I went to Hollywood once, and I’ve been
prone to paranoia when I’m stoned ever since. The whole thing was senseless and
depraved – and now my karma is doomed, possibly forever.
Well, so what? My lungs are too tight for the Pacific coast anyway; I
have always needed more oxygen in this climate - the brutal reality of 21st
Century California demands it. And besides, Los Angeles feels to me like one
giant cemetery which reeks of death and greasy dollar bills. Spending any
length of time here rings out like a sharp gunshot over an ancient battlefield.
There are a small number of aggressive and tribal attitudes that have
evolved specifically to prevail on the boulevards of central Hollywood, but
this notion of powerful anxiety is not one of them. As far as I can tell, the
ability to thrive here is largely dependent upon the immigrant mentality – that
stamina to endure pure hell like a wounded lion lost in the ice, and then
emerge at spring’s first dawn with sharpened claws and a potent thirst for
fresh human muscle tissue. Indeed, the L.A. types seem to recognise this as an
essential truth – any chance to stomp on your fellow man must be seized
quickly, and with great force – to facilitate your own process of survival.
Where the margins for error run at a constant zero, the coyote ethic reigns –
kill the weak and eat their children. Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.
Somewhere in East L.A., I ate pork tacos with three hundred Mexicans who
were talking, kissing, and dancing in the road to the sound of Latino club
music blasted from two eight-foot loudspeakers loaded in the back of a parked
truck. “Well shit, you made it this far,” I said to a tall, dark-skinned man
after listening to the grim details of his childhood memories as a young
immigrant growing up on the southern edge of Huntington Park - “There’s at
least three hundred people around us, and they are good people – I mean, Holy Jesus,
it’s like Guadalajara out here…”
“Fuck man, you know how it is…”
he replied. “Where the fuck is Donald Trump now? Can you see us now Señor
Presidente?” We clasped hands and shared some rum from a paper cup – “Exactly.
Who can kill your energy now?” I asked. “Who’s freer than you?”
Who indeed? “No one my friend, that’s who,” he told me – which might be
true, but I was too busy trying to find my packet of cigarettes to pay any
serious attention to the idea. It was at least an hour after midnight and it
was time, I thought, to get out. The whole vibe of that scene with the Mexican
crowd was getting to me, and so was their Latino club music, which is not
surprising – because I hate club music – I need it around me like I need cancer
in my ballsack. And anyway, I had just noticed a brown-eyed señorita sat alone
on the street corner with fresh blood running from her ankle and mascara tears
trailing down her neck while the mob continued to dance around her in a relentless
frenzy.
We
drove back to West Hollywood in convoy, only stopping for ten minutes at the
side of the avenue while I got out of the car to negotiate with a skinny black
man who was stood on the sidewalk about five yards from Trump’s star on the
Walk of Fame for the price of three grams of medical marijuana – to enhance the
proper function of my sensory reflex circuits and otherwise reinforce my state
of natural calm. Less than two hours later, I was sat alone on the balcony of my
ninth-floor rented apartment overlooking the blue ripples of an empty swimming
pool and beyond, an endless skyline of blackened palm tree silhouettes, all
bending and groaning in the ocean winds.
There was no fun tonight - only failure and quick annihilation – an ugly
series of strange and uncomfortable encounters from El Monte to Venice Beach. I
am not entirely guilty, however… A 64-hour burn around L.A. County with a local
photographer, two Korean med school graduates and a young Californian dope
fiend called ‘Charlotte’ promises to be an intense scenario for almost anyone,
with the subtle risk for extreme personal crisis. So perhaps I was just another
casualty, another roadblock on the path to utopia – one more bullet in the wind
and two more headlights on the highway. But that is neither here nor there,
because tonight I am a survivor – Yes sir, a dangerous man – and I am so far
gone that I don’t care whether they like it or not. Fuck everyone and run. Across
an entire nation of heartless killers & whores – Los Angeles has emerged as
the epicentre of decay. It is not just that final resting place for the
beautiful and damned, but the spiritual home for a new breed of 21st
Century gentiles – degenerate Nazi scum with nothing but terror and sweet
revenge in their hearts. Fuck them.
Unnatural pressures and harsh vibrations on this Saturday night in
Hollywood… What was I doing here and how did we ever cut so close to the bone?
Who could say… Could this whole trip really be forgotten and realistically palmed
off as a doomed experiment in the dark and mysterious art of innocent escapism?
A simple misinterpretation of the basic facts – come on Honey, you understand…
Well, why not? It worked for Bill Clinton in 1998 and, under the
appropriate circumstances, it will work for me too, goddamn it. But first, I
will need to recover my aura of peace and find a way to quickly drain the
pressure from the pink veins of my inner brain… Yes, dawn will be up in three
hours and in the final analysis, it is probably in the interest of the greater
good that I sit gently on this dark balcony with a burning blunt and a record
of pre-revolutionary Cuban music on the airwaves… It was like a watchtower at
the edge of the void – but at a steady $315 a night, the six-room apartment
behind me was quite wonderful. They were asleep in the main bedroom by then,
but when we first arrived almost twenty-four hours earlier, the Korean girls
said that it was the greatest apartment they had ever seen.
