Chris Reinhard's Reverie Machine

Poppin’ bottles over Mulholland.

For this past New Year’s celebration, I did a little jet-setting and spent a few days in the City of Angels. Aside from its literal translation, I still for the life of me can’t figure out why they call it that, because whenever I go there I end up feeling like I should be hooked up to an IV rather than singing praises. Anyway, some of my best friends live in Hollywood and had promised me the time of my life if I came out for the night to end all party nights. While the quality house partying in LA is limited to the social and financial elite (of which there are many, but none of whom I was with), the events that unfolded were fairly hilarious and…well, I’ll just call it a fruitful series of encounters.

Before I get started, here’s a little background on my ever-changing posse of Southern California hooligans. These are the people who continually take me in, show me the best (and the worst) that LA has to offer, and make me feel more at home in a city that, all things considered, should make no one feel at home. Let me introduce you to the team:

Rami - The quintessential Hollywood resident, Rami is and has been one of my best friends for the past five years. He’s been one band or another ever since I’ve known him, and of all the people I know, he takes the concept of SoCal leisure completely to heart. He’s also slept with more girls than anyone I know. I collect rare and unreleased music; he collects virginities.

George - I’ve been close with George ever since high school when as sophomore tennis players, we spied on an older teammate having sex in his hotel room while at a regional tournament. Another one of Rami’s perennial bandmates, he drinks the LA life with a daily dose of sanity sloppily mixed in. He usually mixes the sanity with whiskey, but that’s beside the point.

Slatty/Lindsey/Foxer/Reid/Ranger/Jizzle Face/POD/Etc. - These are the supporting cast and the only purpose served by introducing them is to say that throughout the trip they brought me as close to skipping my flight home and sticking around as anyone ever has. I guess this is more of a shout-out. So, holler.

Back to the story. So I’m going to recount the events of the actual NYE celebratory event, which started in Hollywood, was transplanted to the Valley, and ended—somehow—with one of the most stunning overlook views I’ve seen on the west coast.

After having spent the first part of the day walking Melrose and subsequently watching at least five episodes of How I Met Your Mother on DVD, what will be henceforth known as the Hollywood Crew started to file into Rami and George’s house one or two at a time, already dressed up and apparently ready to start the night as quickly as possible. I sat on the couch, raising a cocked hand to shake those of the new visitors as they arrived, but thanks to a bout of laziness I can only describe as ‘vacation productivity’ I was a lot more concerned with Ted, Marshall, Barney, and their sitcommy antics playing out on the TV. I knew what exhausting events lay ahead; I’d experienced them for the past three nights already.

Here’s a little more info on nightlife in LA. As evidenced by past entries, you might gather that I like to party. But even with that being said, I can’t always hang in Hollywood. It’s kind of amazing, actually: most of my friends who live out there are at least mostly self-sufficient, but they work about three days a week and spend the rest of their time either playing music or drinking…heavily. Like I said, I drink my fair share, but when it comes to night after night after night of birthday-quality consumption I can’t say it doesn’t wear me out. So there I was on the couch, still a little worn out from both the previous night’s shenanigans and the heat (remember that I’d just left Colorado, who was experiencing one of her coldest winters on record), hand outstretched to meet that of anonymous ugly hipster chick number three, when instead I’m handed an open beer. I accepted. George was sitting next to me playing with his new laptop, bent on trying to find an old video of Saved by the Bell cut with a Terror song. He declined when someone offered him a Bud Light, probably because he still had a better grasp on what was going down later that night.

At this point the group was augmented to a point no longer legally appropriate for the house (fire codes and such), so about half the new entrants who’d just arrived headed for North Hollywood and our decided party destination, while the rest of us clamored to uncover any remaining alcohol left on the premises. Alas, little was left over from the week and so first priority became a trip to the grocery store for more.

One of the nice things about living in a city that isn’t New York, Chicago or Los Angeles is the price of things, and specifically the price of alcohol. I can afford clean, classy vodka when I go out to drink, and most of the time I can avoid paying ten dollars a glass. In LA, apparently those types of alcohol either don’t exist, or are so exorbitantly priced that they don’t register on my friends’ radar altogether. Of course, LA is special because in California, you can buy alcohol at grocery stores and on Sundays. It’s pretty fucking convenient.

Before heading to Ralph’s (worst supermarket name ever) to get booze, we stopped by In-N-Out for Double Doubles and those epic soggy fries. While waiting for the food we were talking about some band or something and all the sudden Rami and George both averted their stare to the front doors where a beautiful girl was just walking in and, in unison, both ‘called dibs.’ This isn’t something that you’ve never heard of; dibsing girls is a pastime as ancient and exalted as baseball or roller discos. But it’s worth mentioning because Rami, George, and the rest of their miscreant ensemble call dibs as often as they see attractive girls in LA, which is, like, every ten seconds from dawn till dusk. And when they dibs girls, it actually dictates first cat-calling rights. It’s not a fleeting phase for them either. Every time I go to LA I come home with the growing desire to size up girls using this one simple four-letter word. Just last night I dibsed a waitress. It was pretty sweet.

Ralph’s was surprisingly dead for a holiday, so we didn’t have to wait in line for too long with our arms full of cheap (read: five dollars a bottle) champagne and vodka and Seven-Up and whatever else we might have grabbed. The cashier, a hunched over black man in his sixties or seventies, would make a vulgar comment with every swipe of a bar code: “Hope you boys got some young girls waitin’ for you tonight;” “This is the stuff to make the panties drop;” “New Years Eve is the best time to take those young girls’ virginity.” It went on for about five minutes, because we bought a hell of a lot of champagne.

Finally it was time to head to the party, so after a brief stop back at the house we headed out to the Valley. Of course, even though it was only about 10 miles away, the traffic got us there about 45 minutes after leaving. George drove; so, per usual, we listened to Paramore (George loves Paramore as much as a 16-year-old girl, and gets really upset when people make fun of him for it).

After some frantic searching and a fairly hilarious episode in which George backed his SUV into a couple of trash cans that smelled so bad they might have been filled with human remains, we walked into what turned out to be a lot less prestigious party than I suppose I would have expected. Slatty greeted us with some overzealous cheering, so we poured some stiff drinks and smoked cigarettes in the back yard for what seemed like five hours before the place really filled up. Around 11pm each of us had started to dibs our eventual New Years kisses, but as history shows it was a lot more difficult working that fast than our drunken minds first predicted. The girl I dibsed was a cute blond with a huge, elaborate sidepiece visible from under her white dress…I promised myself this would be my first time with a girl covered in tattoos.

Midnight finally rolled around, and although the celebration was substantially joyous (again filled with an overzealous Slatty), I couldn’t find my blond little counterculturist anywhere. I went outside to smoke more cigarettes—I think I might have moved to bumming Kool menthols from Rami, yeah I was drunk—and called some friends to wish them a happy New Year back in Colorado, albeit a little late. The responses I got could constitute a different story altogether, but that’s beside the point. My mission still lay ahead of me and I headed back into the house.

There she stood, swaying in the kitchen with a cup of Seven-Up and ten-dollar vodka, sleeve hanging off her shoulder.

Now, this girl looked good even when I was (reasonably) sober, so I knew if something did go down there’d be no immediate regrets the next day, save for finding out she was a dude or didn’t shave her legs or tasted like butthole or something. I saucily sauntered to her side and propped myself up on the kitchen counter, drink in hand, and asked her for a handful of the Cheerios she had taken from the pantry. I knew I was in when she said, ‘okay.’

It would be really interesting to do some kind of practical study on the courtship rituals of drunken young adults, to see what kind of responsiveness each party has to the advances of the other. The reason I’d like to see results is because nine times out of ten, I have no fucking clue what I did to get a girl interested in me. Drunk Chris is obnoxious, loud and lacks all the poetic conversational skills I usually possess while sober; yet I can’t recall a time when I hooked up a solid one night stand without the influence of alcohol (on me, dickhead—I’m not a date rapist).

Anyway, this particular ritual was more hilarious than most, because it only took about five minutes before our conversation turned to kissing. She didn’t taste like butthole: first catastrophe avoided! Surely the rest would be uncovered soon. We slobbered over each other amidst pointless conversation while the party continued on around us, and by 12:30 an old friend of mine suggested we head back to his house and all jump in the hot tub. This meant leaving Rami, George and everything I knew to be safe for something completely ill-advised and penis-driven; but my penis is pretty headstrong (a pun, yeesh) and so obviously I obliged.

Without really considering my current state or the adventure upon which I was about to embark, I slid into the back seat of a rather posh Lexus SUV with Tattoo Girl and her friend, while two others claimed the cockpit and one last girl cooped up in the cargo area. There are several reasons why I should not have gone along with this, the first and most important being that nobody in the vehicle was remotely close to sober. I know what you’re thinking: and yes, that included the driver—his name is Devo and the last time I saw him he was having sex in the middle of a crowded room—what did I really expect?

In an attempt to avoid police intervention—also known as inevitability—Devo decided to swerve up over Mulholland and through the back roads of the Los Angeles high country to his house. Though the plan worked, I think he might have misjudged the curviness of the roads and rather discovered a surefire way to make me think I was going to die by way of a cliff dive every ten seconds. The best part of the whole drive, though, was staring back at the girl in the trunk and watching her roll unconsciously around, untethered, often her whole body slamming mercilessly into the walls of the vehicle. I could barely see at this point, but humor is humor no matter how blurry.

The “Oh No House” (aptly named for its live-in musicianship Oh No, Not Stereo) is a 6,000-square-foot box amidst the lavish and over-accessorized Hollywood Hills. It’s owner is 22 years old; his parents bought him the house, I’m told, as an excuse for him not to live with them anymore. The proprietors of the Oh No House are all in their early twenties and all unemployed. The house is known for its wild parties and perhaps moreso for the likelihood that everyone living in it is carrying at least one sexually transmitted disease. Inside the house there are pool tables, a movie theater and little cots scattered about, but there is no furniture. This was my second time in the Oh No House; but last time, I actually knew more than one person there, and I had a ride home. Suffice it to say that this time I had none.

The façade of the Oh No House is stellar. It has its own block. The white stucco rises thirty feet up from the street to a 2,500-square-foot rooftop patio complete with lap pool and aluminum-sided hot tub big enough to fit twelve drunk assholes every night. Lucky for me, I got to be one of them. After borrowing a swimsuit from Devo and not thinking about hygiene at all (happy to say I am still STD-free!), I headed up to the roof where a couple of random young hippie lovers were soaking and plopped down with a glass of Red Bull and vodka.

Tattoo Girl joined me shortly, once again finding her rightful place intermittently attached to my jaw. She shaved her legs: catastrophe two avoided! People would continue to enter and exit the rooftop spa over the next few hours, but we stayed put, and by three in the morning we finally sat, prune-fingered and alone, and I managed to talk Tattoo Girl out of her bikini top. Success.

The morning got longer as they tend to do, and after a pretty epic topless makeout sesh Tattoo Girl and I decided to continue the conversation downstairs in one of the unfurnished bedrooms. I followed her into one of the bathrooms where we made out some more. She made me leave to change, which was classy but completely unnecessary, and so I did. Upon my return, I came upon Tattoo Girl helping Passed-out-in-the-car Girl clean puke out of her hair. I can pinpoint the exact moment I lost any hope of getting laid when I started laughing uncontrollably and got a searing death glare from both of the little pipsqueaks.

I slunk off to the movie theater where I’d seen blankets before, laid down in front of a giant blue screen that I couldn’t figure out how to turn the fuck off, and fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning there were noticeably more people in the house, and though I kind of expected to be chased out with a broom or a Telecaster, everyone was really nice. So I hung out for a while and drank water, and lucked into a ride from Tattoo Girl’s other, paler friend. It should be expected at this point that when I finally made it back to Rami and George’s place, I was received with overzealous cheers from Slatty. Los Angeles is an interesting place.

Oh, and I never did get to find out if the third catastrophe was worth worrying about. I guess that’s the silver lining.