If you like novels about screenwriters in Hollywood (and c'mon, you know you do)...



Hollywood...

It wasn’t what I expected.
It seemed every other building along the boulevard contained a head shop, tattoo parlor, dive bar, or outlet for worthless, plastic souvenirs and T-shirts that boasted bullshit such as, “MY PARENTS WENT TO HOLLYWOOD AND ALL THEY GOT ME WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.” Sure, there were pockets of glitz and glamour here and there, but mostly it was a trash heap. The boulevard itself is embedded with grimy salmon-colored and gold-embossed stars that boast the names of the currently known, the long-forgotten, and everyone in between.

This was Hollywood?

Then there were the people. The outcasts, the forgotten, the ignored. The angry young men and women—once bolstered by a dream but now dazed by a hard life—struggling against poverty, drugs, booze, madness, and railing mightily against whatever it was Mommy or Daddy or Uncle Joe supposedly did to them once upon a time. They populated Hollywood Boulevard and the surrounding area like cockroaches on a grease-encrusted sewer pipe.

(Excerpt from Luigi's Chinese Delicatessen, a novel by Jim Vines)
(Photo © Jim Vines




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