April 29, 6am, Crestwood Terrace, Eagle Rock
Snaking my way to the
upper Height I call Shawna and pass a myriad of coffee shops, laundromats and
street punks. What I notice this
time is how many kids they have and I wonder what the hell it’s like to grow up
on the street with you parents only fifteen, no money, no house, no prospect of
a job. What happens to those
kids? Last night we went to
Harley’s house and recorded all the vocals to our Peptonez ep. He has a bolt on the front of the door,
a contraption with a long metal pole that sat on a diagonal to the door, the
other end fit in to a latch on the middle of the door. Apparently not even the police can
break it and I don’t bother to ask why its there, I just know that it works. His studio is on the bottom floor of a
house, it feels like being at a construction site in the night, with pieces of
the wall shining through. Harley
runs the beer department at Star market and has, what looks like every kind beer
sitting around the grafftied studio walls. We make it through seven songs and leave by 3:30, I’m so
tired I get a tired hang-over the next day and decide to wander the streets
trying to sort it out. But I run
into a wall when I’m too hungry and muddled to make my way through my self-pity. I feel sore and defeated, though I
bought new short jean shorts and feel happy to be walking in them. I head back to exactly where I came,
this time a different way, to the mission, to 16th street and pass
all the people I couldn’t find so easily in Los Angeles, anyone with an indefinable
ethnicity, or deep scars on their skin or limp in their step, or craziness in
their mind, or emptiness in their eyes or hole in their shirt. Not that parts of the mission haven’t
become another gentrified den of hipster reverie where foodies come to sit
outside in the mild air and sip wine from down the highway and eat what looks
like the best pizza and open-faced sandwiches I have seen in days(disclaimer: I
am a friend to good food, and while I can recognize it readily, this food looks
especially good seeing as I’ve been surviving on cookie scraps, millet bread,
yogurt and coffee since moving to
Kempton Street, and this is my own doing.
But the saving grace of it was an incredible meal with Matt and Chris
and Denise at a fancy sushi restaurant in Japan town where you aren’t allowed
to ask for extra ginger and Chris and Matt helped pay my way). But, here amongst the old buildings and
their relic-like signs, and the girls who still where over-size hats, and boys
walking dogs, sporting flannels and puffy, well grown beards, I wander and
wonder about how to gather the pieces that come together, float apart and come
together again so easily in my life, and as I later find out, most lives. I get home and get a text from K that
he has lost that wonderful apartment I described but he has found another place,
and agrees about the up and down of it all. I call Shawna and Audrey who are making Shawna’s famous pie
at Audrey’s loft downtown and I start to write a song that comes together and
falls apart again by the end of the hour.
I talk to Matt who tells me this is all normal, I decide to stay in for
the night because Jerimiah has the tape deck set up and is amped to record
Peptonez live. He hands me a mic
and calls in Will, their room mate with a thick British accent, to come in and
say a little something over the cheering crowd samples J has found on the
internet. So I get up on a chair, behind
heart sunglasses and a hoodie, mic in hand, as Will yells : From Across the
Pond, Live from Albert Hall, It’s the Peptones!!!!!’ and the cheering starts,
and we go.
I wake up after a warm
night on the air mattress in Matt’s room, and he says we will go to Cole
coffee, my favorite coffee, where they weigh your beans and you get an
individual drip. We buy a baguette
and J is deep in thought and we ask him what he is thinking about but he says
he never tells anyone what he is thinking about which sounds about right. By the time we get home, I have to
leave. I ride the Bart, passing by
the dulled rainbow of houses on the hill. I get to the airport and talk to my mom and watch a man get a
shoe shine. I sit down next to a 61 year old woman named Denise who was a
flight attendant for 39 years. She
says she moved to Canada from England when she was eight, that her parents left
ahead of her and that she and her brother came a few weeks later. They had to stop a few places in the
plane on the way to Calgary and she said she knew right then she wanted to be a
stewardess. Our plane took off and
then dipped down. I gasped and she told me that was right, that we were on a
grade E flight. What’s a grade E
flight? I asked. Oh, have you been to Disney World? I told her I had. A grade E ride is the best one, it’s
the scariest one where you think for sure something bad is going to happen. Oh
I said. Denise looked
radiant. She had such clear skin
and seemed to be built only of kind bones. She stopped eating sugar and dairy a year ago and she lost
twenty pounds. Her daughter lives
in Australia with her boyfriend Richard, who also like’s their dog Emma, which
is very good.
. . .
I am at Galen’s house
now and it’s 5:45am, no it’s 6, I feel very awake, we just finished the art for
the face of the cd and maybe I’ll go to bed soon. The cat is feeling social and stretching next too me, and
has just cut my leg. I’ve been up
for close to a day. Galen doesn’t
sleep and rides in the magic that hovers right above life. We are about to embark on a project involving
the record that I’ll keep mum about for now. We are in the red house on the hill, but the owner is coming
back from Germany tomorrow so we are moving to his girlfriend Dakota’s amazing
apartment in West Hollywood. The
sun is up. Dakota is coming by to
help clean up at ten, thank goodness.
We have to leave at one.