The Road Test

If you're thinking of entering into a long-term relationship, take a road trip first...

When you return to your hotel (conveniently located half a block off Hollywood Boulevard at the intersection of Sodom and Gomorrah Streets) and you find enough police cars to film Police Academy 8 surrounding that hotel, you might question your travel agent’s competence, assuming you used one and I didn’t.

But just like the Bible, let’s start at the Beginning.

Los Angeles has a problem with homeless people because even the indigent and mentally ill can figure out that if you’re going to be homeless you might want to do it where the temperature typically ranges from the mid-60s all the way up to the mid-70s and if it ever rains the National Guard is called out to control the rioting.

True story:

I lived in San Diego in the late 1970s and one day it kind of/sort of drizzled for most of the day and if you’re from Northern California where it rains so much animals wear life preservers and instinctively pair up and walk two-by-two in search of an ark, a little drizzle is no big deal, but that night I turned on the San Diego evening news and some hyperventilating TV moron (which describes about 90 percent of the people on local news shows) was warning the public:

“DON’T GO OUT IN THE STORM IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO!!!”

Anyway…lots of homeless people here in Los Angeles so businesses often claim their restroom is infested by King Cobras or their architect forgot to build one because the businesses don’t want homeless people going into their bathroom for nine-and-a-half weeks (which was a completely unrealistic movie because Kim Basinger could do way better than Mickey Rourke) and then have those homeless people declare squatter rights which some California judge might grant them.

So…

When I made my last pit stop before LA for gas and a restroom break, the guy claimed they had no restroom which made me think he ought to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for Strongest Bladder/Gas Station Attendant Division or Biggest Liar/Public Relations Division and possibly both.

By the time I got to my low-rent hotel (it’s just down the street from my son’s apartment which is why I stay there) I had needed to use the bathroom ever since Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz or Santana’s Abraxas album came out (I forget which because they have way too many Santas out here), but the hotel clerk said the public restroom was broken and they only had one room left and it was the smallest room in the very back of the hotel, but did I want it anyway, and since my back teeth were floating, if they’d offered me a broom closet and a bucket I would have said yes.

Got to my room, used the bathroom and once I could have rational thoughts that didn’t involve my bladder’s imminent explosion, looked around and realized the clerk wasn’t kidding about it being a small room.

I couldn’t pull the chair out from beneath what appeared to be about 1/16th of a desk without hitting the bed. I couldn’t walk between the bed and desk without tripping over the chair. The bathroom was so small I couldn’t unpack all my bathroom stuff because there was no flat surface large enough to hold it. If I wanted to unpack my clothes they had to fit in two cubbyholes the size of a shoebox.

Basically, I had rented a bed with a two-foot border of room around it and it reminded me of an old joke told by an old comedian whose name does not immediately leap to mind which doesn’t hurt the joke one bit:

“My room was so small I had to leave it to change my mind.”

So the next morning I asked the clerk if I could switch rooms and he pointed out that I had previously agreed to the smallest room in the hotel and I said:

“Yes, but then I saw it.”

Which made him laugh because I guess I’m not the first guest to realize he’d rented a phone booth with a bed in it and the clerk said he could give me a different room two floors higher, but it had the same exact floorplan as the Mini-Me Suite so I think you gotta hand it to the clerk for telling me to kiss his ass without actually using those specific words and that’s quite an accomplishment because he pulled it off even though English was his second language.

“You want a different room? Sure. How about the same exact room, but two floors higher? And people have retired from their jobs and become eligible for Social Security while waiting for our one elevator.”

Finally the clerk admitted he did have a room on the fourth floor that wasn’t fun-sized, but as I drug my luggage down the fourth floor hallway I couldn’t help but notice most of the fourth floor was still under construction so it was kind of like upgrading to a better seat on an airplane they hadn’t finished building.    

Nevertheless, it had more space so I put my stuff in the bigger room and left for the beach.

Theoretically my son lives maybe 30 minutes from the beach which might be true after the Zombie Holocaust because zombies don’t drive well enough to get learner’s permits, but until then if you go to the beach for three hours you’ll spend two of them getting there and back because of all the traffic. (But here’s the good news; after two hours of LA driving, you’ll be qualified to compete in the Daytona 500.)

So after having lunch and walking to the end of the pier in Manhattan Beach (that’s where we were in the above picture and if you’ve got really good eyesight you can see Japan lurking in the background) we drove back to Hollywood, but when we got to my hotel there were three cop cars parked in front and when you see more than one cop car it means the first two cops arrived, saw what was happening and said:

“Oh shit, we’re gonna need a lot more cops.”  

I went into the hotel lobby and didn’t see any cops, but when I got off the elevator on the fourth floor, three cops were waiting to get on the elevator and one of them was telling the other two about “the last time I was here” so I figured that was a good thing because if gang warfare broke out or the Manson Family decided to hold a reunion, at least the cops would know the way to my hotel.  

When I came back out of the hotel, my son (who stayed on the street to have a smoke because he’s just not getting enough tar and nicotine from the LA smog) said the cops had arrested some white dude with tattoos, but the hotel hijinks might not be over because my son heard one of the cops say they were waiting on animal control.

Which brought up a pertinent question:

Just what kind of animal needed controlling and on just what floor of the hotel would this controlling take place?

We then went to my son’s apartment and watched Shimmer Lake (it’s on Netflix and I’d recommend it) then came back down the street to my hotel and a couple cops were still waiting on animal control and I asked what was up and it turned out there was a German Shepherd on the fourth floor that was scared of the cops because he watched coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. (Did you really think we’d get all the way through this without at least one political comment?)

I asked if it was cool to go to my room and the cops said yes, because the dog was locked in his room, trying to find Shimmer Lake on Netflix, a network the hotel didn’t carry so no wonder the Shepherd was acting all German about it.

(Historical WW2 reference, so if you’re German and haven’t invaded Poland lately, relax; that joke’s not about you. BTW: People who go out of their way to be offended remind me of boxers who see a punch coming and decide to lean into it; if you do that and get knocked on your ass, I gotta think it’s on you.)

Before animal control showed up to tase Cujo, I decided to take a nap before we went to dinner at the Formosa Café (I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and when I get home I’ll get a credit card bill for the candle) and woke up when I heard a bunch of people in the hall outside my door laughing and talking and one of them was barking with a German accent.

So all’s well that ends well, which I don’t really believe, but if we were limited to saying and writing things we actually believe 97% of human communication would cease and then where would Facebook be?

Which finally brings us to the point I want to make.

The Marriage Compatibility Test

People who are considering getting married often wonder if they’re truly compatible and after actually being married I’d advise those people to lock themselves in a chilly room with a thermostat and see how that goes. (Many relationships have foundered on the Our-Gas-Bill-Will-Be-Sky-High/I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-I-Can’t-Feel-My-Fingers rocks.) 

But it now occurs to me that a road trip would be an even better test of compatibility.

Before any couple is allowed to marry they should be required to take a car trip across the United States, dealing with flat tires, reading glasses dropped in the toilet, vending machines that take your money but don’t give you the Twix bar you paid for, bathrooms closed to the public, rooms that are way too small and stepping in what you really hope is dog shit because half a block off Hollywood Boulevard the other option is completely possible and dealing with all these road trip problems would help people find out how their prospective spouse reacts to stress.

And if a few cop cars outside your hotel with one of them using a bullhorn to say, “Come out, Rocky…we have you surrounded” freaks your prospective spouse out, you might want to keep shopping. When bad shit happens you have two options:

1. Freak the fuck out about things you can’t control or…

2. Relax and roll with it.

Think of it this way: if you were buying a car you’d definitely want to drive it first, so if you’re considering buying into a Life Partner, here’s my advice…

Take them for a road test.