24-HOUR PORNY PEOPLE feature

A Considerable Town section, LA Weekly, April 2007

Porny People in LA Weekly

“Join us, salsa dancing, roller skating, and merry making on east Pico.”

It was already 10 p.m. when the text message came in. Still recovering from Friday night’s bender, we nonetheless dragged ourselves downtown — and it was deep downtown, where they don’t have street lamps anymore, where the city planners seemed to give up.

We parked in the dark lot next door and were immediately chased onto the street by two barking dogs. The gate at the address was locked, there was no one in sight, and my internal monologue was already off this street and onto Burrito King’s chile relleno burrito when a worried young gal in five-inch heels and a sparkly purple dress came clicking down the stairs. “Go on up — the salsa teacher got stuck in traffic.”

Three flights high, it was a typical CalArtsy party — mostly familiar faces standing around drinking and laughing in a huge industrial space. Wandering down the hall, I happened upon what seemed like a Moroccan opium den — lush throw pillows strewn about, dark mood lighting, fans oscillating, curls of cigarette smoke colliding at the ceiling — but turned out to be a porn radio studio.

A 40-something woman in a sheer black top, sans bra, rushed up to me and pressed her finger to her lips as a signal to be quiet.

“We’re live on the air and we’re looking for guests. Do you have any deep, dark secrets to confess?” Past the racks of illegibly marked gray VHS boxes and the TV monitors showing video footage of busty African-American women “acting,” a middle-aged blonde wearing heavy lipstick and a low-cut top talked into a radio mike.

I said I knew someone who would definitely have something to get off his chest and ran back to the party to get a friend. They announced him on the air as “Anton,” and what he proceeded to tell the radio host was an outrageous lie, which, of course, she had to take seriously because in the business of perversion eradication you have to assume everyone is telling the truth.

Anton confessed a childhood of incestuous molestation, which triggered the anger that led to his adolescent abuse of small animals. As retribution for his youthful crimes, Anton said, he has dedicated himself to being an animal-control officer for the city of Los Angeles, helping abused and abandoned cats and dogs. The problem, said Anton, is that he seems to be exclusively attracted to men at the workplace. And he just doesn’t know how to move on.

The professional sex world is so eager to be accepting, nothing can be shocking. A studio technician in his 60s took the mike and said, “Hey, Anton, listen. I’m much older and wiser than you, but I used to take cats, put them in burlap sacks, and swing them around. It’s not right, but hey, we didn’t know any better.” Then one of the breathy female guests chimed in. “Maybe you should date a girl with cats. Then you’ll love her and you’ll love the cats. I have cats...”

After an hour of this feline-focused oral extravaganza (and after being offered the job of associate producer, which I graciously declined), the words “cock ring” were spoken, and it was Anton’s and my cue to get the hell out of there. Miraculously, we escaped from the smothering bosom of sexual acceptance just in time for the salsa instructor to show up, about 1 a.m. With the help of blaring music and partial inebriation, I tried my best to follow the simple back-and-forth cha-cha he demonstrated, to little avail. The rest of the night was spent stumbling over someone else’s feet, and roller-skating with the 24-hour porny people who filtered in from down the hall. It was heartwarming to watch the trust-fund babies, sex workers, video artists, journalists and high school dropouts flourish in each other’s awkward and untalented two-stepping.

A skinny, six-foot-tall professional in a skintight red ensemble introduced herself as a “porn star renaissance woman.” As we stood gazing out of the window onto Pico Boulevard’s black abandon, she told me how she takes care of those ill-tempered parking-lot dogs, leaving them food and water. She was very excited that one of the dogs had recently eaten out of her hand. And then she offered me a job — an editor position to go through the thousands upon thousands of hours of tape she has yet to organize. I graciously declined.

FREAKS AND FREAKS feature

A Considerable Town section, LA Weekly, December 2006

Sideshow freaks beat me up in LA Weekly

I’d been waiting for an hour outside the California Institute of Abnormal Arts in North Hollywood when the elephant man finally showed up. After an additional hour, Samantha X, the ringleader of 999 Eyes, “the last traveling freak show in the United States,” appeared on the scene with the midget and a young BBC documentarian. Samantha, a woman in her 40s with dirty, colored dreads beneath a moldy cowboy hat, ran toward us in an obvious state of distress.

“The fucking bus broke down! All my freaks are trapped on some street called Sepulveda. Can you help us pick them up?”

I’d always been into the sideshow, its history and cultural markers — Charles Eisenmann’s photographs and Todd Browning’s Freaks were regular fare when I was growing up — so when I learned that 999 Eyes was appearing, I was on the phone asking to photograph them. They had a lobster boy and a lobster girl! And a giant! And a half-girl! This was the real deal.

But things weren’t going exactly as planned. Ignoring the (prescient) advice of the BBC journalist, who whispered into my ear, “Don’t get involved,” I agreed to lead a two-car caravan down to Sepulveda and Jefferson boulevards.

As soon as Samantha got into my car, I noticed a familiar odor — the putrid stink of dirty hippies: old sweat, soiled clothes, cheap vegetarian Thai takeout and stale health-food cookies. Breathing through my mouth, I attempted to converse with Samantha about her craft and the tradition behind it. It turns out that these freaks spend three months out of the year performing at Burning Man. The fear that gripped me at this point was reminiscent of the terror felt when I first realized my chiropractor was a Scientologist.

After much traffic, anxiety and confusion, we made it to the freak bus. A flash of various body sizes, clown makeup, dogs and tambourines, and we were on our way back to North Hollywood. Next to me in my 1995 Nissan Sentra was the 7-foot-3-inch Gentle Giant, scrunched over his taxidermied two-headed calf, while Samantha X, the lobster girl and (thankfully) the half-girl sat in the back, putting on their white face paint.

I tried to break the ice with some Hollywood humor.

“So, do you guys think you can get me on the guest list for your gig?”

Instead of telling me that of course I was getting a free seat, Samantha proposed a swap: I see the show for free, photograph it and send them prints. Ten-dollar admission in exchange for photographing and developing expensive prints and lugging them to their first L.A. performance? I looked at the giant and he looked at me, and after visualizing one of his super-sized hands around my throat, I just mumbled, “Okay, sure.” Damn, damn hippies.

In North Hollywood, 15 minutes past curtain, I was sitting double-parked, waiting for the freaks to finish unpacking their gear, when I heard the midget yell out, “I hate these kinds of trunks — it won’t stay open!” This was followed by a loud, metallic snap. I jumped out and ran around to see my trunk stuck open at a 90 degree angle. It wouldn’t budge. That’s when I started yelling.

“What did you freaks do? My trunk is broken! Someone, anyone, come over here!”

The Gentle Giant inspected the trunk with Lowrent the Clown, pointed to something on the inside and said, “Oh, it’s that part.”

I looked inside to see what he was talking about, when the trunk came slamming down on my head.

“Oh shit, are you okay?” said the Gentle Giant. When I murmured something close to a stunned yes, he added, “I can’t get this to close. Oh well.” And off he went. That was the last I saw of the giant.

I was standing there feeling my head for blood and fighting off tears when four of my friends arrived. Within five minutes my trunk was closed and there was a plastic cup of Jack and Coke in my hand. I tried watching the freak show, but I couldn’t get into it — whether from annoyance or because it sucked, I couldn’t tell. But world-famous dwarf and sideshow performer extraordinaire General Tom Thumb was probably rolling over in his miniature grave.

At home, my pained head and jaw and my bloodshot eyes worried my brother. Four hours later I lay in Cedars-Sinai, diagnosed with a mild concussion. A woman in a business suit and loud blue pumps asked me whether I had been treated there before. “Yeah, I was born here,” I replied.

I was born here, and here I am. My trunk is broken, I have a concussion, and I didn’t get to take any photographs of those freaks. What was I doing with my life? I let out a huge sigh. My brother continued flipping through his copy of Sports Illustrated and said, “This is why Dad wanted you to be a lawyer.”

HISTORY FOR HIRE short feature

Part of LA Weekly's BEST OF L.A. issue, August 2006

History for Hire in LA Weekly

Rent a War: Best Place to Get Props

The first time I entered History for Hire, I was smacked with bright light; it reminded me of Lou Reed hitting the streets after a six-day amphetamine binge, like the lyrics to “White Light/White Heat.” As my pupils adjusted, I was hit with a kaleidoscope of color: Union blues, bright ’60s psychedelic garb and dreary grays. I immediately felt elated. As I walked through the aisles, the overwhelming smell of must and stale wool hit me like mustard gas, or at least mustard gas was on my mind as I walked through the unending stacks of military-issue camouflage. Coming to this North Hollywood prop house was one of my favorite duties when I worked as prop master for the Greenway Court Theater. I loved walking among the tall, wide and seemingly endless racks of period pieces. Not one shelf was left unoccupied, not one box left unstuffed. You could find everything from Victorian-era cosmetics cases to Revolutionary War muskets to neon 1980s Fender Stratocasters. I always spent more time exploring there than I should have. I loved imagining what movies had used which objects, what kind of characters would need them.

History for Hire started out 21 years ago as a humble living-room operation run by Pam Elyea and her husband, Jim. The first film feature they worked on was Oliver Stone’s seminal 1986 film, Platoon. “Of course,” said Pam, “we had no idea it was going to be such a successful film at the time.” Now, 20 years later, History for Hire has grown into a Hollywood staple, working on 150 still shots, 100 music videos, 50 theatrical productions and 50 feature films a year, with business extending to all seven continents.

Supplying props to film shoots on Antarctica had its drawbacks, however. Production on an IMAX film about the real-life ill-fated 1914 voyage of English explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, in which his boat was seized by ice while attempting to sail past the frozen continent, was halted when the film’s crew ship, carrying all the props and much of the equipment, sank into icy blue oblivion. Pam chalks the experience up to working in an unpredictable industry. Recently, History for Hire has outfitted a pirate documentary for the History Channel, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, and even a private corporate pirate-themed party at the Renaissance Hotel. And what they don’t have, they make — a service aided by Jim Elyea’s experience with design and television product fabrication.

But being at History for Hire seems to radiate a unique feeling of being at home, if home were a huge warehouse full of all the cool stuff you had ever wanted.


History for Hire 7149 Fair Ave., North Hollywood, (818) 765-7767 or www.historyforhire.com

HOLIDAY IN ISRAEL feature

A Considerable Town section, LA Weekly, August 2006

Dodging rockets in LA Weekly

Upon our arrival on July 12, Nurit Gross, a friend of my mother’s from preschool and an active member of the Israeli human-rights organization Women Against Occupation, greeted my mother and me at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport. My mother and Nurit had seen each other only once in the 30 years since my mother, an expat living in America, left Israel. As Nurit grabbed some of our luggage and led us briskly toward her car, she proclaimed that there had been a special performance to greet our arrival — an attack by Hezbollah that left eight Israeli soldiers dead and two missing.

This wasn’t what anyone — not my mother, her Israeli friends, our family here — had imagined back in April when we purchased our tickets.

“We’re going to be real tourists on this one,” my mother had said as she gleefully flipped through an Israel guidebook. It was to be her first real vacation since a post­divorce flight to Bali in the early ’80s. “It’s going to be all about fun.”

Nurit wasn’t very optimistic about that.

“Now it’s going to get bad,” she said. “It’s going to get bad for the Israelis, and it’s going to get bad for the Lebanese.”

I asked her why Hezbollah had chosen to start an attack on Israel’s soil. With the characteristically Israeli manner of being righteous and aloof at the same time, she tapped the ash off her cigarette, flicked her wrist and said, “Because that is what they are trained to do.”

The rest of the trip played out like a checkers match between us, the willful tourists, and the Katyushas — the rockets of Soviet origin that Hezbollah was lobbing at Israel by the dozens per day. Plans to visit family in Nahariya and Haifa turned into extra days in Tel Aviv. Our sojourn to the beautiful and tranquil Kibbutz Mizra ended one day before a rocket hit the neighboring city of Afula — four days before Mizra itself was struck. My relatives living on Mizra, a kibbutz so secular that we ate homegrown pork chops on the night of the Sabbath, had been so confident in their 100-kilometer distance from the northern border that their bomb shelters were still locked at the time of our visit.

Friends from home contacted me, wanting to know if I was scared. After all, people were being killed at bus stations, on their balconies, even while running for bomb shelters. But I found that soon after arriving, I subscribed to the silently understood pact of Israel’s residents: You go about your business for as long as you possibly can.

Yet daily life in Israel constantly reminds you that you’re in a war zone. Every mall, bank, restaurant, hotel and mobile-phone shop has security in front, equipped with metal detectors. Every television set in every household and every business is continuously fixed on the local news channel, and not five minutes go by without the image of a young soldier carrying an M-16. And, as our trip progressed, the hotels emptied out more and more, giving the advantage to tourists looking for a deal on a cushy room.

The one occasion when I did have a clear twitch of doubt came on our first day in Jerusalem. The taxi driver’s car stereo blared with the news of the day on our ride over to the Old City section of Jaffa Gate. Since the news was in Hebrew, I tuned it out and fixed my eyes on a sexy young soldier carrying a large, semiautomatic weapon. I started to make a joke about walking softly and carrying a big gun, when my mother interrupted me, saying, “They caught a suicide bomber at Jaffa Gate.”

My expression must have changed quickly, because the driver looked at me from his rearview mirror and said in heavily accented English, “Don’t worry. Suicide bombers are much easier to catch in the summer. They wear those big coats.” Once at Jaffa Gate, we got out of the taxi, paid our driver the 80 shekels and made our way down to the Western Wall.

On the climb back up, the stairs split into two directions. One led back the way we came, past the armed security booth; the other weaved through an open-air bazaar where Muslim, Jewish and Christian tourists alike buy their souvenirs. I quickly scanned the area for some sort of security personnel, but couldn’t see any. Then it hit me. I yelled for my mother, who was already ahead of me, walking toward a display of colorful hanging beads. She turned around, and I locked eyes with her, shaking my head.

Together we walked back up the other way, discussing whether we should have falafel or shawarma for lunch.