I’ll toast to that – why Hollywood’s not America

It’s been one of those all-around late days. Stayed up late last night, slept in this morning, and didn’t get around to having my first meal of the day until four in the afternoon. That’s never a particularly wise move, as you then find yourself tempted to have another meal sometime way too late in the evening. In this case, it was about one in the morning that I was overwhelmingly tempted to find something to eat, and not wanting to deal with heading out to a restaurant that late at night for no good reason, I settled on doing something creative with the jar of peanut butter and loaf of bread that I bought the other day. So I take out two slices of bread in order to toast them, and being the idiot I am, only then realize that I do not in fact own a toaster.

It was not so long ago that I did own a toaster, but it ended up on the “more expensive to have shipped out here when I moved than to just buy a new one when I got here” list, and somehow I managed to forget to acquire one when I was setting up house here earlier this month. Not content to eat a peanut butter sandwich that hadn’t been toasted, but not able to convince myself to go sit in a restaurant, I resolved to instead do the logical thing and find myself a toaster. I was going to have to go out and buy one eventually anyway, and now seemed like a good time as any.

So gee whiz, how many toaster stores in the neighborhood are still open this late at night? There’s the twenty-four hour CVS not too far down the street, but I have yet to get a handle on what they do and don’t have, and I didn’t want to head over there only to find that they didn’t sell them. I remember seeing toasters at CDS last week (I didn’t buy one when I saw that they had them, because that would have made too much sense), but they closed hours earlier. And yes, there’s actually a CVS and a CDS within walking distance of each other. There’s also a CCS across the street from the CDS (I swear I’m not making that up), but CCS is some kind of currency conversion store and most definitely doesn’t sell toasters.

So where am I gonna go? Ah yes, the twenty-four hour Ralph’s grocery store on La Brea. That place is huge, they’ve got to have toasters. So I head down there, sure enough they’ve got a variety of toasters for sale, I buy one and start homeward. I make it about a hundred yards before I start to wish I’d thought to ask the cashier to put it into a grocery bag, because here I am walking down La Brea Avenue at nearly two in the morning, carrying a new-in-box toaster for all to see. Past the Jim Henson Company headquarters, past the strip club across the street from Henson just as it’s apparently closing and the drunk patrons are staggering out of the place, and past a bunch of quasi-asleep homeless folks who’d probably kill to have themselves a toaster – hopefully not literally.

But do you think anyone noticed me and my shiny new toaster walking past? Not a chance. I got to Hollywood Boulevard just as some other club was letting out, patrons running up and down the sidewalk and hollering at each other from opposite sides of the street, some lost-looking tourists trying to make out the handprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s in the dark, I walked past a still-open McDonald’s where I could have eaten instead (duh!), past the Kodak Theatre where they’re hosting the Daytime Emmys later this week and some security guard was trying to get a sprinkler in the bushes to work properly. More drunk patrons leaving yet another just-let-out club (note to self: the boulevard is more populated at 2am than at 1am, just for that reason). No one cared that I was walking down the street at two in the morning with a toaster. No one even noticed. My toaster and I were probably the most normal thing about the boulevard by that time of night.

Ferras is right, Hollywood’s not America. This place is insane. And that’s what I like about it.