Tag Archives: Hollywood

Non-fiction

Interesting Delight

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In my twenty years in Los Angeles, I never visited LACMA, but I heard it was overrated anyway. I did make trips to Silverlake if that counts. When I lived in Hollywood, my friend who visited took me to the weidest museum–I guess you could call it that–where it was nothing but videotapes of the film Jerry Maguire starring Tom Cruise. It took me back to a better time. Many of you probably aren’t aware of that film. It came out in the nineties, and the nineties carries no relevance to Gen Z, which is a shame. Reality TV wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is these days, and the music and films were superior in my mind. I just believe that because I was a teenager then. Any teenager at a certain period would grow up to believe everything wasn’t what it used to be. Try convincing a Gen Z person that the nineties were better for instance.

Does rock music even exist anymore? I’m stuck in the nineties, so all I listen to are bands from that era. I don’t remember the last rock star in the last twenty years. When I grew up, I had Kurt Cobain, Axl Rose, and Eddie Vedder among several other artists. But somewhere between now and then, all we were left with were a bunch of celebrities rapping and doing TikTok videos for fame. I don’t watch TV, so I can’t really confirm the truth. Who knows what MTV is showing these days? All I can say, as I don’t pay attention to contemporary music, is no one has approached me and said that so-and-so is the next great rock star. It’s further evidence that rock is dead, and I don’t think there will be a revival. The concept of a long-haired person with a guitar must not fly with today’s teenager.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s still rock music and metal buried beneath pop and hip-hop. It must not hold up to the rock music in the nineties, or else I would’ve known about them by now. I’ve tried listening to a few metal bands, but it was just misplaced yelling and growling over drums and guitars, creating hyperactive noise.

I heard that Hollywood is dead too. It wasn’t what it once was. I’ve turned my back on that as well, after living there for seventeen years and trying to be part of the scene. But it got worse and worse as major studios tried to recreate everything instead of making something original. They were too afraid of taking chances, so they stayed safe and did remakes of past films and bought the rights to comic books. I’m not a kid anymore, so I’m no longer the audience. They hardly make films for adults, so again I’m left out. Not to sound elitist, but I’m not into comic books or Star Wars. I must be left with whatever films were up for Best Picture at the Oscars. I tried to watch Oppenheimer a few weeks ago and couldn’t get past the first ten minutes. I forgot what other films were nominated. It was a lot of them, like ten of them. Couldn’t keep track. I’ll pay more attention to the next Oscars if I care enough. That’s the problem: my apathy.

Non-fiction

My Drunken Nights

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I look back at all my drunken nights and can’t count on one finger a single one that stands out. They all come together in a blur, a long, significant blur.

It started when I was twenty-one and ended when I was forty-one. I drank almost every day from the time I was twenty-six to the day that I retired on August 15, 2019. I thought that was the date, but it was nothing official. I used to get blackout drunk with my friends in Hollywood when they were still around. We did shots of anything, and I drank mostly beers, domestic beers, not the fancy imported kind that really wasn’t imported. If you travel to Belgium and drink the Americanized Belgian beer, you’ll get ridiculed. My parents told me you’re supposed to drink a different beer over there. I’ll probably never fly to Belgium anyway.

But I drank whatever came my way like Long Island Iced Teas from a cowboy bar in West Hollywood because the cocktail came in a flower vase with a long thick straw sticking out of the top. The bar had a mechanical bull that I would never ride, and I wasn’t interested in anyone who rode the thing. All I wanted was to get obliterated because life was hard, and I wanted to make it easier.

When my friends went away when I was in my thirties, I was left alone to drink alcohol and smoke hash, mostly weed but hash sometimes. I had acquaintances, not friends. We would drink and get high together, but that was all we really had in common. I respected my time alone with my drinking but also would venture to the bar down the street from my apartment.

One night, when I was in my late thirties, I can’t remember what age exactly, I was crossing Hollywood Boulevard when a young dude on crack punched me in the mouth. It was a sucker punch. I was high already after smoking a spliff in my apartment. The kid walked away, still staring me down and cursing me. I never retaliated, which I should’ve done, but I was too dazed that a stranger would actually hit me at one in the morning on an empty Hollywood street. I continued walking to the bar because I wanted to drink into a blackout after what that kid had done to me.

I told everyone in the bar what had happened, and they were all amazed too.

“I just got punched in the face,” I said.

“By who?” they asked.

“Some kid on crack,” I said.

Of course it might not have been crack. It could’ve been acid for all I knew, or crystal meth. All the more reason not to have hit him back. The kid could’ve felt nothing and been a superhero with super strengths, and a punch to his jaw might not have even fazed him. He could’ve done something worse to me.

I told the bouncer.

“Where is he?” he asked. “I’ll take him down.”

But I couldn’t tell him. He could’ve been anywhere in Hollywood, sucker-punching other drunk fools like me, around the time when I quit drinking. I think less than a year went by when I ended up in rehab and reached an age where I couldn’t do it anymore.

I cringe at the things I’d done as a drunk, like the time I raised hell at my twenty-year high school reunion. I regret ever getting kicked out of a local bar in my hometown. I don’t talk to my high school alumni anymore, ever since that happened. It was a visceral reaction to the way my alums were acting that night, and the alcohol only freed my inhibitions to attack people the way I did. I don’t remember anything. People on social media had to inform me of what I did, and I wanted to hide somewhere for good.

I don’t have to worry anymore. Those days are behind me now. I stare reality right in the face and deal with it head-on.

Non-fiction

124 Degrees

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The Coachella valley reached a record high this week of 124 degrees. I sweated all over when I went for a walk, and it stung my eyes. I couldn’t see where I was going along the sidewalk on my way back home. Supposedly the heat will last for weeks. July is meant to be that way. How will I make it to September when it will cool down? At least that’s what I expect. My parents said it’s usually the case.

Another Sunday has me feeling bored. I don’t know what to do with time. Perhaps I’ll wash my clothes. It doesn’t matter what I do. I still must see the dentist in the afternoon tomorrow, but at least I’ll miss work, the last place I want to be. My boss joked about me preferring to get my teeth pulled over having to go back to work. I didn’t laugh with him. I took his words seriously. So yes, I would rather have a root canal than go to work any day this week, or any week it seems because my job is torture. Angry people on the phone are constantly complaining, cursing, too, as if the problem must be me, not them.

I miss vacation time. I won’t go on another one until September since I like to break it up into every three months to keep my sanity. Imagine if I didn’t take those days off. I would be a wreck come Thanksgiving. Who am I fooling? I’m already a wreck. Work has kicked and slapped me. It’s hard to focus on anything else. I carry work with me after my shift when I take my walks. Does that make me a workaholic? I guess so.

Anyway, the summer is too long these days. It used to be short when I was a kid who played in the backyard. Now I don’t even have a backyard, just a pool that I share with all the other tenants.

I’m at the coffee shop, and a guy keeps turning around and looking back at me from his table. He’s watching horseracing on his iPad. I know because I peeked at it. He’s getting on my nerves. Thank God he just left.

A lot of tourists have entered today. It’s 10:30 a.m. The busy crowd has left the store. Now it’s just us regulars and a family of tourists at a long table.

I stare out the window and see the different shops across the street: Sinfulicious Body Care, Balboa Candy, Crazy Shirts. I’ve been inside the candy store before but never bought anything.

It has been quiet in downtown Palm Springs because of the heat. No one wants to go outside except for me. I can handle the heat.

I’m going through a crisis with this writer’s block. We all go through it as writers. No one is immune to it. We run out of important things to say. Otherwise we’re just repeating stories or ideas. Richard Hugo said to write about our obsessions. I’m obsessed over several things. He also said to focus on the subject that isn’t the subject. For instance, if I was writing about knives, the real subject wouldn’t be the knives but something else. I don’t know what that something else is. I guess it comes to me naturally after I’ve been writing for a while. I don’t know a single writer right now.

I knew a few screenwriters when I lived in Hollywood. Some of them were moderately successful. One of them moved to Texas a long long time ago. I wonder whatever happened to Michael. He was a sweet man. I also met screenwriters who never wrote. They called themselves screenwriters I guess to adapt. Michael was working with several producers at the time I knew him. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. I can’t quite remember. He always sat outside of the coffee shop and stared off into space when he wasn’t waving at people. He would tip his fedora at the ladies. His mouth was crooked. Something awful had happened to him, but I never asked him what or why. We would smoke cigarettes together in the coffee shop patio back when that was allowed. Now I don’t think people can even sit and hang out at that coffee shop anymore. I never thought it would come to that, but it’s here. I hope Michael is doing okay for himself in Texas. He belongs in a better place. Anyway, I’m wishing for the best this Sunday, but I don’t have high hopes, and I’m wishing for the best this week. I hope it doesn’t kick my ass too much.

Non-fiction

My Time in Hollywood

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I spent almost seventeen years living beneath the palm trees and near the stars on the sidewalk. My slumlord was a witch. She didn’t cast spells or anything, or she did. I didn’t pay enough attention. But she would scold me every time I broke the garbage disposal. Apparently, I wasn’t supposed to dump a pound of grease down there. Oh well. I lived and learned.

“You run the disposal every day for one minute,” she said. She grabbed my bottle of dish soap and poured it down there. “And you do this.” Her cigarette hung from her mouth as she told me. “Don’t be an idiot.”

I couldn’t make sense out of it. I couldn’t throw anything down there: no celery, no stringy meat, no grease. So I ended up not using it at all. I was in my twenties, and I drank beer every night alone in my little castle, a studio apartment near the Hollywood/Highland shopping mall. My parents were afraid to see me because the traffic was too hairy.

The witch kicked me out of the garage one day because I’d broken the garage door for the second time. The garage door, as it was designed, was a steel gate that slid across a track sideways with a piece sticking out at the end. My car clipped it twice.

“You idiot,” she said. “You park on the street.”

I had to pay for a parking permit every six months. It was about sixty dollars each time.

I could park on my street except for the mornings when the street sweeper came, which was Monday and Tuesday between nine and noon. I never knew when it would come between those hours, but it didn’t matter. If I parked there, the parking enforcer would write tickets as if he were writing holiday cards. In other words, it gave him something to do.

And those were lucky times when I could find a space on my street. When I came home from my delivery job late at night, around ten o’clock, usually every space was filled. I would have to park on someone else’s street on a steep hill. Sometimes I would have to park a mile away from my apartment building. Sometimes it would rain. Those were times when I thought about bad things happening to that witch. She had to go. She may have cast spells, but I cast fantasies. I hoped for the day when I would make it big in Hollywood and move out of there, where it was less than a thousand a month to rent. But that never happened.

Instead, I had to live in the same building as her, and she made sure my life was miserable. She had the ugliest dog. It was gray with bloodshot eyes, the size of a Doberman but uglier. Every time I saw that dog, it would chase after me as I checked the mail.

I would fantasize about moving to the Hollywood Hills. That would’ve been great. My studio apartment in Hollywood would become just a memory. It’s a memory now, but the Hollywood Hills never came to be.

I remember the day when I moved out of the slum. The movers showed up and packed all of my furniture into a moving truck. They would drive it down to Culver City. My slumlord and her husband, with his shirt off and his belly hanging out, watched me move out from where they stood on the lawn. There came the moment when I handed her the keys. I didn’t even say “thank you” or “have a nice life.” I just dropped the keys in her hands and walked away.

Fiction

Fame

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I don’t know what I would do if I were famous. The hope is that I get there because I’m tired of being a nobody, a face in the crowd. But these days, it’s punishment. You put yourself out there for people to put you down.

Before social media, it was a privilege. Nowadays, angry souls attack you when you’ve made yourself known. Since childhood, I’ve wanted to be popular, but I never got to that point. I had to do something special in order for everyone to pay attention to me and for them to like me. I never could figure out what that specialty was. So I disappeared in high school and became more obscure in college. I’m just a ghost, like most of us. I’m nothing extraordinary.

But is it worth the cost of my safety? My privacy? My well-being?

I write to reach a crowd of like-minded people, but I don’t ever want to become some legendary icon these days. Or maybe I secretly do.

When I was in recovery, in our group session, we talked about what we really wanted out of ourselves. Our counselor read a lot of Kant and taught us his philosophies.

It came to my turn, and I said, “When I was young, I wanted to be like Bruce Willis.”

Someone in the room, a young guy, probably about twenty-two, said, “You wanted to be an actor.”

It had never dawned on me until then that, yes, I’d moved to Hollywood to become an actor, not a writer. I’d only chosen writing because it seemed to be the easiest, most accessible way to get through the door. I could reach fame without having to show my face. I was forty-one when I was in recovery. That kid was wise beyond his years, even though what he said sounded simple.

This wish to be known is really an escape from the grind of work. I don’t want to be just another cog anymore, but I know that if the impossible ever happens, I’ll run back to the shadows and hide from the mob of angry cogs who post their hatred on social media.

It isn’t like the old days when being iconic was royal. You could get away with things. Now every move you make is looked upon by cynical folks who hate their lives.

I’ve said before that the wrong people have reached stardom. I believe that still holds true. You have to have some sort of talent. Either way, they all face the same pressures of being watched, judged, and tormented for being in the limelight. Some of them go insane, while others welcome it like it’s their friend. I believe I would end up in the former, given my track record, when all I want is peace of mind.