no love on century boulevard
Picture a bar somewhere close to the LA Airport in 2006. The smog is thick. No possibility of sunlight being refracted to paint the landscape in color. Instead it's grainy tombstone granite. There's more Carl's Jr. and Jack-in-the-Box litter than McDonald's. You're hopelessly lost in the dangerous part of any desolate city.
The lava rock moat around the building looks like a painful 3:27 a.m. bed of nails that wouldn't hurt until the police woke you up. The sidewalk is snipe city, but too far away from the methadone clinic, mission, or bus station to bring in any takers.
Just to think. What great people chewed all this gum all black now like mounds of heel marks on dingy congoleum? What their story could tell us about ourselves and the future!
The bar looks like it was built in the mid 50s, but probably hopped in the early 60s. Frank Sinatra could have bar-nodded here!
In the day I bet the landscaping was lots of cactus, and the red and black lava rock moat was red and black. No snipes because people smoked filterless and Lester the doorman would witness.
The bright neon sign yanks the patrons right off Century Boulevard like June bugs to a pest disco. It's 1962 and the bar is one of the top go-go clubs on the asphalt river to LA Airport. The go-go girls are wearing plastic blue jeweled short Santa helper outfits with fuzzy white borders and little covering for their plump breasts. Their Freudianly ruffled always visible white undies make the drinks and cigarettes stocking stuffers. Their sexy hair is all tease and Aqua Net, just like the cocktail waitresses.
The bartenders look resplendent with their Vitalis-sheened hair which regardless of natural color looks black. Their white shirts with black ties and clean white aprons folded at the waist make the ice cubes in the Manhattans glimmer. And they always know your poison
"Here Pal. Have some benzedrine and aspirin tablets from Tijuana to spark that whiskey."
The patrons are mostly married horn-rim wearing pattern-balding alcoholic businessmen whose wives have their own lives and the children are embarrassingly ugly with their elephant ears and buck teeth. Women landscape the bar looking tantalizing with their jet black dyed bouffant hair with modern Judy Jetson flips. Wanda with her black pixie glasses dresses up the bar most weekends and every Tuesday at 1:00 a.m. for pig ears and headcheese night. She looks 32, but is actually 17.
The bar is kicking! The cigarette smoke is deliciously thick and eye-burning. There's so much talk and ice clinking that you can't hear Satisfaction blasting from the juke box. The always on TV with its constantly ascending horizontal line stutters vague warnings that the calendar will end in 2012. And no one's heart will escape.
*** Its 44 years later. The outside structure languishes in an unidentifiable hue. The weeds need chemical death. A Graffiti message adorning the back wall by the dumpster shouts in broken Mexican,
"I suck!" It was written by white gang members from Thousand Oaks.
The bar is empty except a few Mexicans getting their asses kicked in pool by a heavy gold chain adorned dwarf who intermittently cheers himself on with indiscernible loud blurts. A lone black guy with a cauliflower stacked natural wearing sunglasses positioned halfway down his nose presides over the place between nodding-out in his chair against the wall. He's been here since the Watts riots and witnessed the towers going up.
Only one bartender is on duty. He actually owned the place in 1956, but 40 years later he's just drawing a pay check selling coronas, steel reserve, tequila shots, LAX Summer Specials year round, Courvoisier to the black guy, and mini-thins to spark that whiskey. Heartache and jail don't make for a life of success.
And then there's me. Balanced between a stool and the bar top leaning on the left side of my rib cage. Half of my white shirt tail hangs out in the front. My hair looks like I woke up in a cell and my eyes are crimson. I'm telling the patron-deaf bartender in dark verse that I can't find love. Even the penny arcade costs a dollar now.
Picture a bar somewhere close to the LA Airport in 2006. The smog is thick. No possibility of sunlight being refracted to paint the landscape in color. Instead it's grainy tombstone granite. There's more Carl's Jr. and Jack-in-the-Box litter than McDonald's. You're hopelessly lost in the dangerous part of any desolate city.
The lava rock moat around the building looks like a painful 3:27 a.m. bed of nails that wouldn't hurt until the police woke you up. The sidewalk is snipe city, but too far away from the methadone clinic, mission, or bus station to bring in any takers.
Just to think. What great people chewed all this gum all black now like mounds of heel marks on dingy congoleum? What their story could tell us about ourselves and the future!
The bar looks like it was built in the mid 50s, but probably hopped in the early 60s. Frank Sinatra could have bar-nodded here!
In the day I bet the landscaping was lots of cactus, and the red and black lava rock moat was red and black. No snipes because people smoked filterless and Lester the doorman would witness.
The bright neon sign yanks the patrons right off Century Boulevard like June bugs to a pest disco. It's 1962 and the bar is one of the top go-go clubs on the asphalt river to LA Airport. The go-go girls are wearing plastic blue jeweled short Santa helper outfits with fuzzy white borders and little covering for their plump breasts. Their Freudianly ruffled always visible white undies make the drinks and cigarettes stocking stuffers. Their sexy hair is all tease and Aqua Net, just like the cocktail waitresses.
The bartenders look resplendent with their Vitalis-sheened hair which regardless of natural color looks black. Their white shirts with black ties and clean white aprons folded at the waist make the ice cubes in the Manhattans glimmer. And they always know your poison
"Here Pal. Have some benzedrine and aspirin tablets from Tijuana to spark that whiskey."
The patrons are mostly married horn-rim wearing pattern-balding alcoholic businessmen whose wives have their own lives and the children are embarrassingly ugly with their elephant ears and buck teeth. Women landscape the bar looking tantalizing with their jet black dyed bouffant hair with modern Judy Jetson flips. Wanda with her black pixie glasses dresses up the bar most weekends and every Tuesday at 1:00 a.m. for pig ears and headcheese night. She looks 32, but is actually 17.
The bar is kicking! The cigarette smoke is deliciously thick and eye-burning. There's so much talk and ice clinking that you can't hear Satisfaction blasting from the juke box. The always on TV with its constantly ascending horizontal line stutters vague warnings that the calendar will end in 2012. And no one's heart will escape.
*** Its 44 years later. The outside structure languishes in an unidentifiable hue. The weeds need chemical death. A Graffiti message adorning the back wall by the dumpster shouts in broken Mexican,
"I suck!" It was written by white gang members from Thousand Oaks.
The bar is empty except a few Mexicans getting their asses kicked in pool by a heavy gold chain adorned dwarf who intermittently cheers himself on with indiscernible loud blurts. A lone black guy with a cauliflower stacked natural wearing sunglasses positioned halfway down his nose presides over the place between nodding-out in his chair against the wall. He's been here since the Watts riots and witnessed the towers going up.
Only one bartender is on duty. He actually owned the place in 1956, but 40 years later he's just drawing a pay check selling coronas, steel reserve, tequila shots, LAX Summer Specials year round, Courvoisier to the black guy, and mini-thins to spark that whiskey. Heartache and jail don't make for a life of success.
And then there's me. Balanced between a stool and the bar top leaning on the left side of my rib cage. Half of my white shirt tail hangs out in the front. My hair looks like I woke up in a cell and my eyes are crimson. I'm telling the patron-deaf bartender in dark verse that I can't find love. Even the penny arcade costs a dollar now.