The Free Way

 

"Oh, it's not the car I reserved.  The only car they had left was a Ford Mustang," MB told me as we walked to our usual Westwood restaurant.  On the way we took a peek at the brand new black sports car.  Since I wasn't present to pick up the car, she was the only one allowed to drive it.

 

The next day we just took the 10 to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed vaguely north.  It was so cool to be in a car.  Not only was it so cool to be in a car, it was so cool to be in a Ford Mustang listening to cumbia music with the windows cracked open.  Even better were the views through the windshield.  In California, when you're driving down the highway, there's ocean on one side and mountain on the other, while you drive either downhill or uphill at an almost scarily steep angle.  You trade your nerves for breathtaking angles from which to drink in what you see in front of you.

 

Eventually we stopped at a little beach called Zuma.  The name appealed to MB.

 

In our trips to the beach at Santa Monica I remember it being too cold to go in the water.  Although, in retrospect, maybe I just should have run in those times.  I felt like a kid playing in the oncoming waves.  I remembered when my family and I went to Misquamicut Beach in Westerly, RI growing up and I'd see my dad wearing a little yellow container around his neck, one of those ones that contain change or keys, and he'd swim all the way out to the buoy.  I'd never venture out that far, I don't even think we were supposed to, but I'd swim out for a bit and let the water carry me to a point that was no longer parallel to our stuff on the beach.  Then I would come in and cling to the wet sand as the waves came down on me in a rush of energy.

 

We drove on, northward, and I suggested going up to Santa Barbara.  MB was contemplating going to UCSB for their Art History program (Actually, UC Santa Barbara has a reputation as the biggest party school in the area, a fact I didn't know until I saw it reported as a news item on KNBC once.  This was a fact the anchors laughed off as obvious, but it was news to me) and I wanted to see how long it would take to get there.  It looked like we were going to be there by 5pm, so it seemed like a good idea.

 

Santa Barbara wasn't a bad little place to hang out.  Think of it as California's answer to Newport, RI.  It's sort of an upper-class seaside town there to attract out-of-towners for a day or so.  It's not much more than that, but it's certainly no less.  It was starting to get dark when we decided to leave.

 

We headed down the 101, the plan was to get off at the exit at Hollywood Blvd and Western Ave, and drive back from there.  But not long after we got on the freeway, we realized the headlights weren't on.  This was our first time doing night driving this trip and MB already drove plenty that day, so it was beginning to take its toll.  MB normally drives a Chevy Malibu with automatic nighttime headlights.  Surely a fifth-generation Ford Mustang would have such a control.  I didn't even know such a thing existed, so I asked her to check the stick left of the steering wheel.  No luck, so we pulled over for a while to play with the controls.  The best we could do was ride with the high beams.  Eventually we pulled into a Sheriff's Department parking lot so we weren't in the way of any cars and looked through every dial and button only to decide we'd drive on, with our high beams, to Ventura.

 

There, we found a nice enough place and a Circle K.  We were the strangest things afoot there as we approached its teenage manager lighting up a cigarette.  I asked him where the nearest gas station was and if he happened to be familiar with the headlight controls on newer Ford Mustangs.  I thought we were in a sketch when he yelled over to a big guy not much older than me to come over here and help out.  Surely a crowd would peek out of the shadows of the midnight horizon.  MB put on the high beams and the big guy said, "There they are!  Those are the headlights!"  Sadly they weren't, but if they could pass for headlights they'd do until we returned the car.

 

The next day I had an internship meeting followed immediately by my first Level 4 class.  Moving from Level 3 to 4 is a pretty big step up, which could be why I wasn't passed the first time I took it.  This is the level at which you start performing for audiences as part of the curriculum.  So I've listed the three dates I'll be there at the end of this issue.  Come to them if you're in LA.

 

I found this first class to be much better than I expected.  Not that I expected it to be bad per se, just that I didn't have any expectations attached to it.  I think we're all a pretty solid group of performers, but as was mentioned in class it doesn't really matter, it's all about you doing your best to make it work.

 

After class I met MB in Hollywood.  We weren't going to be using the car this Saturday, so we just hung out at Groundworks, a coffee house across from Amoeba Records, then we went to Amoeba Records to browse through silent movies, science-fiction, old TV show box sets, and jazz records, for that night we'd be going to the legendary jazz club The Baked Potato.

 

I knew where it was, having visited it before with my uncles, both of whom are into jazz and fusion music.  It was accessible by subway on the Red Line at the Universal City stop.  Even so, we had to wait at the bus stop for twenty minutes and wait at the subway stop for another twenty.  I was afraid I was going to be late.

 

It turns out we got there in plenty of time to pay our cover and head inside.  Though MB and I had just eaten some gnocchi I had made, we still had plenty of room for their big menu item, baked potato.  We split one with cheese, egg, and spinach, although, if I had the money on me and was really hungry, I probably would have had one with steak in it instead.  We were about done eating when the show looked like it would start.

 

In addition to that, there was a two drink minimum.  That's two drink minimum, the potato didn't count.  So, since we weren't driving, MB had a couple of gin and tonics and I had a couple of Coca-Colas.  It's actually a good thing I didn't drive because the Coca-Colas did nothing for my awakeness.  I nearly dozed off during the show.  For the past month or so, my sleep schedule has gradually shifted to being earlier and earlier.

 

But I managed to wake up when I noticed they were playing covers.  Their biggest medley was a string of jazzed up Beatles covers.  Their choices seemed to be McCartney-centric; they even included one of his solo pieces, "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," but they used Lennon's "Norwegian Wood" as a sort of framing device.

 

I asked myself, "How the hell does a band follow that up?"  Well, the answer was with a little story about a song that the pianist/band leader contributed to when it was first recorded.

 

"The middle section of this song was lifted by The B-52's and then by Sonic Youth," he added.  As soon as it started, MB whispered, "They used this for 'Rock Lobster'."  The song was the theme to "Peter Gunn," a standard for jazz bands and marching bands for decades after the TV hit the air.

 

Sunday we finally returned the car.  I looked up the closest non-LAX location for the company that gave us the Mustang, and gave MB directions.  It was just down Wilshire, so I knew exactly where to go.  She wanted me to go with her to add strength with our numbers in case they gave us any trouble.

 

We passed a pizza place with the logically problematic name "Mr. Pizza Factory," presumably where they make Italian guys for you to buy.  When we got there, there were a few sales reps eating some Italian guy I guess.  He looked like a pizza to us though.  We explained our problems with the car and the guy we were talking to seemed less sure than the guy behind the desk.  He seemed to want confirmation from the guy behind the desk for each thing we wanted as part of our deal.  I suspected his insecurity was a show put on for us so they may scam us later.  As a tactical move, I slyly grabbed a comment card in plain view of the guy helping us.  Hey, I thought it was a cool move.

 

They went through the choices of cars they had available to trade for this one and we settled on the Toyota Corolla.  It seemed the most sensible.  After a few minutes they realized there was a problem with that one so they hastily suggested another car that wasn't quite ready, a brand new Chevy Malibu!  Ironically, I was going to be driving this one after all the driving that MB had done this trip.

 

Before we left the rental place, I feigned ignorance (only slightly though.  I wasn't the one who'd driven it before), and asked for a demonstration of the headlights to make sure we knew how to work them.  Before we left the guy behind the desk warned us to fill up the tank before we got to LAX.  We were stuck in traffic after filling up, so we were only at three quarters of a tank.

 

I then drove in LA for the first time.  We got back on Wilshire and headed west to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  There was parking available for $5 for visitors to the museums, so things seemed to be getting easier.  MB already visited the museum the last time she was here, but I was at work.  She acted as my guide through the buildings and we observed how it started to rain during the day for maybe the third time since I moved here.  When I came home my folks joked that I brought the weather with me since it was a particularly nice late spring.  Apparently MB had the same magical powers.

 

It cleared up quickly though and we left for Chinatown.  We were hungry and that's what we were in the mood for.  As I weaved through block after block of downtown, practicing the art of the 90-degree turn, I remembered how fun driving was.  I felt free, I felt comfortable, and MB was happy not to drive the aggressive-looking sports car any longer.

 

The irony I mentioned earlier was compounded by the fact that the Ford Mustang was probably more suited to my experience driving because I was used to handling the sensitive and responsive controls of my dad's car back home.  The Chevy Malibu was much closer to the Mitsubishi Gallant that my mom has driven since our faithful Mitsubishi Minivan died when I was a senior in high school.

 

After dinner, we went on a little joyride through downtown LA.  The first time MB came here was in December and one of our favorite days was wandering the streets of this part of town because it felt like a real city.  It reminded me of New York or the Financial District in Boston.

 

Then it was off to Mann's Chinese 6.  We had tickets to "Superbad."  It wasn't playing in the famous main screen theatre, but we wanted to see that one.  It wasn't worth enduring the bad chemistry of Jackie Chan mailed in kung fu and the slightly racist rapid-fire one-liners of Chris Tucker in "Rush Hour 3" to be in that theatre.

 

"Superbad" made up what some people have called the third part of a trilogy of Judd Apatow films.  On this one he only produced it but it definitely has his unique combination of filthy humor with a heart of gold.  All the hype for this film has called it an instant classic that would last forever.  This summer I've been slightly underwhelmed with the hyped up movies I wanted to see, but here I was optimistic.  This movie lived up to the hype, big time.

 

Part of Apatow's formula (which hopefully isn't too damning a word as long as he doesn't get stale or predictable), are his unique posters in which his main character(s) stare, befuddled, at the camera, as if they don't know what a camera does.  Unique to this film is that its poster features two characters, Seth and Evan, quite obviously named after the two writers of the film.  But the film features a third character, the happy-go-lucky slacker nerd goofball Fogel, known to many an R-rated trailer watcher as the notorious "McLovin."  In fact, his plot is arguably at least as well featured as the one between the two on the poster.  I would still probably call it the B-story because it has a little less dramatic weight though.  His character comes off as one written for comic relief (which is saying something for a movie that already has ample comedy). 

 

This film is about a much younger group of people than 40-year-old virgins and 23-year-olds that knock up TV hosts.  These are high school kids.  And one of the most refreshing things about this film is that they really look like high school seniors for once.  Most of them are kind of scrawny, even the over-weight Jonah Hill, the Seth Rogan surrogate, seems to have a slight quality about him, as if he knows he's only a kid and the real world is still a scary place no matter how much he tries to hide that fact with adventures to score some booze.

 

Originally intended for Seth Rogan to be the star, he takes on the role of the newbie cop instead.  Here he sits as demented middle child between Bill Hader's slightly older cop and McLovin the scrawny kid coming-of-age learning how to live dangerously.  And it was here, that I realized I found my only problem with the film.  It never decides what to do with the cop characters.  One minute they're scamming beer off of a call on the police radio, another minute they're covering their asses by throwing anyone they can under a proverbial truck.  Granted, these are both darkly funny things for the cops to do, but I had trouble figuring out what these cops wanted.  Sometimes that can work to the film's advantage by painting more complex characters, but here it just sounded like the writers were running out of things for them to do.

 

This by no means takes nothing away from the film as a whole, because I agree with critics that this is an instant classic.  I think its genius is that it hides its heart-of-gold much deeper below a sea of jokes than the other two films in the trilogy did.  That there are characters you care about seems almost secondary to eliciting rollicking laughs--but only almost, because we wouldn't be laughing without knowing where these characters are coming from, and where they're going.

 

We went back and had Cinnamon Life for dessert.

 

The next day the plan was a quiet evening with some take out pizza and the shorts of Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle.  Oh how the best laid plans of mice and men don't always come to fruition.

 

From work, I got a call from MB that the car battery had died.  "Where are you?"  I asked.  She was on her way to Wilshire and Westwood, a short walk from my job.  "Okay, I'll meet you there.  It's going to be okay."  I started asking my co-workers if any of them had any cables for a jump.

 

Again, we thought it might have had something to do with the headlights.  The night before, we noticed the car rental agent left the headlights on when demonstrating them to us.  So, for most of the daylight hours they were on.  As I mentioned earlier, the Chevy Malibu has a feature that automatically turns the headlights on and off when appropriate.  But it only works when you set it to Auto.

 

So now that we had a problem, we had to decide what to do.  Fortunately, the car was parked about a block-and-a-half from my apartment and a gas station sat in between.  We had two places to call for a jump start: AAA and the number provided by the rental company.  We decided to call the number they gave us since we figured we might as well be honest about what we could be honest about so as not to get in trouble later on.  It seemed the more sensible option.  When the guy arrived, he opened up the back of his truck and pulled out a gas can.  I watched him prepare to fill up our car figuring this company would fill up the tank for free.  But I wasn't sure, so I told him "We don't need gas, we need a jump start."  He realized his mistake and pulled up next to us popping both hoods and grabbing the appropriate cables.  He told us not to drive the car for another twenty minutes now that it was started.

 

That was it, we were returning the car and not picking up another.

 

With the twenty minutes we now had, I decided to run back to the apartment to grab some cereal bars.  I was starving.  I approached the car and we decided what route we'd take to LAX.  Since we decided to take Pico to Sepulveda, I decided I could handle it since it didn't involve any highway driving, or any on-ramps.

 

Behind the wheel, I asked MB to flip through our Thomas Guide (Thomas Guides are the annually published road atlases for Southern California.  They're an indispensable item in most Californian cars.  They were a gift from my uncles when I moved out here.) to see if she could find out exactly how far down Pico we were and what streets to look for as we approached Sepulveda.  I had some vague idea as I pointed out the streets we encountered as streets I typically cross on Wilshire (only the Santa Monica bus travels this far down Pico).  Sepulveda was somewhere near Westwood I figured.

 

Taking that left down Sepulveda was the easy part.  MB remembered that the rental agency was somewhere inside a Radisson near the airport, so we looked for a Radisson as we consulted our paperwork for an address to look for.  Neither was much help until we found ourselves in the daunting maze of freeways colliding like some physicist's nuclear experiment.  I grew nervous as I negotiated on-ramps and off-ramps trying very hard not to go too far in one direction for fear of getting lost.  We saw our Radisson, we had a tower to look towards, but only a vague idea how to get there.  From looking online at the company website, I seemed to remember that most of the locations closed at about nine o'clock, so we had less than an hour before they closed.  I looked at the fuel gauge and realized we would again be at three quarters of a tank but we'd be insane to risk stopping the car to refuel.  This wasn't like some movie where they refuel the plane mid-flight.

 

We finally managed to get there and I pulled into a spot and put the car into park.  "Are we absolutely sure we're ready to stop?" I asked wondering if we were forgetting anything.  We decided that we were.  I turned off the car and we walked inside.

 

I looked for another comment card stack, from which to grab a sample, as I explained our adventures of the past few days.  They agreed not to charge us for the next day and we felt satisfied at the price they finally charged for the cars.  Rental car companies don't deal in definites until the last possible moment.  By reserving a car, you only hope that there's one there when you fly in.  When returning the car, the calculated cost of the car is a low-end estimate of what the actual price will be.  In short, you can't win.

 

That said, it was worth all the trouble to be behind the wheel again and see the incredible view through the front windshield.  Now we had to get back home and see what was left of MB's last night.

 

We decided to take a different route home than I usually did on the bus.  This time we'd take the Culver City 6 bus and switch in Westwood.  This had a couple of advantages.  First, the neighborhoods along this route seemed a bit safer and secondly, we were both getting hungry so if we really had to we could grab something to eat where we were more familiar with the food.  Instead we went to the Rite Aid and picked up some ice cream while I would cook some spaghetti when we got back.

 

We still managed to pop in our Buster Keaton DVD.

 

The next morning I suggested we both take the bus I usually take to get to my job.  From there, MB could take the Culver City bus to the airport in one shot.  We said goodbye quickly before I went to work.

 

At work, our manager was leaving for vacation so some of my co-workers had some gift certificates, obtained from a test drive, to a Westwood pizza place.  It was Enzo's home of the 23" pizza.  I tossed in a couple of bucks as they wanted to get two cheese and one pepperoni pizzas.

 

That night, MB flew back east through a thunderstorm getting home an hour late.  Her adventures were apparently not quite over.

 

The rest of the week I went back to the Santa Monica office, weighing the pros and cons of transferring and decided it was worth it.  I would be promoted and possibly have increased flexibility for leaving work for auditions on short notice.  I felt confident to take that risk.  After the past several days I felt I had grown up.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.

Upcoming Gigs:

 

September 30-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 7-Andy Dick Theater.  9 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.

 

October 14-Andy Dick Theater.  6:30 PM.  Level 4 Harold show.  FREE.