the soul. Beers spread around us, torn muscles aided and abetted by healing powers of the sweet herb and chlorinated warmth. Then we were ready for the night.

 

Our quartet met up with the work couple at Whiskey Creek. It was early, both in the night and in the season, and therefore there wasn’t much happening. A band of old people on instruments that looked awkward in their hands jammed out Rolling Stones to the 20 or so people there and we played pool and got to work drinking whiskey and ales.

 

Mike and Brundl began talking to a few girls. One was fat and affable while the other was thin and icy, the girl who acts like she’s too cool because she thinks that’s how you get the older kids to respect you. They looked young. Perfect for my depraved friends.

 

Eventually they left as did we and our sextet made the way to Lakanuki’s. While waiting in line, the girl from my work noticed her husband was growing drunk and snuck him out of line. Apparently he proceeded to throw up and pass out. They left the next morning.

 

While waiting in line the two young girls from the other spot called Brundl – or actually one of them did, the fatter one. He ran off and left Mike, Bec and I to roll into the Mammoth Mountain dance club, knocking back shots and Bud Lights with the only youth left in the city. We relished in the senseless waste of money for 4 days of shitty snow and gluttony and cheersed to the fact that it was worth every dime.

 

The next morning we discovered that Brundl had gone back to the girls’ vacation house. Her Grandmother was still up. The girls were 18. Brundl ended up playing cards and drinking with Grandma until 2 in the morning. The girl was staying in a room with her brother, an ogre of a man some might say. Brundl took it all in good nature. Her name was Bivia and he called her such when he woke up on her couch and said goodbye.

 

Mike, Bec and I were hungover as fuck. We woke around 11 to shots of rum and leftover turkey and mashed potatoes. Close to 1 we were tackling the mountain, by now a massive pimple of ice and slush and somehow the numbers of gapetastic orientals had increased exponentially. A few white kids who sucked showed up, too. As I lined myself up for a little park hit I saw an Irvine slowly swerve towards the trannie.

 

“No, he’s not stupid enough to try and go off this,” I thought. The kid didn’t have enough speed to make it to the lip much less to jump. Sure enough he plows into the thing. He scorpions going uphill, a freak accident I didn’t even know was possible, and at the last minute I have to change my trajectory, spinning an off-balance, irritated 3 while yelling, “Fuck you get the fuck off the mountain you fucking gaper!” at the struggling bastard before stomping it and riding away fuming.

 

That afternoon, in the last hours of daylight Bec and Annie and I went for a little jog through the woods. Annie liked that a lot, as dogs like it when they can commune with nature and stretch their legs. So do people. Thus the whole snowboarding thing.

 

That night we partook of the hot tub again and stuffed more rotting leftovers into our fatty faces. Bivia and her friend were coming over for beer-drinking and merrymaking.

 

I turned on gangsta rap because I figured that was what the kids liked and we played asshole. The other girl, not Bivia but the too-cool-for-school one, put on Led Zeppelin instead. I like Zeppelin. The girl tries to act old and wise as we’re all our wisest and most worldly when we’re 18.

 

The night draws to a close and Bec and I consecrate our bed again.

 

Mike and his girl engage in some heavy petting on the coach. Brundl and Bivia, who we discover is actually named Vivian, hook up but mostly cuddle in his bed. It’s a good, wholesome night of drinking and puffing.

 

The next day we sleep in. We check out and Bec posts up in the mountain bar nursing Bloody Mary as Mike, Brundl and I decide to go to the mountain for a few runs. I teach them how to clip tickets from people leaving their day. For 20 bucks total the 3 of us get tickets that let us ride for 2 hours and although the conditions are beyond shitty the price is right.

 

We end our trip with a stop at Grumpy’s for the Indy game, a pitcher or two of beer and linner. As we walk out to Brundl’s Jeep we spot a storm on the horizon. It was going to snow, just after all the gapers leave to reward the locals for their hospitality. I envy them.

 

We stop at Convict Lake for a cold blunt-smoke lakeside and a final appreciation of the alpine. Then it’s homeward bound, 4 weary travelers and a dog who doesn’t understand why we’re leaving the clean air and the fresh feel of the mountain for the lowlands.

 

We get home close to 9. Mike and Brundl have another hour and a half and I feel bad for them but not so much that I’m losing any sleep. We share goodbye hugs and say this is a tradition we need to do every year though we haven’t since because it was a lot of money to spend for crowded, shitty snow.

 

But when the opportunity presents itself, I’d be happy to start the tradition back up and this time not stop. Early season riding is fun not because of conditions or any other factor but only because it’s good to ride early in the season.

 

Thanksgiving is a happy day to be spent among friends. But when you turn it into a vacation it takes on a whole new dimension. It elevates it beyond one day of gluttony into a long weekend of memories, heavy boozing, and extremely welcome leftovers. And that, my friends, is something to be thankful for.

 

 

 

 

Dirt and Freaks in Venezia, California

Venice Italy is the Italian city of freaks, where strange folks have been putting on masks and causing having for almost a millennium. It’s a legendary a haven for artists, sommeliers, sophistos, and derelicts alike, though, like most places of interest it has become sadly gentrified in the modern era.

 

Still, transversely Venice, California is one of the last refuges for the freak power in L.A., where all the misfits are trying to make their last stand amidst rising housing prices and, again, that evil mass-gentrification. A friend once told me the theory went that this country is like a mountain and all the weirdoes and exceptions rolled down the hill in either direction and planted themselves by the sea. If that is true, then Venice is certainly the spot where the strange hit that great wall of water and piled up. And it was with this in mind that I enlisted Bec to accompany me West on the 10 for dinner and a drink or two at the Waterfront Café.

 

We parked on Rose a brisk walk from the ocean. I pointed out the names of trendy eateries and boutiques, a place called ACNE in an old converted church. We passed the Long’s Drugs with the two-story ballerina wearing a clown head and gloves pirouetting above it. We walked past comfortable million-dollar beach houses with old wooden fences and sturdy concrete construction and imagined what our lives would be like if we could afford something so close to the beach yet so spacious.

 

Then we poked out onto the boardwalk, breathing deep of saltwater and winds from far-off places. We miss living by the beach. East L.A. is for people with little appreciation of such things.

 

The Waterfront Café is a little pub with an outdoor patio full of plastic tables and cheap seats. A heavy rope, like the kind used to moor medium-sized sailboat, rests on wooden brackets anchored in cement-filled buckets that people ash in even though they’re not supposed to.

 

We posted up against the rope and stared into a cool, black beach night. A young black kid no older than 10 came up trying to sell us cheap necklaces. When he wasn’t trying to hock his wares to the drinkers and diners he was skating around and playing with a white woman in her mid-30’s, some strange preternatural relationship we were trying to discern. Is she a big sister? Just a girl who’s taken an interest in this young skater kid who sells junk at 8 o’clock on the Venice boardwalk on a Saturday night? Or maybe one of those crazy white broads without any uterus who like to kidnap little minority children and claim them as her own? I keep a close eye on her.

 

We order carafes of Erdinger and stared out into the nearby oceanfront parking lot populated by R.V.’s and hippie vans and beyond at the visible sliver of sand and then a black ocean that stretched on forever. I looked north at the lights of Malibu as the shoreline bent in. The massive Santa Monica ferris wheel, all lit up as it spun endlessly into the night.

 

We ordered calamari since I consider myself a calamari expert, though I’m probably not. They were rubbery and the fried part came off too easily so you were left with a pale gasket of squid that you had to tear apart after much struggling or just swallow whole.

 

We decided to split a small pizza and another round of drinks. The night was relatively normal until we spotted a young Ent walking down the street towards us. It was a man covered in green foliage-wrap walking around on stilts just for the fuck of it. No big festival, Halloween was two weeks ago. He just wanted to look like a tall skinny swamp thing.

 

The little black boy ran up to him and befriended the walking tree. They walked side by side until the tree man stopped under a streetlamp and the man inside the suit bent at his knees into a sit so that it looked like he had a long calf with a short thigh and torso.  They talked about whatever a street urchin and a man dressed like a walking tree talk about underneath the glow of a streetlamp falling just so on the Venice boardwalk on a perfect night when the air isn’t too cold nor is it too hot.

 

Our main course arrived, barbecue chicken and bacon pizza. That was a much better choice. The Waterfront Café redeemed itself and we got just one more beer for the two of us to wash the pizza down. The Ent and the black boy disappeared into the night, two strange friends, and we paid the bill and left.

 

Becca and I decided to walk to another bar to warm up and continue drinking. There was a small patch of restaurants and a sundries store with the lights on and revelers sat outside and milled around in front of these. We passed an old, ornately-bedecked oceanfront hotel advertising rentals by the night, week or month. The lights falter. Nobody was around. A strange feeling of Armageddon set in as the warmth was sucked out of the air. I glanced to my left at the parking lot which during the day held poster sellers and knock-off t-shirt vendors and other random street-peddlers.  It was empty except for 2 people in baggy jeans and white t-shirts with furtive, darting eyes staring at Becca and I.

 

At the next street we decided to turn up towards Main Street. We passed beach cottages and townhomes of the Southern California style that dominates the coast from Mission Beach to Rdeondo. We turned north at Main, passing houses blocked from the busy street by tall wooden fences on our left.  Cars flew by on our right carrying party-goers through the Venice streets on their own adventures and we were all-too aware of them as the sidewalk was too small to be comfortable two-abreast.

 

As we crept across the technical border to Santa Monica and the sidewalk turned into a yoga gym and a Closet overpriced extreme sports clothing store, I spotted the next bar. And I say the technical border to Santa Monica because people who live in Santa Monica consider this area Venice. I’m not sure if that’s a factor of gentrification as well – that as things get nicer, the higher class neighborhoods claim them.

 

We stopped in O’Brien’s Irish pub and ordered rum and cokes as a hipster band with a lead singer wearing tight skinny jeans and a vest with a skinny black tie. They finished their indie emo set in the back room and we clapped with 2 or 3 other people and posted up at the bar.

 

We were tired. The night before we’d both gone without sleeping though for different reasons. This night we had no energy and no conversation and so the idea of paying for drinks when all we wanted was bed seemed foolish.

 

We made our way back to the truck and took off east. We got off by our house and found ourselves in the middle of some crazy, massive march with cop cars flashing their lights and crazies with signs and at first we were afraid we would get pulled over. Then we realized Johnny Law had other, bigger problems. It was day 4 of the great no on 8 riots and the gays were running the street pink.

 

We couldn’t turn right on our street because it was closed off by the marching of the disgruntled gays. The cops were lined up to keep people safe and to keep any man-on-manlovers from destroying anything else.

 

8. It’s a horrible disgrace to our city. Strongly supported by blacks and Mexicans – that’s right, the same groups fighting for respect, equal rights, and acceptance into a white-bred prejudiced world have now turned around and denied basic human rights to others because they can’t relate to them. IT’s absurd but this post isn’t about politics.

 

We pull into the house. A final puff to ease our troubled minds. From 2-story ballerina clowns to stilted tree-men to a home overrun by homotesters, 10,000 thick marching down Sunset in front of our house. It’s a strange world and we live strange life in it. Venice. East L.A.

 

I can rest in peace knowing that, at least for now, there’s still a place where the strange, dynamic, and at times downright freakish can cohabitate in beautiful disharmony. There’s still a hope for our future . . .

Out of Breath on Telemark Bowl, Jackson

A few days over 4 years ago your trusted Uncle Ryno moved to Jackson Hole for the first time. I say for the first time because I plan on moving back there someday, spending the rest of my life chest deep in fine Teton powder in my log cabin house with a hot tub on the back deck and a raging fireplace. In fact if you asked me where I see myself in 5 years I’d have to say in J-hole (or Driggs or Wilson, but ideally Jackson, most likely) writing my 4^th or 5^th novel, living with my beautiful blond wife, a couple Malamutes and various mutts, and probably a little rugrat or two running around. A happy life.

 

Anyway, back to my arrival in Jackson. The adventure began a few days before Halloween and a few days after I met some drunken girl in a bar in Canton who would forever change my life. I drove to the old trapper’s valley city in Wyoming in 2 and a half days. I would’ve made it in 2 but in the 12^th hour of the second day and chugging down rte. 80 I decided to smoke a joint as the temperature dropped so low I had to put on gloves to drive my ’86 Bronco up mountain passes. A blizzard set in as the Bronco whined at a top speed of 60 and I had to pull into a hotel because I couldn’t tell if I was going up or down.

 

2 days later Josh and I found ourselves driving up the pass, a windy mountain road that connects Jackson Wyoming to Driggs Idaho, just past the Stagecoach Bar nestled at the bottom. We pulled over at the makeshift parking lot where other cars were parked and started walking up a small boot pack and then setting a pack through the knee-high white to a little starting spot just above where a couple kids were building a poppy little kicker.

 

I learned a good lesson that day. I had hiked midway up to the bowl. I stopped, breathing heavy as soiled cityboy lungs fought to adjust to the lack of oxygen. It was time to strap in as I catch my breath so I put my board down on its bottom. The thin air and extreme exhaustion made me temporarily forget why we used snowboards – that is, to ride downhill in the snow. But this lesson re-impressed itself into my brain when the board took off down the hill, myself swearing as I set off running, more like hopping through the deep pow as my old K2 Doublewide embedded itself in a ditch a good hundred yards below.

 

I retrieved the old fat green plank and sprinted back up through the same deep snow. True introduction to the mountains, trial by fire in snow the color of heaven, as one would imagine it. When I got to where Josh was standing with a day-after-booze-filled smile creeping across his face, I continued pushing up as if nothing happened. I stopped just once to throw up a decent chunk just to the side of my tracks.

 

Finally prepared to hit the jump, I rolled down, losing visibility as the snow was blowing. In the end I missed the kicker completely. Some kid said “At least your approach looked good” and I waved, apologetically, and Josh and I decided to hike the bowl.

 

Later we would come to find out it was called Telemark Bowl. But that would be later on. On this day we were just explorers, two cityboys making our ways into the wilderness our first time. Frightening and titillating and I’ve never felt so free before or since. We didn’t even know about slides though that’s about as good a first backcountry spot to hit when you’re avalanche unawares. Once we were high enough we both strapped in and set off.

 

MY first 2 turns, before it got chopped up lower, just two perfect pure arcs through an empty canvas, I knew I’d found heaven. At the bottom we jibbed around a little popping over a knocked over log and staring up at the sky.

 

Then we were good and tired and ready to get our drink on. On the way down we ran into a couple hitch-hikers looking for a ride back to their car at the parking lot. The girl, it turned out, was a McDonough graduate. She knew mutual friends of mine. It was our first hitchhiker – and as luck had it, she left her hiking poles which I claimed for myself.

 

That season would go on to be one of the great turning points in my life. The time when I realized I had to accomplish something for myself. That I couldn’t keep fucking around anymore. That I could only return to the mountain once I’d earned it.

 

Still – those early days – the ones of discovery, of the open white canvas so full of possibility and what we would accomplish. That is what life is lived for. That is what I miss. That is what I yearn to return to. The open canvases, the grand skies, and mountains that reach in all directions towards the horizon.