My Weird and Insanely Awesome Trip to Los Angeles

I know I work hard to cultivate the image of a gregarious, outgoing extrovert, a real social butterfly, as it were, but the truth of the matter is that even before the coronavirus forced us all to become shut-ins I was already something of a hermit, a painfully shy and self-conscious recluse. 

That’s one of the things I like about being a Juggalo. It forces me out of my comfort zone interacting only with my wife and children and podcast co-host Clint and forces me to travel extensively to weird towns throughout the midwest and at least one strip mall in Canada, a haunted house in Chicago and various other curious locales and confront not just people I do not know but the whole of Juggalo nation, in all its messy, tragicomic humanity. 

I only ever really experience FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to Jugglalo events so when I saw that Juggalo Days would be held in Los Angeles this year, only a month or so after the release of my new book The Weird Accordion to Al, I knew that was something that I had to experience firsthand. 

I could, and would, be able to combine business with pleasure, book-promotion with experiencing one of my favorite acts in one of my favorite cities, a city I have never lived in, yet where I nevertheless seem to have more friends and a bigger following than I do in my home town of Atlanta or old home town of Chicago. 

The Wicked Clowns in motherfucking Hollywood? That was an offer too fresh to resist, particularly after my friend Beowulf arranged a promotional event for me and the book to coincide with my LA trip at the Dynasty Typewriter, a venue I have been dreaming about and looked forward to visiting since well before it opened, being a huge fan of its co-founder Jamie Flam’s podcast The Long Shot for a solid decade. 

I didn’t just want to visit the Dynasty Typewriter and see a show. It was more than that. I wanted to make a sacred pilgrimage to a bona fide comedy Mecca. And what better way to experience this club than with my own event? The idea that people would pay good money to see me talk about myself and my career boggled my mind. 

So I flew from Atlanta on a Wednesday. My first stop was the home of Paul Gilmartin, host of the Mental Illness Happy Hour. The Mental Illness Happy Hour isn’t just one of my all-time favorite podcasts; in trying times like these, it has helped keep me sane. I’m not sure it is entirely coincidental that when I chose a name for the website that would become my life’s work in 2017 I chose one with the word “Happy” in the title. For lifelong depressives, nothing in the world is more tantalizing or elusive than that tricky beast known as happiness. 

I came to Gilmartin’s lovely home and podcast to discuss the biggest issue affecting my mental health: the psychological cost of being mired in a world of crushing credit card debt. That’s right: I’m not just broke, I’m a goddamn expert on being broke. That’s my area of specialty. I don’t want to brag, but I was mired in tens of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt, unemployable and wondering whether or not I would be able to support my family well before everyone else was. 

I felt like I had a lot of really compelling, substantive, interesting things to say when I sat down with Paul in his home studio but somewhere in between my brain and my mouth I was only about 70 percent as eloquent and incisive as I’d like to be. I wasn’t bad, necessarily, but I’m a lot like Adam Driver: I can’t stand to hear Adam Driver’s awful fucking voice in my headphones. But I also have a hard time listening to my own voice. 

But it was wonderful seeing Paul’s house and meeting his wonderful dog, who I really hit it off with. You know you’re an animal person when you spend close to a week doing podcasts and going to concerts of your favorite musicians and hanging out with people you haven’t seen in ages and one of your best memories is that you met a really nice dog. Let’s just say I relate to the Onion article “Least Popular Guy at House Party Really Hitting It Off With Dogs” more than is probably healthy. 

I visited L.A the week of the Kobe Bryant memorial, which lent an unmistakably funereal element to the trip in the most literal as well as figurative sense. The whole damn city was in mourning for Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter. Everywhere you went you saw his beaming face, on murals and newspaper covers. On the radio you could not avoid talk of his death; it’s as if it were the only topic, or at least only suitable and relevant topic left. Now there’s also only one thing people talk about, with the exception of Tiger King and Quibi-mania of course, and we WISH it were as upbeat as the tragic death of a legendary athlete and his daughter.

You could not avoid the city-wide hurricane of grief and mourning. When I went to breakfast one morning all the televisions were tuned into the memorial, with the sound on full blast. It was, to be perfectly honest, not at all what I wanted to experience at 10:00 in the morning but I did not feel comfortable asking my waitress, “Excuse me, ma’am, but I would prefer to eat my chilaquiles without being reminded of life’s fragility, the death of a child and the malevolent, lurking, ever-present specter of the grave. Can you change the channel to something a little lighter. A Maude re-run perhaps?”

This was the first time I had visited Los Angeles since marijuana was legalized. It changes the entire vibe and dynamic of the city. Everywhere I went there were brightly lit dispensaries staffed by cheerful, smiling young people where you could buy an endless array of delicious edibles, pre-rolled joints and ounce upon ounce of beautiful, beautiful marijuana. Entering a legal weed shop in God’s I was quite literally a kid in a candy shop because the only thing that could possibly make candy better is if the candy also contains marijuana. 

And it’s all legal! In the United States, even! Why you can go up to a police officer and show him a fat bag of weed you just bought and taunt, “How you like all this sweet, sweet cheeba, ya filthy pig? You can’t bust me or nothing because it’s all legal!” and by law the only thing he can say in return is, “Smoke in good health, Sir!” 

So there was a weird electricity in the air that weekend, and not just because one of the undisputed highlights of the trip would be a Weird and Insane Afternoon with Nathan Rabin at Dynasty Typewriter, a 3:00 show where an hour-long conversation between me and author, comedian, actor and writer D.C Pierson about my book and career was joined by music from Jonah Ray and stand-up comedy from two of my favorite comedians, Joe Kwaczala, who I knew from my Chicago days, and The Long Shot’s Sean Conroy.  

It me!

I had high expectations for Dynasty Typewriter. The reality was so much better. To borrow one of Jamie Flam’s favorite words, it is a place of enchantment, a nice place for nice people, a Happy Place not just for Nathan Rabin but for everyone who believes in it and its mission to bring enchantment to the masses. 

I expected a crowd unmistakably on the small side because there are a million fucking things to do in Los Angeles on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon and also because I am most assuredly not famous, or terribly successful at this point in my life. I honestly don’t expect anybody to spend fifteen to twenty dollars to see me talk when they can avoid it and save money. 

We were hoping to at least attract a crowd in the double digits. We wanted there to at least be two audience members to everyone on stage. We did not quite make that goal. Including Beowulf, who hosted, and myself, we had six people onstage and maybe eight people in the audience. 

And you know what? That was fine. It was better than fine. I appreciated the holy living fuck out of each of those eight audience members. I was profoundly grateful for everybody who came out. The exceedingly modest crowd lent the afternoon an unmistakable intimacy. I sat on the stage in a chair watching comedians and musicians I love perform, feeling like a cross between a king watching his jesters perform japes and jokes for his amusement, and his amusement alone, and a roast subject, only instead of mocking me the performers were all exceedingly nice. 

And the lighting! So atmospheric! Like I’m in a Michael Mann movie.

You know who else was exceedingly nice? D.C Pierson. I love that dude. He interviewed me for an Evening with Nathan Rabin, a live event at NerdMelt that was held so long ago that Kumail Nanjiani was the original host, and it was a goddamn delight. It was a goddamn delight this time around as well. I am painfully self-conscious but I felt so comfortable talking to DC that I lost track of time and we fell into a wonderful rhythm. 

The attendance at a Weird and Insane Afternoon was so modest that I literally could have shared all of my edibles with the crowd and still had plenty left over for the night’s climactic Insane Clown Posse show. 

I had so many unsold books that I had to leave them at Dynasty Typewriter so I could go directly to the second, concluding performance of Juggalo Days. 

I chose the VIP package for the second night because I had my mind set on securing a picture of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope holding up a copy of the Weird Accordion to Al book proudly. Also, it was cheap as fuck, which certainly did not hurt. I spent several hours in line but that ceased to matter when I got to Insane Clown Posse, introduced myself and gave them the books, to hold up and then to keep.

Violent J said that he was a fine of mine and that he’d just re-read 7 Days in Ohio. I happen to know for a fact that he was telling the truth because Amazon tells you how often each of your e-books are read, and even how many pages, and one of the only times 7 Days in Ohio has been read in the past few months was two days before Juggalo Days. Violent J gave me his phone number, I got my picture of the clowns holding up my book and then I re-joined my friends, feeling relieved and full of joy, and enjoyed a typically terrific ICP show. It was as surreal as it was wonderful seeing these Detroit high school dropouts against a backdrop of palm trees and Hollywood glamour. 

My VIP ticket meant I could join ICP onstage for Faygo Armageddon but I wasn’t just happy where I was, I was ecstatic. There was no place I would rather be than where I was at that very moment, even onstage spraying Faygo on the crowd. 

When I think back on my trip to Los Angeles, which I suspect I will do a lot, I think about standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers and friends in the sunshine, the sun beaming down on another beautiful Los Angeles night, feeling blissfully at home in a city that was not my own. I think about communal joy and the paradoxical sense of identity and belonging you feel disappearing into a crowd. I think about gathering with my fellow Juggalos for something bigger than us all. 

In other words, I remember doing all the things that we are forbidden from doing these days for the sake of our survival and will not be able to do again for the immediate future. The days, they blur together now, each one more or less the same as the last. Who knows when any of us will be able to gather together again for the communal bliss of a really transcendent concert experience? So I am glad that I got out and took a chance, and made some memories while I still could. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an unhappy time by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course you can always buy an autographed copy of my new book, The Weird Accordion to Al for twenty dollars, shipping included, by paypalling me at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net

OR you can buy my book here: https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews

AND, of course, you can buy my even NEWER book, Postal, with Brock Wilbur, at https://www.amazon.com/Postal-Boss-Fight-Books-Book-ebook/dp/B0855T5SGB/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=postal&qid=1586127601&s=digital-text&sr=1-2