L.A. the final frontier: in which things go south, and the south goes home

After my quality time with the homeless folks on Wednesday, I decided to go to Santa Monica for my Thursday morning run. I set a personal best mile time, and looked at this for every second of it.

I had a meeting back in Santa Monica later that afternoon, and I'd planned on trying out a coffee shop Ben recommended not far from where I needed to be to get some work done in the meantime. By this point in the week I had spent quite a bit of time driving around in Santa Monica, so I was getting to know the lay of the land a little bit -- but not so well that I didn't manage to drive past the street I needed to turn onto to get to the coffee shop. When I suspected I might've gone too far, I looked down at my directions while stopped at a red light and planned to turn around at the next intersection.

And at that next intersection, everything changed.

Suddenly there was collision. Suddenly there was acrid dust burning inside my lungs from the airbag that had burst from the steering wheel inches in front of me. And suddenly there was a dream, and I was dreaming it, and I could not wake up no matter how hard I tried.

In that moment I couldn't remember how to stop the car, or turn it off, or even put it in park. I couldn't figure out how to open the windows that I'd rolled down so many times that week to breathe in salty air. All I knew was that the other person involved in this crash had been riding a motorcycle, and that he was hurt, and that he wouldn't be hurt if I had made that turn I was supposed to make, and was somewhere else, on another street, at that exact moment.

I was hysterical. I promise to you, I promise to anyone who will ever know me, that I will never use that word again to describe much of anything because at this minute, in that place, I was truly hysterical. And it is not anything I have ever been, or felt, or experienced before.

The epilogue to this story, that I want to give you right away -- like when you call your parents and say, "The first thing you need to know is that everything is fine, and I'm safe" -- is that two weeks after this accident, back at home in Memphis, my phone rang. And it was that guy, from that motorcycle. He'd found my number on the police report and wanted to call and let me know that he was okay. We talked for almost 20 minutes. I could not express to him on the phone that morning just how thankful I was to talk to him. That one hour I spent at the scene of the wreck that Thursday morning had been perhaps the longest hour I had ever lived. And every minute since then had been consumed with worry and sick with wondering and believing that I wouldn't know anything until months and months from now and trying to convince myself to live with that and keep moving. I replayed the collision over and over again in my head. I was a mess. And though I'm still very much processing the emotions of that morning, I would be every bit as messy if it weren't for that phone call.

As they hitched up my rental car to tow it that morning, I remembered the pair of shoes I'd left in the floorboard of the backseat and went to the police officer to see about getting them out. Everything else, I thought, had already been retrieved. Later that afternoon, I was on the phone with the Fair Haired Boy when I realized that the one item still left in that car was, in fact, the world's tackiest souvenir that had been hunted and purchased especially for him. I was instantly in tears, over a cheap plastic snow globe with a cartoon bikini bottom that said "Shake Your Booty in L.A.!" with a map of California on the opposite side. It was a ridiculous thing to cry over, but I guess none of those tears were really about that snow globe at all.

I don't know what I must've sounded like, that morning, when I called the Fair Haired Boy just after the accident. Hysterical. Probably only an ounce less hysterical than I'd been on the phone with my parents a few minutes before. He was so calm with me, and steady. Steady. That is the best word I can find to describe it, and I think it is a word that describes the state of things, in general, when I'm with him. It's why it was so good to see his face when I got off that plane on Saturday. He was so patient with me that weekend. I was nervous and still shaken and didn't want to drive, and he took me back and forth to Bartlett so that I wouldn't have to. He didn't ask me for details, but listened when I wanted to give them. He was steady.

I'm really pretty crazy about him.

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I could've easily gotten a replacement car from the rental company, but I had no desire to do any driving and thankfully Ben was able to give me a ride to the few appointments I had left. (I know I probably wasn't a barrel of monkeys to be around those last couple of days, but I was so thankful that he was there for me -- he even got up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday just to take me to LAX.) That night, I didn't know how mentally up for any amount of professional anything I really was. But I reasoned that if I quit or went home at that point, the trip would largely have been wasted. And I just couldn't let it become that much more financially expensive, as emotionally expensive as it had already turned out to be.

Thursday night, as we headed toward one of those meetings, we passed by the intersection where the Notorious B.I.G. was shot. I took this photo from the moving vehicle, so I was only able to pour one out for Biggie in my mind.

As mentally wrecked as I was, dinner that night was great and I got a lot out of it. On Friday morning I met with another music publicist acquaintance for coffee and a mentoring session, and then spent the afternoon working on client projects from a coffee shop.

I didn't really want to do anything at all that afternoon except get on a plane and get back to Memphis. But before the accident, I'd planned to spend Friday evening on the beach. And so, at his encouragement, Ben and I headed to Venice to walk the boardwalk, see the crazy folks and take lots of identical pictures of the sunset.

It was stunning, but it wasn't Memphis.

The next morning I flew stand-by to get out of L.A. at 6 a.m., instead of waiting on my scheduled 2 p.m. flight that would've gotten me home after 10 that night. It was a gross, overcast, cold wintry day in Memphis, worlds apart from the constant sunshine of southern California. But when I walked out of the terminal, the Fair Haired Boy was waiting on me and I can tell you with great certainty that I have almost never been so happy to be home.

cheers,

elizabeth

L.A. day four and five: the last supper and the world's largest pancakes

Monday was Emily's last night in L.A., and the last true night of vacation for me before I was back on my head with client work Tuesday afternoon and commencing with the cocktails and the meetings and the lunches and the cocktail-lunch-meetings.

We had sushi with Cy (our kind and generous host) at a place called SugarFish. I didn't manage to take a picture of anything, not one single thing, because after that first bite it all got eaten too quickly for photography AND I'm pretty sure I was disoriented from deliciousness and would not have been able to operate a camera. After sushi we headed for a street/district in Venice called Abbot Kinney that was just teeming with adorable. Little shops, boutiques and cute restaurants everywhere. And this!

After dessert, we headed to a bar right on Venice Beach called The Venice Whaler. It was dark, so there wasn't much of an ocean view, but the breeze was killer and looking out at the black expanse of ocean across the sand from us was a pretty nice way to end the evening.

Tuesday morning, we had a hankering for pancakes. This was the size of our hankering.

Now with my hand, for scale purposes.

And now with what I managed to eat out of it in that first sitting.

I only note "in that first sitting" because I later ate those exact same pancakes for breakfast FOUR DAYS IN A ROW. We were at a place we found on Yelp called The Griddle Cafe, which I felt was Los Angeles' pastry/baked goods equivalent of San Diego's Hash House. And when I say equivalent, I clearly just mean: another place where you will be served more food than even THREE people could eat in one sitting, and it will be amazing, and you will push the boundaries of consumption.

And if you're us, drink three mimosas each. Also: WHY DID I ORDER A SIDE OF EGGS? That was ill advised. The fact that I did not nap that afternoon and instead powered through and actually managed to get work done is not only a source of personal pride but also, I feel, grounds for some type of national merit award for advances in will power.

I dropped Emily off for her flight around 2 o'clock and headed for the home of my second host of the week, my friend Ben. We caught up for a bit before I settled into work mode, and after a few hours of responding to e-mails and sorting out my to-do lists for the rest of the week we headed to Smith House, where Ben bartends, for some beers and grub.

Wednesday morning I got up and set out for Venice, back near The Whaler, to get in a morning run. After four days of eating Griddle Cafe Hash House All You Can Eat Vacation Buffet style, my body was ready for a change of pace. And while there were a lot of homeless people out enjoying the morning with me, this was what framed my run. I can't complain.

That day I worked from a cute little coffee shop called Bricks and Scones, outside under palm fronds most of the day. I went to Santa Monica Wednesday night to meet up with Kate, an old friend from middle school and high school who now works in entertainment PR. We had a couple drinks at a bar near her office that was (somehow, miraculously) showing the Memphis basketball game on its one television.

After the game and our catch-up, I picked up some dinner and headed back to Ben's to get some more work done and call it a night. Up next is our final installment from the L.A. trip, in which things go south, and then, so do I -- home.

cheers,

elizabeth

L.A. day four: life affirmations and the hollywood hills

There were very few touristy things I was interested in doing in L.A., mostly due to my disdain for any group of people larger than about 10 and the aforementioned desire to spend this vacation engaged in as little actual activity as possible. But there was one thing that I wanted to do. Just one thing. And that was to visit the spot on which it all began: Dash Calabasas, the first Dash store owned by the Sisters Kardashian.

And y'all? It was basically in a regular ass, dingy strip mall. You can't see it very well in this picture, but to the left there is a nail salon with a white sign that just says NAILS in red lettering. Not even "Tina's Nails" or "Fancy Nails" or "YO NAILS LOOK GOOD, GRL." Just, NAILS. Also, I'm pretty sure there was one of those stock image looking cartoony stick-on ladies in the window. You know the ones.

And you know what? It was strangely life affirming. Here's to you, Dash, and your funky carpet and your handmade sale signage. You are just like everybody else.

After we took a quick stroll around Dash and found that even the items on sale were way out of our price range (they wanted to sell me a Dash tee shirt for sixty em effing American dollars, I'll have you know) we drove around Calabasas for a little while, gawking at houses. Okay, and there was one other thing. We may have been on a quest for this -- the old town Calabasas sign that E! always shows in b-roll on Keeping Up With the Kardashians. We spent most (if not all) of that time driving around discussing various plot lines of various episodes of various Kardashian spin-off shows, and also wondering whether the Armenian restaurant they go to all the time is actually in Calabasas, and then subsequently deciding that, in fact, nothing is actually in Calabasas. Except the Kardashians. Possibly I should take this moment to reiterate my very strict policy on there being no such thing as a guilty pleasure. I listen to all kinds of smart music, and watch smart shows and read smart things. And sometimes my brain bleeds out to Khloe Kardashian trying to figure out whether that is poo or chocolate on her Egyptian cotton sheets. (It was chocolate.)

Oh, and one last note on Calabasas: apparently some of the locals call it "CalaBLACKless." When I learned this, I wanted to come up with lots of reason to talk about Calabasas, so I would have lots of reasons to talk about its distinct lack of racial diversity.

That afternoon, we headed for Hollywood. I was on a quest for the tackiest souvenir I could possibly find (to be bestowed upon the Fair Haired Boy), and we'd wanted to cruise through the Hollywood Hills gawking at billion dollar houses, so we decided Hollywood Boulevard would be the perfect place to start.

We popped into a few tacky souvenir shops, wandered the Walk of Fame and hit the Kodak Theater to take in some views of the Hollywood sign. We tried to have a drink at the Roosevelt Hotel, but sadly we were a little too early and their bars weren't open yet. Haven't these people heard of day drinking?

As planned, we left tourist country and headed up through the Hollywood Hills. We took whichever turns felt right at the time and wound our way up and up and up and then -- happened upon this.

We'd driven our way up the mountain to a scenic overlook above the Hollywood Bowl. The views were incredible.

On the way home, we spent as much time in Beverly Hills as I could talk Emily into: we drove through it. I was able to snap this picture of the police station as we passed by it, whilst having two very important thoughts: 1.) Even the police station in Beverly Hills is fancy pants, and 2.) Axel Foley?

cheers,

elizabeth

L.A. day two and three: ringing in 2012

Emily and I had barely arrived back in L.A. before it was time to hop to it on ringing in the new year. We met up with Mike, a friend we'd made back at CMJ in October, and grabbed some quick eats before heading to our final destination of 2011. Also, there was a beer that was bigger than my head. It required two hands. I give you Exhibit A:

Our plan for the night was to catch some bands at a club called The Satellite. We caught sets from LA Font and Henry Clay People, and then things devolved into an insane jam session that resulted in some amazing covers of "Born to Run" and "Don't Stop Believin." I say if you're looking for an omen on a good year, it can't hurt to have the first 20 minutes of January 1 include a dude standing on a piano ripping out a guitar solo to a Journey song while a mosh pit develops. Did Steve Perry ever perform in front of a mosh pit? Probably not. But maybe Asian Steve Perry has.

Also, you should know that this was the hand stamp we received at the door.

The other two notable things I can tell you about the evening are that I was stopped by a middle-aged biker-looking dude while handing champagne glasses to Mike and Emily so that he could tell me that I look like Reese Witherspoon. I wanted to respond with either a.) "Maybe in the dark" or b.) "Just because I have blonde hair does not make me look like Reese Witherspoon. See related: people with dreadlocks and how they don't all look like Whoopi Goldberg." But I did not do either of those things. I'm pretty sure I snorted, and said thank you.

The second notable thing is that The Satellite had a photo booth, and that we took pictures in it. I do not have those pictures, because the strip we did for me wouldn't fit in my clutch and I completely forgot to get them back from Emily. Frankly, we just look like crazy screaming girls in most of the shots. It's probably for the best that you can't see them, internet. It's probably for the best.

After eating our Hash House leftovers in the wee hours of January 1, we officially chose to spend the first day of the new year in Santa Monica. We had brunch on the promenade, did some people watching and couldn't stop taking pictures of pretty things, which was everything, which meant lots of pictures of everything. Lots of pictures of the same every-things. From slightly different angles.

After brunch we headed toward the beach, and stopped just by the statue of Santa Monica herself to take in the view and snap some photos. When we got there, this guy a few feet away offered to take a picture of us. We politely said no thanks, but he was pretty persistent. He offered his services no less than three times, and on the third offer insisted to us that he "has a knack for this." This, I assumed at the time, was standing around trying to pick up tourist girls by taking their picture in front of the ocean. This, I learned a few moments later, was actually just taking really horrible, horrible pictures, three or four or seven in a row.

This was photo one of three. I can't decide if my favorite part is the dude on the right (hey, dude!) or the purse and shopping bags at my feet that he decided needed to have their moment on film, as well.

After he left, I took other pictures that were less ridiculous. Maybe I have a knack for this, too.

At some point during our walking the beach/walking the promenade/walking the pier in Santa Monica, it occurred to us that something was going on all around us. And at some point it occurred to us that it was the Rose Bowl. And at some other point later when we started seeing all the signs in business windows that said WELCOME ROSE BOWL FANS and all the people decked out in Oregon and Wisconsin gear, we realized that were both perhaps only functionally retarded.

Shortly after all this information dawned on us, I saw these people while we were waiting for ice cream at the soda fountain on the pier. And I demanded a photo.

We wandered down the pier for a bit, people watching and searching out tacky souvenirs, and ran into Jade The Psychic. Now, Jade The Psychic (JTP?) was hanging out in a little inch of real estate on the pier with her folding chair and her fish bowl full of dollar bills and her business cards, and it just so happens that Emily and I had not 10 minutes before been discussing our mutual desire to engage in some type of psychic reading during our vacation. We'd passed a brick-and-mortar psychic on our way up to the pier that had been closed. (Shouldn't she have known we would be there that day, wanting to come for a reading? HELLO.)

The thing you should know about JTP is that she was not exactly the caliber of psychic we were looking for, but she also said she would give you a reading for whatever you could drop in the bucket, which instantly put her squarely inside my price range. I gave her four dollars and she set her 1990s flip phone alarm for four minutes.

JTP told me a lot of things that fateful day, though most of them were about JTP. For example, she used to work in public relations. Also, she has learned through experience that musicians are not the monogamous kind and she does not want to see me dating one of those hooligans. In the few seconds of my four dollar reading that we were able to touch on me, I did learn that my business is going to be successful and that I have a strong entrepreneurial reading. Or something. I also told Jade a little something that day that I haven't told you about yet, and JTP had some very nice things to say about that, too. Or rather, him. (I told you I wouldn't be introducing anyone here until they were a more permanent, recurring character. And this one definitely is.) JTP said the spirits were telling her that he's a "fair-haired boy." When I broke the news to her that he was not, in fact, fair-haired, she quickly explained that when the SPIRITS say this to her it ACTUALLY means that he is someone who is very intelligent, very fair in demeanor and very lucky. Ahh yes, JTP. Naturally. A fair-haired boy.

After our exhausting day of soaking in ocean air, we decided to stuff ourselves with incredible food at Bottega Louie in downtown Los Angeles. It looked like it was in an old bank or train station terminal, with sky high ceilings and crisp white walls. And of course, stellar people watching. We had a bottle of wine, appetizers, pizza and (obviously) not one but two incredible desserts (including the tiramisu pictured below). We had given some thought to hitting a whiskey bar after dinner, but once this plate was clean it was pretty clear the only thing we were hitting was the couch, in our pajamas.

cheers,

elizabeth

L.A. day one: in which we promptly leave L.A. for somewhere else

A few hours after I landed in L.A., and about 20 minutes after Emily touched down, we were in our rental car and on the freeway headed south for San Diego.

We met up with my brother Noah (who no longer calls SD home but was visiting for the New Year) at his former place of employment, Karl Strauss. (You may remember the culinary and beer-related delights found there from my adventures in June.) Emily and I were famished and ready for a brew, so we started out with a cheese-beer fondue and two flights of Strauss beers. Here, Noah talks about beers, gesticulates wildly and compares the flavor of one specialty beer to the taste in the back of your mouth when you barf up stomach acid.
After we spent a few hours at Strauss pushing the boundaries of consumption, we intended to head to another bar and meet up with some of Noah's friends for more drinks. Intended. What actually happened was that there was a pit-stop as we waited for others to join us at the apartment where we would be crashing that night, which allowed Emily and I just enough time to get curled up on couches. With blankets. And realize exactly how tired we were, how full we were and obviously, that we were colossal weinies. We both promptly passed out, round about 10:30. It was delightful.

The next morning, as promised, we sent off 2011 like true Americans by once again pushing the boundaries of consumption at San Diego's famous Hash House.

We had about an hour to wait for a table, so we headed across the street to the Hash House's sister restaurant, Tractor Room, for fancy pants beverages. Mine is on the left, and the garnish is a slice of pear. Noah had the bloody mary on the far right and Emily opted for the one in the middle, which was sort of like a reimagined mojito featuring fresh cucumber.
And then, at Hash House, this happened. (That glob on top is goat cheese. SERIOUSLY. Let's talk about it. Call me. Any time. GOAT CHEESE.)
After breakfast, I felt the need to attempt to take a picture of myself. There is absolutely no reason for me not to have known that this photo bomb would occur.

Shortly after this, Noah parted ways with us and Emily and I headed in the direction of the beach. It was such a gorgeous day that we decided we might as well touch the ocean in San Diego and Los Angeles if we could help it. Not surprisingly, it wasn't so clear by the water -- still a little early in the day for it to have burned off, I guess -- but we both still managed to get attacked by errant waves, and we thoroughly enjoyed Ocean Beach's Christmas decor efforts.



After our jaunt in the sand (and after Emily accidentally got soaked to the knees while staring through her phone's camera lens and waiting to snap a photo of the wave hitting her toes at the exact right moment, good GRIEF I love irony), we set out for L.A., with a quick stop off at a shopping mall outside the city to find New Year's Eve ensembles. We arrived in Culver City, got settled at my friend Cy's place and started getting ready. Here's us, pre-festivities:

And the story of how we rang in 2012 shall come next. Stay tuned, y'all.

cheers,

elizabeth