The B-Side: Notes from a 2006 L.A. Trip

An Ocean's Garbled Vomit by the Shore; Los Angeles I'm Yours

Nineteen years ago, I visited Los Angeles for the second time. My first was quite a story, and if I can find that journal entry I’ll post it here. In the meantime, enjoy this lightly-edited missive from a Young Liam about his trip to the City of Angels.

I was in LA for all of fifteen minutes when I had my first celebrity sighting.

Los Angeles is a driving city, and I am still a month away from taking my road test. Therefore, I can tell you from hard experience that a good time to reevaluate your life choices and your comedy career is on the train in from the airport.

Basically, I know the neighborhoods in LA to completely avoid based on whether or not I’ve heard them mentioned in a rap song: Long Beach, South Central, Crenshaw Boulevard. And the train in from the airport goes through all of them. You transfer from the Green Line to the Blue Line to the Red Line, and each stop keeps you feeling more and more borderline homeless.

So I was sitting on the train, and I was literally thinking, “At least I’m the most famous person on the Blue Line” when, as if the Hand of God had descended to bitch-slap me, in entered Screech. Dustin Diamond from Saved By the Bell, with a lady, both wheeling bicycles.

And while I was no longer the most famous person on the Blue Line, I also could no longer feel like the biggest failure either. Entertainment is a fucking hard business.

* * * * *

I’m writing this on the airplane. Here are two announcements the flight attendant had to just make over the PA:

1. “Will the passenger whose dog got loose from its carrier please check to see if your dog is missing and come pick it up?”

2. “Seriously, if you’ve lost your dog please come and get it. It’s running up and down the aisles.”

When you fly in from New York, you fly over a large desert, just miles and miles of barren land, incapable of supporting life. Then you fly over a large, rocky mountain range, impossible to cross without luck, no-how, and expert help. And then you suddenly arrive on a low-lying, sprawling metropolis, built where no city was meant to be built, literally carved into the land with sheer insane, single-minded willpower. And that’s Los Angeles.

* * * * *

The Olsen Twins look as if someone has deliberately stunted their growth, to keep them looking like young girls forever.

* * * * *

I was staying with my friends on their couch. And here’s how my being a complete idiot also leads to my being a genius:

First morning, I awoke as C. was heading out for the day. She said, “I’m off to the doctor’s office.”

I said, “Because you’re pregnant.

Awkward pause...

“Yeah that’s right. How’d you know?”

What then followed was the conversational game of, “No Seriously? Really? Come on.”

* * * * *

I spent some time at LA coffee shops, where putting out a tip jar really is an act of balls. One coffee shop I enjoy going to has a tip jar out even though you have to pour your own coffee. In other words, you’re expected to tip a woman for the act of handing you an empty cup and showing you where a coffee machine is. I did tip, though, because I walked in and she was singing the theme to Mel Brooks’ “Robin Hood: Men In Tights.”

This laptop only has another hour of juice left in the battery, which means I will probably end up watching “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” on the way back to New York as well. Guess whose copy of The New Yorker fell apart in LA for some reason?

I walked in and she was singing and MTV was there shooting a scene for their reality show, “The Hills.” Because nothing says “capturing a gritty sense of reality” like three cameras, a light crew, a guy walking around having you sign a release, the air conditioning shut off (during 90-degree weather), and a guy shushing everyone so he could get something called “room tone.”

* * * * *

There should be an alternative Hollywood Walk of Fame, maybe on Sunset, called “the Hollywood Walk of Shame.” And each square would have a broken heart, and in each broken heart the name of a person who came to LA to make it in show business only to run into the weird crazy awfulness of an industry town where everyone believes that movies are real. It could stretch all the way to Palm Springs.

Other than that, I drove up the PCH and through the mountains and through Brentwood down Bundy and along the beach and through West Hollywood and through Chinatown and Echo Park and Silverlake and the worst slums of LA and to the airport and here we are.