Hollywood’s where people who haven't made it yet congregate.

A passage people have to successfully pass through, much like a lower colon,  prior to the end game in the high stakes mass entertainment gamble.

Those that make it get premasticated and fed as pap to the overly deodorized.

Those that don’t hang around leading high volume lives of increasing desperation.

It has every shade of extreme fashion intermingling frictionless by virtue of a common yet lonely greed and dissatisfaction.

Success being perceived as an ever morphing respite via the purchase of goods and services from the yearning  to fill the voids and vacuums that are in great part Americas cultural core. 

Lots of over-dressed  try-hards with just enough philosophy to confuse the unwary into presuming depth.

Depravity is the biggest section in the yellow pages here. 

I’m having a wonderful time.

Entombed in the constantly teetering dynamic of a goth S+M after-hours club in Hollywood I sit behind the curtain.No-one got tortured today, someone got tortured yesterday.It was behind closed doors in the dungeon but I could still listen in.

I was tidying up around the place. It was a long session, past 3 hours with peaks and troughs. Alternate snuffling, passionate howling, a rigorous choreography of extreme discomfort.

On the third peak of applied pain he went to the next step in his self analysis

“Mummy..Mummy, oh no Mummy.” he mumbled

Pain/mummy/love whats new under the sun.

I continued sweeping the dancefloor.

I went in later to inspect the tools of the trade, they went beyond spanky spanky.

It was more your trussed suspension, industrial nipple-clamped, scrotum twisting, deep and rugged anal probe while being injected with substances that increased intensity at chosen crescendos kind of operation. I read in the paper today of a little girl, 7 years old, who rang 911 because her friends had hurt her feelings.

I sit behind the curtain.

I should be sleeping, its 9am and the place usually closes between 6 and 8am

But this morning it sounds like theres extra efforts being made.

Theres an orgy happening.

Couches unfolded  flesh-slapping, moaning, encouraging words, various interwoven rhythms.

I could watch but I don’t,

 I could walk through and spectate but I don’t,

 I could part the curtain and peek but I don’t.

I just sit behind the curtain and listen.

Thankful really, that my life allows me such depravity surfing circumstances.

I’m an inhabitant, I let myself out a side door unseen, onto Sunset Boulevard.

Its hideously bright, stark unfiltered LA morning light. I walk 2 blocks to the 7/11.

I see the dapper, shopping cart pushing street person. He wears a clean pressed shirt every day and a tie. He panhandles reflexively and is unfathomably chipper.

He says “God bless you sir.”  He contains more divinity than I because for a moment I do feel blessed. For a brief moment I am not calculated  flotsam. 

On the way back from the 7/11 I meet the soul bleached gaze of a crack-whore whose expression contains no enticement or sexual authority but rather a candid searching  scan. Her eyes slide off me. I’m too fresh. I’m relieved and disappointed.

 I let myself back into the nondescript building across the road from Hollywood High.