schwab's now

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset near Fairfax is a sad Schwab's, where actress types come to meet with potential managers, the kind who live in uninspired apartments and who shuffle headshots around like limp arrangements. An infamous celebrity scandal-monger sits in the corner by the bathroom, sponging up several hundred thousand unique visitors to his site everyday, making more than enough money from his google ads to live in his sweatpants and slippery sweet flipflops. I told him we were in the new Schwab's and that he was inthe updated version of LA Confidential, his muckracking website standing in for those sensational tabloid newspapers and newspaper men who crouched in aloe plants outside of stuffy bungalows hoping for a glimpse of some B List actor smoking reefer with a C List actress. He had never heard of Schwab's and so my ideas died in the hot white sun that careens off of the golden Director's Guild building next to the uninspired signage for a greezy spoon called The Griddle where a friend once had chocolate chip pancakes, then had to shit so much that a long nap was all he could think to do next. At The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, there are bored and pimpled Eastern European teenage escorts in their designer jeans and hopeless European sneakers that give away their homesickness. The internet yellow journalist will have his own reality tv show after he pulls it loose from the dogfight between competing empty networks but he's never heard of Schwab's and doesn't know that it used to be where the Virgin Megastore now is, where sometime later a Baskin Robbins was, where my brother and mother and I went with new GI Joe figures before my father was photographed and interviewed to be on the cover of people magazine, the cover blurb of which suggested that he was unnaturally attached to his mother, just like the fictional momma's boy he played for the rest of his life in and out of the movies. And now I can walk into a dispensary for medical marijuana, just south a click or two on Fairfax to Santa Monica opposite the Whole Foods where the exits are clogged with petitioners running in a dream in which a signature makes the vice president sorry for something, anything. And I don't have to fear the yellow journalists snapping MY picture when I cross Santa Monica to the new old bookstore where the big and tall men's shop used to be in search of either a book for my son or else an important and esoteric volume for my brother who turned 30 two weeks ago with no parents to note it, no nice books to give or get. At the counter at the dispensary I heard a dude telling the good folks who worked there about how he ate an eigth of mushrooms and how the Disney cartoons they got on at 4am are trippyier than possibly some others, with trombones turning into snakes. And I wish I was still green, and had just come to LA like my half-brother in law.