Last week, my editor-in-the-sky at the Big Paper dropped me on Hollywood Boulevard to cover the fallout of the Kimmel fiasco. I parachuted onto the avenue from the rooftop of Hard Rock Cafe, while someone at a faraway command center radioed in Kimmel’s impassioned speeches about ending U.S. intervention in the global south and calls for “cultural marxism” here at home… As I rocked down toward my drop point, I thought, “God Bless our Democratic system, because without that thin safety net, we’d have a Red Army gathered behind Kimmel ready to topple the good and generous Tzar.” 

I fully descended by mid-afternoon, a peaking period on the boulevard when asphalt and hot-dog stands blasted the air with heat and electronic ads buzzed between circuits. There is a sort of vintage charm to the place, despite all of its modern shortcomings. Hollywood is an old, sickly man of wealth with injection bumps from all the botox that he shot like heroin during his heyday. Where botox could not reach, testosterone could. And without any regular upkeep or exercise, the skin has blistered and tightened to the point that every vein is made visible in cracks on the sidewalks and buildings. In Hollywood, most especially on the boulevard, the streets are grimy, the buildings unusually proportioned and tourists confused to high hell why anybody would revere such a hot mess. But no matter how trashy it may get, it will always be the place where, at one point, things were really happening; where movie stars strutted from silence to sound, where many members of proper society lost their lives to the party and where you could “make some really good money dealing,” according to one source I spoke with. 

All of it, the opulence and ad nauseam, is what makes Hollywood, Hollywood. 

After covering the mostly uneventful protest and talking to some men-on-the-street about their perverted ideas of free speech, I took my designated thirty and went right down the avenue into a wig store. The woman who ran it looked like someone had put Dolly Parton through a California filter and commanded attention from the protestors like an activist Pope. She gave all the first-time, disorganized resistors a verbal handbook on proper demonstration with a religious kind of fervor. I largely ignored her, because I was busy trying to find a hardline conservative who could speak a lick of English in the tourist bazaar. But by Pope Parton’s good grace, I overheard her talk up a more monumental protest in October that sounded like a good enough pitch for a story down the road, which meant I’d be taking her sermon instead of lunch the next day. 

When I arrived at the shop, surrounded by gorgeous mannequins with authentic Brazilian bust downs, I was greeted instead by Parton’s minion, who told me she was out “at the magic shop, running some errands,” with a smile pasted across his face like Jack Nicholson’s. It was clear to me that he had come to life the night before, animated by a Wall Street businessman's toupee imbued with blue-eyed Voodoo, which explained why he was yet to be accustomed to social regularities. I stuck to the front door glass and slowly backed out while his eyes followed me like a painting; I wouldn’t take part in that demonic ritual — the goddamned rapture is on Tuesday, according to some Manson-types on TikTok and another Hollywood resident I spoke with. 

As I reversed, I fell back into an unlicensed mobile business that specialized in horticulture that was run by a fellow who called himself Jaysta. Jaysta was a gargantuan man, standing at least eight feet tall, whose voice sounded like it came straight from his stomach and boomed halfway down the boulevard. “What you need? I got everything you need.” He set it up so that saying “no” would not only be denying him, but yourself, much needed relief from imminent tomfoolery of your day. “What do you have for me?” was the only response that seemed sufficient when talking with such a massive, almost omnipotent force. He opened a chest of flowers, invited me to sample scents and seduced me with better deals than I’ve seen at any establishment in the city. He asked what I did for work and I told him I was a career signholder on the Boulevard, but that I had enough of the luminescent ads taking attention away from my gymnastic sign stunts and wanted to pivot into an electrical engineering career for purposes of sabotage. He gave a funny look under his hulking browline, and I could tell he sensed my deceit… We had built up a good amount of rapport and I regretted betraying it. But as the saying goes, you can’t hustle a hustler. 

And there I was back on the Kimmel business.

In my opinion, not the Big Paper’s, Kimmel is a whorish hack. He peddles comedy so bad that if you could smoke it you’d catch a fat headache instead of a good buzz. But on that day, right in front of my eyes, he was becoming a sort of symbol: One that was somehow bigger than any Columbia student who wasted their youth in prison yards for protesting or the professors who were fired for trying to keep those students safe. It surprised me that it took a poor late night host getting suspended for the American left to understand the Gestapo crackdown hitting them right in their faces. In March and April last year, I documented as servants of the law bucked bloody teeth out of student’s mouths for occupying a patch of grass I had only ever seen about four people on at any given time… And the students hardly talked at all. 

Kimmel becoming a martyr for free speech, even briefly, was probably the funniest joke he has ever been a part of. 

His next show will air on Tuesday. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see what he does with his newly won freedom of speech. 

Now, as the rapture approaches, Kimmel will be back on air to harp on this situation for weeks to come… There will likely be some bit during his monologue where he looks left and right stage before whispering something sly about El Presidente. It will light up the room, but fall flat in dens and TV rooms across the U.S. Those first-day-out ratings will probably haunt Kimmel for life, because as the recent numbers have made clear, he will probably be on a relentlessly whorish hunt for another suspension-worthy moment until the end of his chatting career. 

I noticed on Monday morning that my own deceit came full circle. Because he wasn’t registered to Zelle, I cashapped him and foolishly requested to wire money to Jaysta via Zelle. The first was instantaneous, and I asked him not to accept the Zelle request in confidence. He unfortunately ignored the buyers instructions and accepted the payment anyway. I contacted him about the mix-up, still believing that our intimate correspondence that day would’ve left him as affectionate towards me as I was toward him. But when Jaysta texted me back, it made me think Kimmel might end up saying something similar when his next episode imminently falls flat. 

“Ima have to give you double the tree when I get back to LA,” Jaysta wrote “You didn’t lose your money… I got it and I got you.”

We’ll see where each of their small victories leave us.