So I promised to tell ya about my Hollyhood night…

Met my adorable friend Tristan last August…he managed a clothing store at the time… but now he’s opening his own (more on that later).  Y’know how sometimes people just have good energy?  Well that’s Tristan.  He just makes you smile.

(Tristan is the blond)

So he sometimes invites me places, but I don’t go out as often as him (he’s only 21, and I can’t party like I used to)….but Nathan was still visiting family in Arkansas and  I figured what the hell.

And yeah, I used this website as an excuse.

Tristan was having a birthday party with two other people.  The cab driver took me downtown to the address, and it was skid row.  Literally.  Tents lining the street.  Someone had actually spray painted SKID ROW on a trashcan (were they being funny? Ironic?  Poignant?  Honest?).  I wanted to stop and take a picture, but honestly, it was a scary place.  This is the LA no one talks about, and you don’t go there by choice, let alone for a party.   As I paid the cab driver, a man came up to the window and yelled at me for money.  He kept saying “I have full-blown AIDS”.  I told him I didn’t have any cash, only a card.  I wished I had money to give him.  He didn’t believe me.  The cab driver finally held up my card to show him.  The homeless guy gave me a disgusted look and limped off.  The street was vacant.  The cab driver didn’t want to leave me, and I thought I must have gotten the wrong address…then I saw some hipsters headed down an alley and a security guard at the entrance.

It looked like any deserted building from the outside.  Inside was lit up, weird movie scenes projected on the wall, a band, later there were fireworks and fire dancers.

Tristan’s friend makes crocheted koozies (I want one!):

The people were all from the fashion and movie world.  Some were, ummm…different:

One, a producer, came up and asked if I had drugs, which was so cliched bad Hollywood movie it made me laugh.  Another was an actor who I didn’t recognize, and, for some reason, didn’t want to tell me what he was in.  He didn’t mind telling me he was an actor, though.  Do you know him?  Is he famous?

This guy in the top hat is an artist.  He was really cool. The girl in the hood is channeling Little Red, I guess:

This is his flyer:

check out his website here (see, I stand by my word! I promised you a shout-out, and here ya go!)  And here is

This guy was so funny and sweet:

Another guy seemed very cool, and seemed to really listen to me.  It was so refreshing, meeting a nice guy in LA who seemed genuinely interested in my thoughts.  He told me he wrote TV reality shows.  He knew I was married (not that this matters to many LA guys, but he seemed respectful of that).  So I thought…well, he just finds me interesting.  How refreshing. Later I googled him (yup, I admit it, I google people).  He wrote for dating reality shows, then wrote and directed a movie about a guy who wrote dating reality shows…then opened a business offering dating advice from a guy who worked on dating reality shows.  I was completely suckered.  All of a sudden his genuineness seemed so fucking calculated:

http://www.videojug.com/user/USEX0148

Whether he thought he might get some action because I was there alone, or I was just a chance to work on his dating guru techniques, seeing him give advice via the internet on wooing women made me feel so weird and manipulated.  But also, it was kinda hilarious.

Moral: nothing is quite what it seems in La-La land, especially the people. Especially people who work on reality television shows (with the exception of Chris and Carla – love you!)

The whole night was surreal.  It was fun, actually.  Though part of me could not forget those homeless people a few feet away from this fabulous party where we sucked down overpriced mixed drinks.  I wonder what they thought of the fireworks?  But I still had fun, which might make me a horrible person…or just human.

Afterwards, Tristan and I and his sweet friends went to a late night diner on Vermont.  I had “the dime bag”, which is eggs and pancakes and hashbrowns.  Then Tristan got water spilled on him, so he took off his pants in the middle of the street at 5 a.m.  He didn’t pee on himself, that’s from the spill.  And he said I could post this picture.  And I will, because he is so cute.

All in all, it was great getting trashed and acting crazy with kids who are in their 20′s, but I’m just as happy to sit at home and watch TV.  And I guess that is because I’m not in my 20′s anymore. (though, on occasion, it is fun to pretend I still am)

Skip Hay once turned to our Chekhov class and said (insert growly cigarette-stained, Arkansan twanged voice): Y’know, you’re all gonna die one day. And at the time, I’d found it shocking. Me?  Die?  I’m so fucking alive.  I mean, I just went to JR’s last night and made out with this cool guy whose name I can’t remember but he’s in a band and then we all went to this after  party at this house and the craziest shit went down….but now, years later, I have started to understand.  At least a little.  Skip wasn’t talking about death…exactly.  Or maybe he was.  I don’t know, he’s a genius…but I’ve used that line, ya’ll r gonna die one day, in my classes and seen my own initial shock reflected in their eighteen year-old faces…and somehow, it is starting to make sense now, why he said it, not for the shock factor or to be cruel or horrible… He might have said it out of kindness.

I taught Russian lit  this year, a whole unit on Checkhov, and I know I will always be a sad imitation of Skip, who  can rip a short story out by the root…but there is something to those Russians.  Everything is extreme.  Tolstoy’s favorite part of the bible was Revelation 3:15-16: I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth.…and see, I even put it in another color because this whole blog entry is so fucking depressing. In fact.  I’ll give this blog a good title that can act as a warning…I’ll even make the font small so it’ll be hard to read…

…and, truth be told, there is something so freeing about having a blog and saying what you really feel and knowing others can read it, or choose not to read it, but that it actually exists.

My pole dancing teacher says I forget to breathe.  When we solo dance at the end of class to the song we have picked…well, most of the time I don’t remember those five minutes, in that dark room, sliding across the floor and rolling around, crouching low like some hungry animal or whipping myself around the pole in combat boots or, other times, just grinning to myself and prancing…feeling my arms reach above me for the next surprise life has to offer me.   Anything.  Everything. Bring it on.  Yeah, it isn’t what people think, pole dancing.  But, according to Janelle (and I believe what she tells me, because I admire her greatly) – I forget to breathe. And my response, when she said that…without thinking, yeah, you’re right, and I forget to breathe in my everyday life too.

Is that what you were talking about Skip?  Breathing?

I’m not trying to be deep here.  In fact, I will admit I know absolutely nothing about anything ever ever ever. But I do know I’m lucky. And I know Lynn lived and loved fully enough for two lifetimes…and I know  it means so much to me, those of you taking the time to read me…even just a paragraph now and then.  And please, if you think of something, agree or disagree, anything at all, say it in the comments.  I don’t want this to be a void, this blog…

I guess what I’m saying… I hope this website doesn’t paint my life as all roses and icing, ’cause some days really suck.

I haven’t talked much about losing Lynn here…the first few days were really hard.  And then I started feeling better.  But then something would happen…like I’d be flipping through my phone contacts and see his name and feel this piercing stab…I’ve lost people before, but somehow this is different…so unexpected and so fucking unfair.  He was way too young, too kind…okay, I’m gonna stop now.  ’Cause it is such a downer.  But  I had to do it… ’cause if I want to be honest, to show you who I really am, I have to show you the hard times too…anyway, everyone cry big fat sobbing tears for me ’cause my life is so hard…I know it isn’t.  I have a roof and people I love.  And I had fun last night…which is what I had intended to write about in the first place before I started spewing all these hot/cold/lukewarm words…

(edit)

Okay, I just cut a whole paragraph I had written.  It was about lost souls in LA. I cut it because I realized I could never say  it as perfectly as West does in Day of The Locusts (heads up: this is some super gorgeous/depressing shit):

….The police force would have to be doubled when the stars started to arrive. At the sight of their heroes and heroines, the crowd would turn demoniac. Some little gesture, either too pleasing or too offensive, would start it moving and then nothing but machine guns would stop it. Individually the purpose of its members might simply to be to get a souvenir, but collectively it would grab and rend…

…Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

See?  Wow,  I mean, what is the point of describing Hollywood when Nathaneal West has given us that?  Luscious. perfect. prose.   And that is everything I wanted to say, and I can only dream of one day being able to express myself with a millionth of the power West did…that is Hollywood I am feeling right now.

But here is what I need to focus on, and I will even put it in a different color (because these are good things, and because, obviously, I just learned how to use the color button on WordPress and am officially color-happy):

It is Saturday night.  And there is salsa music from the complex behind us and loud Spanglish and hysterical beer-fueled laugher.  And on our other side, in the new condo (East Berlin, as the Girls called it) someone in standing on the porch smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone…and my new neighbors seem nice, and their door is open often, and they laugh a lot, and it makes me feel not so alone.  And my parents, who I get to see soon in Philly…and I’ll get to walk Old City with my dad and Matilda…and there is my new nephew in Miami, and his name is Caleb and he’s healthy and I can already tell from the pictures he’s a genius.   So there are good things.  There is Oklahoma, there are friends I adore…

And there are all of you. And those are the good things.

And tomorrow I will tell you about last night, becasue it was true Hollyhood night.  And for now I will force myself to put on lipstick and walk to the end of the condos, because there was an invitation on my mailbox…there is a party at the end of the complex.

and I have to go, right?  Not just for me…for you. Remember, I’m using this site as an excuse.

UPDATE:

i did it.  i put on lipstick and wore that shirt in honor of West.

‘

i would actually see this movie.  i can’t even highlight this one.  there’s too much good shit in here.

oh, man, i’m gonna need a whole new section for these!  And i’m gonna highlight my favorite parts for you….

What was your favorite movie as a teenager?  Why?  What was your favorite scene?

And no, this ain’t a test.  You don’t have to answer every part.  You don’t have to answer at all. But I’d love if you did.