Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles

“When Cobain said “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous” – that was a load of rubbish, wasn’ it?”

“All his lyrics were rubbish. That was the whole point. He was rubbishing you.”

“I still say it was an EMP.”

The rolling blackouts hit L.A. every summer, and every summer Eyeball chalked it up to the Chinese or North Koreans or Nazis from the dark side of the moon having a go at the electrical grid.

Standing on the East 4th Street bridge in the dark, strapped to the tits with paintball guns and taking blind potshots at the homeless scurrying around the bed of the L.A. river below – not knowin’ if they’re hittin’ anything but hearing the occasional groan – all three closet-cases jerk their heads up in unison to the rising roar of a V6 engine gunning their way.  

A midnight-blue mustang with this asinine underglow tacked on shoots across the bridge blaring “Mephistopheles of Los Angeles”.

As it comets along 4th, Bram Stokely starts to ramble: “What does this asshole want? What, he expects us to be impressed with his tacky Vin Diesel bullshit? Are we supposed to whistle like we got blue balls and he’s ridin’ a blonde bombshell?” 

They leg it west - dimly seeing the halo bleeding across the horizon from distant patches of the city still lit - over the railyards and further on where Santa Fe splits from Mateo and East 4th finally dips down to street level where it crosses Molino. As they pass a dog park wedged at the intersection, they see a burning trash can just inside the fence with three whinos in the firelight passin’ the booze aroun’ and singin’ “Werewolves of London.” 

Looking south on Alameda wondering if that’s the way, they hear another land-boat gliding it’s way from the west. A 1971 Cadillac Eldorado, the infamous “White Whale” Thompson himself switched out his whip for after he totalled the Red Shark in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, blinds them with its high-beams and Eyeball and Scabface Lauder think they recognize the make and model only after it passes. They pass the cold storage and, unsure where to now, slowly edge south on Central Avenue before making a sharp turn and trudging north. A few more blocks due west and they would land smack-dab in the heart of Skid Row. Up the block, the same White Whale, having circled, cuts them off as they’re about to cross East 3rd and the driver shouts if they wanna lift.

It was either Eyeball or Lauder who tapped Bram Stokely on the shoulder: 

“Echo Park?”

“What’d’we wanna go to Echo Park for?”

“I’ve always wanted to find the joint where Elliott Smith supposedly stuck himself with a knife.” 

Skips Mailer taps his hands on the wheel as he waits. No one’s around. Finally they hustle into the belly of the Whale, Stokely calling shotgun and the other two sidling in the back. Their driver blares Toad the Wet Sprocket and Gin Blossoms as they shoot up Central, turn right on East 1st a block later, then onto Alameda and through Little Tokyo. By the time they edge around Chinatown, they’d only passed two other headlights coming down the other direction. It was when they followed the curve where Alemeda becomes Spring that midnight blue roared up behind them and started edging their bumper. 

Scabface mutters something like, Oh g-It’s Tokyo Drift again. What does he want? 

Eyeball chimes up: “He’s whippin’ around in a blue mustang, so I call him Blucifer. You know, like that giant-ass horse statue they got outside Denver International?” 

Scabs ignores him, lifts up his paintball and opens fire on the windshield. Blucifer sticks to they ass as they cross the Spring Street Bridge back over the L.A. river, only to immediately hook a sharp left onto North Broadway – intersecting Spring at a 45 degree angle - and zag back over the waterway. Passing Elysian Park then running parallel to the way they’d just come, Skips cuts a sharp U-Turn on Alpine and Blucifer shoots past. The White Whale starts west on Alpine and by angles and squiggles and straight-shoots across the map gravitates in the direction of Echo Park.  

“Why you didn’t just stick to Bellevue…”

“All those honky houses lined in a row – gives me the shudders”, sez Skips, so pale that a tan to him is Dracula’s marble flesh at midnight.

Bellevue-Edgeware-Templeton and onto Glendale. Coming up Glendale like a Sunday driver, approaching the shadow of the Hollywood Freeway, midnight blue flips the corner from Cortez down the block and gains on them. Skips steps on it and breezing past a set of tennis courts, Scabface catches a glimpse of a trio of dark shadows smoking just inside the fence. Once past, he’s looking over his shoulder, sees whoever-they-are turn their heads and follow the mustang with their eyes, burned-out teens briefly lit by the high beams in the otherwise darkness, all tack and strobing lights like a low-flying Close Encounter of the Third Kind, the underglow getting ready to beam them up.      

Eyeball and Lauder manage to pelt the windshield, headlights and hood with a few paintballs as Blucifer’s grill aggressively pounds the Whale’s back.

The Whale gives out. At the merging of Bellevue and Glendale, Skips finally loses control and the Whale loses a headlight swiping past a light post and runs down an entrance path before finally diving into the park lake. The Whale sinks, its high-beams lighting up the lake floor before murking out. The paintball partisans do a few strokes and roll onto the grass. Skips Mailer paddles deeper into the lake, aiming to get out on the Echo Park Avenue side. Eyeball sits upright, Scabs tries to sit up only to plop back down. Bram Stokely continues to lay sprawled, tilting his head up. For a quiet blink of time, they see the silhouette of the U.S. Bank domineering the L.A. skyline with the Wilshire and surrounding bank towers rounding out that strange jumbled cluster hideously jutting out of an otherwise flat land. Complete eyesores by day, you could spend all night staring at them. Beacon-studded monoliths washed ugly in the light of California sun. Then the high beams blind them. The Close Encounter glides forward over the pedestrian footpath and they’re on their feet crossing the well-manicured public lawn. Bram aims up the boulevard for the concrete stairway leading up to Clinton and Belmont. They pound up the stairs, pausing midstep to gance back and seeing him speed past – no doubt, Bram calculates, to take the next left and circle up to them on Santa Ynez and Bonnie Brae.

“Where is everyone?”

Bram waves them and they run the few yards over to the Lago Vista condos, through a small parking lot and - hearing the distant squeal of tires braking sharply around a corner - drop down into an empty, tear-shaped swimming pool. They press against the side of the deep end,

(full dark)

totally lost in pitch-black shadow.

At the shallow end of the pool, the tip of the teardrop with a few steps leading down, they see the diluted blink of strobing underglow.

Doc Martens crunch gravel. A soft whistle that, after hitting a few wrong notes, they recognize to be “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Mockingly it gets closer - they raise their paintball guns pressed close to them - until finally Scabface craps out and books it for the shallows and the way out. They follow and split. Track sprinting across lots and before disappearing down narrow openings, each catches a glimpse of a bulk and a bald dome, standing pale against the dark at the edge of an empty pool.

…Eyeball’s got the midnight mustang pressed against his ass all the way down Clinton. He swipes a left onto Bonnie Brae then right onto Bellevue that here dead-ends into a cul-de-sac. He books over the low railing and trots down the hill onto Alvarado.    

…Bram Stokely sprints south on Belmont and across a footbridge from where Belmont cul-de-sacs, over the Hollywood freeway and finally flings himself behind a junk heap in an empty lot on Palo Alto.   

…Scabs Lauder hops a few backyards, stirring up a cacophony of braying dogs. As he’s ticking past the cookie-cutter four-walls on Kent, the thunder of Blucifer rounding nearer until its finally riding his ass, he gets slammed and sprawled across the hood of the midnight motherfucker. When they reach the end of that section of street, midnight-blue slams the brakes, ejecting Scabs across the yellow lines of the pedestrian walk and sending him rolling onto the middle of Alvadero. He’s almost picked himself up when it slams into him again, raking him another couple feet over the pavement. The mustang slowly rolls up on Scabs lying in the middle of the street when he hears a rapid-fire burst of dull thumps against the driver’s side window. Bram opens fire from half a block away, paintballing the midnight blue finish with dyed polyethylene.  

…Stokely, heaving, watches the headlights of a Toyota merge onto the sparsely populated freeway. He crosses the overgrown grassy patch and hops the barrier, quickly jackrabbits over to a stucco-pink (though color is meaningless during black-out) concrete island, a curved triangle between the on-ramp, off-ramp and main roadway. As he moves over to the tip of the island to stand under the footbridge he has just sprinted across, the siren of one a them whips Nic Cage drove around in in Bring Out Your Dead dopples closer to him and blares past, and he squints, watching it turn onto an off-ramp just past the Bonnie Brae overpass and shoot down to North Alvarado.

…Both, but especially Bram, were found pulped, their insides flattened and seeped into the cement. He expired just as they brought the stretcher around, with one paramedic - catching that moment one loses those 21 grams - being reminded of seeing old footage of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Bobby lying on the ground. Feet and legs circling around.

Scabface Lauder pulled through, though most of his right side and limbs were crushed and warped.   

Passing through the dark an hour before dawn, bobbing in ’n out of semi-consciousness and throwing his head down when he can to glance at his crushed toothpaste-tube of a body, Scabs keeps muttering a disjointed line, a final punctuation without context or meaning he must’ve read somewhere:

“Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”