Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Non-fiction

Delivery Chronicles

Leave a comment

All I think about is work, which must make me a workaholic. I used to have an imagination doing deliveries. Those times were traumatic. I wasn’t making much money (not that I am now either), and I drove all day and night through Los Angeles, with a two-hour break in between, which in some years I devoted to meditation and writing. Sometimes the dispatchers would send me downtown to pick up nine-hundred-dollar food deliveries and deliver them to one of the companies in the skyscrapers. I get a panic attack just remembering. If you’ve ever been to downtown Los Angeles, you would recall the one-way streets of Figueroa, Hope, and Grand, and how, if you missed the address, you would have to start all over again.

I went through panic attacks on the road.

One time, I’d come home at around 9:30 p.m. from another shift and smoked a bowl of potent weed and took a shot of whiskey when I was smoking every day. My dispatcher, who was also my boss, sent an order to my phone for a sushi restaurant. The order was huge, and the tip was over fifty dollars, and I was already high, so I panicked. I couldn’t tell him I couldn’t drive there. It was the end of the shift, and the other drivers had gone home. I could’ve gotten in trouble if I rejected the order, and I couldn’t tell him I was stoned, so I decided to drive to the sushi restaurant. A cop could’ve pulled me over and tested me for drugs. Now that they can do that somehow, I would’ve been fucked.

I made it there okay and entered the restaurant high as hell. My eyes must’ve looked like two fireball candies. I was paranoid. It felt as if the customers were looking at me. I was so high, and I had to stand in there and wait for them to make the sushi rolls, and the restaurant was filled to capacity on a Friday night. Did I mention it was raining? There was nowhere to sit and try to relax, so I stood near the sushi bar for about twenty minutes and waited for them to finish the job. When they did, I grabbed the sushi bags and got the hell out of there. (Actually, I used bags of my own. The restaurant owners were too cheap to afford plastic bags. Anyway, I bagged everything and left.)

It was a dangerous trip up Laurel Canyon to a house in the hills on a stormy night, where the road curved like a sidewinder, and I had to be careful turning and looking out for cars speeding down the opposite lane to my left with their bright white headlights making me temporarily blind. Somehow I dropped the food off safely to the customer who’d ordered sushi that late at night and drove back down the winding road.

I forgot how I got home, which usually happened when I was high. I was the character from the movie Memento who forgot everything with no short-term memory, so he had to write everything he’d experienced to recall what happened. That was me on weed. I don’t smoke it now, but my memory is evasive. I forget a thought from a minute or so ago, so I sit and try to recollect it. Some of them are important, so I should probably write them down as well, but I never carry a notepad, and my phone is too complicated to sort through. By the time I get to the note app, I forget what notes I was supposed to take.

So that was one story of when I was doing deliveries in Los Angeles. I’ll write a book someday on my experiences doing that job, just not now. I’m not ready. I’m working on other stuff. Sometime in the future, like with my month in rehab and the hospital in Pasadena, I’ll get to it. Unlike those nightmares I lived through as a delivery driver, I took notes at rehab every day and kept them in my closet somewhere, and I’ll take them out in a few years.

Non-fiction

Interesting Delight

Leave a comment

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

The Snow in California

Leave a comment

When it rains in Southern California, the citizens don’t know how to react. But when it snows, everyone freezes along with the temperature. It hasn’t snowed in Los Angeles since the early sixties. And it rarely snows in Central California, where most of my family lives.

Back in 2018, it snowed in Bakersfield on the day or so after Christmas. I had to drive back to Hollywood that day. The 99 was closed, going up the grapevine, and that was my usual route. So I had to take a detour up through Tehachapi, where the snow had to be about five inches deep.

I stopped to get gas and almost slid to the ground when I reached for the pump.

It was a three-hour stall just getting there. I’d never seen anything like it in my life except for when I used to live in Pittsburgh for five years, where I expected snow every winter. But that was when I was a child. I was forty-one when I was stuck up in Tehachapi. It would take seven hours to get back to my apartment.

When the traffic finally cleared up, I split onto the 14 freeway toward Lancaster. The road was icy, and diesels surrounded me.

I drove at about fifty miles per hour and tried to glide easily across the ice. Then, at some point, I slid across a sheet, and instinctively, I slammed the brakes. My car spun around like a dreidel. I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. My Hyundai stopped spinning after about three revolutions, and I continued forward without a bruise or a scratch. But my heart was still thundering. I didn’t want to die that way.

I finally made it home at about eight at night after a seven-hour journey through the mountains. I turned on the heater in my studio apartment and watched a movie on Netflix. It wasn’t snowing in Los Angeles. Hell, it wasn’t even raining. It was just cold and dry like it usually is in December. But I’ll never forget the time on the 14 when I almost slid to my death.