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[PART I, in which the word NAKED is used three times, as well as WHISKEY and CANNONBALLING.]
Mike Garlington, up-and-coming art photographer, calls. His cell phone isn't working so well. Apparently, he stepped on it while having sex.
"You're coming down to L.A. for the big Steven Cohen opening—no questions. We'll road trip, stay at a seedy motel, whiskey drinking. It'll be good for the article, don't worry. What do you say? You got a car?"
Garlington has a posse. A sort of misfit/artist/biker gang of photographers, model types, musicians, writers, all friends, all artists in their own right. One gang member, Damien Kalish, has a stack of cheap white shirts and a big black permanent marker so he can wear his thought of the day. Today's shirt is specially prepared for L.A.: "I want to kill Tom Hanks".
"Tom Hanks represents everything wrong
with our society. He's a celebration of the bland and mundane," Kalish explains.
In the middle of this warm Los Angeles night, the rag tag troupe appears, unannounced, at the door of the Bel Air estate of one of Garlington's big art patrons. They are searching for a cocktail. After initial befuddlement, the doors are swung wide open and Mike and the gang are offered free run of the home, pool, and liquor for five days and nights.
By 4 a.m., neighbors are phoning in noise complaints, naked people are cannon- balling into the pool, and Garlington is gulping Johnny Walker Gold out of a champagne flute while sitting on the stove wearing only his tighty whities. Is our gracious host, the art patron, fazed? Nope, he's right alongside us, smoking a cigar, sucking it all in, it seems, so he can have a great tale to tell his business friends.
Garlington is drunk. And, now, naked. And insisting everybody else gets naked. It takes a lot to satiate him. He'll drink till
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