Living in McWorld

by John Schoenkopf

It’s late February. I’m suffering away living in North Hollywood, whilst working in every part of town but the Valley selling ads for L.A. Record, and doing it all on public transit. I’m cheerful, but I’m looking for reasons to miss that last train and stay at a friend’s place rather than make the 10 pm or midnight trek back to the abode.

As a result of that whole missing the train routine, I routinely find myself waking up with a two hour trek in front of me just to change my clothes and then another two hours on the good ol’ Metro to get back to whence I came.

Shit wasn’t runnin’ smoothly from an efficiency standpoint. I threw my hands in the air, knowing I was going through the kind of hoops people just would not put up with if their name wasn’t John Schoenkopf.

Now, what I lacked in scheduling sanity, I made up for with awesome side benefits as a result of being the frontman for the world’s raddest music publication. Things like, oh, I don’t know, one of my favorite musicians asking me to move in with him while his girlfriend is out of town for a month or two (they have separate rooms). Oh, and his girlfriend is a musician too, again, one of my all-time favorites from wayyyyyyy before I met them, so much so that she was my theme music on the radio show I hosted in Oklahoma at OSU. I’d have her on in the background while I yammered on the mic. For minutes on end. Her on repeat.

Now I’m living in her room?

Problems solved! With a bonus of awesome!

It took a few seconds to wait for him to finish asking me to move in before I happily agreed that yes, I would be doing that, and within a day my stuff and I were at home in Highland Park, close enough to the Metro Gold Line that we could hear the trains pulling into the station.

Living with Ariel was rad. He’s a total freak/sweetheart/musical genius. But the whole thing was I was filling in for someone who was out of town for a month or two at most. I believe this is called temporary housing, but instead of a cot at the Newark YMCA I was living in the room of Geneva Jacuzzi, my theme music. Glam in my universe, but temporary.

I don’t live in the future. I am a man of the moment. Unless the moment is horrifying, then I live in the future, or the past, or I think about UCLA football. This “month or two” they spoke of was, to me, obviously two. One of my biggest flaws is that I operate under the assumption that the best-case scenario will always prevail, and that I don’t have to necessarily do anything to see that that happens. Just wait back, be me, and everything takes care of itself.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Before you know it, my month (not two) was running out, and I hadn’t made any kind of arrangements as to where to go. I have family, but I’ve done that circuit so many times that it’s something I’d like to avoid going forward. I’m, like, 27 and stuff. I should stop fizzing out and going home to them. I should conquer the survival thing on my own.

I decided to stay at my sister’s for a week to come up with my next address. But I couldn’t go the traditional route, you know: lease, credit check, first and last. I don’t have any of the above. I have charisma, a music publication, some art, a bong, and really really awesome music. Surely I could squeeze into some kind of niche here in this giant-ass city, right?

Well, a few days into it and I wasn’t exactly flush with options. I started to worry. And the whole while in the back of my head, I knew where I would be living come the end of that stretch on Becca’s couch: McWorld.

photo: Paul Takizawa

Now, don’t get the wrong idea; I don’t live at McWorld. Nobody lives at McWorld. I don’t live there, Eli doesn’t, Rudy doesn’t, Nick and Greg don’t, and, well, you get the picture. That being said, this is kind of like a dream come true, if I’d been audacious enough to think that people actually lived like this, so free and unconcerned with the material side of life, and with a purpose. I thought I was lucky getting to live with Ariel in Geneva’s room; I had no idea that people actually lived like they do at McWorld. It’s communism, it’s in the hood, it’s bachelordom, it’s an art gallery, it’s a community jewel, I know all the homeless people in the neighborhood already, the rent is three hundred dollars a month with no deposit, it’s open most all days and nights to anyone who’d like to come, it’s chaotic, it gets mopped every morning, it’s about 5,000 square feet, we have 50 to a hundred guests each night seeing three to seven bands (once, this band took the stage in front of a raucous yet well-behaved crowd of one hundred people at four in the morning; try getting away that anywhere else), the ceilings are 60 feet high, there is literally no mirror on the property, there’s a plastic skeleton wearing a pink dress hanging on my wall, and it’s ultimately the kind of place that my little Asperger’s Syndrome brain can feel like it’s finally where it’s meant to be. They even gave me the best space—the loft that lords over the stage area with a ladder leading out. I also have the small tent on the roof for when I’m feeling like camping, or if Rudy is playing drums real late.

Going back to when I lived in North Hollywood, and I would miss that last train home on purpose, McWorld is the place I spent 80% of those nights. Sometimes things work out for me, like a best-case scenario, but it’ll be one that I hadn’t thought of yet. My best-case scenario was staying an extra month with Ariel, but what the universe gave me was something permanent, unique, and satisfying on every level.

Thanks, universe!

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