Gathered in Los Angeles…

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While in LA we stayed in Santa Monica with a guy called Mike. However, we didn’t know he was called Mike until we met him in person because he went under Vladducantes on his couch surfing profile and I’d spent all of our phone conversations bypassing his name. On his profile it stated that he was really into vampires and pirates, so we had some idea of what we were in for…

What he failed to mention, however, is that he lives with his mum. Apparently the whole couch surfing malark was her idea, but you wouldn’t have guessed it the way she hid in her room the whole time. She was a small black woman resembling Mrs Tiggy-winkle and Naomie Harris in Pirates of the Caribbean. Mike was an introverted soul. He rarely made eye contact when he spoke to you, preferring the floor or an upward gaze through his red and black dreads. He wore black continuously and he loves Marilyn Manson and computer games.

The place smelt of sickly sweet vanilla and old flight cases, cabs, etc. formed the majority of their furniture. The bathroom was pink and filthy. Both the mirror and handrail were broken. Around the sink were scattered rose petals covered in a thin layer of dust, the bath was filled with black clumps of hair and stood on its ledge was a bottle of flea-shampoo for the cat. There was no shower in sight, so Fin and I spent the first day unwashed. Before I get into that though, I’ll tell you that in the living room there was a perfectly good futon that Mike had been sitting on while playing with his iPhone as we watched LA Confidential. When the film ended it transpired that we weren’t aloud to sleep on this futon. No, we’d have to sleep on the floor or on the very small two-seater that even I felt cramped on. He didn’t give us a coherent reason, he just mumbled something to floor and we caught the words “mum” and “clean”.

So, the first day: we woke intermittently to Mike and his mum arguing about various things and when we finally gave in and got up Mike’s mum was no where to be seen. She came bounding in an hour or so later screaming How Soon is Now at the top of her lungs before busting into Love Shack and shaking her arms over her head. It was all fairly amusing and we went out to breakfast fairly lighthearted. We drove as close to the Hollywood sign as possible, which isn’t very close as it turns out. Then we walked down Hollywood Boulevard to see all the stars and waste as much time as possible out of the house.

When we got back Fin wanted to make a sandwich, so he reached into an already open cupboard to get a plate but recoiled as his hand met with a thick layer of grease and dirt. Then Mike’s mum – you may be wondering why I keep referring to her as ‘Mike’s mum’, this is because we were never introduced – stormed out of her room and said “What are you doing?” Fin muttered something about wanting a plate, so she stomped over, grabbed a plate and thrust it into his hand before heading back to her bedroom. By this point you can imagine we felt pretty pestilent.

Around 11pm Mike emerged from his room to say goodnight and then flicked the lights off, leaving us baffled in nothing but the dim glow of the TV. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, we were told to leave in the morning. Again, Mike told the floor that there was problem with management and we had to leave in a few hours.
We packed up and decided to head to the beach while we figured out what to do and Mike invited himself along. We’ve no idea why though, because all he did was play on his iPhone, follow us around in silence and refuse to lend us 20¢ for the parking meter.

We didn’t know who to turn to. So we ended up driving back down to San Diego, back into the arms of the lovely Val, who took us out for Indian and took care of us all over again.

We then spent a couple of days driving up to Santa Cruz, although I’m not sure how we managed to stretch it out that far. We drove along the coast up Highway 1 through Laguna Beach, Newport, Huntington Beach, LA (again), Santa Barbara, the Big Sur, and some more.

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