Everybody Comes to Hollywood

Yeah, I lived in LA once… For the record, some of the most amazing people in my life, who are very dear to my heart, I met while in Los Angeles. Some of the most amazing experiences in my life also took place there. Looking back, this is a tale of heartbreak and homesickness. Hollywood just held me for a fleeting moment as it passed…

From DIRTY Magazine, 2010

I moved to Hollywood this last Spring. Well, employment opportunities moved me here. If you had asked me this time last year if I’d be in southern California, I’d say “fuck no!” – especially after working so long to move back into my beloved hometown of San Francisco.

The View from the back of my old Apartment…

The transition has been a mix of joy, anxiety, curiosity and longing for the particular places and people of home. It’s been filled with my own personal ironies, like having my Black Jacket game on lock in the middle of a 117°F summer (Record of 113 in DTLA). Each day I can’t decide if I miss San Francisco less, or just hate Hollywood less. No, I definitely still miss San Francisco. Get ready for my triumphant return…

In the smallest idiosyncrasies, Hollywood is a lot like SF. And in more conspicuous traits: the main streets carry a vague scent of urine. There are lights, cars, hipsters. The usual stuff.

But with my new different neighborhood, also comes new weird shit. The Church of Scientology castle looms just a few blocks from my apartment; the surrounding yard looks like something out of Anne of Green Gables but I’m half expecting a busted ass Haunted House prop to jump out at me instead of a black SUV whisking away their clan of celebrities.

I’ve had my moments where I don’t want to hate it though; moments of catching myself thinking, “well, getting to photoshoots is much easier in LA; there’s so much more skate industry here; you meet a lot more people with interesting lives here…”

Except… so many people with seemingly “interesting” lives talk to you only to figure out if your life has something more interesting that may be of use to them. Not through authenticity and immersion. No, through affect.

It’s a city full of mockingbirds trying to figure out how to be crows.

Networking unabashedly rears its slut face at every waking, breathing second of the day. People do not have “conversations” in Hollywood. They have “exchanges,” rather – a verbal barter economy based on social/industry equity. Everyone wants to meet everyone else’s perception of success, while plenty are doing just fine already on their own.

Anyway… Each time I wander the ‘hood, I almost feel like I’m back home. If you replace every other liquor store on Mission street with a Sex shop or Tattoo parlor, you’re instantly transported to Hollywood Blvd. In fact, replace all of the Mission’s liquor stores, and throw in countless smoke shops. Replace Powell Center with the Hollywood Suit Outlet, and swap out one of the Federal buildings for L Ron Hubbard’s Life Exhibit [sic], and I feel right at home.

The crazies wander the strip on late weeknights, when the crotch-dress foot traffic is relatively dead.

People set up fort under the 101 overpasses and behind music venues, but unlike seedier parts of SF, there’s a sense of nonchalance and unobtrusiveness about sleeping on the streets around Hollywood. The weather is just that nice, and the pedestrians are otherwise just too drunk to notice.

I find myself walking down the boulevards here at all hours of night, just like I did in the Mission and SOMA. Sometimes I’m drunk, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m crying, sometimes I’m laughing to myself about stupid things I see along the way. I’m usually alone.

Walk for an hour here though, and you’re still not even halfway to wherever your drunk ass decided it was going. You could take a bus, sure… LADOT supposedly has one of the best public trans systems in the US (never mind the 3 hour, 3-connection route it suggested I take for my 8-mile work commute to Burbank). In some ways, the Metro rivals the underground SF MUNI subway system, but Metro Hollywood/Vine stop dumps you right into the lap of some VIP event in the W hotel, not at the 16th street Walgreens in the middle of a drum circle crack deal.

You could drive here, instead. In fact, you have to drive here. Actually, both walking and driving in this town are their own special kind of torture. “LA Traffic” is not so much a myth as it is just misunderstood. Yes, there are a lot of drivers on the road. But most of them move fast enough to keep the flow. The freeways here are well designed and efficient. On the other hand, the majority of drivers believe exit lanes, turn lanes, intersections, crosswalks and curbs are their private lanes for overtaking cars to get around the very backup their dumb asses are creating.

Even better: at any moment your route can be completely cock-blocked by a swarm of paparazzi, detours diverting you around a sitcom filming, a bottleneck getting to the Hollywood Bowl, or Lindsay Fucking Lohan trying to get trashed at your corner bar, causing it to take 50 minutes to move one block to be able to pee in your own apartment. I just got off work, Lindsay… Stay in jail and let us be.

Not only do you have to drive here, you have to pay someone to park your car. I guess on the upside: LA is full of fucking parking. It’s everywhere! In fact, it’s such a bountiful goddamn resource that people never learned how to use it correctly. Do you see? DO YOU SEE? Parking! Everywhere! But the naked LA eye won’t find it – it’s been thrown away like gutter trash, squandered on the hopelessly myopic and inconsiderate.

It’s like wiping your ass with $100 bills.

In fact, executing accurate and efficient parallel parking in this town might as well be rocket surgery. I do not want to fly in that rocket. No wonder any self respecting business has valet. In their own parking lots. Yeah, it’s that bad.

It takes most people more turns to get into an ample parking space than there are skanks and bump-its on the Saturday night Les Deux stroll.

And they still end up five fucking feet from the curb in the middle of two otherwise perfectly good spots (the skanks or the parked cars, you pick).

Ultimately, it seems the thing San Francisco and Hollywood share at the deepest end of the irony pool… is that people seem to always “end up here” with all these dreams and aspirations, only to get caught up in the Invisible City – an imaginary construct.

Sure there are valid reasons for migrating: new inspirations to experience, new environments to enrich a person’s life. And these two fine cities are as good as any for the shiftless, the brilliantly creative, people with personalities and dreams far too big for their hometowns, and the new breed of questionably-funded youth in revolt.

Spoiler Alert: these cities are dirty, expensive and you won’t suddenly become something other than what you are capable of.

They may push you to bring out things inside of you that had been held back, and they may change your life forever – but they sure as hell won’t make you anything you never could have been. At any given moment, a person is doing the best they possibly can. Even if that “best” is still pretty fucking bad.

The Hollywood/LA lifestyle is such a huge thing in and of itself that it belies any discrete characteristics or possibilities these cities actually posses. For everyone that comes here and accomplishes something amazing, three more fail in pursuit of that alleged lifestyle, and instead enter the resulting authentic one of overspending and underworking.

The folklore around these cities is so grand that it self perpetuates, seduces and captures… then so often crushes and disappoints, dropping you off for the longest, most soul-breaking walk of shame.

Gone wrong, Hollywood is a good lay with a bad person – you’re not supposed to stay friends after that.

Yet something about both Hollywood and SF inspires such intense loyalty – strange, in a time where no one is really “from” anywhere anymore. Nearly everyone is transplanted from somewhere else, seeking that alliance normally reserved for the last of the natives… making excuses and defending our cities till death. A time where no one can really afford shit anymore… making excuses and living with 15 roommates just to be “here” or “there” or whatever. Luckily I only have two roommates, and they’re awesome. But it’s both a privilege and a unique, mediocre sadness, to witness the things we do, day-to-day, in two cities that have inspired my own roller coaster of love and hate.

It’s a roller coaster with the best scenic view of any fucking place on earth, simultaneously intensifying and numbing my own humanity with each crack in the sidewalk.

But like I said, no matter where we go, we can never be anything other than what we are. Here or anywhere, it’s our fucking life. Make it or let it die. Not even Hollywood could save anyone then.

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