Chapter 19: LAPD police report. Code 1027 in the canteen

Brief update on the Cuban restaurant, Versailles. Yum!! I had special Cuban roast pork, black beans, rice, and fried banana. As did Eric, a friend of Kate’s who afterwards complained of a “pork headache”. When we got home, Kate and I made Ginger Short Biscuits, with sauteed nectarines and sour cream filling. Also yum! I feel systemically full today; though I’ve eaten nothing, I’m not hungry after my three days of gorging. Still, that didn’t stop Kate from making a wonderful dinner tonight: salmon with yoghurt and cilantro sauce, gnocchi with sage and butter, and jicima and fennel salad.

So yesterday a great thing happened. I found a spectacular pair of sunglasses for $12. They were almost identical to the $225 pair of Gucci sunglasses, which I had greatly admired yesterday and reluctantly forswore.

After observing my intense admiration of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) helicopter buzz-by the other night, Kate thought I would enjoy a visit to the LAPD gift shop and coffee shop. It’s special since it is in the Ramparts District, which has been particularly plagued by all the scandals (police stealing cocaine out of the evidence bins, framing suspects, protection rackets etc, etc) Our visit was quite, quite surreal, and definitely the best tourist sightseeing spot in LA. Before hitting the canteen, we visited the gift shop. First of all, I have to comment on the special aroma in the shop: a pervasive smell of fresh leather firearm holsters, mixed with gun cleaning solvent. And, of course, there was an enticing range of merchandise. It’s too extensive to list completely, but let me itemize some of the choicer items:

• A full range of handguns and semiautomatic rifles, with all the accoutrements (I want to emphasize that this place was named the LAPD Gift Shop. Get it? Honey here the Colt automatic loading pistol you’ve always wanted for Mothers’ Day)
• Videos entitled Sharp Edged Weapon Defense
• Little jade carvings of pigs
• LAPD official hand sanitizer, (kills 99% of all germs, with no water, I guess for when you’ve been handling really stinky hobos)
• Pink foam squeeze-pig, embossed with LAPD logo (to help you destress; I hope the whole police force are issued one when they join)
• Infant’s bib with LAPD logo and Code 1 written on front
• A T-shirt with an LAPD logo on the front and on the back a very bad drawing of two hands cuffed to prison bars with a caption saying One Size Fits All
• An LAPD T-shirt emblazoned with riflemen engaged in some SWAT action with bullets flying
• Little Normal Rockwellish statuettes of LAPD officers in various situations. Two merit special mention: (i) the sharpshooter crouching behind a dumpster ready to fire his rifle and (ii) the LAPD officer handing a teddy bear back to a rather engaging-looking child, but the LAPD officer is carrying two guns, and a stun gun in his belt.
• Golf balls embossed with (you guessed it) the LAPD ensignia
• Truly hideous womens’ nightgowns, embossed on the front with a teddy bear sporting the LAPD logo
• Photographic 8x5 stills from Dragnet – a US police show
• Infant’s plastic nursing bottles with LAPD logo in crayon and a stick figure of a police officer with a gun on it.

Kate has rightly pointed out that what makes all this merchandise so very special is the LAPD logo, which transforms the ordinary into the quite, quite extraordinary. I wonder if they have a mail order catalogue? We were laughing so hard in the store, I was fearful that we would be arrested and framed for something. In the gift shop I heard the sales assistant telling a customer to “be careful with foreign ammunition because it’ll rust your AK47, and they are hard to replace now”. The AK47 is a particularly lethal automatic machine gun, for those of you who don’t know. So that was nice and cosy. I also heard this jovial exchange between two police officers:

“Gosh, buddy, you’ve lost some weight. Are you on a diet?”

“No, my HIV is starting to kick in.”

Laughter all around from the other police shoppers.

We then went to the canteen. I had a rookie burger. Kate had a salad which cost $1. The waitress had hugely long fingernails of a uniquely horrible pink colour, which will probably cause me to seek therapy when I get back to Vancouver. I was worried she was going to spear my eye out when she served us. Kate liked the glitter sparkles on the other waitress’s nails. We toured the firing range, where a rookie lady cop was getting instruction. (Would everybody please pray for the people of LA tonight: please, God, don’t let her on the street any time soon!) Kate observed that the really scary thing here was how the greatest damage to the backboard at the end of the range was in the places furthest away from the targets. We toured the garden, which was like Disney or the Flintstones: water and garden features made out of concrete poorly sculpted to resemble Flintstones rubble. Kate said that when she brought her Mum here – she brings all out of town visitors here, it’s a sight in case you haven’t got it yet – they were having a wedding in the garden, which is not more than 20 meters away from the firing range.

Coming out, Kate pointed out the police cars to me. Black and White. With the LAPD motto on the doors: “to protect and serve”. Quote unquote. They put quotation marks around the motto. Kate asks me “Do you think they are trying to be sarcastic, here, with those quotation marks?

Today in a bookstore I picked up the LA Gay and Lesbian Yellow Pages, which are amazingly are as big as the Yellow Pages for all of Cape Town! But what is more astounding is that practically ALL of the products and services listed therein, are marketed with a buff torso of a naked man. For example, what picture for Hollywood Bail Bonds? A naked man in handcuffs, of course! What advert for LA Radiator and Automotive? A really hot guy, streaked with grease, carrying a tire. Advert for Midway Ford? The slogan Irresistible Deals emblazoned above a naked guy, spread out on the bonnet of a Ford 4x4.

The adverts for physicians in these Gay Yellow Pages were even better. Roughly a third were for perfectly normal HIV specialist practices. No problem there. But the rest were all for dermatologists, plastic surgeons and podiatrists. Derek H Jones MD advertises that he is an expert in the “Diagnosis and Management of” a range of dermatological conditions, including Athlete’s Foot and nail problems. (Are people really so dumb, that they can’t diagnose and treat their own Athlete’s Foot?) And the Beverly Hills Surgical Institute declares that it is “your first step to foot pain relief” (GROAN!) It then promises that it is “dedicated to providing the finest and most advanced foot & ankle care available today”. Whew! What a relief to know that. I’ll sleep easier tonight for sure, just knowing that should I develop a sudden case of foot pain, while slumbering on Kate’s couch, that relief is at hand. And clearly, I’ve got reason to be fearful; there must be an epidemic of foot problems in LA, because on the next page Dr Timothy J Liddy promises that “Relief from Foot Pain is a Visit Away”.

I’d like to talk in particular about Pacific Wilshire, a plastic surgery, because it offers a stunningly impressive array of treatments:

1. Eyelid Surgery
2. Pec Implants
3. Mini-Face Lifts
4. Face Lifts
5. Facial Implants
6. Colorectal Surgery
7. Chin Lifts
8. Liposuction
9. Forehead Lifts
10. Laser Skin Resurfacing
11. Microdermabrasion
12. Nose Surgery
13. The Breasts (Lifts, Enhancement, Reduction, Enlargement, Reconstruction, Implants)
14. Tummy Tucks
15. Vaginal Rejuvination
16. Bladder Suspension
17. Sweaty Palm Treatment
18. Lip Enhancement
19. Collagen Injections
20. And much, much more…

Tomorrow, when I call Pacific Wilshire to make my appointment for number 8 above), I’m going to pose a few questions about the other treatments listed above. Re 6: is this procedure something the plastic surgeon normally learns in school? Re 13: What’s the difference between Enhancement, Enlargement, and Implants? Re 15: The public doesn’t want to know about this, thank you very much. Re 17: I’m so glad that help is at hand, and Re 20: What else could there possibly be?

I had exhausted Kate’s hospitality, if not her culinary repetoire, and so I decided to follow that time-tested advice: Go West Young Man. Except in this case I merely went to West Hollywood, which is just a few kilometers from Los Feliz. However, psychologically and socially, West Hollywood might be in a different universe from the laid back, Latino, neighbourhood of Los Feliz. West Hollywood is the gay ghetto, and, folks, it’s kinda weird! The streets are chock full of men, many of whom are so pumped full of steroids they look like they are about to burst open with a gigantic popping sound, kind of like when you squeeze bubble wrap. There are few woman are to be observed anywhere. Everyone wanders around with a huge Starbucks Coffee in hand as they walk their dogs.

I stayed with my friend John, and spent the next three days running into people I knew from everywhere else in the world. Ran into Johnnie from London. Ran into a different John whom I met at the Sydney Mardi Gras. Ran into Johan, a friend of mine from Capetown who moved to LA a few years back and whom I'd lost contact with. The world is a small, small place, and if you’re gay, then it, like Alice, shrinks even more. Otherwise I suffered a terrible, terrible hangover (Thank you John!). And I saw a wonderful movie, Moulin Rouge, with Nicole Kidman who is luminous and Ewan McGregor.

Overall, though, LA is delightfully entertaining, especially when you have a delightfully entertaining friends like Perry, Juan, Kate, Johnnie, Keith and John to play with. And clearly, it helps to have a slightly cynical eye. Then you can laugh. Otherwise, you’d go stark raving mad here.

Chapter 18: It’s plastic, it’s fantastic, it’s LA

So I left Bali. There is only so much rice, tuna, and beer which a boy can consume before it starts, well, to get to him just a little, ya know? My last few days in Bali were quite nice. Karen and I had several incidents of quite astounding mental telepathy. It kept happening over, and over, and over; we’d be thinking exactly the same stuff at exactly the same time. And of course, Karen and I bought Ubud. Liam continued to amaze and entertain; I was looking after him in the market while Karen went into a shopping-buying trance. He really made me laugh, because he was running around grabbing all kinds of stuff – it was a real task to keep an eye on him – and then suddenly he picked up a bunch of carved wooden spoons, held them up to me and said “These are stunning, Peter!” Now, where does a little kid, age 2 ½ learn the word “stunning”? I nearly fell over I was laughing so hard. I also went one night to a Kecak dance, which thankfully has no gamelan orchestra, but instead a musical accompaniment of 120 men chanting in harmony nonstop. They have a priest on hand as many of the chanters fall into ecstatic trance while doing their thing, and have to be revived from the spirit world carefully. Really fantastic, and just perfect for me being only 1 hour long. I have a short attention span.

The flight from Bali to LA? You don’t want to know. Ever stopped in Taipei? Ugh.

And now I’m in North America, staying with my friends Perry and Juan in West Hollywood in Los Angeles, that most plastic and somehow unreal of cities. Perry and Juan have a bulldog named Lola, who thinks that she is a person. Something in the LA air, proximity to Hollywood and all that, made me crazy – I believe it affects all Los Anglenos – and for the first day I kept serenading this poor dog with “Her name was Lola, she was a showdog, etc.” Also very interesting: Perry and Juan keep a box of Wet Wipes on the kitchen counter to clean Lola up after she comes back from her morning and afternoon poo perambulations. Question for circulation list recipients: do any other dog owners do this? While staying in West Hollywood, I went to a gym which charged me a $23 drop in charge! I also saw my friend Keith, whom I met years ago when I first moved to London, and who had a baby with a lesbian friend two years ago. He said it is wonderful now that his little girl is old enough to have a real relationship with, but in the first year he kept thinking “Oh my God, I’ve ruined my life.”

Then I moved on to stay in a different suburb of the plastic-fantastic city, called Los Feliz, with my friend Kate, whom I met while kayaking in Malawi a few years back. Kate’s special: she can cook. Last night at dinner she forced me to drink mojitos, my new favorite drink, a Cuban concoction of fresh limes, mint, sugar, rum, and soda water. She cooked scallops and black rice and Asian salad in rice vinegar, while I hung out her kitchen window looking for my new, as-yet-unintroduced-to-me, Cuban boyfriend. I love Kate because she told me that when she receives my e-mails, she always stops what she’s doing and makes herself a fresh cup coffee before she reads them. She has a musician friend from across the street who is currently jamming on the accordion (!!!) in her living room, while I write.

LATER: It’s later in the evening and as I write (this is real in-the-moment reportage, folks) our house ­– well Kate’s house actually – is being buzzed by a police helicopter doing circles over the street. Also, there is a police car right outside the house, parked in Kate’s driveway, and policemen at the bottom of the street with guns. The helicopter search light is sweeping the street and coming in our windows, and the megaphone says “You are surrounded, come out with your hands up”. The noise is so mechanical, unhuman, etc that I feel like a hunted homo sapiens in some apocalyptic future where machines have taken over, aka Terminator. Where is Arnie when you need him? Kate says she’s going outside to put her hands up and shout “Please, how long does it take to cook scallops?” The noise is deafening, and it’s a little unnerving since one tiny pilot error, and we are toast; the helicopter is flying REALLY low. Kate has just made fresh tea – herbal no caffeine cause we’re already a bit worked up – and we are settling in to watch the spectacle. Clearly, we have criminal in our midst. I keep hoping for someone to run up the street, gun-in-hand, and for the police officers to give chase right past our front door. The police force presence is truly awesome. I’m thrilled, as I feel I’ve had a real LA experience. This is NOT Canada. The next morning we are so excited by this experience that Kate has decided to take me to the LAPD coffee shop for a doughnut, where I can sit amongst many burly police offices, who are “all packing heat” – Kate knows how to turn a phrase. There is also a souvenir shop right next door where I can buy things like LAPD sweatpants, or a T-shirt which commemorates a very violent street shoot-out a few years back, with a score card (bank robbers versus police) on the back of it, with various categories of scoring: rounds fired, weapons used, injuries, and, yes, even deaths. So this is LA! I think I finally “get” this city.

But in addition to policing, LA is also something else for me: food! America has the BEST snacks in the world. Crans – sundried and lightly sugared cranberries – yummy! Taro chips – taro root cooked like a potato chip and seasoned lightly with Asian spices – delicious! And the restaurants! We’ve been to a wonderful Mexican restaurant, which served heavenly guacamole and burrito, and a Japanese restaurant where we ate salted soy beans, glazed sea bass, albacore and yellowtail sashimi, and miso soup with special mushrooms (just tasty, not hallucinogenic, thank you very much). Baskin Robins Ice Cream Store has also received some patronage from us. We’re going for Cuban food tonight, I think. Kate mentioned a Peruvian restaurant too. More to come after our next meal…