Holy Taco in Hollywood: A Photo Essay

You may be surprised to learn that the Holy Taco crew are not Hollywood jetsetters.  We set jets and all, but we tend to do it at Farmer’s Markets and bodegas and other such places where the crowds are maybe not so glamorous as they are in Hollywood, where maybe wiping your hands on your pants is an acceptable replacement for sanitation, and spitting out your tobacco is foreplay.  But every so often we do fly out to the west coast, maybe because FOX really wanted to tell us about a planet of the apes movie or whatever, and then we rub elbows with the Hollywood elite, like so many elbow-rubbing, blow-blowing celebutants.  What kind of celebs?  Check this out!

That’s Ice-T’s dog!  Oh yeah, I was totally on an elevator with Ice T.  Here’s his wife’s back.

Here’s Ice T walking away from me in disgust that I’d be snapping photos of his wife’s behind and his dog.  His dog had huge balls, incidentally.

Is a Holy Taco trip to LA all dog balls and Coco?  Not hardly.  Come with us, won’t you, and see how Holy Taco rolls in LA.  We had bottle service at two parties, so forgive the huge gaps in picture taking, as working the buttons on camera became far too laborious a task.

To start, it’s worth noting that the awesomest thing about the airport in Toronto, Ontario is that, at 8 am, you can buy porno and beer within 10 feet of each other.  This gave me new respect for Canadians.  Then I stumbled upon this old man using the exact same phone as me, except his phone was firmly held in some manner of plastic scaffolding that allowed him to grip it in his decrepit old hands with my surety.

You can’t make it out very well in this pic, thanks to the iPhone’s awesome picture resolution, but it seriously looked like he built a support structure around his phone the likes of which you’d see around Michelangelo’s David if it were being waxed by delicate professionals.

My flight was a delight as I soon came to realize I was going to spend 6 hours next to a man who smelled like gingivitis and moth balls.  I tried that joke out on everyone I met in LA and most thought it was funny.  100% true though, it was like a mix of deep rooted apathy and fear of water damage.

Some charming individual had broken something off in the headphone jack at my seat, forbidding me from watching any of the delightful in-flight films like the Rite and something with Liam Neeson at his Neesonest.  Instead, I watched this satellite map of my position while listening to my iPod and wondering why mothballs next to me was watching Rango sans headphones.  He watched it three times.  A cartoon.  With no sound.  So it’s not like he was reading lips or anything, he was just staring at animated, lizard Johnny Depp for about 5 full hours of a flight.  For a while I started watching it with him to see if I was missing something.  I wasn’t.

Across the aisle in seat 18A was a girl I had seen literally 5 guys hit on from the gate up to her seat, including a guy in first class who brought back a hot towel or her, and a man stewardess who checked on her a good 10 times while I sat and drank my 1/2 sippy cup of warm, stagnant water and no one gave a shit about my comfort.  I had an awesome part ready for this article about her that fell in the shitter when I foolishly asked her if I could take her picture, pointing out it wouldn’t be weird because I write for a site called Holy Taco.  Her exact words, edited for sensitive readers, were ‘Oh my God, what is that, like p*ssy?” and she walked away from me.  Dear readers, why didn’t anyone tell me that’s what people thought when they heard the name of the site?  I mean, really.  Is it?  I feel uncouth.

Since she refused to let me photograph her, here’s an artist’s rendering;

I had very little time to orient myself once I got to LA as my schedule was about as tight as that girl must have clenched when I told her the name of my site.  Still, I did find the time to check through my hotel mini bar and discover there was a box of canned peppermint air available for $18.  I appreciate that the words I just wrote don’t seem to make sense in the way I wrote them, but it’s totally what happened.  Three cans of 90% oxygen were in my mini bar.  I took them home with me.  I hope they give me powers.

After meeting up with some internet types like The Smoking Jacket’s Adam Brown, beer aficionado Ian Cheeseman and frenetic sex offender Evan Hoovler, we proceeded to an Irish pub that played Bel Biv Devoe and ordered some $3 beers.  Did I have an Arrogant Bastard and an Old Chub?  I may have.  Again, that sentence really did make sense, it just doesn’t sound like it did.

Before our hosts whisked us off to FOX studios where security threatened to break my face if I took pictures, I did learn that there’s a Shrek live show featuring Shrek, if he were an inmate in a Southern prison facility.  Charming.

After dinner and an advance screening of X-men: First Class which I enjoyed despite the presence of a girl whose basic powers were being a dragonfly with flaming vomit, as well as a handful of drinks that we assumed were some manner of sexual Sprite, it was back to my unfathomably trendy hotel.  I ordered a $30 hamburger feeling bad about it the entire time and tried to watch the movie Your Highness on demand, only to discover the signal was not working.  This is how I inadvertently and very technically ended up sleeping with a Hispanic gentleman named Orlando.  I know, that old line.

Orlando was sent to my room to fix the TV at about 1:30 am.  Here he is hard at work.

At about 3 am, Orlando woke me up by shaking my foot and repeating “Sir!  Sir!” in the kindest way possible while I tried to hide my dread that I had fallen asleep on a king sized hotel bed with my wallet next to me and a man in a blue jumpsuit in the room.  My first instinct was to look for my kidney, my second was to make sure nothing was any more gaping than it had been previously.  Lucky for me Orlando is either a consummate professional or exceedingly gentle.  Either way, I thank him.

Next day it was time for breakfast.  Evan needed cash and chose to make a withdrawal from the Hollywood Bank of Sidewalk Sperm.

Then it was on to Big Wangs’.

After determining none of us wanted breakfast at a wang-themed restaurant with barred doors, it was on to somewhere less hilariously named.  The rest of our day was filled with watching this psychic use a magnifying glass to read someone’s mind.  He really did that.  And I really felt bad about it.

And yes, maybe two semi unathletic luchadores.

On the left is Gay Mysterio and on the right is El Pollo Depresso.  Shortly after we’d drank to the point where Mexican wrestler masks in public seemed like a good idea we actually had to get down to real work, which you’ll learn about later in the week as we start letting you know just how apes are going to take over the world and shame the special effects in Avatar at the same time.  That’s a lot of work for monkeys.

As a fun epilogue to the story, my flight out of LA was cancelled and, as a result, I stole this pillow from an old lady to sate my bloodlust.  I bet she had the most un-goddamn-comfortable flight ever.