Down, down, downtown L.A.

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I had this dream once that I was Andy Warhol. Not like the cool, Svengali NYC socialite/innovator/icon Andy, but the gay, badly toupeed, shot up Andy. It was really weird.

So I rented a loft in Downtown L.A. to try and feed this dream. I mean I went through the trouble of dying a toupee white and searching for young boys on the street to piss on my paintings, but it didn’t work well for me.

I wanted the most industrial, gritty place I could fine. Low and behold my surprise when it didn’t look like The W Hotel inside. The loft had fleas. It had rats. I got bites from the fleas on the rats. It had no hot water. It had a kitchen that was abandoned a quarter of the way through completion. It was sticky. I’d wake up with welts on my body from God only knows what. It had a few inches of filth that had accumulated over the years during it’s previous life as a sweat shop. I was living in post-apocalyptic, BLADE RUNNER type shit. As sexy as it sounds, you don’t want your home to be that. Do you know where Boyle Heights is? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The area also had a magic portal in the parking lot where one can leave something and before they turned around, it was gone. For example, one afternoon, I put a wine ice bucket full of water in the middle of the parking lot to quench the thirst of a mangy mutt. Before I reached the door, I looked back onto the horizon of the concrete paradise and the ice bucket was gone. Not the water, the whole thing. The damn dog didn’t even get to drink from it!

I was intrigued and wanted to leave more items in the spot to see if they would disappear. However, my articles meant too much to me. I wasn’t sure how I would get them back. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later a van also seemed to spontaneously combust in that same spot. Or rather spray-painted on then torched.

Moral of the story?
Don’t strive to be a 20th Century pop artist in the magical land known as Downtown L.A., it will only get you killed.

(Yes, I recycled an old story, God dammit. My well is dry right now. Dried up, I say!)