Los Angeles Invasion

Today I write to you from scenic Los Angeles, where I have been for the last several days “taking meetings,” “doing lunch”, and other stuff that makes this town number one in the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. Through a strange turn of events (meaning someone else paid), I even flew out here first class, something I had never done before as I am a simple man. I figured it would be really great and I could sleep really comfortably the whole time, but as it turns out I guess I have flying coach down to a science and actually had more trouble sleeping in first class. I guess I really am a man of the people when it comes right down to it.

Anyway, I have been mostly running around doing the stuff mentioned in the previous paragraph while I’m here, so I haven’t had much time to see friends or anything like that as much as I’d like too. On Friday, I shot a promo (It’s like a commercial I’m told) in the desert (El Mirage, it was called) for my exciting new television show “The King of Miami,” which debuts May 7 in the futuristic high definition format on the futuristic high definition network MOJO, which is on cable. The promo was with me and the guys from all the other shows they have coming out on the network. That is a picture of me in the desert above during a moment of non-activity. As you can se, I am relatively comfortable in the desert and was not that close to dying or anything. Being from Cleveland and all, going to the desert is kind of like going to the moon, so really it could have gone either way. Weirdly, this was my fourth time shooting in the desert over the past year though and I pretty much came away unscathed this time around.

Because of the promo shoot and all, I got to stay in a nice hotel for a couple nights, but the rest of my time out here in Los Angeles I have been left to my own devices. For the first couple nights, I decided to get a hotel on Priceline.com, the popular website. I bid low on a “moderate” (one notch up from totall shitty in theory) hotel room and ended up in the Days Inn on Hollywood Boulevard, easily the nastiest hotel I have been in maybe in my whole life. The first room I checked into had a big yellow pee stain in the bed (I both smelled and touched the spot with my hand to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. It tested piss-positive). I went back to the front desk and alerted them of the large deposit of urine (not my own, I assured them) in my bed and they gave me another room. The next room they gave me didn’t have any visible signs of urine damage but did smell like a nursing home. I bought a scented candle and a big beer at the grocery store across the street to dull the sensory assault I was up against. I am a man of low standards, but this place even pushed it for me. It seemed like a place someone might come to die alone. I was even woken at 4am by a couple in the room above me boning. It was like a bad movie.

In an effort to avoid sitting around my pee-scented room any more than I had too, I met up with my friend Nick for dinner at Sushi Nozawa in Studio City my first night in town, a restaurant considered by some to be the best sushi place in L.A. It was pretty awesome- the kind of place that makes it hard to eat sushi anywhere else for a while until the memory fades and you can go back to eating not-as-good sushi again. I know that last sentence kind of makes me sound like a douchebag (even moreso than the photo above perhaps) but it’s true- Sushi Nozawa is pretty great. My friend Will took me there back in the ‘90’s and I really liked it then too. Okay, so that’s what I have to say about that.

Yesterday I headed up to my friend John’s new place in Eagle Rock, a nice little hamlet near Silver Lake. John and his wife and baby just moved there from NYC, so it was wild to see all their stuff from their New York apartment all set up in some new house across the country. It kind of messed with my head. They have orange trees in their backyard now too. I totally ate the fuck out of one of those things. Then we went to some Vietnamese restaurant that was rumored to be awesome but ended up just being pretty good.

Today I am just “dicking around” as the kids say, doing Sunday stuff and whatnot. I will get back to the glamour tomorrow but for now I am trying to just be some regular guy sitting around in a cafe of some sort typing and drinking lemonade that is not really very good. I guess I sort of bought it as a prop so they wouldn’t get mad at me for totally sitting here and typing and stuff all day. Still, with every sip of the lemonade, I keep thinking about how sucky it is. And yet I can’t stop drinking it. Do you ever get that way?

Dave Hill