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Sunset Strip
Saturday, July 17 1999
Kim and I go to the Whiskey A Go-Go for Cyclefly, but instead we see some me-too San Diego white boy rap metal bands.
I was extremely hungover this morning and useless for anything that couldn't be done stretched out on a couch. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for others), the teevee featured perfect hangover recovery programming, the monotonous broadcast and re-broadcast of trickling details coming from the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s private airplane, which had turned up 404 on its way from New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard. Not being a yuppie People Magazine purchasing housewife, I hadn't really been familiar with the JFK Jr. story and was surprised to learn how little the hunk had accomplished during his life with all of his inheritance and name recognition.
The plan for the day had been to pick Kim up at 2:15 PM at the San Diego International Airport, and then later we'd drive up to Los Angeles to attend a Cyclefly performance at the Whiskey A Go-Go. But Kim called me from Phoenix all bummed out saying her connection there was delayed two hours. It didn't sound like a big deal to me; my experience with years of riding Greyhound crossgrain through the Appalachians has left me with the expectation that layovers typically run on the long side of three hours.
Kim called back several times, gradually hatching an alternative plan. She would catch a different plane to Los Angeles and I'd drive solo up to LAX airport and we'd get some fancy hotel somewhere. It made sense to me.
Kim had told me to pack her some clothes, especially underwear, but when I started looking at them without her actually in them, I quickly became confused as to which was which and what did what and what went where and whether or not she even still wore them. Girl clothes are still something of a wonderful mystery for me, which is a good thing since they continue to carry with them a certain fetishistic appeal.
Driving north on "the 5," two things of interest happened. One was the sudden appearance of a terrifying small white car on my tail. Its front hood was all smashed in and uncloseably ajar, flapping up and down in the breeze like the terrible mouth of a fearsome injured beast. I was very happy when the car pulled around me and continued tailing other people. I noted that it was driven by someone with a shaved head and I think I even saw a racist bumpersticker, though I can't imagine anyone wanting to leave a car unattended with such a provocative message.
The second site came in the midst of a remarkably brief traffic jam. It was a big recreational trailer lying on its side directly in the middle of the northbound lanes. I could see its exposed muffler, transmission and other normally hidden dirt-covered goodies in the full light of day. A slough of cars had pulled over, apparently to serve as witnesses or to help out, but no one appeared to be injured.
After a little crowded vehicular mayhem in the vicinity of LAX, Kim was in the car, Sophie was licking my face in delight, and we were headed northward towards Beverly Hills, where Kim already had a specific hotel in mind: the Avalon Hotel, once known as the Beverly Carlton Hotel and the home of Marilyn Monroe. The only challenge was Sophie; like most hotels, the Avalon Hotel doesn't allow dogs.
While we decided what to do, we parked near the Avalon and walked with Sophie into the adjacent Beverly business district. The neighborhood kind of reminded me of downtown Bethesda, Maryland, though the people seemed generally more open and friendly (of course, Kim and Sophie may have had a slight influence on this metric).
We sat down to an expensive lupper of Middle Eastern Food out in front of a hip little café. A bum unsuccessfully tried to spare change us before we'd finished.
The only other major thing we did was buy a litre of Jim Beam.
Back at the Avalon, we decided to pack Sophie up in her little transport bag and smuggle her in just like we do on the airlines. Soon enough we found ourselves in a room on the fourth floor in the back building. Every object in the room was super-mod, function-over-form stuff, and mostly in earthy shades of green. Kim thought the bathroom was a small-scale high school locker room, right down to the industrial-strength stainless steel door handles.
I was tired and weak from a day of hangover and all I really wanted to do was watch the teevee. With the exception of a few checks on the latest news about John F. Kennedy Jr.'s missing plane, I kept the tube pretty much locked on the Sundance alternative film channel. I was initially drawn in by Microcosmos a virtually narration-free French film focusing on the mundane daily struggles of insects. It's non-stop eye candy, the perfect experience for the pot smoker who likes to reflect on the parallel universe of the arthropods. When a rain drop falls on a water strider, it's a big deal. It takes very little to rock an insect's world. The close-up photography and sound effects were amazing, like a Koyaanisqatsi. Next came the wacky Italian film Il Mostro (the Monster) about a bumbling petty criminal mistaken by authorities for a serial killer. Authorities send an attractive female officer to befriend and secretly investigate our protagonist, and then of course...
By this time it was past 10:00 pm, so it was time to head down to the Whiskey A Go-Go.
We ended up on Sunset Blvd., which, on a Saturday night, was not the place to be if you were heading somewhere. This was the same thing as the world famous Sunset Strip, and on Saturday Nights it has nothing to do with transportation. It's a parking lot, but no one stuck in its clutch seems to mind. They're too busy checking out the babes and/or the hunks and showing off their shiny rides.
Via side streets we found the Whiskey A Go-Go without difficulty. Parking was $5, but we intended to get into the show by virtue of the Cyclefly guest list. We were in for a rude awakening. It turned out that Cyclefly, the band we had come so far out of our way to see, had played at 9:00PM and had only played for a half hour. Everything was a pain; we had to cajole the fat girl checking IDs just to get in for free. By the time we got inside, the only bands playing were whiteboy rap-metal crossover bands, and most of these were from fucking San Diego. "San Diego!" they kept shouting patriotically between songs, and we'd just have to gnash our teeth at our misfortune. We actually knew a couple of the guys on stage, but this didn't make us happy. Later we found out that bands playing at the Whiskey have to pay $500 for the privilege. That's no way to rock and roll.
The scene in the black-painted interior of the world-famous Whiskey A Go-Go didn't come across as quite as genuine as it had been at the Dragonfly. For example, unlike at the Dragonfly, there were plenty of guys who looked like they'd just blown in from a frat party across town. Of course, whiteboy rap-metal has a way of drawing crowds of precisely this sort of person, so perhaps it's unfair to judge the Whiskey from what we could see on this particular night. There were, after all, some interesting spectacles. For example, at the side of the stage where Kim and I were hanging out, a couple of girls clad in vaguely bondage-style clothes were dancing with one another in such a way that I expected them to launch into full-blown cunning linguistics at any moment.
Kim was a lot more disgusted with the scene than I was. When I'd picked her up at LAX, she'd seemed genuinely enchanted with the hustle-bustle of Los Angeles, at least in comparison to San Diego, our backwater adopted home town. Now, with regard to the pathetic schedule of the Whiskey A Go-Go, she was saying things such as "This would have never happened in New Orleans." She wanted to leave as quickly as possible and go to the Dragonfly, the place where we'd originally seen Cyclefly. I thought that we should hang out and, you know, find out what this place was like, and I had to be assertive to get my way. But we didn't end up staying very long. Overall the night was a disappointment.
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