A few days later, Adrien Brody would plant one on Halle Berry inside this very building
It’s March, 2002. Arty Party and I are thinking of moving from Philly to California and we want to scope out the area. We’ve been there before, but never with the perspective of, could we live there? AP’s childhood friend and the third component of our cross-country trekking triumvirate, Perfect Shot, decides not to join us this time. We ask Funny Girl if she’d like to go, she says yes, and the trip is on. First stop is somewhere in Missouri, site seen Meramec Cave where we are treated to an America the Beautiful light show and some psycho twelve-year-old girl keeps lingering around AP. At one point when they turn the lights out to show you how dark the cave was when first explored by the brave and daring souls who stumbled upon it (something they do in all caves, in case you’ve never been in one), someone punches AP in the arm. When the lights go on, the twelve-year-old is next to her, smiling like John Wayne Gacy in full clown gear. We move on to Oklahoma (where at the Flying J they serve us spaghetti with taco sauce as if we won’t notice), then to Amarillo, TX where site seen is the Cadillac Ranch and we pick up spray paint cans and leave our mark. We drive through a petrified forest, see a meteor crater and anything else they’re advertising along the side of the highway. We stop in Albuquerque, shop aong Route 66 and see a movie. It’s all fine and wonderful and road trippy . . . and then we get to LA. The first person we see when we get off the Hollywood Boulevard ramp is a homeless man. He starts walking towards the car, saying something that we can’t hear because we’re all screaming at him, telling him to get away from the car. AP is driving and also screaming the loudest, GET AWAY FROM THIS CAR! She punctuates this command by leaning on the horn, which completely scares the shit out of the homeless guy and he stumbles into a sort of irate combination tap/breakdance. He punches the rear passenger window–where I’m sitting–really hard. I almost expect the glass to break. Now we’re all really screaming, like we’re in a boat that a shark keeps ramming into with his snout. I’m blaming FG because she made eye contact with the dude before he came over and said to us, “Look at that guy.” I tell her he probably thought she was calling him over. “Don’t look at people here!” I scream at her. It’s a red light, but I tell AP to drive. She pulls out into criss-crossing traffic, everyone is beeping, screaming, total mayhem. Welcome to Los Angeles.
Quickly we decide we are definitely not moving here, but we are here for three more days, let’s make the best of it. We’re staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt, right across from Mann’s and the Kodak, and they’re setting up for the Oscars and we all feel very Hollywood right now. The next day, March 19, we have plans to cruise Melrose for complimentary show tickets. We don’t yet know it, but we have no control over the day; we are strictly on someone else’s clock, players on someone else’s game board. Cue Oprah.
Let me say I didn’t bring my Compaq on this trip; I wanted some time away from Bike Route. My Brett muse wasn’t exactly losing steam, but I had hit a road block in the story and felt I needed to step away from it. I would soon find out that what I felt or wanted or thought I needed was irrelevant.
We go down to breakfast around nine. We want to get an early start. Our server is a little slow on the draw and by the time we get our check and pay it, it is close to eleven and the dining room is empty except for us. We’re a little grumpy, which turns to a lot grumpy when I realize I don’t have the claim check for the car. At the Roosevelt they force you to valet park and make you pay twenty a day for it. So we’re re-tracing our steps, looking for the valet ticket all over the carpet, on the elevator, back in the dining room when our server comes up to us. “Are you looking for this?” It’s our claim ticket which he claims we left on the table. How had none of us seen it? Another thirty minutes wasted. It’s now eleven thirty.
We get to Melrose Avenue, where CBS has an office where they offer free show tickets to anyone who asks. We climb the stairs and get tickets to The Other Half, which was a talk show featuring Dick Clark, Mario Lopez and Danny Bonaduce. It tapes the following day. Back outside, a guy stops us on the street. He’s an audience scout for Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. He asks if we could come later on that day. We say yes and he hands us passes for the front row. We go shopping in one of our favorite stores, Red Balls, which opened at noon, so we’re glad we had the hold up this morning or we would have been standing on Melrose twiddling our thumbs. We also would have missed the Politically Incorrect guy. So we’re living on the premise of everything happening for a reason and moving on with our day. We bought temporary hair coloring in Red Balls and want to do our hair for fun that night or maybe in Vegas, our next stop. We needed a special kind of applicator brush that Red Balls didn’t sell, but that they have in the beauty supply store a block down. We walk down and find the store doesn’t open until one. Half an hour. Do we wait it out? Or do some sight seeing? FG has never been to LA so we decide to sight see. We get in the car and head for Sunset Boulevard.
The hills are looming before us and we’re thinking of all the celebrities who are up there right now, living out their glamorous lives. AP, in the passenger seat and refusing to drive in LA since the homeless man incident, muses, “I wonder if Carl or Brett is up there right now.” “Nah,” I say. “They live on the west coast.” In the back seat, FG says, “That looks like Brett.” I yell, “What did I tell you about looking at anyone?” at the same time I hear pounding on the passenger glass. Great, another psycho is punching our car. I’m only half-right; it’s AP, who has slammed her upper body spread eagle against the window, voice quivering with awe as she utters, “That is Brett.”
I don’t want to believe it, but instantly I know it’s Brett. I can tell by the way my heart starts racing, my mouth is dry, I can’t think straight. My muse, in a strip store parking lot, getting his lunch, just feet away from me. So I do the only thing I can at that moment: I do a U-turn at the light so I can get a look at him, because now he’s climbed into his car. As I get back to where they had first seen him, he is now pulling out of the parking lot. They are telling me to follow him. “I can’t,” I say, now seeing the back of his head, rock star blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, looking so Humer Ellory, hero cop of my novel. But I do. So ashamed of myself, but I follow him. He makes a left turn and I get behind him. He looks at me through his side mirror (let’s not talk about how I felt when I see his eyes) and I don’t know if he’s just looking, or if he knows I’m following him. Again, I don’t feel right, but the other two are telling me it’s fate, I have to follow him, I have to talk to him, why else would we be seeing him? He does a few last minute jaunty turns and I’m thinking he’s either lost or trying to lose me; I’m convincing myself it couldn’t possibly be the latter. Then he pulls into the gated parking garage of a hotel on a side street off Melrose. I drive back and forth along the street like a maniac. What to do, what to do? I want to drive away. “NO!” the two of them scream in unison. “Go in the hotel,” AP says. “I’ll go,” fearless FG says. “NO!” AP and I scream in unison.
We sit in the car for a few minutes. We devise a plan. Oh, to take that day back.
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