Palms Era
From November 1, 2007 through May 1, 2008, I lived in
Palms with Brett. For the most part, it
was a period of promise and relative harmony.
It started off with the debacle of the arrest at Disneyland, and quickly
turned more positive from that point forward.
Brett wanted to make it up to me, so the next night they held a “Disney at
Night” event, he bought tickets again, and we went , and we had a pretty good
time. He also took me to see I am Legend at an IMAX theater, which
was the first time I saw a feature film in IMAX, and it was very cool. He also took me to see Cloverfield, which I was not all that excited to see but which I
considered an above-average popcorn flick.
My prescription ran out in January of 2008, only
being good for three months due to the sketchy nature of my verification, and
Brett provided me with all of the herbals I desired from January through
May. This even while he was forced not
to smoke due to court orders that he attend Narcotics Anonymous and paranoid
fears that he would be tested, which he eventually overcame.
The above two paragraphs describe the vast majority
of the things we did together, and much of our time inside that apartment was
spent apart, with minimal speaking. I
liked it that way and he didn’t seem to crave socialization, so it worked out
well, except for a couple minor details involving music which would eventually
compel me to believe that I could live a happier existence on my own. But that was much later.
The whole time I lived there, I worked at Jefferies,
and Jefferies was very close. It was a
dream of a commute for L.A., another reason I regret changing my housing
arrangements. It took five minutes to
get from my house to my office. Straight
down Rose Ave., right on Sepulveda, pass Pico, pass Olympic, building at the
corner of Santa Monica—an absolute dream for a city where the biggest issue is
unanimously agreed to be the traffic congestion. I did not however have a parking spot in our
building, and this became an issue for me as well, as sometimes there would be
frustrating five or ten minute walks just to get to my car, not to mention
nervousness about its protection on the street.
Though my car did get keyed while it was in L.A. I parked it one night in Culver City, to go
to the head shop called Nirvana that Brett had told me to go to—I had broken
the female piece of the Ghost and needed a replacement—and I found one there
with almost no problem. When I came back
there were long key scratches along both sides of the car. Why anybody did this to me I can’t
imagine. Sometimes I feel like it was
punishment for past anonymous transgressions I’ve committed that no one else
knows about and so I will never know who keyed my car in the same anonymous
way. Other times I feel it was someone
that found my New York University bumper sticker ostentatious and therefore had
to cut me down to size. Lastly I feel as
if it may have been someone who was just random and insane. Needless to say, it upset me greatly, but
fortunately it was covered by the comprehensive aspect of my car insurance and
so the vandalism was repaired with $0 deductible.
For the six months I lived with Brett, I did not
worry as much about my personal financial situation, but more about my total
life situation. It was a great time to
“get my act together” but in the process of doing that, I made some terrible
decisions and I ended up two steps behind where I started when I had first
moved to that apartment.
New Year’s Eve was notable. And so is Kenny. Of all the people I met in L.A., he came the
closest to personifying the type of success I pined for in moving there. He had grown up there, in Eagle Rock, and had
actually been at school in New York for a while. He was a couple years younger than me. I met him first, and knew him, as a friend of
Molly’s, first meeting him at the studio in Venice Beach, playing Metroid on
the Wii console he was lending them, him giving me patient direction though I
lacked every conceivable skill appropriate to the game. Later he would tell me that he had met
Vincent Gallo and Eric Erlandson at the improv jam session concert tour they
played around the country, ending in L.A.
I told him I had read about those shows and vaguely considered
going. I think Hole is kind of cool
despite the huge amount of hate they receive.
I also saw Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny and vaguely liked both,
though Kenny had seen neither.
Apparently he helped the duo with some of their technologically-advanced
computer audio resources when they ran into problems before starting the
show. He talked to them enough to say he
was now friends with Vincent Gallo, and was invited to his condo, which was in
a building downtown. Perhaps Kenny was
star-struck, but he ended up renting in the same building and he had a very
nice loft that was something like $1600 a month, perfect for someone like him,
enjoying a budding, successful, career in the arts. I wanted to latch onto him any way I could,
but there was no way I could appear useful to him. Everyone in L.A. writes. There are more writers than there are actors,
or photography models. If he had asked
me to pose for him I would have but he was always commissioned by other
people. He did work for the L.A.
Times. He had a housewarming party at
his loft and there were maybe ten people there.
He showed some weird French movie projected onto his wall. There was an older photographer/artist friend
there who was probably in his fifties and who smoked a couple bowls by the
window. In the end it was a fun party,
but it was sparsely attended. I was
hoping to meet Vincent Gallo but I did not.
But before he moved into his downtown loft, Kenny was
one of the few others to join me at Sycamore and Molly’s new apartment in the
Hollywood Hills. At the end of the
night, I drove home drunker than I probably ever did in L.A., and apparently
Kenny fell down and opened up a gash in his head, and got into his car, and
passed out, and woke up in the morning and drove himself to the emergency
room. I remember that being crazy.
But mostly New Year’s Eve was one of the best nights
I had in L.A. We just drank a lot,
everyone was in a good mood, we sat around for a while near the end of the
night listening to Panda Bear, we went outside on their terrace and watched
fireworks in six different directions get fired off at midnight. I don’t remember much of anything else but I
know I was pretty wasted and had lot of fun.
Oh there was also the girl Catherine, who had taken
the studio in Venice Beach as the new tenant so Sycamore and Molly could move
to Hollywood. She was a co-worker of
Molly’s. She brought all of her stuff
with her that night and planned to sleep over on their pull-out couch due to
planned drunkenness. At a certain point
Molly’s friend Sarah and her friend Cara were calling to say they were going to
be there soon, but they had smoked weed at Cara’s apartment and had gotten
extremely panicked and anxious.
Catherine thought this was massively intriguing. When they finally showed up, and as we had a
drink on the terrace around midnight, she confronted them about their evening’s
prior entertainment, for whatever reason I don’t know. It was somewhat awkward. It was almost as if she was scolding them for
smoking, but then was also envious because she really wanted to smoke and
hadn’t been able to experiment with it enough before. It was confusing.
But Palms had been relatively close to Venice Beach,
so it hadn’t been too bad to go visit them there. The drive to Hollywood was a bit more of a
commitment. My usual jogging pattern
would be to take a right onto Overland, go down a few blocks to Venice Blvd.,
and take that the four miles or so down to the beach. It was great and a very hardcore work out,
usually taking me between 90 and 120 minutes.
About a month ago I suffered from hematuria for the first time and now I
would be scared to go out for that long, but I never had any health issues in
California. I like to say that it was
the healthiest period of my life. I was
in excellent physical condition, and in an excellent place mentally, despite
smoking pot far too often.
I loved working at Jefferies. Jeremiah was a great partner. He was 21 or 22 years old, I can’t remember
which exactly, had a serious girlfriend, lived with his family in K-Town and
moved into his own $500 a month room in a boarding house with his girlfriend
while I was working with him. Perhaps I
compelled him to move out on his own. He
still had to pay about $300 or $400 a month to help his parents pay their
rent. I remember that being especially
impressive to me. I marveled at the
fact. If I had to help my parent’s pay
their mortgage, I would have a very different attitude towards being
alive. Being that sort of benefactor may
be something of a curse, but it can also be a blessing. You know that you matter.
I will also never forget Warren and Oneyda, Linda and
Ben, Giorgio, Adam, Maria, Tommy, Jon, Genie and Maxine (who seemed to be
nearing retirement age but were loaded), Steven, Fred, Anthony—and probably a
few others—Mario, the doorman—Adir and Raoul, the mail room guys, the latter of
which told me I hated life and was the closest to getting into a fight with me
one day when I made a snide comment about why he needed to talk and shout so
loudly—it was very intimidating when he obviously had heard me say something
and confronted me and was like, “I’m sorry, did you have a problem?” in this
overly polite tone of voice, as if he wanted to make sure he was being
professional but still wanting to scare me a little, and he probably had the
right, since I think he had worked there longer than almost everyone else.
On my birthday they gave me a cake there. Everyone was nice to me. Maria gave me a hug. She was my boss. She knew I was leaving at the beginning of
May and she said she was so sad about it.
I wish I had never left. My life
in L.A. might have turned out slightly differently.
I had my amp sent over and plugged my guitar in and
played as quietly as I could muster, and Brett still knocked on my door and
said that it was too loud. Everything
was too loud. I was in a band with
Sycamore and Molly, and her co-worker Spencer.
We were called Cinnamonster. I
would be the singer but after our one practice I knew I needed to bring more to
the table so I tried to get better at guitar, to no avail. I thought getting my own apartment would help
me develop the motivation to become adept at the instrument.
There had to have been more that happened there, but
really, there wasn’t. Those six months
fell into a highly regular pattern, as does the rest of my life whenever I am
holding down a job. In Palms, it was:
wake up at 5:45 or 6 every morning, shower, brush teeth, shave every other day,
sit down Indian-style next to me bed and put on music very quietly and smoke a
bowl, leave the apartment by 6:45 AM, drive to work, take cigarette break in
morning, after lunch, and in afternoon, leave at 4, or 5, sometimes, make
overtime hours everyday, go home, smoke again, go running once every three or
four days, if not run, work on second novel, see Ashleigh at Beverly Hills
Dermatology every other Wednesday, make myself a bag lunch for the next day of
work, make provisions for dinner, watch DirecTV, go to sleep between 9 and 10
or so, repeat five days a week, work whenever necessary on Saturday, pull down
between $1800 and $2000 a month at least, visit Sycamore and Molly every
weekend or every other weekend, or whenever, go to Amoeba Music whenever bored and
wanting to buy something to make myself happy, go to the movies by myself
occasionally, make short, intermittent small talk with Brett whenever I
happened to see him in the kitchen or
living room, live a generally peaceful and generally lonely existence. After six months of it I had gotten impatient
and needed a change. The day after my 25th
birthday I made that change, and a tube opened up, and I slid down it, and
though the ride has evened out a little, it continues to this day.
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