Tags: Chloie, callgirl, stripper, Holiday Inn, downtown L.A., the beast, driver, gypsy cab, factotum, Hollywood, viral video, jarvis, marquisdejolie, Hollywoodland
Sleeping With The Beast
The city, downtown, is a different creature at night. In the daytime, traffic pushes you around like bumper cars, forcing you to into lanes going opposite your destination, pushing you past your stop. You drive round and round and round the block looking for a parking space, trying to avoid the packed, overpriced parking lots in favor of a rarely available vacant metered street slot.
You eye other drivers suspiciously. They’re after your parking slot. You know it, they know you know it. It’s competition at its fiercest. The fastest rat with the sharpest eyes and narrowest turning radius wins.
At night, lo the face of the beast becomes benevolent, Plenty of parking slots, empty, unmanned parking lots, big enough to play football on.
Homeless people push raggedy shopping carts down the middle of Figueroa. Rats casually dine on garbage strewn along the curb.
A bus hisses to a stop somewhere just out of sight, but otherwise its strangely peaceful. My mind fogged at the quiet. The beast that is the city in the daytime was sleeping and I wanted to sleep with it.
Forty minutes passed treacherously slow, like single-file marines laying wreaths at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Slow, steady movements of time. I watched the second hand on my watch step/slowly/ one/ tick/ at/ a/ time/ around/ the/ face. . .
Chloie came out of nowhere, surprising me, hopping in my car as if she had called my taxi hours ago, and announced, “We go to zee uzzer ‘oliday Inn now. ‘ere,” she handed me a slip of paper with some sort of scribbles on it.
I looked at it. It looked vaguely organized, as if it might actually be some sort of writing.
“What’s this?”
“Zee directions, of course,” petulantly.
Looking up from my lap where the directions lay, I saw another Holiday Inn a few blocks away on a hilltop, its corporate green logo beaming at me like a lighthouse on a foggy coastline. Coming out of the fog now.
“We’re off,” I said, hoping we were going to the right hotel, surprised that there was another call so soon.
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