My Week in LA

(Please excuse the litany of spelling errors, broken sentences and generally cryptic/retardedy thoughts....this was not spell-checked or re-read...)

A couple weeks ago, I was in southern California, appearing on Jim Rome Is Burning for the first time. The Forum is a segment of the show where he invites two journalists on the show to discuss sports topics. As far as my television appearance go, it was easily the most high-profile appearance and something I thank Jim and Mike for. I met them last year when we were discussing some possible employment opportunities. Since then, I've kept in regular contact with them and they both gave me the good look coming on their show. Mandt is an excellent dude and great tv producer. Rome might be highest profile sports personality in the country, made even more impressive because, although he has a show on ESPN, he is not an ESPN-entity, he's his own man and has forged a ridiculously lucrative and influential career, almost on his own. Just being around those dudes at work is like a lesson

As fun and educational of an experience it was to be on the forum, the highlight of the week was hangin in SoCal. I can't get enough of LA and it sucks that it's all the way on the other side of the country.

They put me up at the Hyatt in Huntington Beach, since the studio is in Orange County and LA traffic is so horrendous. I'm not a beach-dude. I'm about as urban as they come. I like concrete and buildings and dive bars and cafes and corner-stores where I can kop $1.50 40oz malt liquor. And it's a good thing I don't like beaches, otherwise you'd run the risk of seeing me in all my burlesque glory, sorta like Martin in Big Momma's House two, except I'd exchange the onesie for some trunks. But I am a nature-dude. Does that make sense? I may not like laying on the beach, but I love DC during cherry-blossom season, take trips to see resplendent trees in the fall...that kind of stuff. In that respect, my room was awesome. it had a balcony that looked out on the pacific ocean. I kept the balcony door open 24-7, so I smelled, felt and heard the Pacific throughout the day and night. You can't get that in downtown Dallas or Detroit.

My afternoon habit was buying fast food. I never ate breakfast, so by the time I left the studio in the afternoon, I'd be near-starving. I tried them all -- In-N-Out (a favorite from previous trips to SoCal), Carl's Jr., Jack-N-The-Box, Del Taco. The West Coast is king of fast-food options and, between the ridiculous amount of beef, fried potatoes and alcohol I consumed, my digestive system was wrecked for a week. Unfortunately, I wasn't on my foodie game this time, so I don't have too many stories about fine-dining...I'm saving that for next trip.

Monday and Tuesday night I stayed in Huntington Beach for the most part, which was a corny option. Orange County is souless. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the MTV shows Laguna Beach and Newport Beach...well, those depiction of OC are not far off. It's very white, very suburban, very rich...very corny. People may mistake LA for being nothing but Hollywood (starlets and wannabees), Compton/SoCentral (gangbanging nigras) and East LA (essays that wear their shirts buttoned to the top)...but it's not. LA has a surprising and commendable cultural mix and a ton of distinct neighborhood with a lot of character. Ornage County does not.

I got to the telly Monday eve and watched the game in my room, ordered room service and chilled out, but Tuesday, not having any real plans, I watched the Lakers game at a bar on Main Street, which is Huntington Beach's main drag. The scene was typical...a bunch of beach bums, tanned white women with tigo-bitties and trustfund brats...besides the fact that I'm not the kind of dude that minds being the only black dude in the room, there's a difference in crowds when, say, you're at a predominantly white bar in Adams Morgan in DC than, say, an all-white bar in Capitol Hill? An atmosphere can be multi-culturally inclined even when it's composed of one race. But then you have places like Ornage County that are monolithic, isolated and insular. But here's all that I needed to feel like one of the guys -- they were all cheering the Lakers...ha, my people. And of course the Mexicans were clearing our empty beer cups and shot glasses. Ultimately, aside from the pro-Lakers atmosphere, the actual bar and bartenders sucked, though. It was one of those spots that poor sucky drinks in plastic cups, but it was packed and young, had the game on loud and a slew of flat screens. And LA won! It wouldve been a really cool experience, sharing -- for the first time in my life -- a significant Lakers win with a bunch of fellow Lakers fans in Lakerland...but there was thic black girl....

This black girl took obnoxious to profound levels...I mean, it was beyond my Vince-On-10-Obnoxious level.

There were two black couples in the bar and me. So 20% of us were acting like a Class A rube. This loud-a$$ black woman was shouting at obscene levels in support of the Spurs. I was afraid that someone was gonna call her a "black b*tch", tell her to shut her monkey-mouth up, then I was gonna have to get valiant and help begrudgingly seek justice with the other afros on site. I doubt she even knew the name of two players, she was that kind of bird. She would clap extra loud and long after a Spurs bucket. She called Kobe a "b*tch" at least 100 times, at the top of her lungs. And she was drinking an apple-martini out of a plastic cup -- what a typical afro-bimbo. She paced the bar, screaming and yelling "woooooooo!!!" during timeouts when the Spurs were up. I'm an anxious Lakers fan and, although I have tons of patience for true fans, supporting opposition in a non-obnoxious kind of way -- you know, some good-natured needling -- there is never a need for some bimbo to be in SoCal, at a sports bar, mindlessly rooting for the opposition. She embarrassed me. And if she embarrassed me, well imagine what her boyfriend thought. The three blacks she was with were all Lakers fans, so it annoyed me that her boyfriend didn't 1.) have the gonads to calm this bish down; 2.) instruct before entering that it wasn't kosher to be obnoxious just for the heck of it. A couple times I shot a menacing glance their way and the dudes looked at me with this sheepish grin like, "Sorry, bruh. But you know how they are and you know how we are. Whatcha want me to do?"

I find it comical that when I'm out with a group of black women they tend to have little patience for the Girls Gone Wild kind of white woman. If they see two or three white women getting kind of close on the dance floor and dancing a little too dykey, or if they hear them screaming too much, they all get this tense look, like, "I'm about to slap this attention-whoring white-chick." yet I don't think there is any ethnic-gender more annoying and grating than out-of-control black women. When any kind of man is out of control, it's usually not annoying, more like threatening, since a fight always seems within the immediate future. But not only are out-of-control black women rubish, they also think they can intimidate everyone, specifically white people. There was a bully-streak to this woman's behavior and it frustrated me that these soft southern californians were letting it go down.

That whole experience really typified SoCal -- outside of the hood, it's very soft. I always say that a city really doesn't have full character and heft unless you get some ethnic whites in the mix. It goes without saying that she wouldn't have been acting a fool in Watts or East LA, since logic would hold that some Lakers-loving gangsters (and make no mistake, Angelenos LOVE the Lakers) would have made it abundantly clear from the onset that her kinda behavior was gonna be met with the threat of violence. But she got around white folks and thought she could act out. Well, you can do that with WASPs, but ethnic whites -- Irish, Polish, Italian -- don't play that garbage. In fact, insulting their teams might be more of a volatile act than insulting a family member. Whites in SoCal are a bunch of bidussies, so this bimbo invaded a pro-Lakers bar and acted a fool. It was such sweet silence when Kobe went off at the end and shut her up with the LA win.

Later that night, i hooked up the GPS system and drove up and down Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Blvd, from Huntington thru Long Beach, pumping my iPod...now THAT was a good time.

The next day I got up with some old friends from Buffalo. We met in Santa Monica and watched the Detroit-Boston game at fairly swanky sports-bar, if such a thing isn't automatically an oxymoron (to get to Santa Monica, I drove through Venice Beach and Marina Del Ray...I wanna live in Venice...the residential hood and the arts/entertainment district around Abbott kinney Blvd is nothing like the touristy boardwalk....it was dope.) Sitting at the table next to us, there was a crew of Pistons fans from Detroit. I tried to let them down gently when I told them that Boston was gonna win, since Detroit spent all it's energy picking at the lead. They didn't believe. So I just smiled as the final buzzer sounded and the Cs were walking a way with the vic. That was a typical NBA game. One team gets up by a big lead, the other team expends ridiculous energy to get back into, but doesn't have enough to actually pry away the lead and get the W.

The ill thing about games on the West Coast is that they end in the early evening. So you don't go out to watch the game, you watch the game while you're out and then really go out. Later that eve, we made our way to Hollywood and went to the Comedy Store on Sunset Blvd, which is a famous and fairly historic comedy-haunt in LA. Interestingly, basically the whole cast of MadTV showed up to do bits and none of them were extremely funny, which is probably why I never watch MadTV. Pauly Shore dropped in for a hilarious 10 minutes, though. I was never a Pauly Shore fan, his MTV persona was about as bad as his movies and his movies were atrocious. But, on a stage in a club, he's got a pretty strong presence. He's excessively vulgar and comports a deliberately stoned persona, but it all works. During the week, the pros descend on clubs like the Comedy Store to try out different bits they'll use on tour. Pauly came up with a with about 5 or 6 crumpled sheets of print-paper, which he had stuffed into some sweats that he clearly copped from WalMart. And almost every other comic would end certain jokes with "I guess I won't use that one" or subtely mutter things like, "So they like that one."

There happened to be one guy there, however, who insisted on laughing raucously at every joke that was told. he was the worse kind of audience member for others in the audience. His laugh was grating. He was a knee-slapper and the guy that ends every laugh with strings of "Oh god" and "Oh nooo" and "Ahhhhhh god." Even some of the comics had to put dude on Front Street, like, "Was it really that funny, guy?!" Initially it was mildly amusing, his hysterics. then it became intriguing, then puzzling, then annoying, then alarming...and finally you became numb. Take Robert Deniro in Cape Fear -- the scene in the movie theater -- and multiply that by 1,348...that's how this rube was carrying on. But hypocritically, this one comic -- a weird looking guy, who dressed like a bag man, looked like he'd mug and rape you in an alley, stood hunched over with his shoulder length hair covering his face and told self-deprecating jokes that were Rodney Dangerfield, if he were sadistic and suicidal -- had me and Mike rolling and we happened to be the only one's laughing. There's something about a frightening looking comedian telling dark knock-knock jokes and ending them with, "Please like me...or I'll kill myself," that we found hysterical. And I can assure you it wasn't the Makers Mark.

After that, we were denied entrance into a lounge on some "this is for cool people only". Even though that had never happened to me in LA before, neither in all my time in NYC, San Fran, Atlanta, DC, nowhere -- I thought it was such a wack "LA" moment. It wasn't the "We have a dress code" kind of thing. It was the "LA thing" where the doorman looked at my friends and I and just didn't wanna pull back the rope. Didn't matter that it was a Wednesday and no one was in line...the spot was obviously too dope for us. We left the Comedy Store well after midnight and LA closes at 2am ( which is absurd coming from NY where last call is at 3:45. L:ast call in LA is at some stupid time like 1:30. This is no joke, but there are plenty nights where I dont even get my night started til after 1am) and walked across the street from Comedy Store to this nameless spot. My two firends and I (the Benzes, a guy and a gal), we just wanted to sit at a bar, hang, catch up, spend money and mind our buisness. We got up to the bouncer and he just stared at us. Mike was like, "Okaaayyy. What's up? How's everything in there." The bouncer responds, "It's cool," without making eye contact. I'm like, "Aight, are you gonna let us in?" He says something coy, gay and rude like, "We're cool for now."

"WHAT, NIGGA?"...at least that's how I wanted to respond. I can see if your at capacity, or if there's a line, or if it's a group of 5 guys walking up, or if there's a dress code...there's a litany of reasons to deny someone entrance into your establishment..."We're cool for now" is not one of them.

I kinda got buppie on him, though. I was like, "You're cool for now? What does that even mean, dude? What's makin you cool. Explain cool to me." He greases me with the silent treatment. I felt like gettin at him how Leslie Mann got at the doorman (Craig Robinson bka Darryl from the Office) in Knocked Up. Remember how she just kept calling dude "Doorman!" and then Craig broke doorman-character and divulged how he hated playing gatekeeper. I'm hoping either 1.) it was a gay-bar and he didn't want heteros effin up the vibe or 2.)Puff, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jessica Biel and their entourages were up in there a the cool-quotient was way too high for normal people. Otherwise that was just some LA bs and it bothered me. But you know how I get down, just give me some oak and some whiskey and I'm good. So we walked a half-block to the next spot and ended the night there.

It should be mentioned that LA bartenders pour ridiculous amounts of alchohol. If you ask for a whiskey in Buff, Orlando, ATl, DC, NYC, most places, you often get a shot. If you ask for a neat whiskey, they might give you a double shot in a tumbler. In LA, they give you like 6 oz of the good medicine. It's insane. By the end of the night I was nice and fuzzed, which made our encounter with another Buff-transplant all the more entertaining. he was Asian, which meant that he was most likely kin to one of 4 or 5 Asian families in the Buff metro area. he also hailed from Lackawana. An Asian in Lackawana is like a Prius in the parking lot of a Lynard Skynard concert. I can't remember if I said anything offensive to him, but chances are I did. Anyways, he finagled the bartender to serve us shots after last call and invited the Benzes to his house party. I also think he asked Sarah if she modeled or some other "LA" question. I'm predicting with a good deal of assuredness that any party this dude throws is quintessential-lame. He's the dude on Chippewa, at SubZero, dancing with teenagers, singing along to Akon. trust.

Thankfully, I had Thursday off, since there was no show. So I woke up late, drank wine on the balcony, ate lunch with my visiting cousins and my uncle BJ, who now lives in LA. Then I headed to downtown LA to catch Game 5 of the Lakers-Spurs series. You know the story. LA clinched thanks to a gangsta-Kobe performance. When I left the arena I pumped the Snoop-Kurupt "Lakers Theme" all the way down Wilshire on my way to Hollywood. It was euphoric and made me wanna spend at least one year as a single adult in LA, during NBA season.

I ended that night in West Hollywood with two journalists friends of mine. The bar was dope, except the men were serving us our drinks barechested...bare...chested.

One of my friends -- a self-proclaimed "fag-hag" -- was a female, thankfully...otherwise it would have been uncomfortable. I just don't see any reason for that. Unless it's Chippendales or a male strip club, I just don't see any reason for a dude to serve me my drinks without his shirt on. I know that's probably just a West hollywood kinda thing, but this bar wasn't overtly gay. What I mean by that is, it didn;t feel like a gay meat-market. There were plenty of gay couples, but just as many hetero couples and a healthy share of straight women. Maybe like in that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Larry and Jeff were opening a restaraunt with Ted Danson and they were having the pre-opening meetings about menus and wardrobes; the pre-opening mtgs for the Abbey must have went like this, "What should our servers wear?" "Umm, how about jeans tight enough to hopefully reveal the outline of their shafts....and no shirts!" "Fabulous!" it was still a good time, but i'm sayin...put your shirts on, fellas.

By Friday, I was petering out. I had spent the past three days staying out till 3 or 4am, drinking like Jimmy McNulty and eating like a teenager or a 2006-2008 Vince. The show went well, then I went back to the telly to take a nap, hoping that I wouldn't be a zombie later that night. I ended up hangin in Long Beach with a friend and her friends. By the time I got back to the telly, I had enough time to pack and get to the airport for the morning flight.

As far as late-May biz-n-pleasure trips, this one ranks right under Memorial Day Weekend 2006, when I was in Miami covering the Miami-Detroit Eastern Conference Finals and VIP clubbing in South Beach.

Funny, my girl J -- who has been to LA far more than me -- did Rome's show the week after me and she did something interesting -- she did all the tourist stuff -- she went on the Houses of the Stars tour, watched pickup basketball on Venice Beach...stuff like that. Back in the summer of '04, I was in LA for a few days interviewing for a post-grad internship and I did the Hollywood Walk of Fame thing, but that's about it. Maybe in the midst of work and revelry, next time I'll take out a few moments to tour a movie-studio lot, see Will Smith's crib and stuff like that...seriously...or maybe not...maybe I'll go back to that lounge-spot on Sunset, call that dude "doorman" and piss on his Kenneth Coles...it could either way....