From April 5, 2007:
Earlier today I was writing about an incident that happened in Venice years ago. After I finished expunging it from my gut I felt the impulse to go back to the precise spot where the episode had occurred. I drove over there around noon and parked in a lot across the street from the same apartment building in which I used to live. It felt kind of trippy to lock my car and trudge down the street to go to the boardwalk. I had followed that exact path so many hundreds of times years ago. Back then I would go jogging each day and some afternoons I would walk to the beach again just to lie in the sun. The familiar surroundings brought back so many memories of my teenage years: lying in bed listening to the sounds of gunfire at night, watching drug deals through my kitchen window, becoming a stripper, dropping out of UCLA, trying crystal meth for the first time, dealing with a bout of chicken pox while I was broke, getting a boob job, walking up the cement steps each night to my cheap studio apartment.
Today my former apartment building looked just about as it did back then. A small, older black SUV sat in my old parking spot and pots of dying plants decorated my old balcony. Many of the surrounding dwellings looked about the same as they did then too. The houses at the end of the block, which faced each other from opposite sides of the street, seemed simultaneously inhabited yet unoccupied. Years ago it had appeared that someone or something lived in each of them, but that no one ever came home. Or maybe some entity was always home and never left. I had never once seen anyone exiting or entering either of the premises in all the time that I lived in the vicinity. Both houses were probably built before 1920 and they looked mildly neglected, but not abandoned. One day I had seen a large box with a delivery notice sitting on the porch belonging to the one on the South side of the street. The box was gone by the next afternoon. That was the most activity involving either of those properties of which I had any awareness. Today I still felt the same conflicted vibrations as I meandered past them: the houses seemed inhabited yet unoccupied. Who or what was inside them?
I crossed Pacific Avenue with the green light and began walking very slowly through this last block which lead to the boardwalk fronting the beach. Many of the structures lining its sidewalks had not changed at all. Other examples of mass-produced, characterless construction had sprung up around the older ones. Of course there were two ubiquitous "loft" developments interspersed among the rest of the places. More memories flooded over me because that familiar block had retained much of its same character in spite of the new construction. In another ten years that time-honored, rough-hewn spirit will probably vanish altogether. Waves of gentrification are washing over Venice and I often find myself lamenting the loss of its former squalor. I like debauchery. Yuppies and trendy people bother me more than they should. I don't rail against them - I just try to avoid being where they congregate. It's getting much harder to do that in Los Angeles and I suspect that I may end up living either in Detroit or a rough section of Miami in the near future.
When I reached the boardwalk I noticed an amazing blue and white structure at the end of the Rose Avenue. I didn't remember ever having seen it before, but I must have. Clearly the building had inhabited the spot since the 1920s. The building materials used in its construction and its Art Deco facade attested to that fact. They don't build them like they used to.
All of a sudden I began feeling a bit ill, the type of mild nausea that generally is a precursor to a panic attack or some type of revelation. I stared down at the ground and felt my body turn hot. The heat came in flashes and the world started spinning. I felt glad I was in Venice because no one would bother me when I sank to the sidewalk and leaned against the building behind me. Venice has already become hip and fashionable, but homeless people still abound in the region. I would probably just look like another one of them dotting the landscape. As I slid down the wall I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. I dropped my head between my knees as I sat there on the ground and willed the heat and queasiness to go away. My pulse rate had gone up dramatically and I was having trouble controlling my breathing. I started counting to five over and over while I attempted to synchronize my breathing with the rhythmic counting. A voice intruded:
"Are you OK?"
My body tensed even more and I felt frozen. I kept my eyes shut and my head facing steadfastly downward, hoping the woman would go away.
"Hey.." the voice said again.
Maybe I'd gone unconscious for a period of time. Maybe I was lying in the middle of the street in front of a car. Maybe a group of people had gathered around me. Maybe I was at the police station. Maybe I was in the hospital. Reality had become too warped - I had no idea what reality was at this point. I lifted my head up. A beautiful blonde woman was squatting next to me and I peered at her from beneath the grey hood of my sweatshirt. It was Yvonne.
Yvonne did not look all that concerned.
"I think you need a drink." she said.
That was a strange thing to say. I stared at her. Where had she come from? What was she doing here? Her sparkling green eyes gazed back at me with amusement. I had never before seen Yvonne outside of the Cooper Arms. All this time I had just assumed she lived there, or whatever you want to call it. She seemed to read my thoughts.
"I still go out and party." she informed me with a laugh. "The ship came in last night - they brought Canadian Whiskey."
She said the last two words with relish and grabbed my hand to pull me to my feet. I hopped up off the asphalt. The hot flashes and nausea had vanished and the world was no longer spinning.
"Let's go to the Towne House." she said. "They pulled in crates and crates of the stuff last night through the tunnel. I think they even have some beer too."
I just followed her. Her excitement felt a little bit contagious even though I generally don't get too charged up over the possibility of drinking whiskey or a beer. We walked towards Windward Avenue. Every man we passed turned to gaze at Yvonne. She looked radiant and beautiful with her flowing blonde hair and amazing figure. I felt invisible and wondered if I was. Everybody at the Towne House knew Yvonne when we arrived there. They immediately ushered us through the door and numerous rough-looking men gazed at Yvonne with longing as she strode past them. Various people sat scattered around the large wooden bar, a few of them were kids. I did not see any bottles of liquor at all. A plate of hardboiled eggs and a few other mundane food items sat in trays around the room. Nobody was really eating.
"C'mon!" I heard Yvonne calling out to me with impatience. She was standing at the top of a staircase that looked like it must lead into the bowels of the building. Burly men were guarding it. I rushed to follow her as she began descending down the steps. The pitch of the staircase seemed way too steep and I could not fathom how Yvonne even managed to navigate down it in her high heels. She seemed to have the practiced assurance of someone who had ventured down the path many times before. I heard piano music playing as I gripped the railing and followed her. It got louder as we reached the bottom and I also began hearing the hum of voices and laughter. We entered a room with a low ceiling and incredible, hand-painted murals on the walls. All the dimly illuminated decor seemed to be black, red, and brown. A man in a tuxedo played the piano and several bartenders were pouring drinks in the far corner of the room. My eyes adjusted to the low, shadowy lighting and I saw a number of langorous female figures decorating velvet couches. They were beautiful and they were mostly naked. Here and there people engaged in sexual acts on the furniture and up against the walls: men with women, women with women, two men with one woman, three men with one woman. Was this real? I watched the beautiful women, the drunk men, and the stony faces of large, gun-toting men who must have been guards. Yvonne got us some whiskey. The scene was amazingly sexy and unbelievably decadent. At last I realized that I was standing inside a speakeasy in the 1920s, a particularly orgiastic speakeasy at that. It was Prohibition and the stockmarket had not yet crashed. Yvonne had pulled me back in time yet again.
I felt aroused and amazed by the spectacle in front of me. Then I had an unbidden, hazy thought about people partying in ancient Rome as the city burned. None of these people, many centuries later, had any inkling of what lay ahead of them..
You can view the entire "Double Your Pleasure" gallery inside www.TanyaDanielle.com now.
- XXOO Tanya
***
Earlier today I was writing about an incident that happened in Venice years ago. After I finished expunging it from my gut I felt the impulse to go back to the precise spot where the episode had occurred. I drove over there around noon and parked in a lot across the street from the same apartment building in which I used to live. It felt kind of trippy to lock my car and trudge down the street to go to the boardwalk. I had followed that exact path so many hundreds of times years ago. Back then I would go jogging each day and some afternoons I would walk to the beach again just to lie in the sun. The familiar surroundings brought back so many memories of my teenage years: lying in bed listening to the sounds of gunfire at night, watching drug deals through my kitchen window, becoming a stripper, dropping out of UCLA, trying crystal meth for the first time, dealing with a bout of chicken pox while I was broke, getting a boob job, walking up the cement steps each night to my cheap studio apartment.
Today my former apartment building looked just about as it did back then. A small, older black SUV sat in my old parking spot and pots of dying plants decorated my old balcony. Many of the surrounding dwellings looked about the same as they did then too. The houses at the end of the block, which faced each other from opposite sides of the street, seemed simultaneously inhabited yet unoccupied. Years ago it had appeared that someone or something lived in each of them, but that no one ever came home. Or maybe some entity was always home and never left. I had never once seen anyone exiting or entering either of the premises in all the time that I lived in the vicinity. Both houses were probably built before 1920 and they looked mildly neglected, but not abandoned. One day I had seen a large box with a delivery notice sitting on the porch belonging to the one on the South side of the street. The box was gone by the next afternoon. That was the most activity involving either of those properties of which I had any awareness. Today I still felt the same conflicted vibrations as I meandered past them: the houses seemed inhabited yet unoccupied. Who or what was inside them?
I crossed Pacific Avenue with the green light and began walking very slowly through this last block which lead to the boardwalk fronting the beach. Many of the structures lining its sidewalks had not changed at all. Other examples of mass-produced, characterless construction had sprung up around the older ones. Of course there were two ubiquitous "loft" developments interspersed among the rest of the places. More memories flooded over me because that familiar block had retained much of its same character in spite of the new construction. In another ten years that time-honored, rough-hewn spirit will probably vanish altogether. Waves of gentrification are washing over Venice and I often find myself lamenting the loss of its former squalor. I like debauchery. Yuppies and trendy people bother me more than they should. I don't rail against them - I just try to avoid being where they congregate. It's getting much harder to do that in Los Angeles and I suspect that I may end up living either in Detroit or a rough section of Miami in the near future.
When I reached the boardwalk I noticed an amazing blue and white structure at the end of the Rose Avenue. I didn't remember ever having seen it before, but I must have. Clearly the building had inhabited the spot since the 1920s. The building materials used in its construction and its Art Deco facade attested to that fact. They don't build them like they used to.
All of a sudden I began feeling a bit ill, the type of mild nausea that generally is a precursor to a panic attack or some type of revelation. I stared down at the ground and felt my body turn hot. The heat came in flashes and the world started spinning. I felt glad I was in Venice because no one would bother me when I sank to the sidewalk and leaned against the building behind me. Venice has already become hip and fashionable, but homeless people still abound in the region. I would probably just look like another one of them dotting the landscape. As I slid down the wall I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. I dropped my head between my knees as I sat there on the ground and willed the heat and queasiness to go away. My pulse rate had gone up dramatically and I was having trouble controlling my breathing. I started counting to five over and over while I attempted to synchronize my breathing with the rhythmic counting. A voice intruded:
"Are you OK?"
My body tensed even more and I felt frozen. I kept my eyes shut and my head facing steadfastly downward, hoping the woman would go away.
"Hey.." the voice said again.
Maybe I'd gone unconscious for a period of time. Maybe I was lying in the middle of the street in front of a car. Maybe a group of people had gathered around me. Maybe I was at the police station. Maybe I was in the hospital. Reality had become too warped - I had no idea what reality was at this point. I lifted my head up. A beautiful blonde woman was squatting next to me and I peered at her from beneath the grey hood of my sweatshirt. It was Yvonne.
Yvonne did not look all that concerned.
"I think you need a drink." she said.
That was a strange thing to say. I stared at her. Where had she come from? What was she doing here? Her sparkling green eyes gazed back at me with amusement. I had never before seen Yvonne outside of the Cooper Arms. All this time I had just assumed she lived there, or whatever you want to call it. She seemed to read my thoughts.
"I still go out and party." she informed me with a laugh. "The ship came in last night - they brought Canadian Whiskey."
She said the last two words with relish and grabbed my hand to pull me to my feet. I hopped up off the asphalt. The hot flashes and nausea had vanished and the world was no longer spinning.
"Let's go to the Towne House." she said. "They pulled in crates and crates of the stuff last night through the tunnel. I think they even have some beer too."
I just followed her. Her excitement felt a little bit contagious even though I generally don't get too charged up over the possibility of drinking whiskey or a beer. We walked towards Windward Avenue. Every man we passed turned to gaze at Yvonne. She looked radiant and beautiful with her flowing blonde hair and amazing figure. I felt invisible and wondered if I was. Everybody at the Towne House knew Yvonne when we arrived there. They immediately ushered us through the door and numerous rough-looking men gazed at Yvonne with longing as she strode past them. Various people sat scattered around the large wooden bar, a few of them were kids. I did not see any bottles of liquor at all. A plate of hardboiled eggs and a few other mundane food items sat in trays around the room. Nobody was really eating.
"C'mon!" I heard Yvonne calling out to me with impatience. She was standing at the top of a staircase that looked like it must lead into the bowels of the building. Burly men were guarding it. I rushed to follow her as she began descending down the steps. The pitch of the staircase seemed way too steep and I could not fathom how Yvonne even managed to navigate down it in her high heels. She seemed to have the practiced assurance of someone who had ventured down the path many times before. I heard piano music playing as I gripped the railing and followed her. It got louder as we reached the bottom and I also began hearing the hum of voices and laughter. We entered a room with a low ceiling and incredible, hand-painted murals on the walls. All the dimly illuminated decor seemed to be black, red, and brown. A man in a tuxedo played the piano and several bartenders were pouring drinks in the far corner of the room. My eyes adjusted to the low, shadowy lighting and I saw a number of langorous female figures decorating velvet couches. They were beautiful and they were mostly naked. Here and there people engaged in sexual acts on the furniture and up against the walls: men with women, women with women, two men with one woman, three men with one woman. Was this real? I watched the beautiful women, the drunk men, and the stony faces of large, gun-toting men who must have been guards. Yvonne got us some whiskey. The scene was amazingly sexy and unbelievably decadent. At last I realized that I was standing inside a speakeasy in the 1920s, a particularly orgiastic speakeasy at that. It was Prohibition and the stockmarket had not yet crashed. Yvonne had pulled me back in time yet again.
I felt aroused and amazed by the spectacle in front of me. Then I had an unbidden, hazy thought about people partying in ancient Rome as the city burned. None of these people, many centuries later, had any inkling of what lay ahead of them..
You can view the entire "Double Your Pleasure" gallery inside www.TanyaDanielle.com now.
- XXOO Tanya
***
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