HOLLYWOOD — We’re really not that different, when you get right down to it. Sure, you step off the plane here and it’s 85 degrees and sunny … but that’s more impressive in January, when it isn’t also 85 degrees and sunny back home.
Yes, there’s a vibe that you will run into a celebrity at every red light Out Here … but really, Celebrity Row is a push. They have Will Ferrell, we have Michael J. Fox. They have Charlie Sheen, we have Robert De Niro.
No, there’s one place to go if you want to find something completely Californian, something we don’t have, probably won’t ever have, something They can hold over Our heads with a bit more pride than the Kardashians.
They have In-N-Out Burger.
We do not.
Advantage, Them.
There are plenty of people inside this In-N-Out on Sunset Boulevard at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, because there always are plenty of people inside this location, or any of the locations dotted across California, Arizona and Nevada. You get in line and you wait, because at the other end of the line is a double-double, and if you’re a return customer you know enough to order it “animal style” and …
… and, well, I didn’t come here for lunch. I came here to find Los Angeles Kings fans. There are no easy targets, because there are no Kings jerseys among the clientele here. There are two kids in Kobe Bryant jerseys — one purple, one yellow. There’s a Yasiel Puig jersey, and a Clayton Kershaw T-shirt.
Someone is wearing a battered and beaten-up Angels cap — old-school, the one with the wings on it. I start with him.
“Who do you like in the Cup finals?” I ask.
“Who’s playing?” he asks.
Look, there’s no law that says that just because you wear a sporting garment in public, that has to reveal anything at all about you. I know. My hobby is baseball caps. I have close to 100 of them. And invariably, when I wear my Expos cap to a bar, someone will wax poetic about the injustice of Tim Raines’ Hall of Fame journey, and when I wear an old-timey A’s cap there will be a Mets fan nearby to lament the fact Yogi went with Seaver on short rest in the ’73 Series …
And I let them go, and go, and go, and finally, invariably, disappoint them greatly when I tell them, “I just like the hat.”
So I get it. Tim Salmon isn’t a big hockey fan.
“Kings in five,” comes a voice from behind.
He is dressed like you imagine most Angelinos dress for work in this sun-blessed land, khakis and a plaid golf shirt and sunglasses perched on his forehead. His name is Carl Rolling, and he works in real estate, and he has been a Kings fan since they got Wayne Gretzky from the Oilers in the summer of 1988 when Rolling was a freshman in high school.
“I won’t lie to you, even when the Kings won the Cup two years ago they never came close to being as big as the Lakers and the Dodgers,” Rolling says. “And that’s perfectly OK with me, and with a lot of us who care about the team. The Lakers and Dodgers have done a lot of winning for a lot of years. It’s something for us to shoot for.”
Others hear us shooting the breeze about hockey, and some chime in, and all eventually admit, some more sheepishly than others, that they are johnny-come-lately fans, bandwagoneers, and I tell them, that’s OK, there are a lot of people rooting for the Rangers back home whose eyes glaze over when they ponder the term “rolling four lines.”
“Kings in four!” one of them shouts, not so definitively.
It is a wonderful day outside, it is a wonderful place to be, within range of the famous “HOLLYWOOD” sign, and the Walk of Fame, and the Chinese Theater formerly known as Grauman’s. Around the corner is the place, corner of Highland and Sunset, where the Top Hat Malt Shop used to stand, where Lana Turner walked in one day in 1938 as a 16-year-old Hollywood High junior and walked out a star in waiting. They say a Chick-fil-A stands there now. I’m not going to Chick-fil-A. When in Rome …
And make it animal style.