hollywood

First Run-In with LAPD Produces My Very Own “Lebowski Moment”

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

Dispatcher: “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”

Me: “Yeah, uh, someone just threw a glass bottle at my car while I was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard.”

Dispatcher: “OK. What started the altercation?”

Me: “I said ‘fuck you’ to him.”

Dispatcher: “OK, we’re sending a police unit over…”

Ask anyone who knows Los Angeles what the worst part of the city to drive through is, and I’d bet my life that their answer is “Hollywood.” The whole area is a constant cluster fuck of rich locals driving their $100K cars way too slowly, adventurous Angelenos heading for a hike in the hills, and tourists wandering around completely befuddled as to why the famous “Hollywood Boulevard” is so underwhelming as an attraction (that’s an entirely separate blog post someday).

Based on where my apartment is in the Culver City area, there’s no worse place to have to drive to than Hollywood. It’s just far enough away that taking the freeway through downtown almost makes sense. Except that in LA, taking the freeway should always be a last resort. If your life is depending on it, I guess you should consider taking the freeway. Otherwise go side roads. When I inevitably have to suck it up and visit Hollywood, the goal is always just to get there and back without incident.

Saturday afternoon’s drive home from Hollywood can best be described as “with incident.” And it was this incident that finally made me google the sentence “when should you use 9-1-1”.

LAPD’s website answered: “911 should only be used for an emergency. An emergency is a life-threatening situation, crime in progress, or serious crime that has just occurred.”

Something tells me what happened to me and Julie on Saturday at 5pm was not an emergency in the life-threatening/serious crime sense. But does anyone bother to remember their local police department’s phone number these days? Do people have a bunch of emergency contacts stored in their phones? Or do people react to all police-necessitating situations like I do and lazily dial 9-1-1?

Maybe it’s best if I start from the beginning. Let’s see…how to best describe my driving habits without having my girlfriend’s parents read this and panic over the kind of maniac who’s driving their daughter around. I guess you could best categorize me as a combination of “ultra-aggressive with safety in mind” and “short fuse towards any driver who makes a mistake.”

And LA suits my style perfectly. LA driving is on a level of aggression I’ve never seen before. It’s like I’m sharing the road with 10 million other Ross’s. And if there were 10 million of me on the road, I imagine there would be plenty of controlled road rage. Normal things like swearing, flipping each other off and giving people the handjob sign as a symbol of your annoyance level (don’t pretend like you’ve never escalated from the middle finger to mimicking an HJ at somebody…I have no idea what that’s supposed to tell someone, but we all do it).

So when Julie and I were driving down Santa Monica Boulevard Saturday afternoon and I started honking my horn and screaming at a cab driver who just cut across three lanes of traffic, cutting me off in the process, I couldn’t help but be a little bit proud of him. He’s a man after my own heart. He needed to get in the left lane immediately and just went for it. Screw all the other drivers. While part of me respects that aggression, another part of me loves to antagonize people who do stupid shit while driving (cutting me off is one of those things).

When I pulled up next to this cab at the next traffic light, his window was down and he was staring at me. He mumbled something to the effect of, “Screw you, everyone does it.”

Ask my Mom what it’s like trying to get the last word in against me. It doesn’t happen. So just to make sure he knew I disagreed with his driving, I replied “fuck you” and then pulled forward a few feet. The next thing I know the cops are swarming around me, trying to revive me and checking to make sure I know where I am. There’s flashing lights and police sirens everywhere.

Wait, no, that’s not what happened at all.

The next thing that happened was the cab driver threw a glass bottle and hit the back of my car. I think I would have been less shocked if he had pulled out a gun and started spraying bullets at the side of my car. I immediately backed up a few feet to pull even with him again, and asked in a completely shocked voice, “Did you just throw something at my car?” His response? “Fuck you.”

Every detail at that point is foggy except for his license plate number, which Julie and I immediately wrote down. He sped off one way (yes, I believe he did in fact get the last word, dammit); we slowly drove the other way, completely shellshocked. Who throws a glass bottle at a car in the middle of a crowded intersection? What kind of cab driver loses his mind after another driver says “fuck you” to him? Doesn’t that happen to him probably 15 times a day?

So I dialed 9-1-1 a minute later for two reasons: 1). Shock. I didn’t know what to do, really. What’s the protocol for this? Let it go? Sure it wasn’t a life-threatening situation, but there was a crime in progress wasn’t there? And 2). I didn’t know how much damage had been done to my car. I figured it would be best to get it on record with the Police in case the bastard had messed up my car.

If I could do it all over again, I probably would have pulled off to the side of the road and looked at the back of my car before calling the cops. Turns out there was no damage, and all the cops did was not-so-subtley lecture me on the unimportance of the incident. They couldn’t have been more honest about how little of a priority this was to them.

But for anyone who’s ever watched The Big Lebowski and wanted their very own “leads? yeah, sure, just let me check with the boys down at the crime lab”  moment, I got mine. After we asked if they were going to find the guy who did this to me, the cop said, “Yeah, um, another unit is checking him out right now.” Suuuuure they are.

What’s the point of this article? Fuck, I dunno. For me to vent, I guess. For me to get reader feedback on whether “throwing a bottle at a car” is the next logical escalation in the altercation I had with this guy (I think he should have spit on my car before throwing a bottle, that’s the correct order in my opinion). To warn any reader who ends up in a car with me that there’s at least an outside chance this could happen again, considering I don’t plan on reducing the number of “hand job mimics” I pass out on a daily basis.

Oh, and for anyone in LA that wants to boycott the cab company with me, it was a Beverly Hills Cab driver:

beverlyhillscab

Around the Clock Trivia: WBFF’s First Legit Reader Contest

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

While I’m busy cleaning up my puppy’s bodily fluids (and solids), I thought it would be fun to engage my readers in a game of “guess those 12 random locations.”

As anyone who reads my blog knows, I’m a pretty big Pinterest basher. After all, it’s the thing that causes every girlfriend to freak out when you throw away a wine cork (“I was gonna use that wine cork to make a corkboard, and then use the corkboard to make homemade wine corks!!!”)

But I’ll be the first to admit that Julie hit a home run with her Pinterest-inspired homemade wall clock:

Rather than use pictures of ourselves for the 12 numbers—which would have been a progression of photos with me wearing less and less clothes in each—we chose 12 different locations that had some kind of meaning or relevance to both of us or at least one of us.

The challenge to my readers, of course, is to name all 12 locations. You don’t need to be too specific…the town or city will do. For instance, if we had a picture of the Space Needle on the clock, you could guess Seattle and you’d be right (we don’t have Seattle by the way).

The first person to guess all 12 locations correctly—and since there’s no way anyone will be able to do that, I’ll award the person who gets the most correct—will win an actual prize with real value. Even if you’re unsure, give it a try. My prediction is that no one gets more than eight right.

The prize will be your choice of a fully paid In-n-Out Burger meal (this prize can only be redeemed in LA, in person) or a specially autographed photo of two of LA’s most famous people (shipping included).

Below are the 12 pictures with a corresponding number before each picture. Please reply in the comments section, email me, tweet me or MySpace Message me:

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

Topeka’s Biggest Celebrity Visits LA Then Writes About It…Sort Of

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

[Editor’s Note: You’ve probably noticed guest blogs popping up on the WBFF blog recently. Not only does this give me more free time to sit by the pool at my apartment complex and take random weekday trips to Palm Springs (my current location), but it allows me to tweak my resume to say something like, “Responsible for managing a team of writers on an internationally-renowned blog.” I’m happy to introduce a new guest blogger today, Matt Blanchette. And he’s not just any ordinary Schmoe…Matt happens to be the pride of Topeka…Yes, Topeka, Kansas. Feel free to read more about my most famous guest blogger HERE. Matt was our first official visitor in LA over the 4th of July week, and we did our best to stay busy. We agreed that having him write about his experiences would be a good way for other would-be-visitors to decide if visiting us in LA is worthwhile or not. For some reason he seemed nervous about writing too much in this blog post (something about boring people, which I try never to worry about), so I’ve taken the liberty of adding to his thoughts (my comments in red). Enjoy.]

First off, I want to thank Ross for allowing me to be his second guest blogger, and god help me I am determined to do better than a series of blogs about Euro League Soccer.

I found myself with some free time over 4th of July and campaigned some friends for a free place to stay. Ross and Julie were very insistent that I head west, so LA it was.

Our visit started with a look at Ross’ new “haircut.” And by “haircut”, I mean “letting it grow out in any direction for as long as possible without ever trying to tame it in any way.” Turns out, I missed the accompanying mustache by a few days. So if this whole comedy writer thing doesn’t pan out, I am sure there is a 70’s era porn star impersonation gig available for Ross. [It’s true, I haven’t gotten a haircut in at least three months. I tried to keep the mustache going for as long as possible, but it got really itchy and almost caused me to be unexpectedly single. Here are some pictures of the three-week experimental mustache and the “hair growing in any direction.”]

First stop on my trip, a hike in Malibu. Aside from getting lost looking for a lake, which turned out to be nothing more than a puddle, the highlight came from a 15-year-old girl at the swimming hole. Basically this was a cliff jump into the water, but one girl decided to stand on the edge of the cliff for 20 minutes while everyone screamed at her to either jump or die.

Long story short, after we left, three fire engines and ambulances raced towards the hole. I can only assume this is her:

[Matt’s totally underselling just how ridiculous this swimming hole scene was at Malibu Creek State Park. It was a small swimming area littered with douchey teenagers who had absolutely no adult supervision. If it hadn’t been so damn hot out, and if we hadn’t been promising Matt an awesome lake to swim in, we probably wouldn’t have bothered jumping into the swimming hole because it just seemed like something bad was going to happen with all those kids. Julie even said this out loud while we were swimming. The funny part (if there is a funny part to this story) was when we left the hole and were walking down the trail towards the parking lot. We heard sirens in the distance and joked about how they must be coming up to Malibu Creek because that girl who refused to jump fell off the cliff and killed herself. Two minutes later those fire engines and ambulances are tearing up the trail towards the hole. Anyway, below is a picture that kind of shows you what we’re talking about. And also, getting lost wasn’t a total downer because Matt & Julie got to play inside some props from M*A*S*H.]

After Malibu Creek, it was off to a Malibu Vineyard…where they happened to be shooting season one of “Ready For Love,” the new reality show from your favorite housewife and mine, Eva Longoria.

The setup is simple: a good-looking guy takes multiple women out on dates one after another. In this case Ben, the good-looking guy, had his choice of five or six very attractive, though malnourished, females. I admit, I do not watch reality dating shows, but it was wild.

One of the female producers (who we called Scissors, for her ability to scissor the girls to put them in a good mood) had the unenviable job of coddling each woman while Ben was on dates with the others. In one case a hysterical woman was only put at ease when she was handed another bottle of wine to suck on. Basically all the women sit in the “bullpen” and wait for Ben to call on them.

Ben did get some action, to which I gleefully proclaimed “They’re kissing, they’re kissing.” (I had an entire bottle of wine.)

Look for this scene on the show on NBC this fall!

[Matt’s description of the “They’re kissing, they’re kissing!” moment doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Here’s how I would have described it: “And after two hours of staring at these reality show contestants nonstop—to the point where we wouldn’t have been surprised if security had asked us to leave the premises—we finally saw Ben essentially choose his favorite girl by making out with her…at which point Matt turned into a fifth grader who was seeing two of his classmates kiss for the first time, and he exclaimed in a pre-pubescent shriek, “They’re kissing, they’re kissing!!!”]

Day two (4th of July) was Dodgers Day. If you have not been to Dodgers Stadium, don’t, or at least do not sit in left field. It is basically a stockade. Fans have no access to center or right field, nor the rest of the stadium. You have one bathroom, and one concession stand, which has limited food options (dodger dog, chips, and cracker jacks).

And check out the scoreboard:

I felt like I was watching RBI baseball 1993. Nicely done, Frank McCourt.

As for transportation options, there are none. The traffic is a nightmare, and to walk (which we did) takes about 30 minutes to get to civilization. Luckily we found a dive bar that included a shot of Patron with every beer.

But hey, at least the fireworks at the stadium were good.

[OK, I gotta stop you right there, Matt. The night of the baseball game escalated quickly because when we finally got to “civilization” and jumped inside a bar, the bartender confused me with a drink special to the point where I ended up ordering each of us a beer and two shots. And even though we decided that was too many shots, we went ahead and ordered a third shot just moments later. Other things of note that happened after those shots were: Matt contemplating drinking a beer that a stranger had left on our table, Matt buying a 12-pack of Budweiser over Miller Lite just because the cans had an American Flag symbol on them, Matt & Julie getting in an argument over the difference between a pizza with buffalo sauce on it and a pizza with buffalo mozzarella on it (I did the sensible thing and ordered the pizza with buffalo mozzarella AND got a side order of buffalo wings), and finally, Matt working up the courage to get a picture with one of our childhood idols, the Ultimate Warrior…see below.]

Most of you have stopped reading the blog by now so I will speed through days three and four.

[Matt is really underestimating how bored the WBFF blog readers are at their jobs. He doesn’t seem to understand that people have been reading my ramblings for months now.]

Going to the beach is never a sure bet in LA, as far as I can tell. We were not blessed in that arena.

[What Matt is trying to say here is that we didn’t get good beach weather, and as a matter of fact, I haven’t yet been to the beach in LA when it has been beach weather. I hope that changes soon because why the hell did I move here if it wasn’t for the beach? Here’s a picture to show you just how non-beachy the weather is every time I try to bring someone to a beach in California.]

[For some reason, Matt decided to leave out two of the coolest things we saw on Day Three of his visit: the back of the Hollywood sign (sure everyone can see the front of it from all over LA, but how often do you see the back?), and people randomly getting foamed up and washed down at Venice Beach.]

And if you plan to be a tourist and do sightseeing when you go to LA, appeal to Julie. Ross is not sympathetic in that area.

[Completely true. I will pretend like LA has no sightseeing or landmarks until you’re convinced. And if you’re still not convinced, I’ll tell you that they are all closed for maintenance.]

Also in LA, everyone seems to be in the entertainment business or curious if you are. And you “think” you see celebs everywhere, but we really did not see any that I know of.

[Wow, Matt totally glossed over the fact that on Night Three when we went to a free concert at the Santa Monica Pier, him & Julie spent the entire time staring at a group of people and debating whether one of the women was a celebrity. The entire night. I’m not even exaggerating. Matt was saying things like, “I watch A LOT of TV so I’d know if she was famous…unless she’s on one of those Real Housewives shows or reality TV.” To which Julie quickly replied, “Oh, I’ve got those covered. She’s not from one of those shows.”  This topic is ripe for an entirely separate blog…thinking we see famous people but never being able to put a name to the face.]

So I guess the point of this blog is to get others to visit LA, so I would recommend it. Maybe that will buy me a second blog.

[Gee, thanks for the ringing endorsement, Matt. “I guess Ross wants me to say LA was fun so others will visit…so yeah, it was fun.”]

[For anyone who does decide to visit, I can’t guarantee that we’ll see the filming of a not-going-to-be-on-the-air-long-anyway reality dating show, but I promise we can find a group of people to stare at in Santa Monica and discuss how each of them might be famous.]