Our table buzzed with talk of the impending show. Speculation and rumors ran rampant as to who would have the best and worst booths and which games would “suck”, which ones would “rock.” I felt very much out of place. I haven’t held an active interest in video games (playing them, anyway) since controllers had less than six buttons. On occasion, someone would toss a question my way, and I would offer a non-committal nod or “oh, yeah” in response. There was also mention of a party being thrown at the Playboy Mansion the following night. Rich and Dave had a connection that they were confident could get a few people in, if not the whole lot of us. We dined mostly on chicken wings, a staple of the exploitative chain, and marveled at how bad they were. Rich, Steve and I had ordered “hot” wings, and the “spice” level was about as hot as Debbie Gibson after nineteen eighty-nine (or Joey Lawrence in any year). Disappointed, we focused on making plans for the rest of the evening. My traveling partner and I suggested going to see Shrek at Mann’s Chinese Theater. The others wanted to go clubbing, but were agreeable to catching a show.
We went cruising in Mike’s Hyundai Elantra, looking for the famous theatre. The last showing of the night was set to begin in under a half-hour, so there’d been no concern about making the “ten-minute” jaunt. As it turns out, Steve’s version of ten minutes more closely resembles forty-five. We finally found the place sitting at the end of a dark, scummy block in Hollywood. What I’d always imagined as a palatial monument to entertainment looked more like a run-down dollar show, flanked by gaudy tourist malls and souvenir shops. My stomach knotted up. I hadn’t been this disappointed since discovering the giant electronic billboard that was plastered to the side of the Eiffel Tower in nineteen ninety-eight. The movie, it turns out, hadn’t opened; our film listing would go into effect on Friday…
Since we were in Hollywood already, we decided to club there. Surely there must be some action in this town, even on a Thursday night, we figured. We parked along the Boulevard and just started walking. Not long after, we came upon The Viper Room, the notorious nightspot co-owned by Johnny Depp. The curiosity overcame us all, so, after mustering a bit of courage, the five of us rounded the corner of the building, passing by a drug store on the way, and stood in a line of people maybe six or seven deep. I wondered what chance we had of getting in. To look at us, an oddly dressed gang of middle-class kids, one might assume that we’d mistaken The Viper Room for a golf supply store. The lanky, lightly bearded doorman checked names off of The List, and when it came to us, Rich asked if there was room for our group. The doorman turned behind him and yelled out “Five!” to someone inside. He then let us around the Velvet Rope (a sort of posh prop, I thought, on this kind of slow night) and mumbled in a weird gypsy accent to pay the second doorman ten bucks, and to have a good time. It occurred to me on the way in that he’d sounded exactly like Brad Pitt’s Mickey character from Snatch.
The second floor of the club was dark–past the point of “intimacy”, bordering on pitch–and it was hard to see anything but the bar at the back of the room. Everyone ordered drinks and moved to the front by the stage. A band called Ghettoblaster was set to perform soon, and we wanted prime spots. My friends and I had assumed that the performers would be some kind of cutting-edge hip-hop outfit, but we would soon discover that nothing could’ve been further from the truth…
After I got my bearings, I took notice of the club’s patrons. Distress washed over me as I stood among the roomful of mostly late-twenties to early-thirties men. They dressed either as just-off-work computer programmers or as pretentious Goth wannabes. There was a spattering of women about, to be sure, but there was nothing remarkable or “trendy” about them. I thanked God for the atrocious lighting, as I doubted that my mind could process the sight of so much khaki and leather in one room. I tried to focus on The Band, which was concealed behind a green canvas shower curtain on the stage before me. Perhaps they would provide some ounce of relief. Just as that thought crossed my mind, Rich tapped me on the shoulder, directing my attention to a booth at the top of the room. “That’s the DJ, man,” he yelled with an incredulous laugh. A man of about sixty sat spinning records in a tiny glass room. He looked like Jerry Garcia reincarnated as The Crypt Keeper. My hopes sank further until…
Ghettoblaster exploded from behind the tarp with much fanfare. And, as their name suggests, they were not a hip-hop group, but a throwback to the Ôeighties era of glam-rock posturing. The lead singer, a sort of low-rent Mick Jagger clone, was prone to leaning forward off the stage, bleeding his heart into the microphone all Jim Morrison-style. The ladies, and a handful of the men, swooned as he exuded drippy energy and made the crowd “feel it”. As for my friends and I, the only thing we felt was overwhelming nausea and the urge to break things. We watched as the room clapped and “danced” to sappy lyrics sung under an incomprehensible barrage of guitar noise. There was nothing to do but crack up and make jokes at the band’s expense. Though, after the second song ended, the scene turned from ironically hilarious to absolutely pathetic, and it was time for The Grand Exit. We marched past the bouncers at the rear door and exchanged looks of sympathy. The freedom of the street brought with it a strange and exhilarating feeling: I’d paid ten bucks to get into a hip club and was able to walk out with a feeling not of insecurity, but of being too cool for the place. Granted, I’m not the model of sleek rebellion or anything, so that goes a long way in explaining the atmosphere of The Viper Room. I began to think that perhaps River Phoenix hadn’t truly overdosed on that sidewalk outside in Ôninety-three. He simply couldn’t cope with the music…
Our search for a good club ended there. Though we walked up the other side of the street for a half-hour, there was no sense of certainty that we’d find anything better. The lines were either filled with desperate-looking men (never a good sign), the music was lousy, or the clientele resembled the crowd at a Megadeth reunion tour. Despondent and fatigued, we called it a night…
Conventional Wisdom
There’s something to be said for sleeping in an air-conditioned apartment on the floor with nothing but a bath towel for warmth. But I’ve decided against using such language in this article…
On the morning of E3, Tony and I woke up early and walked about seven blocks to a Jack in the Box for Breakfast. Jack in the Box, like Winchell’s and Ralph’s, is a chain not found in the Midwest, so my curiosity took over; option B was the McDonald’s across the street. In the spirit of exploration, Tony agreed to eat with me there, even though his last and only experience with their food yielded frighteningly gastric results. I was very much skeptical about the menu; any place that serves hamburgers alongside Chinese and Mexican “cuisine” is not to be trusted. However, the bigger surprise about the joint was the interior of the restaurant. Large bulletproof glass walls separated patron from employee like some quick-serve currency exchange. The food was pushed through plastic bins that resembled transparent microwave ovens. I ordered the chicken teriyaki meal and Tony had a triple cheeseburger. In the middle of our idle chitchat, my friend turned a pale shade of green and said that he could feel the grease working on him already. My meal was fine, however, a half-step above Lean Cuisine…
We made tracks back to Steve’s, climbing uphill on full, queasy stomachs in the morning heat. On our way, we saw a garbage truck emptying trash by the use of a large mechanical arm that jutted out from the side. I marveled at the ingeniousness of it for a minute until I realized that this invention likely resulted in the loss of jobs for a few hundred workers at least. And I wondered if James Cameron had anything to do with this…
For the better part of an hour, we waited for Chris, another programmer from The Company, to show up with his car. A late-night phone message explained that his flight from Chicago had been grossly delayed, and he arrived in Los Angeles as just after five-thirty that morning. Nervous tension filled the room. The convention had started a couple hours earlier, and, the later the hour, the less time there would be to canvas the whole show. We were a heartbeat away from calling a cab when Chris showed up with another Mike; at the same time Rich arrived with Mike Number One. Immediately, we headed out the door, dividing up the group for carpooling. Just as we were set to depart, Chris exclaimed that he’d left his Expo badge back at the hotel. It was nearing one o’clock, and these complications were becoming more than a little annoying…
I rode with Steve, Mike and Rich to the Los Angeles Convention Center. We passed through much of the city and I observed that, especially during the day, L.A. looks like a run-down maze of strip-malls and fast food clones (much like Vegas when the lights go out at dawn). One bright point in the monotony was a place called Mr. Steve’s Donuts, Chinese Fast Food and Ice Cream on Maple and Sixteenth Street…
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