Say Goodbye to Hollywood
Before parking it in San Diego for our final event, the FuzeCruzer made a brief stop in Los Angeles. Poorer financially but richer experientially following a jaunt to Vegas, I was excited to spend a little more time with my cousin Patrick.
A terrific windstorm had hit the area the day before, leaving palm fronds and tree fragments everywhere. It looked like all of Santa Monica’s trees had vomited all over the place. Isn’t anybody going to clean this up?
Halloween was approaching, and we decided it would be a good idea to put on suit coats and hit a few Santa Monica bars. Not surprisingly, striking up conversations with strangers while looking like total jackasses was pretty much only funny to us. But that was really all we were looking for. Patrick even added some black dye to his beard for “that extra Billy Mays sheen.”
I spoke about the Bills briefly with a good-looking girl from Buffalo at one bar. And it should be noted that, like many of the attractive people from that area, she had moved away before she was 25.
(One day Western New York will be back in the saddle, chumps. Then we’ll see who’s laughing!)
The following day MP invited Pat and I to see his bestie Trey do a show at a Manhattan Beach bar called the Side Door. Trey was dressed as the spitting image of Kid Rock, complete with trashy full-length fur coat. After his set we headed to my favorite thing in the world: a costume party.
Upon arrival at a beachfront condo, I realized Pat, MP and I would be the only ones not in costume. Pat had shaved his unseemly beard off the night before, and was in some ways already masked behind his own good-looks. MP has his ridiculous hair, which is really a 365-day-a-year costume.
I, on the other hand, had to think on my feet. Wiry guinea beard in tow, I was in no way attractive or even interesting-looking enough to pull off dressing like my normal, homely self. I ducked into the bathroom, and after a quick internal powwow, I removed my jeans and tied them like a sweater around my shoulders.
When I excited the bathroom a partygoer asked me, in my (thankfully clean) boxer briefs and old sneakers, what I was supposed to me. I told her I was “a pants-off dance-off.”
This seemed to meet with general party satisfaction throughout the night, and when pressed I was able to come up with several excuses as to why I could not actually participate in any dance-offs, and thus be exposed as an uncoordinated impostor.
- I only did break-dancing and “this condo has no cardboard to lay down”
- “Everybody knows you can’t dance-off to Ray J”
- “Can we wait until my instructors from Juilliard get here?”
- “I would, but the sea air just triggered my sciatica.”
So in the end everybody won. I don’t know when my life’s journey will take me back to La-La Land, but I sure have had some fun times there. Stay classy, City of Angels.
