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CUT TO: RODEO DRIVE. If you want to
simultaneously feel like a horse’s ass and park
for free, by all means swirl on down to the underground
garage at The Rodeo Collection. This Dubai style park-o-rama
looks like Donald Trump built Batman’s motor court.
A splendacious fountain leaps in curlicues, hissing,
as you stomp your brakes for a valet hurling at your
windshield — past framed ‘name’ art
— over clean, cobbled stone. His uniform costs
more than your outfit, including your shoes. “Welcome
to the Rodeo Collection” he murmurs, with no small
kick of Fuck You.
When one ascends to sea level, the Collection proper,
the question begs: ‘Collection’ of what?
This clipped poodle of a structure, ungodly puffs of
acrylic, brick and marble, has been pretty much empty
since it opened twenty some years ago. The ever-changing
shops are customer-free. What we have here, I do believe,
is a Laundromat for filthy lucre.
(“It’s hard to make money legally in L.A.”,
says my boyfriend Aap. “And ‘legally’
usually means a bribe for legal documents with illegal
money.”)
One spankin’ new, soon to be closed store drew
me in. It was a tawny Asian womb, big as a cruise ship.
No customers, and even inside, I couldn’t tell
what they sold. Three scary Taiwanese people grinned
maniacally from the twenty foot burled wood reception
desk, then rushed me.
They sold amber (“Best-In-Da-World,” they
sneered as one word, though the dyed-looking beads were
strung on elastic), and some skin stuff. They also hosted
a ‘spa.’ A one-hour massage at the ‘spa’
was a thousand bucks, though you can get your feet or
neck rubbed for half an hour/four hundred. The cheap
treatments, however, don’t entitle you to use
the shower and steam.
Now, a note on attire. A guide’s advice: ‘It
is important to dress sophisticated casual while visiting
Beverly Hills. Store owners have been known to ask customers
to leave if they are not properly dressed.’
Har-de-effin’-Har-Har! The real sign of affluence
in Beverly Hills is to sport a quasi-homeless look (dirty
hair okay), but wear enough ‘signs’ to beam
out, in code, an astral credit limit. The most common
of these signs are:
1.) A honkin’ gaudy ‘name’
watch, 18k plus or titanium, optimally smothered in
precious stones.
2.) Spotless high-end running shoes
with something translucent and lots of doo-dads.
3.) Turtle sized diamond studs.
4.) Unscuffed (you have dozens to choose
from) purse with designer’s initials on it.
(“Louis Vuitton makes ass-ugly vinyl shit two
initials away from the crap at Sav-On” my friend
Silver has been known to bleat.)
5.) Be Iranian or Japanese.
As I wound my way through the A.M. radio hit-like boutiques,
Versace, Armani, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Prada etc., I
noticed a hot new fashion trend that didn’t have
to do with clothes.
The newest rage storming the street is to have a deep-voiced,
shaved-headed, one earring’d, tall, built, handsome
black doorman/guard greeting all, but especially ‘the
ladies.’ And oh, how this service delights the
implanted, fat-suctioned, bleached-leech third wives.
It’s safe to say that none of them married to
secure steady sex with their husbands.
(“Women in Beverly Hills are not women,”
Aap explains. “They are ballistic missiles, with
infra-green detection systems.”)
These doormen must make out like bandits. The pool
man affair thing is just so, you know, last millennium.
Drunk with culture, I staggered next to a place I’d
not been through before. I call it Sim City, though
its given name is ‘2 Rodeo Drive,’ and it
is frightening.
Built for two hundred million fifteen years ago (imagine
today’s tab) ‘The Piazza’ is a replicant
of a European street. Where in Europe is debatable;
it’s a compost of locales. It touts its own shrunken
Spanish Steps, based on the real ones in Rome. But trust
me, that connection will never occur to you
— in any lifetime.
There is no patina of time at The Piazza. All is O.C.D.
clean, like some nuts licked the stone with their tongues.
Tourists with large upper arms take photo after photo
at the ‘Via Rodeo’ sign. It’s enough
to make you want to shoot up a playground.
“I avoid walking on Rodeo Drive, even if I have
to go somewhere the long way” says Gina, a teen
of my acquaintance. “It’s, like, all uptight.
It reminds me of my grandma.”
Strange connection, ‘cause it reminds me of my
grandma — who’s dead.
“Perhaps that’s because the local citizenry
resemble embalmed stiffs,” mused Silver.
Aap crocheted his brows into a boomerang. “There’s
no real influx of new blood there, just more drastic
plastic surgery techniques.”
In the beginning, before the Spanish settlers stopped
the music, Beverly Hills was a sacred Native American
site. Within the parched desert that L.A. actually is,
Beverly Hills had the highest of blessings — water.
Streams flowed from its verdant canyons and pooled
at (what is now) the Beverly Hills Hotel. The natives
lived in an Eden of wild grapes, cucumbers, oats, buckwheat…
jungles of roses, poppies fuchsia, blue lupine and goldenrod.
The natives greeted the Spanish settlers with food,
and gifts of seeds. The settlers, in turn, gave them
smallpox.
“That explains it all,” said Aap. “The
place is cursed.”
“Why can’t those plastic boob women wear
a bra?” asked Gina. “They always wear see-through
tank tops. Their boobs look like those old cartoon characters’
eyes when they pop out of their heads.”
“Beverly Hills,” she winced, “is
so over.”
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