In The City

When I drive in Los Angeles, I listen to one band. That band is Eagles. And I generally only listen to one song. That song is "In The City" from the album The Long Run (Asylum, 1979). No matter where I drive in L.A. County, "In The City" makes the most amount of sense to me, which is why that song is on repeat-mode on my iPod, all the time. I once listened to "In The City" 16 times in a row in Silver Lake while waiting to buy weed from Bill Maher's cousin, Jimmy-Jim.

So, when I left the Fox lot early this afternoon, my compulsion to listen to "Disco Strangler" instead of "In The City" surprised me. But I rejected that impulse. Which made me crank up the volume when "King Of Hollywood" played for the third time. And that's what led me away from Beverly Hills and into Hollywood, speeding like I was on fucking "ill". I drove miles and miles over oil-stained macadam: From Franklin I drove Normandie south to Beverly Boulevard. Took N. Ardmore up to Maplewood. Cut west to Western. Drove north to Sunset. Sunset to Wilton Place. South to Melrose, past Paramount Pictures. Cut up Vine to Hollywood Blvd., and then west to Cahuenga. South to Santa Monica Blvd., and drove six blocks west to cut back up N. Highland, and then all the way up to Franklin (where I stopped to buy a half-dozen pornographic magazines), and then stopped again, two blocks later, for a 12 pack of Amstel Light. I continued on Franklin east and shot up Los Feliz all the way to Glendale. I took Glendale Avenue to the 134 and wound up driving all the way to fucking Burbank where I ran out of gas just as I was coasting into an Arco station. 

From Burbank, I took the Ventura Freeway to Jaxx' place in Tarzana, where I bought an ounce of chronic and an 8-ball of meth. Jaxx was stoned, sitting on his sofa, wearing a trench coat over a pair of plaid pajamas. Jaxx said that (he was almost certain) someone was filming a snuff porn in Reseda, but earlier, when he asked a neighborhood kid about it (the possibility of a snuff porn being filmed in the neighborhood), she said he was confusing it (the unrealistic idea of something as absurd as a snuff porno being filmed locally) with an animated short film based (loosely) around the Industrial Revolution. Jaxx eventually told me to "forget I mentioned it, hombre."

I hung around Jaxx' place for a while, smoking weed, watching the Obama/McCain debate. Later, when Jaxx put on Season One of The Greatest American Hero DVD, my desire to leave was so overwhelming that I began to cry.

Later, as the sun was setting, I stood at the railing on the south side of Griffith Park Observatory, stoned, confused about the Santa Ana winds, looking down upon the L.A. basin floor as it sparkled like clean, new diamonds. The orange haze over West Los Angeles, and further out over the Pacific, afforded me with a lucid hope and indescribable clarity that I had not felt in so long. It was almost like the city's emasculatory hold on me had somehow been loosened enough so I could take a deep, sharp breath; something that I had been needing for forever, it seemed. Even from the precipice of Griffith Park it was only dirty, gritty Los Angeles laying below me like a whore with her legs spread, but there seemed to be a new hope out there on that horizon. Out beyond the neon lights. I know there must be something better. But there's no where else in site. It's survival in the city. When you live from day to day. City streets don't have much pity. When you're down, that's where you'll stay. 

In the city.