So there was that 5.1 quake on Friday and maybe that had something to do with the whole Weird Saturday or maybe not but here goes…
I get to the gallery five minutes before Noon and my two interns are there waiting (90% of success is showing up) and I go to unlock the door and this really short Asian dude, kinda street, kinda too clean for the street so maybe gang, he walks up and says “Hey you got a cigarette?”, he looks a little loaded. “Nope” and I open the door and we walk in and he follows us in. “Oh its nice and cool in here, ahhhh…” he says as he sits down on one of the couches up front in the gallery. We are kind of looking at each other like, “okay, how can this go wrong…” and he says “I got so sunburned man..” and he passes out.
So okay, I guess we should all just get to work. I hope the guy doesn’t snore and I hope is not on the run from some Chinatown Gang shit, that’s all, can we have a pleasant Saturday at the art gallery? So a little while of no drama goes by and I step out to get a bag of Fritos. You know, here is a little something, Fritos are vegan in case you need a fix. So I go to the market and get a bag of Fritos and a Shaq soda. The Shaq soda is seriously the greatest thing ever invented in the world of Soda Pop and they are 99 cents, so this is my lunch. I come back to the gallery and the dude is up, He is wearing a white teeshirt and has lots of tattoos on his arms and he is sunburned. And so I am eating my fritos and he is talking and it comes up that he doesn’t even know he is in Chinatown. So basically he must have gotten fucked up and ended up here, probably passed out outside and got sunburned in the morning sun.
“So where you from, man?” I ask him knowing that if you ask this wrong, with a scintilla of hostility in your voice, well men have been murdered for saying that question in a tone of voice that isn’t sympathetic. SO I ask him this in as non-judgmental tone as possible. He says Gardena. I have my laptop out and say “You on Facebook?” He is, I ask his name.
“Jennifer.”
Oh shit, the dude is a chick.
So then I scope her FB page. It becomes terribly apparent right away that this chick is mentally ill. Ranting against court-mandated anti-psychotic medication is a common theme of her posts and the “being raped by demons” theme shows up a lot as well, in between selfies of her tattoos and pretty girlfriends. So sad. Then she asks for a sip of my Shaq soda. Remember that scene in Papillon where the guy with leprosy asks for a puff of Steve McQueen’s cigar? What was I to do? I gave her her gulp. A day later nothing appears to have been contagious.
About this time I notice some sketchy homeless guys hanging out front. Now, Chinatown isn’t Beverly Hills but the tourist plaza doesn’t really pull in the dregs of downtown in such high-concentration numbers. As Jennifer rants aloud about how fucked up Long Beach is these two guys are nursing beers. One is sitting on the steps at the end of Chung King Road, long matted homeless hair looking extra greasy in the mid-day sun. The other, more menacingly, is standing still looking straight ahead. He has a backpack, a heavy duty one that in my experience dealing with the element is probably full of changes of clothing in order to avoid looking like a described suspect once a little number has been pulled.
Then the redshirts came. Someone else had noticed the sketchy side of town looming over here. The two unbathed guys and sunburnt Jennifer can smell cop and the red shirted private security that rules over Chinatown has the same odor. They all got up and skeedaddled. Just then an aftershock from Friday’s quake hit. I’m not saying it was inter-related or cosmically timed, I’m just saying that was what happened. Nothing fell off the walls but the weirdness had sure come out of the rafters.