I arrived here with 2 suitcases (actually one suitcase and a slightly torn Europack which is literally on its last stitches). LAX felt familiar, the long walkway into the baggage claim slightly fluorescent, people walking at various speeds towards men in hats holding signs that said things like "Tarintino" (I'm not making this up, the last time I flew in there was a limo driver ostensibly waiting for Quentin Tarintino) and "Molshkevik". My new roommate, Greg Ryan, arrived on time to pick me up in his new used, rust-colored CRV. By the way, if the way people are known to drive in LA is any indication of the general population's mental state, then they are, indeed, all lunatics. I grabbed my bags from the conveyor belt and tried to look like someone famous in a hurry because it's kind of fun to trick people into thinking that you are famous and hopped in his car. I eagerly rolled down the window and Greg rolled it up because he's Greg and this weather feels like paradise to me now but to most Angelino's it is cold (it is not cold). Greg is my new roommate and I have just landed in the city of opportunity, dreamers, runaways, celebs, bottom-feeders, bombshells and some of the tannest looking homeless people I've seen in my life. At the first stop light we hit, a giant rat runs in front of our car but it's not actually a rat its a possum and we both comment on how we haven't seen a possum in ages. I'm starving, so we try and Yelp some sort of Asian food, preferrably something that is Pho and, lo and behold, while we're lost on the long streets of LA a spot called "Pho Show" pops up. Perfect. We sit down and it tastes so good I feel like I'm finally "in LA" and Greg offers to buy my meal for me and nothing tastes better than free warm fish broth when you've just gotten off a flight.
The next morning Greg has the day off, so we go out to the Hollywood Hills to purchase a Pioneer receiver from a young Iranian man who has a really nice house, except most of his furniture is oddly covered in giant, beige canvas drapes. On the way to the bathroom, I see an old man standing that looks like his dad in the kitchenette staring at me and I keep walking. We purchase the receiver, get lost while we're leaving and make it back to our apartment around sundown. My friend Collin, who I am replacing in the apartment because he got a movie job in China, arrives from his flight back from the Pacific NW and it's really good to see him since it's been almost a year and we slap each other on the backs and almost immediately start drinking Manhattans, almost ironically since that was the other place I was thinking of moving, and then Collin's friend Ben comes in to pick up a Jack LaLane juicer and we all mingle for a bit until we decide to go down to Silver Lake later.
Silver Lake is kind of far, I think (I'm still getting used to the sprawling geography) so we get a ride from Collin's apartment neighbor Bianca and meet up with my old neighbor Ely from Vancouver at our friend Jesse's bar called Bar Stella. Jesse has a beard now and is wearing a white tuxedo jacket and black tie and the whole place has a swank but relaxed vibe. There I am introduced to two friends named Sam and Sean which are the names of my brother and mother, respectively, except this Sam is a girl and Sean is a boy. They tell me I have a nice voice and I should go into voice-over work, which is very flattering and my first moment in LA where I'm like "I can do things in this town". Bar Stella closes at 12pm, which seems early to me, but I guess lots of things close early in this town so we move over to a bar next door which I recognize from my last trip as the bar where Collin and I talked to two porn stars for several hours and I even got a picture with the male porn star where we kind of look like brothers. There don't seem to be any porn stars in there at this time, but pretty much everyone I cumulatively have met in LA is there and it feels really good. Ely buys us all a shot and some of us start dancing and I feel instantly welcome. The bar closes and they let us linger a bit longer and then we drive back to North Hollywood and everyone crashes at our place.
The next day I'm slightly hung over and Collin and Jesse are operating on pretty much no sleep because I guess they stayed up all night talking and Collin still has to go get his Visa approved for his departure to China. Jesse leaves to go bartend a private event and Greg is at work, so I sort of slink around the apartment like a cat, napping in various corners. Collin comes back and tries to invite people to his final night in the city on Facebook and it takes him a long time because he has like a thousand friends and doesn't know who most of them are. When the time comes, we drive down to Hollywood and meet at The Blue Boar, a sort of English pub, and Collin's co-workers from Kitchen 24 arrive, which I find out is right across the street and is sort of like a swanky Denny's minus the charm of Denny's. In one corner of the pub is a game where you have to swing a ring suspended by a rope and try to land it on a hook. It's a lot harder than it looks and at the moment only one of our group has successfully landed the ring. I meet some more of Collin's friends and it's embarrassing because since I've been to LA I've had the worst indigestion and have been breaking wind at a rate of at least 50/hr and it's becoming increasingly detrimental to my social skills. Jesse shows up from his private bartending gig and shows us at least $100 of free booze that they gave him at the end of the night and we all decide to again head back to our apartment in NoHo for more after-hours socializing. One of Collin's friends Sunmi jumps on my computer and is on there for like an hour and then she passes out on the long couch so I end up sleeping on the short couch and wake up several hours later confused as to where I am.
I'm even more hung-over than I was the previous day and spend most of the day trying to will the hangover away via Jedi mind tricks but nothing seems to work except the passage of time. Later that night we drive Collin to the airport and say our goodbyes and it all seems like it's happened so fast--me showing up, his short visit, the fond farewells--that I wish I had tried to move here earlier. We head back and I sleep in Collin's bed, which is now my bed, and I have some incredibly intense dreams about Chicago, they city I left behind. Since I've been here I haven't thought too much about Chicago because I wanted to leave really badly for so long and maybe that whole thought process is best reserved for another essay, but I can't really control my dreams so they stay. The next day I wake up and Greg is gone and I'm kind of at a loss what to do so I try and catch the Farmer's market down the street, but it is raining and I miss it by like 20 minutes. I do a giant circle around my neighborhood and there is a huge LED sign that says "I'VE GOT THE NEED...THE NEED FOR SPEED" and it just seems like a very LA moment, this giant digital edifice cropping out the horizon with the tagline from Top Gun. I walk past some car dealerships and decide to turn around because it feels like I've gone too far since there seems to be less interesting stuff the further north that I walk.
I've forgotten to mention that pretty much the entire week I've spent in LA it has been raining and I was looking at the weather in Chicago and for some reason there was a weird December heatwave and it was like 70 degrees and sunny for a few days, but at least there are hills and palm trees here and a lack of insanity-inducing wind gusts. The next few days I explore my neighborhood more and purchase goods that I didn't have enough room to take on the plane and procrastinate looking for jobs. All of my acquaintences are busy at the moment and the weather is kind of not great anyway so it feels okay. There are a lot of pretty girls in North Hollywood and LA in general but so far I haven't really talked with any of them, which is all right since I want to focus on other things like finding an income, playing music, writing and just meeting good new people and not getting distracted by all the beauty that passes me by.
Ben, Collin's friend who picked up the Jack LaLane juicer, comes over to pick up the rest of Collin's things and put them in his closet for storage and Greg and I help him out and in exchange he gives Greg an office chair. Ben is a solidly built, huge guy with a huge personality and seemingly endless reserves of energy and is extremely personable. He bartends down in Encino at Tony Roma's where Kareem Abdul Jabaar is a regular, his giant knees peaking over from behind the tables as he orders probably a large quantity of food. I mention to Ben that I took improv classes in Chicago since I overheard the other night he was taking classes at Upright Citizen's Brigade and he invites us to a show immediately that night. Greg misses the show because he's stuck in traffic trying to buy a turntable off of Craigslist (to compliment his Pioneer receiver, which by the way is the EXACT same receiver my parents had when I was a kid) so Ben picks me up and he shows me how he memorized the entire Aesop Rock verse for "None Shall Pass" and that practicing it has helped his diction out considerably. I tell him how I was practicing freestyle rapping a week before I left Chicago and it has helped out my improv skills and the rest of the week we pretty much go see a show every night and he becomes my new best friend in Chicago and I become his de facto replacement for Collin.
One night we go to do karaoke at a tiki bar down the street and we walk into the middle of a karaoke contest where the winner receives a grand prize of $100. A girl sings an AC/DC song and hits the notes pretty well and even does a full Angus Young duckwalk down a row of tables and she wins the hundred dollars, which inspires me to start practicing my karaoke staples in the shower the rest of the week. The next night we try and go to a show at UCB but it is sold out so we go down the street to Improv Olympics and I meet my first "celebrity", a guy who has been on the show Community several times. He seems pretty nice and talks about wanting to lose weight because he doesn't want to be cast as the "fat guy" anymore and it is a conversation I can't really relate to at all because I have the metabolism of a goose on methamphetamine but I recommend to him listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, which most recently deals with comedians getting into shape. We watch an all-female show and then an 8-person team that hands out free cookies and hot dogs before their performance. There are a lot of people from Chicago milling about before and after the show, since that's where IO got it's start, and it seems familiar and like home but I'm also slightly turned off by being around it.
Sidenote: A few things about LA: now that the rain has passed the weather IS truly amazing. It's been an average of 70 degrees and apparently it stays like that throughout the year. On top of that, the air is fairly still, so there's none of that mercurial wind that swoops your hair around like a nattering typhoon like in Chicago. As far as people here go, I haven't noticed anything remarkably different from Chicago except that there are a LOT of attractive people here, men and women. For an aesthete, it's somewhat nice seeing attractive faces everywhere you go, and I admit I am a bit vain so it's something that is somewhat soothing. It seems a little bit more earthy/spiritual down here, too. I just found out last night that the giant, space-agey building down the street from me is actually a Scientology center, which is kind of hilarious/frightening since I didn't really think stuff like that existed but it's all over the place here. So far I've been able to navigate a limited portion of LA without owning a car, mostly thanks to generous ride-offers and a not-too-shabby subway system, but I'm still wondering if I will have to make the plunge and go back to owning a car or if I can really make it happen here sans a 4-wheeled gas guzzler. Did I mention the weather here is awesome? It's like not frightening to leave my apartment in winter, in fact it feels exciting, like a personal treat that almost nobody else in America gets to enjoy. I never have to ask anyone how cold it is outside and I came almost at the exact perfect time, except that all the medical marijuana dispensaries are being shut down and all male porn stars are required to wear condoms, but just like anything in LA, those guidelines feel relaxed and bound to be reversed.
Anyway, I'm here and I've found a coffee shop down the street that sells ridiculously overrpiced, albeit delicious, pastries and plays pretty crappy music, but it's pretty much the only place to sit down and write that has free wifi (although it is only dispensed in 60 minute increments). Everyone behind the counter looks cleancut and there's a canopied outside seating section which is rare for a coffee shop, but there's plenty of dudes with beards and Macbook's with various stickers advertising various brands. The sun sets around 5pm, but until then it shines bright and beautiful, and sunglasses are mandatory until you hit a dark shaded area. I'm in LA. I'm writing. And that feels good.
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The starry-eyedness of our City's vision took advantage of multiple facets of its contours. The complete flatness of the city in contrast to most other landscapes is huge, along with the denseness of space and fairly liberal attitude towards back-street stop signs. Riding your bike in Chicago felt at once liberating and rebellious, as if you were cilia within an organism which got to bypass the bulkier mytochondria. One never had to deal with the byzantine parking rules (enforced by a 3rd-party organization since Chicago had privatized its street parking many years ago) and one was pretty much free to navigate the city however you wanted as long as you didn't crash into anything. I absolutely loved it, and scarcely used public transportation, except during extreme weather or when accompanying someone who didn't deem it safe or logical to ride bikes in the city.
Our achievements were priding, but there can still be shadows cast underneath the bridges and throughout the sodium-lit alleyways. The number one major downside to riding your bike in Chicago, as public word of mouth presumes, is that the weather there is REALLY rough for about one-third of the year. It's really hard to motivate yourself to go anywhere during the winter months, and if you chose to, be prepared to spend about 20 minutes bundling up for extreme cold and harsh, spiraling winds. I wore a ski mask and goggles during most of February, the fog of my breath obstructing my lenses as cars zoomed around me. Fortunately, I survived the Winter infirmary by being extremely careful and tactician-like in my route-chosing--taking back streets, riding slowly and trying not to get knocked off my bike in extreme blasts wind.
