Coming to LA, Part I: He Offered Me The Crack Pipe

In between Junior and Senior year of college I decided to do an internship in LA.  My high school best friend accompanied me, not to do an internship, just for the experience of living somewhere different (and because I begged her to as I HATE BEING ALONE AND ALSO HATE MEETING NEW PEOPLE).  We found an apartment in Westwood to sublet from two UCLA students, but unfortunately we wouldn't be able to move in until a week after my internship started.  In the interim my Dad found a "rent by the week" hotel at which we could stay.  He looked up pictures online and said it looked nice.  At the time I was not worldly enough to know that "rent by the week" was code for crack den, but I soon learned my lesson.

These were the actual pictures on the website:



This is what it looked like in real life:

(Okay, that's technically a photo of a prison, but you get the idea.)

There was a tiny bed with springs sticking out, a dirty sink on one wall and a TV bolted to the ceiling.  The showers were down the hall from us and creepy old men would stand out in the hall and lecherously watch us walk back to our room in our towels.  There was a sign posted outside the building that said "NO VISITORS" which we didn't really understand when we moved in.  Later we learned that rule existed so that hookers wouldn't bring their tricks here.  But none of this alerted us to the fact that we were living in a crack den.

Even the "communal back patio" didn't scare us off:

But then one day I was walking to the bathroom and noticed our neighbors' door was open.  Now we were pretty familiar with our neighbors because we could hear them through our wall.  This was partly because the walls were made of cardboard and partly because they were constantly screaming at each other.  But there was one aspect of their lives that we were not familiar with.  They were crack heads.  They were smoking a crack pipe with the door open and absolutely no one cared because... EVERYONE THERE WAS A CRACK HEAD.  Suddenly it was like my life was flashing before my eyes.  I remembered all the missing teeth I'd seen, the fact that everyone seemed jittery, the used syringes on the "communal patio".  Then we made eye contact and he offered me the crack pipe.  HE OFFERED ME THE CRACK PIPE.

So what was a girl to do but shout: "No!  No means no!" run to the bathroom and lock myself in.  That night we slept in the car and two days later we moved into our legitimate apartment.  But at least we had our first LA Experience.  We could cross live in a crack den off the bucket list.