Night Flight

Wednesday night, back in the cold embrace of Hollywood. I left Johnny's pad after taking a nap with the blurry television bickering in the background, a taped Law and Order from Saturday night just what I need before I brave the mean LA streets alone all night: homicide detectives trying to unravel a murder mystery; a man stabbed to death in an alley. Arrogant, dick-eyed detectives sleuthing around with pistols and fancy monologues and the same hard ass Christopher Meloni speech at the end of every episode. He was on OZ playing a prisoner not afraid to bare it all in the shower now he plays a cop, God he's so versatile, I kid, it's like Shaquille O'neal doing Othello. After eating a tv dinner whilst ignoring the tv I packed up my Yamaha guitar I had purchased in one of those Persian-owned music shops on the boulevard after I had bartered the owner down to 100 dollars and no tax , I had broken the b-string on the epiphone that afternoon while tuning it before I had even got a chance to play and besides I did not want to lose my vintage guitar if I was going to be out all night. I filled up a 200 ml vodka bottle with coffee (only bottle he had) said goodbye to Johnny and grabbed my pack and guitar. I walked down to Hollywood/Western Metro station and shuffled down the steps into the stale and musky underground. I had no money for a ticket, but my luck had been good so I did not worry about it. I exited the train at Hollywood and Highland and walked up the three flights of stairs out into the neon night. The streets were bustling with people, the celebrity mascots or look-a-likes or whatever their called, the super-heroes and costumed picture posers, the musicans the cd-hustlers, the beggars, the poetry peddlers, the performers and dancers and of course the drug dealers but worst of all the fuzz stationed along the curb in the black and white crown vic with the red lights flashing and some poor soul handcuffed and head bowed staring solemnly at the ground. LA cops are the worst, they're notorious for beating up innocent but maybe slightly crazed individuals and for using excessive force on people, but the deputies and sheriffs, the green shirts are worse then the police, they are human garbage, scum, all of them, they're all young and look like rookies and subjective analysis has deemed them unfit for a badge and they need something to prove, these guys are former bullies and locker-room towel-whippers. I've had my ass kicked by the Los Angeles Police on two occasions, and once I was bumrushed and then dogpiled by seven or eight Santa Monica Police officers for drunken conduct in a park and then had my face mashed in the dirt and my head bloodied and kicked in and was hauled off to jail, where they scanned and photographed all my tattoos for like an hour to compare them to the ones in the gang tattoo data base while the whole time I asked for water and was told repeatedly to shut the fuck up. Anyway, I crossed Highland and sat down on the corner resting my pack under my knees. I took my guitar from out of the cheap cloth bag I had it loosely wrapped in and started playing some blues and then after a while I decided to play something with a little latin flare to it, with no pick. I kept having to get up and walk fifty feet up the street behind the phonebooth to take a leak and that kept messing up the flow and I was losing my interior rythym and I started getting bored so I decided to walk over to Famima!! and sit outside and write something. There were a few people sitting at the tables outside and one homeless man with a notebook with extremely meticulous notes written in small, neat handwriting was sitting at one of the tables drinking out of a coffee-stained dixie cup that had left brown rings on scattered pages of notes lying all over the table and I asked him what he was writing. He told me it was a business idea for a cafe, I wanted to ask him more, but the next instant the shift-leader came and told hime that he had been nursing that single coffee for five hours and it was time to go. The man gathered his papers and scattered belongings with desperation in his eyes and an utter look of disheveled abandon. Cramming them in a plasic bag he meandered down the street in hole-riddled sneakers. So, I took the spot he left behind got out a notebook and wrote a poem. I decided then that the next day I was going to go to Santa Monica to go see Matt and see what the west side streets were like these days and if Venice was any good for street musicians. Feeling restless I got up and thought that I would walk over to Cahuenga and see what was going on at the bar scene over there. When I got over to Cahuenga there were two cop cars that were blocking off the street. Wondering what was going on I crossed over and in the distance I saw a school of fire engines parked up and down Cahuenga from Selma to Sunset and then noticed the glow of a fire coming off one of the buildings. The ladders were arching out of the trucks like errant limbs leaning up the facade and mustachioed yellow-coated fire-men were shimmying up them extinguishers in hand. A crowd had gathered and outside the Spotlight, which is a gay bar, I got in a conversation with a man who asked me if I would play my guitar. I told him I would, but I had to take a leak, he pointed in the direction of the fire and said you're fluids are needed over in that direction, I laughed and said I would return. When I got back we some how got on the touchy subject of where I live and I told him I don't have a place to stay. To which he replied you can stay on my floor and don't worry I'm not gay I have a girl friend her name is Roxanna. I Knew he was straight even though I had seen him come out of a gay bar. I welcomed the offer and thanked him very much, saying we could jam at his place because he had told me he was a composer. So he ended up buying me a Heineken inside and I got in a conversation in German with Stefen some German from Munich that he knew who was sitting at the bar. Then I was verbally assaullted with a barrage of flirtations from a buck-toothed queer with horrible breath, made it out with Martin, who was feeling very sentimental and very drunk and was hugging every third person. He was also very hungry but nothing was open so we tried walking trough the drive-thru at McDonald's but the bastards ignored us until he spit at the window then they came up to the window, but he had walked off, and God knows they would have spit right back in the burger. So we went to his place and smoked some of Humboldt County's finest and I had my first good night's sleep in a few days.