Ever wonder what lies just beneath the glitz and glitter of Hollywood’s ‘walk of fame’? Broken dreams, maybe? Novels in progress, perhaps, buried beneath a million un-produced screenplays? There just might be a heart. Keep in mind though that Hollywood is not that glitzy and glittery in the first place. It long ago lost its title as capital of the glamorous life to somewhere else, maybe New York or even Las Vegas, where pretentiousness is the currency, handy to have when you’ve lost all your money gambling. I’ve never seen Hollywood in anything but its faded glory mode, blissfully degenerate and totally unselfconscious and unconcerned about its own saddened state. A true art would be concerned, but Hollywood has rarely pretended to that, nor pretended to much of anything but image. Hollywood is an industry town, bare knuckles and dirty hands. At its best Hollywood pretends to the art of compromise, the essence of mass entertainment, particularly feature film-making. The city itself is no different. It has a carnival atmosphere on a good day, transplanted New Yorkers hawking pizza and corn dogs to over-excited tourists from ‘Braska who think that’s exotic ethnic food. They get the so-called ‘Walk of Fame’, the Chinese Theater, a big sign, and a few scraggly prostitutes, wild stuff, all stretched out like Times Square getting horizontal with itself, a failed theme park trying to imitate Las Vegas. But, like another dimension surrounding us unbeknownst, there’s another Hollywood that begins just blocks away.
LA is home to many ethnic groups, not least of which is the Mexican group who actually founded ‘the pueblo’. But that’s only the half of it. LA is home to so many transplanted East Asians that there are few who haven’t had a neighborhood named after them, complete with shops and restaurants specializing in their creations: Japantown, Koreatown, and Chinatown, to name a few. Unlike the Spanish-language Central Americans concentrated on Alvarado St., they are scattered all over the city, divided by language and custom, not even counting the Vietnamese in Orange County’s ‘Little Saigon’ or the Cambodians in Long Beach. By some quirk of fate or sympathetic magic ‘Thai Town’ is attached to Hollywood, the greatest concentration around Hollywood and Western boulevards, taking up where ‘Little Armenia’ leaves off, and intermixing and mingling with it. There would seem to be little connection between them, from opposite ends of the Asian continent, except perhaps common Aramaic alphabetic origins, but that’s evolution for you, a series of brilliant mistakes. Armenian food seems to be well represented in stores and bakeries bearing Armenian names, but I have yet to see any restaurants. There are plenty of Thai restaurants, however, and five years ago you would be excused for dismissing the so-called ‘Thai Town’ as nothing more than a conglomeration of such eateries. Since then, clothing stores, CD stores, bookstores, fortune tellers, and others have set up shop, and while you probably wouldn’t confuse it with Chiang Mai there is the critical mass to make a Thai feel somewhat at home, what with all the trappings. That includes Thai massage, not to be confused with Asian ‘hotties’ or 24/7 ‘outcall’. True Thai therapeutic massage, like Chinese acupuncture, is all about lines and points, and in its popular form is like having Yoga done to you.
Enter my wife Tang, a Thai massage practitioner ever since I got tired of her whiny housewife crap and told her to get a job or get lost. Check. She responded by deciding to study Thai massage. Queen takes pawn. I responded by telling her that that would be fine as long as confined to clinical situations. Check. Be careful of what you ask for; you might just get it. I knew from personal experience that typical Thai massage parlors are only about two steps removed from a typical Thai bar as a place where East meets West, but that’s the price you pay to play. On the other hand, many massage practitioners take the practice very seriously and study many hours up into the high levels of accomplishment and Thais of all levels of society appreciate the soothing effects of a good massage. It’s more than a simple rub after all, putting you through multiple positions with more than a little awkwardness, benefits only accruing with time. Unfortunately many Thai women see it as one of their few work options, along with cooking cleaning washing ironing or whoring, so the ranks are thick, even in LA. As recently as five years ago, there were no Thai massage parlors in Thai Town. Now there are at least ten. You can’t get any more Thai than that. It seems that there is an economic law of Thai massage which states that given no artificial restraints there will be as many massage parlors and masseuses as can survive at the minimum sustenance wage for all concerned. LA seems to be no exception. Add the US love of regulation and licensing and you’ve got a situation where not only is the market glutted but hard to break in to. All those certificates we scanned over from Thailand are worthless here. Apparently to give a good Thai massage you need to know Swedish, shiatsu, and deep tissue stuff. Fortunately there is some wiggle room in interpretation of the laws, so Tang was able to find work.
LA is the loneliest place in the world. I’ve been to over fifty countries and I don’t get lonely anywhere, except LA. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the lofty expectations or the vapid social climbing, whatever. It’s probably the poor urban planning, which by creating a center-less city, has actually engendered a lack of ‘centeredness’ in its populace. So now my wife in her first week in LA has more friends than I ever had in several previous attempts, simply because of her Thai birthright. Whether any of those benefits will accrue to me remains to be seen. So while Tang tries to whip old flabby butts into shape, or at least into feeling better about themselves, I sit over here a block off Hollywood and Vine listening to the clinks and clangs of business and industry by day, and the grunts and groans of not-quite-unrequited desire by night, all under the gloss and guise of Hollywood, so anything and everything goes, absolutely everything. The really weird shit goes on in places cheaper than this. Actually this place has got the best TV I’ve ever had in my life, not just IFC and Sundance, but LINK TV (aka the Chomsky Channel but they’ve also got world music), so I’m content for a while at least, attached by cable to the real world above like some Matrix Mugwump on bio-feedback, receiving images from the mother ship. This is Hollywood’s Golden Age after all, the best filmmakers from all over the world right here working. Ever wonder what happened to all those independent and ‘foreign’ filmmakers like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Peter Weir, Wolfgang Petersen, Steven Soderbergh, Guillermo del Toro and Robert Rodriguez? They’re all in Hollywood making ‘commercial’ films like Man Inside, 2Fast2Furious, Truman Show, Ocean’s Eleven, Hell Boy, and Spy Kids. In my spare time I continue plotting my future using the latest algorithms from al-Khwarizmi himself, and ejaculating my little messages in bottles for the easily amused. ‘Simple blogger’ indeed! The massage parlor owner even said Tang could crash at the shop if she wanted, just like they do in Thailand, so I guess I could take off and come back if I really wanted, just like I’m prone to do ‘over there.’ It’s still a big world ‘out there.’ Tang works ten to twelve hour days, seven days a week, and gets paid in cash. Hey, wait a minute! What country is this, anyway? It’s Thai Town, Jake. It’s Thai Town.
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