: :Lost Angeles: :

So what, I says, I have at least three or four good friends in town…I’ll be fine. Not a great deal of cash – but hey! This is LA. This is Stevie Rey! We’re great together!…
Two planes, a bus and three trains later, no sleep since (?) and at the bar of Hollywood Billiards staring at several of their thirty-two (32) tv screens simultaneously and wondering why I hadn’t actually told ANYONE I was coming.
Some moved to London, some had houseguests already, several said wrong number and others were having children in half-renovated chaos.
So, tired and emotional (yes Mum, drunk) I take my trusty skateboard (well, Tommy Lec’s trusty) and roll down to Sunset Boulevard - where the dreams aren’t broken, but they’re sure walking with a limp.
Hotel St Moritz, which makes the Ritz look like….well, the Ritz. Weekly boarders on welfare, hookers on the early shift, some guy asleep in the hall - with his shopping still in hand. Room 203, sharing with the cockroaches, and every room’s got a bath if you dare.
...I dare.
Mattress with springs that’ll take an eye out. Sheets with cigarette burns forming a most elegant pattern. Guy next door coughing up the other lung (I could tell he’d done it before).
It felt like home- someone else’s, judging by the band-aids on the wall. The ceiling obviously had open-heart surgery (gone terribly wrong).
Time for a drink, I say. So I saunter down in Sunday best to the supercool bar next door, which – though obviously not connected with the hotel – was actually underneath ol’ room 203. Hear more AC/DC than at the Tote on classic hits night, spend more on three beers than I spent on the room, and sit next to Frodo Baggins - drunk and lamely chatting up some poor hobbit girl. Them Bagginses! (someone tell Gandalf).
No smoking indoors, I’m told – unless you’ve had yer name above the title, it seems. Just a matter of time, I say to myself as the bouncer shuffles me outside. So much for California weather! I look up and see my open window, and realize this is going to be a long night. The speakers were actually, physically attached to my floor – making it louder in there than on the lame dance floor (please, no-one dances to Back in Black).
So I sit in the bar and wait to be discovered. Or kicked out at closing time, which is what happened as it transpired. That left me exactly four hours before the service station next door began practicing for the next Indy 500 wheel-nut change. I really believe in those boys, if only for their intensity and singular commitment to the wheel-nut.
Next morning I stagger out the front door and into Santa, depressed (well, deflated at least) and looking a bit worse for wear. Kinda lifts my spirits, though, as I set off in search of arts and the galleries they adorn, unaware that the Hollywood sign – and all it stands for – was the opposite direction.
Ah... found in Lost Angeles.