We spent a good chunk of the first day on the road into California, passing the outer rim of Edwards Airforce base traffic in the sky and into Coachella Valley’s nature preserve: a blister of gas stations and Marriott’s joined by sister car sales places for the on the go businessman. The Traveler is angry and nervous; knowing our paths will eventually dovetail a few hours down the road. At a certain crank of the engine, I decide Sarah is now my publicist for the rest of the drive. There’s a part where we pass through Palm Springs and the car goes dead quiet – a tense conversation with our traveler about how we can’t put him up for the night. He makes other plans.
He’s loud and prone to outbursts of excitement on just about any topic. An excellent friend for the road, not at all the kind of person you want when you’re going to be waste deep in Strangers in Los Angeles – all manner of twisted individuals with certain proclivities about social conduct in public places. He’s built for the road and will do just fine on a boardwalk somewhere.
Drifting slowly slowly into that ever enveloping mass of California Territory known as Los Angeles County, driving through mist and rainfall that makes the ever aging infrastructure look even older than it normally does. Black streaks from rain water runoff on old stucco apartments, an oily sheen to all of the roads. Los Angeles doesn’t look historic, it looks old – dated almost, lush. Like you might pull up a sheet of crabgrass from a strangers lawn and find a mass of eyeballs staring back at you underneath.
Once that nervous energy from a long drive hits you, you turn into a tourist anywhere you go. A steady tremor will drive you to do stupid things – hotel bars, minibar fridges, talking to the people at the front desk in a way that any healthy person would recognize you’ve gone mad from the road and its time to put you down.
There’s a word for the charm of Sunset Boulevard so long after the decades of rock n’ roll bands carved their way up and down it, but I have bigger things on my mind, the first thought to break through the surface tension of my road-addled brain is that the ridiculously ornate hotel The London has rooms that look like you’re planning to kill James Bond in them. The hotel has mirrors on every surface, so no matter where you go the persistent voyeur of the self has something to say about the way a shirt rides up your back. Not counting they’ll help you see every angle of a stranger if you dare to look.
We’re right down the road from the famous bar Whiskey A Go-Go, playing music almost every night of the week – tonight’s set was an 80’s cover band. All of the members cosplaying the famous outfits from the Sunset Boulevard era of hair metal, a crowd planted with members from other bands that work the same gigs, playing tourist sets for 13$ well drinks and a hefty cover at the door. It was worth getting a t-shirt with the bands logo thrown directly at my face from the singer, at some point a woman dressed as Ziggy Stardust invites us to an after-party right down the road at the Rainbow Room.
Some type of rock and roll tourism I haven’t gotten the chance to do in forever, the walls of course plastered with the idols of old from Tony Iommi to forgotten late 80’s punkers on the walls: golden LP’s collecting dust, picture frames with sharpie writing on them older than I am fading into illegible smudges and a carpet that’s probably had every bodily fluid spilled on it at some point if the stories are anything to go by. It’s a locals spot that bills for tourism: the old rock and rollers that are still with us have grey hair and a lot of lines on their face. They know all of the stories, and they’ll wave you over to tell you a few too.
Our Ziggy Stardust reveals herself to be a school teacher for highschools who runs a San Diego based band called Hot For Teacher, one table over from us the backup dancers from the sets earlier have conversations with the band their in with no room for yokels from Arizona to cut in at all. We drink champagne to the band, stuff our faces with their food and eagerly listen to some stories. Always a good idea to put yourself in a strangers company if they’re eager to tell stories, even if more than half of them cant be true. Karin and I say our separate ways, it’s a good night that ends in a blackout party and a half stumble down sunset boulevard. Too much glass everywhere, a little carved out picture of ancient history up in the handful of bars that start with The Whiskey and end at Rainbow Room.
But you can’t go a day in California without that ugly monster of finance working its way into your social circle, even a nice little place like this where we’re free to forget the real world exists and pretend at any point a real life gen-u-wine rock and roll band is going to walk through the door. I’m not paying attention and suddenly the bar is packed with a nervous, chattering crowd. Throwing around memes and loudly shouting about the pros and cons of the Spawn movie from the 90’s.
I butt in, five tequila and tonics deep, about the prime quality of the film and the conversation spirals and dovetails into something something do you know who Saint Germain is? The Liquor, the historical figure, or the guy in Castlevania: one of the short little men looks up at me and starts rambling incoherently about The Philosophers Stone and the Book of Aquarius. The realization hits me before they even have to say anything, and when I ask them what brings them to the Rainbow Room on a Tuesday night it’s because they just got out of an exclusive AI and NFT meeting near the Santa Monica pier.
The shorter guy must be the leader of the pack; not out of confidence or social status but just because the more people that trickle in the more people make an effort to say hello to him. I don’t get his name, or I don’t remember it: the next few hours pass by like a blur: at some point I steal pizza, ask a woman what she gets out of the AI scene to get a confused reply, and feign ignorance any time one of them asks me if I know about something just to see how they explain it. “Journalists really hate AI” one of them says to me, a lanky artist with an ironic sense of humor and a stoner’s countenance. “I can’t speak for all journalists, I just want to know what it does.” “Oh you’re a writer?” one of them says. “Chat GPT is like your best friend. Any time you can’t think of what to write, it can fill in the blanks for you.” “Writing is sort of the easiest thing in the world to do, man.” Which doesn’t land the way I think it will, the two men I’m talking lose the plot and push the conversation into writers block.
The woman next to us is eager to share that she’s from the area, and mostly hangs out with the NFT and AI crowd because there just doesn’t seem to be much else to do that she can afford. She’s been getting in for free because she knows some of the guys here, but mostly her world consists of laundry and Netflix. “Everything is too expensive in LA now, hanging out, going anywhere.” “What do you get out of the NFT guys?” “Just people to hang out with.” Another woman at the party tells me she uses Chat GPT to write “Lore” for NFT characters to support the scene. On the fringes of our finance and technology circle, the old metal heads at the bar try to figure out what the hell’s going on.
I never waste a moment, letting them know it’s an AI group from Santa Monica meeting up for an after party. He shrugs “Nerds.” and we take a minute to talk about LA’s other music-famous watering hole, The Viper Room.
My brain feels thick and foggy with tequila, while the LA streets outside get pounded with rain keeping us all held up in front of the bar together. The short one with the glasses I identified as some kind of leader earlier wants to talk about AI now – how you can’t talk degrading about it or to it, how it needs to be treated nice “just in case” one of the women from earlier adds in. What if the AI they invent purposefully comes to harm us? Atheists are constantly inventing religion for themselves. “Rocco’s Basilisk is some Nerd Shit, man.” We don’t talk again for the rest of the night.
Part of my business expense is going to be covering an almost hundred dollar tab for the drinks at Whiskey A-Go Go tonight, since the one thing I failed to do in conversation is get one of these men bragging about the 250$ cover for their NFT event to buy me any drinks. On the way out the door, I stop to talk music with a Bored-Ape hat wearing “intelligent dance music” fan who I immediately finger as one of my people – a little around the block, falling for a scam, but adopting everything about the scene he can for a sense of belonging. I know guys like that in every small town in the world, we talk about clubs and are interrupted by a woman yelling as she gets into a car. “Aint no fucking way I am hanging out with a black man wearing Trump Tower clothes and saying “it’s vintage!” a car door slams, tires spin. A cowboy in an oversized yellow duster with the trump tower logo and his friend stand in the rain, looking like they don’t know how they fucked up. We stop to talk on the way back to my hotel, and they offer free cocaine in exchange for a place to charge their phones.
NEXT UP:
The Writers Strike Hits Home…
Tips to do drugs in California….
Rolling Hill Zone…
ADDITION:
We blast through the morning on a binge of cocaine and beer, with a side-load of marijuana and whatever our partygoers pull out of their topics. At the fancy resort we’re staying at with a crystal clear view of Los Angeles from one of those hills that has a castle sitting on it, a rooftop pool, a maze of a bathroom with a pool-like bathtub. It’s all on someone else’s dime, anyway – so I tell our Cowboy and Toast, who I am introduced to shortly after, to cut loose with us.
Lines get assembled on the glossy cover of an LA times magazine sitting on the coffee table. The front-cover is emblazoned with palm trees on fire and letters about a city in crisis: Will Los Angeles Make it Another 20 Years? We can answer that after some drug use and a little paired off getting to know each-other. The Cowboy’s Associate lets me know that lately in California you make other people do their drugs with you before you find out how free they are. Everyone’s dosing fentanyl and weight-loss drugs, and they tell me they’ve got a few more friends on their way.
Toast is the first arrival – a writer and poet who’s brain I pick about the art of the craft. The Cowboy and His Associate deliberate with me about the future of the entertainment world after another writers strike. He’s nervous clutching a joint and looking solemn over the rooftop. “The writers strike just means I could be out of work for a long time.” We’re all packed out on the porch, passing a joint around and talking about a job offer he got. Of course it would be videogames.
The Cowboy got a job offer from Riot Games as some kind of corporate lead position, the size and scope of the modern videogame industry passing right over his head. That’s sort of the advantage the people who run the ship have over everyone else. Gamers love Call of Duty but most of the players have no idea the actual size of the corporate machine behind selling new versions of it every few years. It’s Associate and Toast who help us give a dawning idea in the Cowboy’s brain, and I can’t escape videogames anywhere I go. Three more guests appear – a transient punk rollerblader, The Divine Creator and his partner P, Merci and their outfit that induces a deep seated paranoia they could spontaneously start telling me all about Serial Experiments: Lain while I was deep in someone else’ drugs.
Lording over the coffee table telling stories and figuring out what makes each other tick. The Skater shows them how a ring gag around my neck can easily be placed in my mouth. A brief moment of stuck chemistry before the sun starts to peak over the hills of Los Angeles. The Skater, my Publicist Sarah and I all have to be up to do the over-the-hills-and-valleys drive to San Francisco in approximately four and a half ours. My head is spinning and some horrible toxicant effect from the combination of substances have started to cancel each other out. I almost make it to the bathroom in time to leave it all down the side wall of the bathtub. We’ve already got a noise complaint or two on the bill…the last thing my big-kid job needs to know is that a degenerate was throwing up in the faucets of the rich and famous all night. The last thing I remember is saying “I’ll hammer out a draft on the drive over.”
After sad goodbyes and troubling sleep, my body recovered enough to realize we’d already left. A pair of sunglasses kept the road almost pitch-black while we drove, piloting through storm clouds, rain and fog towards Northern California. Oakland comes in with a type of lush foliage and parks you haven’t seen in the praries for miles before San Francisco hits you and it all screeches together at once. I’ve been trying to avoid building the whole thing in my head all weekend. Moscone Center brings itself to us by aerial view first, the road from the bridge taking you down and into San Francisco directly through a series of curling slopes. This way I could see the whole sprawl of convention buildings and parks awkwardly slammed in this corner of the city. Sarah gives me enough time to grab my bag and roll out of the car. It’s 5:00 clock and there’s no time for harassing the good common folk of our country, I have a VIP awards show to get to if I can just figure out where…
TikTok comedy….
Haunted Castle….
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me…
YES!! YESSS