A Week In Los Angeles

Of the more sucky aspects of moving is the disorientation you feel once you’ve arrived.  Especially if you don’t know the area.  You find yourself fucking things up without really knowing how or why.  You have to write down your address and stick it in your wallet.  You spend too much money.  You end up in places you usually wouldn’t because you’d have at least some idea of what the fuck you are doing.

Dude, you're tearing up the lawn! Put some cardboard down or something!

The first disorientating thing is boxing up everything you own.  Having to look at everything you own is weird.  Why have I moved a detachable face car CD player that hasn’t been installed since 1998?  Of course you have a friend with you so everything is up for judgement and derision.  (“You haven’t even owned a car since 2008.  Is Pioneer even still a company?”).

Then there’s creepy drawer issue.  If you don’t know, the creepy drawer is a drawer that will flop open when you and your friend are moving either your dresser or your nightstand.  It is always the second drawer down (there is no earthly reason to keep your penis pump in the top drawer unless you have some sick I-want-people-to-find-physical-evidence-of-depravity-fetish).  It will slide open as you are carrying the piece of furniture thus forcing both of you to pretend not to notice.  Or your buddy will immediately stop and call attention to it (loudly) and then berate you for not storing it in a more secure place or just duct taping your drawers shut if you’re going to have weird shit like that around.  My creepy drawer did slide open only to reveal, gasp, a bunch of boxes of old checks.  Dun-dun-dun!  My helper friend was non-plussed about this as he hasn’t lived down his own creepy drawer experience which involved a chin-dong (“My girlfriend at the time gave it to me  and I bought it together.  Together!”).

The most embarrassing belonging of mine he found was a box of Magic: The Gathering cards.  His mood improved considerably.  Then he told me about helping move a female friend who’s creepy drawer popped open and released a large frosted dildo a large dildo shaped like a cucumber with a smiling cucumber face on the end.  He picked it up and waved in her face asking, “This thing work or what?”  Actually he didn’t say that but I find that to be the only acceptable response to inadvertently finding sex toys in your friend’s belongings.

And by "trap card" he means "boner".

First Night Out

One nice thing is that out of town friends want to visit you and see the new digs.  One bad thing is that they don’t know where anything is either.  They show up and say, “Hey let’s go out.  Where’s the happening spot to be where all the fly young honeys get fresh on the dancefloor?” (Sometimes your friends are from 1991) You say, “I don’t know.  I’ll skull 9 beers and then get to work on a plan.”  That’s how you end up at a pseudo hipster craft beer bar where you get a look of towering condescension after ordering an Amstel Light.  We trolled around this bar (the name escapes me; we’ll call it Hops And Sneers) for an hour  before everybody decided they didn’t want to consume craft beers all night because of its adverse effects on your butt the next day.  We needed a new bar.  We needed a cheaper bar.  We needed a friendlier bar.

So my most geographically knowledgeable roommate went to the all powerful and fail safe Yelp.

Mobile Yelp only gives you the first three sentences or so of each review.  When you are drunk and impatient and bar close is approaching, you don’t click on the review for elaboration.  My friend found a bar nearby called FUBAR. He read the first couple of reviews and all of them said it was a cool divey type bar with cheap drinks.  Best of all, it was in walking distance.  We made a bee-line.

Now dear reader, you know what sort of degenerate I am.  As you can imagine my friends are of the same ilk.  No one was going to mistake us for the moneyed hoity-toity class.  As we walked over to FUBAR, our friend was singing the, as far as I could tell sole, verse and refrain to his original song, “Damn, girl, your pelt hangin’ out.”  Pelt in this sense being pubic hair.  I, at this point was wearing a novelty maroon vest with white knit curlicues that has been best described as appropriate apparel for a gay matador.  We stumbled up FUBAR (after I stashed an 18 pack of beer in a bush behind the building) and the bouncer informed us it was a gay bar.  My friend stopped singing his original jam (whose refrain had inexplicably morphed into “Damn, Dad, now YOUR pelt hangin’ out!”) and everybody kind of looked at each other.  After various mumbling, the bouncer said, “Don’t worry, they don’t bite.”  Which, apparently, was everybody’s sole worry because once we heard this it was like a starter’s pistol going off.  We rushed the doors to LA’s (self proclaimed) hottest bar.

It was like this, but, you know, gayer.

I’ve been to gay clubs a handful of times and honestly it’s kind of meh at this point.  You know what you’re in for.  If homosexuality doesn’t bother you, then it’s kind of like being in a bizarro version of a regular nightclub.  Roles are reversed.  You get a little bit of an idea of what women go through in regular bars. You get a couple of random ass grabs which is a nice self esteem booster.  Sometimes you get followed to the bathroom.  It’s pretty harmless.  And usually after a half hour everybody can tell if you are straight or gay anyway.

That being said, this place was pretty gay (I know that’s a little like walking into a strip club and going,  “Man are there a lot of titties in here”).  I’d rank it as the second gayest bar I’ve ever been in ( The Saloon in Minneapolis being the undisputed champ).  First, there was full on gay anal sex on the TV’s above the bar in the casual way that sports bar would be tuned to Sportscenter.  I ordered a beer ($3 for Bud Lights and not even a whisper of a smirk; Go the Gays!) and glanced up.  It was a literal case of Suprise! Buttsecks.  I was like, wow, these guys are going hard in the paint.  To be fair, I’d have been thrown off to walk into a meat market and see full on porn on the tube as well but whatever.  Then it got gayer.

Thursdays are Big Fat Dick Thursdays over at good ol’ FUBAR.  There was boner contest being conducted.  This involved a heavy amount of cock-flashing (duh) by the go-go dancers and a clothesline hung above a stage where pictures of dongs were clipped for judging.  The crowd voted via cheering for the best penis.  Not wanting to look like fucking noobs we cheered for every dingus.  They crowned the victor amongst the frenzy of applause and sensing things could only go downhill from here, they brought up the lights and gave everybody the boot.

Once I’d retrieved my beer stash I came back around the corner to see that my roommate up into a tree which I’d off-handedly remarked looked “climbable” earlier.  I attempted to hoist myself up but 15 beers has a negative effect on my ability to scale trees.  Luckily, a polite homosexual came by and offered to give me a boost which involved two pretty serious handfuls of my ass (which was a dicey move given the amount of craft beer I’d consumed at Hops and Sneers).  Once I was up in the tree, I noticed another person had managed to scramble up without assistance.  It was none other than the winner of the Big Fat Dick contest.  After congratulating him on his achievement and his climbing prowess, we fell/climbed back down and made our way home because, goddamnit, there were grilled cheeses to be made.

Lob City

Another effect of the disorientation of moving to a new city is that you’re open to things you would have pooh-poohed in your old city because you’d already done it and it wasn’t that rad and kind of a waste of money.  Like going to professional sporting events.  Thus the following Thursday I found myself going to Staples Center to watch the big Clippers/Nuggets tilt.  (Don’t even pretend you weren’t on the edge of your seat for the 19th game of the NBA season)  About 72% of the reason we went is because the LA Clippers website (Lob City, baby!) implied that there were $8.80 tickets available at the box office.  This meant we could buy many $9 beers.

Laugh it up skeezer, you just wasted $13...like a boss.

Of course being noobs, we had no idea that scalpers basically rule ticketing at Staples.  I don’t know if it’s legal or what’s going on but scalpers were coming up to people in line at the box office and selling them tickets.  We also found out that scalpers had already purchased all the rafter seats and were now selling them for $40 per person.  Since not a one of our group actually gave a fuck about the Nuggets or the Clippers (sorry Lob City) we decided to go to a bar and watch the first half.  Then we’d come back and offer a pittance to any scalpers who hadn’t moved all their tickets yet.  Luckily a friend of ours who was already inside had made buddies with a scalper named Jaheed.  We got on the horn to Jaheed.  10 minutes later he met us in front of the bar and sold us three tickets for $20.  Two were in the nose bleeds but one was actually a 4th row ticket with a face value of $110.  This is probably why Jaheed kept calling it highway robbery as he sold us the tickets.  Then again, who the hell was going to buy these tickets if we didn’t?  Who wants to pay face value for a blowout that was half over (The Clips got blown out the building by the Nugs)?  That’s right, Jaheed, nobody.  Or in this case, only newly transplanted Angelenos that don’t know about the sanctioned (apparently) ticket scalping going down.

The lesson learned here was that you always buy the shit on the website.  Something a local with more than a week under his belt probably would have known.  Of course, we are talking about somebody who was amazed at how gay a gay club was so all bets are off.

Update(2.8.12 – 10:45a):  In Tuesday’s post we referred to a giant frosted dildo falling out of a woman’s creepy drawer.  It was actually a large green cucumber shaped dildo with a smiling cucumber face on the end.  We also mistakenly attributed the purchasing of a chin dong to a girlfriend when in fact it was a joint purchase with the boyfriend (the moving helper in the story).  SA regrets these errors.

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