Hollywood High Day 6: Rendezvous at The Rainbow - 9/8/04

I planned to drive out to Palm Desert today to interview Unida for a special Contact High Desert Session and see the birthplace of desert rock, but circumstances conspired against it. The recorder Sirius gave me wasn’t working properly, Garcia's schedule was tight, and Vaporella and I had an important appointment early the next day. Our friend Felicia, an associate producer of The Simpsons, had invited us to a private script reading with the cast. To reciprocate, Vapey and I offered to take her to dinner. We met at her home in Sherman Oaks (which is packed with Simpsons memorabilia, including a huge taling dancing Homer) and went out to an awesome rainforest-themed restaurant called Amazon.

After dinner, they went home, and I went to finally meet Robert Flores at the Rainbow Room. Unfortunately, I had no idea what he looked like, and when I arrived his cell phone had conveniently stopped working. As I paced in front of the club trying to figure out how to locate him, a big red and white RV with the words "Got Vape?" rolled up to a stop in front of me. The door opened and a bunch of punk/metal dudes with crazy hair stepped out.

"Excuse me," I said, "are you guys affiliated with the vaporizer company?"

"Yeah, why?" said a cool looking guy with pointy, vertical hair.

"Hi. My name is Bobby—I work at High Times."

That was all I needed to say. Turns out, they were Church and Tilo from Methods of Mayhem. They were advertisers of ours and had partied with coworkers of mine in Vegas many times. They immediately dragged me onto their bus, where they busted out a giant glass sidecar pipe and the sickest golden hash I’d ever seen and it was on.



During our smoke session, Flores called me from the phone of his buddy Dominic (a porn director with a mohawk) and they came in to join us. We emerged from the van 15 minutes later amidst a gust of smoke and sat down at Flores’s table in the outside patio of the restaurant. They just happened to be sitting with Dino Cazares, former guitarist of Fear Factory.

Right after we sat down, who comes walking in but Dave Atell of Comedy Central’s Insomniac. Since I make a living doing in print kinda the same thing he does on television (going places, getting wasted, taking pictures of cool/weird people), I introduced myself and turned the tables by asking him to take a photo with me.



Mere moments later, I turned around to realize that Steve-O of Jackass/Wildboyz fame had been sitting at the table behind us the whole time. Knowing he was big fan of the magazine and had done photos with us before, I went over to say hello. True to form, he was was manically animated and totally cool. I won't conjecture on what drugs he might or might not have been high on—I'll just say his pupils were completely dilated and he never stopped talking and leave it at that. He was going off about how he’d been promised the cover of the magazine a couple years ago and got punked—how he’d told all his friends including Method Man and Tommy Lee about it, even went and bought a frame. I felt bad—he was obviously a nice guy and a big fan, so I told him I'd do what I could, which wasn't much.



"Dude, I will do anything to be on the cover," he pleaded. "I will balance a fucking barbecue grill filled with a pile of flaming buds on my face, while a skateboarder flies over my head doing a 360 Judo Air."

I don’t know if that would work as a cover, but hell—I’d love to see it, wouldn’t you? Survey says…